Yeon - seon Park
Books
Where are the Bodies?
Dasan Books
The novel’s author, Yeon-seon Park, is well-known in South Korea as a TV and movie screenwriter. Where Are the Bodies? is her first novel and was marketed to Korean readers as a “cozy mystery” which contains all the suspense of a typical thriller, but with a more humorous tone that skips over violence and gore. The novel’s strength is its dialogue-driven plot, with plenty of vivacious personality-- and occasional cursing--coming from both Musun and Grandma Hong. This book would complement the current trend of thrillers (particularly Korean thrillers) in translation, with breezy first-person narration that makes the story a fast, Knives Out-style whodunnit.
Musun Kang--twenty-one years old, unemployed, and a two-time failed college applicant--is not excited to spend a week at her grandma’s home in the mountains after her grandfather dies. Her ire turns to horror when she wakes up the day after the funeral to learn that her parents have returned home, leaving her behind to take care of grandma, eighty-year-old Kannan Hong. With no cable TV, no phone service, and what seems to be no residents under the age of sixty, the village of Duwang does not shape up to be a promising location for Musun to spend her so-called “exile.” But when Musun happens across a treasure map that she drew during a visit fifteen years earlier, she begins to unravel a mystery that makes her unplanned vacation a whole lot more exciting. Upon seeing Musun’s old map, Grandma Hong tells Musun the story of four village girls who all disappeared on the same day fifteen years ago--in fact, while Musun was visiting. Musun soon meets Grandma Hong’s neighbor, Changhee Yu, who is the younger brother of one of the missing girls, and finds herself on a wild good chase across the village, interrogating locals to try to learn more about the whereabouts of the missing girls and unearthing the family tensions boiling beneath the streets of seemingly bucolic Duwang. Over thirteen chapters told in Musun’s irreverently humorous voice--interspersed with brief monologues by the missing girls--readers slowly uncover the truth about a decade-old mystery that the residents of Duwang have been trying to forget about.
The missing girls and their fates:
Sunhee Yu: Changhee’s older sister Sunhee was in ninth grade at the time of her disappearance. Her story, Musun discovers, is perhaps the most tragic amongst the four missing girls. Following a tip about a positive pregnancy test that Sunhee took at a local clinic soon before her disappearance, Musun learns that Sunhee was raped by the local mailman and became pregnant. Unable to get an abortion locally, she traveled to Seoul end the pregnancy, but the attempt was unsuccessful and she secretly gave birth to a son. Without adequate medical attention, she died from complications a few days after giving birth. In an attempt to cover up the shameful circumstances of their daughter’s death, Sunhee’s parents adopted Sunhee’s newborn son and raised him as their own. Changhee, it turns out, has spent his entire life thinking that Sunhee was his sister. In reality, Sunhee was his mother, and the parents raising him are his grandparents.
Buyoung Hwang: The same age as Sunhee, Buyoung was also in ninth grade at the time of her disappearance. Her home life was less than desirable; her father was abusive, and her intellectually disabled brother became the center of a local scandal when he attacked another local teenager, Misuk Yu (who later became one of the missing girls). Buyoung had been saving up money to run away from home for quite a while when the incident with her brother spurred her to finally leave Duwang once and for all. She used a birthday party for a village elder--which all the village’s adults attended--as her opportunity to sneak away.
Misuk Yu: In twelfth grade at the time of her disappearance, Misuk was known for being Duwang’s resident bad girl who paid too little attention to school and too much attention to boys. When she was attacked by Buyoung’s intellectually disabled brother, a feud broke out between Misuk’s family and the Hwangs, dividing villagers over who was at fault. Like Buyoung, Misuk used the village birthday as an opportunity to escape the feud enveloping her life and sneak away with her boyfriend unnoticed. Misuk is still alive, it turns out; her parents have secretly been in contact with their daughter for the past fifteen years, but haven’t told any of their neighbors because of the unpleasant memories and tensions that flare when her name is mentioned.
Ye-eun Jo: The daughter of the local pastor, eight years old at the time of her disappearance. Her father drowned in mysterious circumstances a year after her disappearance, and her mother has had a nervous breakdown, claiming that her daughter now lives on a star and communicates with her from the cosmos each night. Musun finds Ye-eun’s bones in a local cave and discovers that Ye-eun had been under the care of her elder sister on the day of her disappearance. Their parents, along with the other adults in the village, were attending Grandma Kapjin’s one hundredth birthday party. With Ye-eun’s apathetic older sister failing to look after her, the eight-year-old went to play in a local cave, which collapsed while she was in it. At the end of the novel, Ye-eun’s mother attacks and kills the local mailman (the same one who raped Sunhee and indirectly led to her death), mistaking him for an alien who took her daughter away.
