VOL.95/2026.06

Special Project

 

Spaces within Books, as Seen by Critics across Generations

 

 

2026.06

 

 

In the June issue’s Special Project, literary critics from different generations introduce spaces within books, as well as books themed around space. This feature presents works that explore the desires of children caught within the college entrance system, the foundations of daily life and neighborhoods, the spaces depicted by the master writer Park Wan-Suh, and the architecture of Gyeongseong, modern-day Seoul, during the Japanese colonial period.

 

 

 

 

The 20s Perspective – Lee Sollim, Cultural Critic

 

“Children Driven to the Edge”

 

 

Schools are often spaces where the most intense narratives are born. In this context, the school environment is far from the romanticized image of youth that one might typically imagine. Students are perpetually anxious and rushed. Gathered together simply by virtue of being the same age, they are subjected to relentless comparison and competition. At times, this competition drives individuals in completely unexpected directions. The novel The Mimic Girl coldly exposes the reality of the school environment within Korean society.

 

At the center of the story is the premise of a proxy college entrance exam. One day, Yeong-ri, a student living in poverty, receives a proposal from the chairman of a major corporation to attend school and take the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) on behalf of his daughter, Chorom. With her father in a coma following a sudden accident, Yeong-ri swallows her hesitation and ultimately accepts the offer.

 

To blend into Chorom’s life, Yeong-ri begins to alter her own body piece by piece. She changes her hairstyle, undergoes laser eye surgery, and even implants a mole on her face in the exact same spot as Chorom’s. To gain entry into a higher social stratum, she essentially erases herself to clone another person. However, a school is a space where glances and rumors travel faster than anywhere else. In an atmosphere where people fear another person’s success just as much as their own failure, the proxy exam operation progresses precariously, narrowly dodging the tangled desires of students, parents, teachers, and private academy instructors.

 

The Mimic Girl does not merely rely on pushing a provocative premise. The novel relentlessly tracks how human circumstances and desires warp ethics. Alongside the school, the hospital emerges as an equally critical space in the work. Both institutions are places that drive human beings to extreme desperation. Faced with the terror of missing out on the life they wished for, people gradually abandon their morals. The landscape where the phrase “It is not a crime if you do not get caught” is casually tossed around feels painfully familiar yet bitter.

 

The school in this work acts not merely as a background, but as a massive system that amplifies desire and anxiety. Although Yeong-ri possesses talent and Chorom possesses capital, both characters ultimately invade each other’s lives out of a longing for what they lack. The author, Sohyang, who is actually an elementary school teacher, notes in the appendix that we frequently witness real-life news stories where the university entrance system tests individual ethics. Ultimately, The Mimic Girl is a novel that uses a chilling, fast-paced narrative to demonstrate how easily people in modern Korean society clone and alter themselves just to secure a coveted position.

 

 

 

 

The 30s Perspective - Maeng Junhyuk, Publishing Editor

 

“Our Foundation”

 

 

Sam-o Restaurant is a small eatery nestled in the absolute heart of Yeongdeungpo Market. To some, it is a fierce battleground of commerce and a mother’s workplace; to others, it is an ordinary restaurant where they stop by to fill an empty stomach. Amid the nonchalant exchange of food and money, mixed with all kinds of rumors and coarse language, another day draws to a close. Usually, when asked to choose a book themed around “space,” people tend to first think of beautiful and unfamiliar places like an old bookstore, a seaside village, or someone’s cozy room. However, after reading Lee Myung-lang’s novel Sam-o Restaurant, one arrives at the realization that a good space does not necessarily have to be pretty or romantic.

 

In this work, the market is not a mere backdrop or a stage where characters briefly pass through. Instead, it is a living space that shapes the temperaments and language of the people, ultimately grasping and swaying their very destinies. Centered around Sam-o Restaurant, a fruit shop, a fish market, a boiler room, a restroom, and a weathered wooden bench are densely interconnected. The visible space may be cramped, but the volume of life nestled within those crevices is by no means small. Someone’s desperate livelihood rests upon it, while long-suppressed resentments, empty bluffs, and shabby desires hover around its perimeter.

 

Rather than being a purely warm place, Sam-o Restaurant is where desire and wounds intersect, and where love-hate relationships and sorrow entangle. Yet, that is precisely why it delivers a weightier resonance. The market people embrace one another only to easily inflict scratches, and they laugh heartily only to become harsh a moment later. However, that dizzying complexity is closer to the true, bare face of “daily living.” We often try to package spaces into romantic memories, associating a market with “human warmth,” an alleyway with “quaintness,” and a restaurant with “a warm bowl of rice.” Yet, Sam-o Restaurant sternly declares that such soft words cannot fully explain life. Even if it reeks of fish, noises abound, and the place is shabby, someone stubbornly endures their day right there.

