This is an unusual work and all the better and more interesting for that. O is best known as a poet of Korea, and it may be better to approach this collection of scenes and situations in this light. Most are set in the early/mid-twentieth century, around the years of the Japanese occupation. Plainly written language, subtly rendered black and white graphics, unexpected endings (not always conclusions or resolutions), nuanced questions of justice for vice, suffering, ignorance . . . I paused after each to challenge myself about what I had experienced. Is it what I expected it to be?

And that is partly the experience, I think. My expectations (partly as a Western reader, partly as one familiar with more traditional east Asian texts) were seldom met. Instead, I met people ugly and grating, quiet and enduring, and wondered at their "fortunes." Wherever we meet them, however, three absences struck me as constants: there seems little/no power beyond the local, there seems little in terms of an economic future, and there is little still in any power beyond the impotent human. 

All this makes for some bleak reading (at times with uncomfortable laughter), but together O offers a fascinating moral telling of the human condition, nonetheless.