Kyungha

Kyungha is the main character and first-person narrator of the novel. In the narrative present, Kyungha is living in “a flat in an open-corridor apartment complex” in Seoul (6). Although she has spent many years working to sustain her and her family, she finds herself entirely alone and alienated from society. Her narrative later reveals that her alienation is the result of the research she was performing for her most recent book. Kyungha was studying and writing about the Jeju massacre and the pre–Korean War era. The longer she worked on the project, the more her dreams were infected with scenes and images “of outright violence” (10). Nothing Kyungha did could eradicate the dreams. In turn, she could not sleep and ended up hallucinating similarly gruesome scenes. As a result, she pushed her family and friends away, or they distanced themselves from her. These experiences capture how Kyungha's generational...