Like cosmetic surgery, widely encouraged by the aunties and the boyfriends, Sokcho is only considered appealing under very specific circumstances. Dusapin regards the body as an extension of the land, scarred and bloated, like the beaches and like the body under the scalpel to transform into something beautiful. The theme of a disposable body, human and land, is constantly examined by Dusapin and this duality is called upon when the narrator recalls the morbid curiosity by visitors to a catch a glimpse of the border that divides the North from the South, and when a woman unknowingly strayed too far while swimming and was shot by the soldiers who patrol the border of the North. There are guests that are recovering from facial reconstruction, ‘seeking refuge from the capital’ and avid hikers and there is also Yan Kerrand, a famous graphic novelist, an older man with a melancholic disposition that matches the off-season seaside town of Sokcho. Tourists come to Sokcho in the summer to escape, but what happens to the people who never escape Sokcho? The disposable nature of tourist towns is explored in this novel through the livelihood of the inhabitants as we follow them through their daily routines and their expectations of a fulfilling life some, like the narrator’s boyfriend, are desperate to leave for the city that glitters, and others return with their degrees to work in a decaying guesthouse.
Already, we have the first of many tensions between the surface and what lies underneath in this evocative and visceral novella. Elisa Shua Dusapin is unrestrained in her exploration of the innards and the inkiness, the poison and the flesh, the pliable and the deformed, and yet the translator’s restraint in conveying this to an English reading audience is utterly captivating. Reading WINTER IN SOKCHO is a cinematic experience and the image of the eponymous coastal town in South Korea lingers like a memory, which is further sustained once the final page has been turned and the reader closes the book to gaze upon the cover, depicted like a postcard in a retro and hazy style, as if plucked from a tourist shop to bring home. There is nothing quite as satisfying as a deceptively simple book.
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