Winter in Sokcho

Elisa Shua Dusapin, Aneesa Abbas Higgins (translator)

This quiet novella, set in the popular beach town of Sokcho, punches well above its weight.

The resort town of Sokcho is perched on the northeast coast of South Korea, very close to the North Korean border. The terrain is the stuff of fantasy novels: You can stand on the sandy beach with water lapping at your ankles and gaze at mountains in the distance. Just a short walk from the water is a grove of pines where the scents of salt water and pine needles blend together. In the summer, you can eat seafood just pulled from the water at pop-up stalls, balancing a paper plate on your lap as you look out over the East Sea.

But in the winter, it’s an entirely different place: cold, gray, and uninviting. The town feels like all it wants to do is sleep. That’s the Sokcho in which we find our narrator, a young woman in her early 20s, a receptionist at a down-at-its-heels guesthouse. Her life is uneventful, but not soothing. Then her routine existence is disrupted by the arrival of a surprise hotel guest — a French cartoonist seeking inspiration for his new book.

Our unnamed heroine is in rocky relationships with all the people in her life: a truly terrible boyfriend; an oblivious, judgmental mother; a distracted, disgruntled employer. Her father, a Frenchman, is not in the picture — but our narrator has romanticized his homeland, daydreaming about a visit, learning to speak French from books.

All of these circumstances have her primed to be painfully curious about Yan, the cartoonist from Normandy. She secretly watches him draw. She cooks Korean food for him, which he does not eat. And when he asks her to show him Sokcho through her eyes, she’s careful and eager in equal measure.

What follows is a few weeks of not much, and also everything, as the two of them explore Sokcho together and slowly reveal small glimpses of themselves. They visit the snowy countryside, the chilly beaches, and the fish market where her mother works. They meander through a Buddhist temple and the demilitarized zone. Their relationship remains opaque to them and to us, constructed of feelings both complex and ambiguous. The author brilliantly captures the unsettled feeling of lacking the confidence to ask for what you want — or maybe not even being able to identify what you want. So events just… happen.

This is the kind of novel you’ll want to revisit every winter, in that January-February timeframe that feels like hibernation — a powerful little book that tenderly explores identity, loyalty, and vulnerability in just 160 poetic pages.

In the car park at the observation point, the wind whipped our coats against our legs. A smell of cold oil wafted towards us from a tteok stall. Kerrand buried his hands in his pockets, his sketchbook protruding from the right pocket. We climbed the hill as far as the lookout point. A line of binoculars. For five hundred won, you could gaze at North Korea. I slid a coin in the slot. It was so cold our eyelids stuck to the metal frames. To the right, the ocean. To the left, a wall of mountains. Ahead of us, fog. — Elisa Shua Dusapin

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