 

Throughout reading this book, I thought about the difference between a “place” viewed from the outside and a “foundation” wrestled with from the within. A place can be appreciated with the eyes, but a foundation can only be understood by experiencing it with the entire body. In front of a foundation, there is very little room for choice. Even if you do not like it, you must tenaciously earn money, argue, eat, and fall asleep there. The characters who dwell in Sam-o Restaurant are precisely the people of such a foundation. Therefore, the market in this novel is not a romantic scenery, but the bone-aching pressure of survival itself.

 

Today, we buy goods with a single click and push carts in smoothly polished mega-marts. This does not mean such changes are inherently bad. However, as convenient and sophisticated spaces multiply, someone’s roughly pulsating life recedes further from our view. Sam-o Restaurant summons those persistent lives, which have become invisible to our eyes, right back into the center of the novel. The true meaning of a space ultimately depends on who eats there, wipes away tears there, and rolls up the shutters again the next morning. Therefore, reading this novel is not merely about sightseeing a weathered “place” called Yeongdeungpo Market. It is an encounter with someone’s sweat-scented “foundation” hidden behind the smooth scenery, and a process of questioning what kind of lives we have been passing by all too quickly.

 

 

 

 

The 40s Perspective – Kim Mihyang, Publishing Critic

 

 

Space is not a mere backdrop. The kind of space one has lived in directly reveals how one has lived. In this regard, Grandma Judy, a collection of ten short stories meticulously selected by novelists of 2026 from among Park Wan-Suh’s numerous works, is a volume that relentlessly exposes the theme of “space” from the most everyday perspectives.

 

Given that it brings together works published from the 1970s through the 1990s, this collection provides a condensed view of how spaces in Korean society have evolved. From post-war living spaces to the influx of urbanization and apartments, space undergoes continuous transformation.

 

In Park Wan-Suh’s fiction, space is never fixed to a single locality. Living spaces such as houses, kitchens, alleys, apartments, and airports function as devices that unveil the characters’ emotions and relationships, as well as the structural landscape of the era that was South Korea. The “home,” in particular, is presented not merely as a place to stay, but as a structure where life accumulates. For Park, space is not a simple background; it is the very way of life the characters have led. The “home” exposes the tension within family relationships, the “kitchen” visualizes women’s roles and labor, the “alley” carries the footprints of the era, and the “apartment” reveals social mobility and desire.

 

In The Heaviest Dentures in the World, the tension generated by national division and state power infiltrates the apartment where the everyday narrator lives and even the narrator’s own body, manifesting in a way that structurally oppresses individual life. The space remains, but the moment cracks appear in the relationships and emotions contained within it, that space can no longer serve as a peaceful foundation for life. In this manner, space in her stories transcends individual locations to function as a structure that constructs the narrative itself.

 

Another characteristic repeatedly shown in this collection is how space reveals relationships. In You Think Babysitting Is Easy?, urban residential spaces and the scars of redevelopment expose the characters’ socioeconomic class, while in The Person I Met at the Airport, the liminal space of the airport serves as a crossroads where post-war life and experiences in a foreign land intersect.

 

As such, Park Wan-Suh’s fiction relentlessly tracks how spaces acquire meaning and how they collapse. It is at this very point that this collection transcends being a record of the past and connects with today’s reading. Even though we live in much more diverse spaces half a century later, the structural reality of life contained within those spaces has not changed significantly. The class division and lack of understanding exposed in Stolen Poverty, and the feelings of loss contained in My Very Last Possession, remain ongoing issues. The spaces of the past have vanished, but the structures of relationships and emotions created by those spaces continue to repeat within our lives today.

 

In this respect, reading Park Wan-Suh’s fiction is not an act of reminiscing about the past. Rather, it is closer to reinterpreting the very spaces we inhabit today. In Korean society, space has functioned not merely as a physical location, but as the accumulated result of relationships, memories, social classes, and emotions. Park’s works vividly expose this process of accumulation, compelling readers to read into these spaces once again.

 

For international readers, this collection serves as a gateway to a multi-dimensional understanding of South Korean society through everyday spaces like houses, kitchens, alleys, and apartments. At the same time, the experience of reading works from different eras side by side will prompt us to question what we have lost and what we have gained along the way.

