Among the narrators in Cho Nam-joo’s astute short story collection, Miss Kim Knows, is a Seoul-based author who’s penned a #MeToo-era feminist sensation. As she confesses in Defiance: “The novel wasn’t especially progressive or radical, but it landed in the crosshairs of so many disputes,” a position that generated intense online trolling as well as enviable sales figures.
It’s an experience familiar to Cho. Her own internationally bestselling novel, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, highlighted pernicious gender inequality and misogyny in her native South Korea through an account of a young mother’s psychotic break, and proved so divisive that when a member of K-pop band Red Velvet revealed she’d read it, male music fans vowed to burn her photo.
Many of that novel’s preoccupations are present here, unifying the experiences of female protagonists who range from tweens to octogenarians, office workers to maths teachers. Their stories encompass love and loss, flight and mystery, yet lurking within each is some combination of gender-based violence, discrimination or harassment, and the risk of erasure through motherhood and domesticity is keenly felt.
While none of these are uniquely Korean problems, Cho’s opening story grounds them in regional traditions. Under the Plum Tree is a matter-of-fact elegy to sisterhood and self-determination, based around an elderly narrator watching her sister fade away in an Alzheimer’s unit. For all that she forgets, the sister always remembers to call her by the name she chose for herself, rather than Mallyeo, meaning “last girl”, the name given her by parents who saw no use for daughters and were determined to have a son.
A later story, Grown-Up Girl, explores the extent to which things have changed – and to which new challenges have emerged. The narrator’s mother founded a women’s refuge, and she herself started a feminist book club in college, but when her own daughter conspires to trap boys who’ve been upskirting with their phones at school, she struggles to support her in the face of criticism from other parents.
Along with deeply felt family responsibilities and some pungent culinary detail, intense pressure to achieve academically is one of the ways in which these stories assert their local flavour – “cram schools” are ubiquitous, and one woman confesses to having no memory of her teen years because all she did was study. It’s equality of a kind, at least when stacked against the experience of grandmothers who never got a chance to finish high school, but as the title story makes clear, young women still aren’t being treated fairly when they enter the workplace.
Its narrator has taken up a post in an ad agency left by the eponymous Miss Kim, whose role seems hazy. “Miss Kim was… Miss Kim”, a colleague tries to explain. As it turns out, she did everything in this eccentrically nightmarish office, and did it altogether too well, despite having no set job title and an entry-level salary. In the end, she became so powerful she had to be fired.
There are other Miss Kims in this collection, such as the Miss Kim at a travel agency who books a middle-aged narrator and her mother-in-law on a trip to Canada to see the northern lights, a lifelong ambition, in the sublimely droll Night of Aurora. Half-glimpsed characters, the Miss Kims share a surname with the main character of Cho’s breakout novel, Kim Jiyoung, akin to “Jane Doe” in Korean. In that sense, these literary cousins are everywomen, but there’s also a Ms Kim.
She pops up in Defiance to accuse the story’s author protagonist of plagiarising her drunken confidences and exploiting women’s pain for narrative effect, flattening their experiences in the process. “The lives of women are all different, and we’re each suffering in our own way,” she fumes. These eight tales can be unevenly paced and aren’t always helped by the translation, but Cho celebrates that difference throughout. Despite her characters’ hardships and disappointments, there is mischief and glee to be found in these pages, along with the kind of laughter that sets two women over 50 rolling in snow with tears streaming down their frozen cheeks and the aurora borealis dancing above them.
Miss Kim Knows and Other Stories by Cho Nam-joo, translated by Jamie Chang, is published by Scribner (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
