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language: Korean (English tr. Lizzie Buehler)
country: South Korea
year: 2010
form: short fiction
genre(s): literary, speculative
dates read: 24.8.25-27.8.25
Yun Ko-eun’s Table for One (translated by Lizzie Buehler) is a collection of nine long short stories. unfortunately, it’s largely made up of the kind of ~quirky~ realism that’s so popular for translation in English, which typically doesn’t move me. there are a few stories that are unambiguously speculative, and I mostly liked those best by a wide margin. the one upside is that the quirkiness here is often very dark, which was at least a change of pace.
the first of the two stories that stood out to me is “Roadkill”, which is about a vending machine operator who finds himself trapped in a surreal motel during a seemingly endless snowstorm, slowly bankrupting himself until he’s forced to mortgage his very identity in hopes of receiving enough money to live another few days in a series of rapidly shrinking motel rooms. deeply unsettling and very fun.
the second is “Time Capsule 1994”, about a member of the team tasked with restoring the contents of a damaged and decaying time capsule dug up a few hundred years before it was meant to be opened. among the contents, she finds an uncatalogued and seemingly blank — or at least indecipherable — CD, which she must decide what to do with. the speculative element here is much more liminal, but the story’s interspersal of the time capsule plot with the narrator’s conflicted feelings and memories of her brief relationship with her husband (who died only a few years into their marriage) and her daughter-in-law (who has now run away from the family member she went to live with after her father died and disappeared) works really well.
most of the other stories were less successful for me. the one other clearly speculative story, “Hyeonmong Park’s Hall of Dreams”, is a kind of fantastic satire of late capitalism following a man who’s job is dreaming bespoke dreams on behalf of clients who are too busy to have their own dreams and then narrating them back to the clients. it was fine but it went on just a bit too long, for me. most of the other stories deal with social outsiders, mainly unemployed people: a man who becomes pathologically obsessed with bedbugs in “Sweet Escape”, a writer who escapes her family by going to write in a fancy department store bathroom in “Invader Graphic”, a newly divorced house husband whose sense of reality is violently collapsing in “Piercing”. the title story, “Table for One”, is a (slightly too labored imo) story about an office worker who, for reasons he doesn’t understand, has been socially excluded from his coworkers’ daily lunch plans, prompting him to sign up for a course to learn how to be confident eating by himself.
the “slightly too labored” I think summarizes how I felt about most of the stories — they just went on slightly too long for their concepts, resulting in stories that feel diffuse rather than sharp, as they seem to be meant to be. (“Piercing” is, appropriately, the exception on this front; it just didn’t move me personally.)
having said that, I did appreciate that the stories’ endings are often anticlimactic: after the narrator of “Iceland” has meticulously described the ups and downs of the online forum for the Iceland-obsessed that he was part of, the conclusion is simply that he’s going to move to a different neighborhood to be close to his job’s new office building. the sense of anticlimax is genuinely interesting throughout the collection: Table for One is full of characters who are balanced precariously on the brink of some kind of escape but who, at the last moment, are either thwarted or turn away, unable to commit themselves to that escape. this is cool! just not cool enough to really work for me, alas.
moods: dark, mysterious, reflective