 

 

 

 

The 50s Perspective - Jang Dong Seok, Literary Critic

 

 

I was born and raised in Seoul, yet I do not know the city through and through. I am only slightly familiar with the neighborhood where I grew up, the streets of Jongno that we used to call “downtown,” and parts of Mapo-gu that I frequented for work. Still, some places remain as vivid memories. The royal tombs of the Joseon Dynasty, where I often went for school picnics as a child and strolled with my wife before we were married, are among them. So, it goes without saying that I know even less about the time when Seoul was called “Gyeongseong.” The reason my eyes were drawn to the newly published One Hundred Scenes of Gyeongseong is simple. The spaces of that era, which existed during Gyeongseong and still stand in today’s Seoul, are all around us in abundance. If we show just a little interest, we realize these places can transport us into the time and space of history. In the introduction, Kim Eun-ju, an architectural archivist and historian who introduces 100 structures in One Hundred Scenes of Gyeongseong, states: “What they all have in common is that they are buildings that formed Gyeongseong during the historical period of Japanese colonial rule, strictly exist as records of our history, and are cultural heritages that must be preserved for the future.”

 

The first building introduced is “Gyeongseong Station.” Named Seoul Station from 1947 after liberation, it is the very place now called “Culture Station Seoul 284.” Serving as the “central station for Japan’s expansion into the continent,” Gyeongseong Station was completed in September 1925. It was designed by Japanese architect Yasushi Tsukamoto, featuring a European-style exterior. The twelve massive pillars placed inside were a device to show off the “dignity and scale of modern architecture.” The author defines Gyeongseong Station as “a space where the times of diverse individuals, including independence activists and traitors, capitalists and laborers, those arriving in the capital and those returning home, are layered on top of one another.” While it fully reflects imperialist ambitions, it is undeniably a symbolic location in our history, as it also bears the footprints of the citizens’ daily lives and their strides toward independence.

 

The book also introduces “Bukchon Hanok Village,” which has recently been receiving much love from foreign tourists. During the Joseon Dynasty, Bukchon was predominantly inhabited by yangban nobles in power, while Namchon was home to disenfranchised nobles. Under Japanese colonial rule, this shifted so that Joseon people resided in Bukchon and Japanese people lived in Namchon. The large and spacious hanoks of Bukchon were gradually “reorganized into modern urban residential areas.” From the late 1920s, urban hanoks, which were modern improved hanoks, were built intensively. The person who dedicated himself to this work was Jeong Se-gwon. He developed the Bukchon hanok housing estates through his real estate and housing management company, Geonyangsa. He was heartbroken by the reality that the people of Joseon were being pushed to the peripheries of Gyeongseong. Thus, he proposed the hanok as a new urban housing model, building and selling them directly in an effort to “go beyond mere housing supply and improve the residential environment for the Joseon people.” In that regard, Bukchon Hanok Village deserves to be called a “living museum of modern urban hanoks.” It is regrettable that due to constraints of space, I cannot introduce all 100 locations here. However, I hold a great expectation that there will surely be discerning readers who will take One Hundred Scenes of Gyeongseong in hand and visit all 100 sites.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Written by Lee Sollim (Publishing Editor)

As an editor, she contemplates books that will stand the test of time, while as a critic, she keeps a keen eye on new releases that demand to be read in the here and now. She is also a reader who dreams of a day where she can step aside from professional concerns to simply read to her heart’s content, secretly hoping to one day find herself accidentally locked inside a library.

 

Written by Maeng Junhyuk (Book Editor)

Rather than aiming to craft a polished review or a perfect introduction, my true hope is to accurately convey the “code” shared by myself and the “us” out there somewhere. As a South Korean reader in my thirties who loves literature, I seek to carefully give voice to a part of that sensibility.

 

Written by Mihyang Kim (Book Critic·Essayist, IT Service Planner)

She worked as a publishing editor for thirteen years, spending three years on books and ten years planning and editing magazines. She is the author of the essay Mother Said She Was Not Happy, and co-authored Key Words of the Korean Publishing Industry 2010-2019, What is Film?, and Goods Caution. Having served as a Creative Director at a tech company, she is currently designing, interpreting, and recording the world as a service planner and storyteller.

 

Written by Jang Dong Seok (Book Critic)

He is a dedicated reader and writer. Captivated by the vast and profound world of literature, he spends every spare moment reading and contemplating how books resonate with our society. He is currently striving to transform books, the infinite source of all content, into diverse cultural formats. His published works include The Living Library, The Rebirth of Forbidden Books, The Birth of Different Thoughts, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms: A Story Renewed After a Thousand Years, and Meeting World Classics for the First Time: A Guide for Teens.