Blowfish - Jo Kyung-Ran

A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:
Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:

support the site

Blowfish

by
Jo Kyung-Ran

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Blowfish
Author:	Jo Kyung-Ran
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2010 (Eng. 2025)
Length:	292 pages
Original in:	Korean
Availability:	Blowfish - US
	Blowfish - UK
	Blowfish - Canada

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Korean title: 복어
Translated by Chi-Young Kim

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

B+ : moody, with heavy matters treated with a quite deft touch

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Publishers Weekly	.	26/4/2025	.

From the Reviews:

"Jo’s atmospheric writing distills the novel’s mood from its settings (...), while details about the sculptor’s family history inform her chilling determination to die. It’s a memorable existential tale." - Publishers Weekly

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

The complete review's Review:

Blowfish is presented in relatively short chapters -- there are sixty-seven of them -- that alternate in their focus between its two unnamed protagonists, a female artist and a male architect. (Many of the characters in the novel are referred to by name, but not the two main characters; amusingly (and tellingly), even in the company of the architect the woman, at one point: "kept forgetting she was with someone else. She could not even remember this man's name".) Divided into four parts, the story moves from Seoul to Tokyo and back to Seoul -- with the city-backdrops a strong presence throughout. Both the artist and the architect are unattached, and are drawn to each other, meeting fairly frequently though generally remaining at a certain remove; at one point, for example, the artist goes back to South Korea from Tokyo for the holidays, without even bothering to tell the architect.
Death -- and, in particular, suicide -- haunt both protagonists. The artist's grandmother killed herself, at a relatively young age -- the artist never knew her --, while the architect's brother also had. These two suicides also strongly affected the fathers of the protagonists, the architect's withdrawing completely into himself, while the artist's father, whose mother had killed herself in front of him and his father when he was a child, still now:

became nine years old again every night in his dreams. Not a single night was spared. Alcohol did not help. She could not stand her father anymore, this nine-year-old desperately calling for his mother.

Early in the novel, the artist has decided:

Now was the time to sever whatever chains tethered her to this world; now was the ideal time. She and her other self agreed on that point. Now only death remained.

A three-month artist's residency in Tokyo seems to make for the perfect circumstances. She makes careful plans there, and even goes to Ueno Park with a chair, ready to hang herself, but doesn't go through with it then -- not least because of/after an encounter and conversation with (the spirit or whatever of) her grandmother, who had died more than half a century earlier ..... But she doesn't entirely give up on the idea, and soon fixates on following in her grandmother's footsteps, at least in terms of method, drawn to the blowfish (also pufferfish, or fugu) -- a delicacy, but also, in various parts, highly toxic (so much so that only licensed chefs can legally prepare it in Japan, and it is apparently banned in the European Union).
The artist does her research, buying a book on Understanding Blowfish and repeatedly visiting the Tsukiji Market, where she finds the one shop there that sells blowfish. She earns the trust of the gruff master, Abe-san, there, and learns more about the fish and its preparation from him. And while it is considered a delicacy, when she asks what it tastes like:

"It's a grotesque taste," Abe-san said. "When you eat it, it tastes like death. That's what it tastes like."

At one point the artist explains her new interest to the architect:

     "I want to know more about them."
     "About blowfish ?"
     "Why, is that weird ?"
     "No." He shook his head. "What made you interested in blowfish ?"
     "I was just drawn to them."
     "Just naturally drawn to them ?"
     "Something like that."
     "Without any end goal ?"
     "Like ... the way my right hand leads my left."

So, they're not entirely open with one another -- but, as the architect eventually sums up:

He didn't know much about her. All he knew was the following: She was living a life dogged by a continuous urge to die. That was her true existence.

The architect apparently still feels guilt about not having saved his brother -- he was the last person his brother called -- and he realizes and admits, fairly early on:

     "I want to save ..."
     "Who ?"
     "This person I met."
     "This person, is she a woman ?"
     "Or -- I don't know. I just don't know."

The 'or' hangs over much of the novel -- is something else possible between or for the two protagonists ?
Blowfish sways full of uneasy backs and forths, both from chapter to chapter, as well as in each chapter itself. For all her focus on an end-game, the artist does engage otherwise as well; so too the architect has other projects and issues to deal with. The story arc is also not a simple, predictable one, especially in moving to the fourth and final part. Suffused with death -- and with other difficult family-issues prominent as well --, there is a heaviness to the novel, and Jo maintains an in many ways impersonal distance for her two protagonists (not least in not revealing their names), but it all works to good (if perhaps for some readers hard to take) effect.

- M.A.Orthofer, 3 July 2025

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

Blowfish:

Astra House publicity page
Wildfire publicity page
An Interview with Kyung-Ran Jo and Chi-Young Kim, Author and Translator of "Blowfish" by Tony Huang

Reviews:

Other books by Jo Kyung-Ran under review:

Tongue

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Korean literature

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

South Korean author Jo Kyung-ran (Cho Kyŏng-nan; 조경란) was born in 1969.

- Return to top of the page -