Book review: Kang Hwagil’s Another Person is an incendiary feminist thriller set in South Korea

Another Person

By Kang Hwagil, translated by Clare Richards
Fiction/Pushkin Press/Paperback/304 pages/$17/Amazon (amzn.to/45nsxoh)
5 stars

Here is a tightly plotted thriller by a young South Korean feminist writer that lays bare the knives stowed in both the psyche of men and women in a patriarchal society.

Another Person by Kang Hwagil begins like a testimonial against an isolated incident of workplace and intimate violence.

Jina is told she has “ruined a good man’s life” when she brings her senior to court for assaulting her five times.

When Jina takes to the Internet to expose the injustice – Manager Lee is fined only three million won (about S$3,000) – she gets vitriol instead of support, including an anonymous comment that calls her a liar.

But the scope of violence widens beyond an isolated case when Jina’s determination to confront the anonymous commenter forces her to face her past at Anjin University, where she was both victim of and complicit to the violence that shook her cohort.

First published in 2017 – the year after Cho Nam-joo’s best-selling novel Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 sparked a feminist campaign in South Korea – Kang’s novel can be read in the same vein of feminist fiction that is unflinching in its depiction of toxic masculinity and women’s experiences.

The book might not have been the media sensation that Cho’s novel was, but Another Person has received critical acclaim in the form of the Hankyoreh Literary Award, and it is not hard to pick out the literary merits of this gripping debut novel.

Told in multiple perspectives – and in this regard, its narrative style is reminiscent of

South Korean International Booker Prize winner Han Kang

’s The Vegetarian (2007) and Human Acts (2014) – the novel wants you to sympathise with Jina in her first-person accounts before a polyphony of other voices enriches and undermines her story.

In the hands of translator Clare Richards – one of the translators behind the best-selling Beyond The Story: 10-Year Record Of BTS – the multiple voices shine through with their distinct registers.

The voices run the whole gamut from the ostensibly benevolent misogyny of Jina’s company boss (“Jina-ssi, you never looked like that kind of girl”) to a mysterious voice who says: “We ought to sue the creator of this universe. For the women who end up like this, there’s no one to tell and no one to hold account to.”

Throughout the novel, a recurring motif – the onomatopoeic “tuk” – is used as an ambivalent sound that can be interpreted in multiple ways according to who is narrating the story: a gentle pat or a violent slap, a friendly gesture or a source of trauma.

In the course of seeking personal closure, Jina gradually realises that the women she pushed aside in her old life – the attention-seeking Ha Yuri who met a tragic death, the ostracised village girl Yang Sujin who dated the most eligible student on campus – play an important role in who is she today, and who she can become.

What begins as the flames of a personal crisis spirals into an incendiary tale that confronts the shades of violence that women in South Korea face, and the hurdles they must cross to dispel the cloud of silence that hangs over them.

The book’s heavy subject matter can make it a difficult read, but there is also great empathy in Kang’s narration that makes the story comforting, if not hopeful.

Another Person is a remarkable debut novel to come out of

this latest Korean wave

.

If you like this, read: Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo, translated by Jamie Chang (Liveright, 2021, $16.18, Amazon, go to amzn.to/3YtJScR). This South Korean bestseller, which sold more than a million copies and was adapted into a movie, follows a young stay-at-home mother who details the discrimination women face right from the moment a mother begins to favour the son.