The Good Son – A Harrowing, Character-Driven Mystery/Thriller

“There are some people you just can’t love. Even when they smile, they make you want to pull on either side of that smile and rip their mouth off.”

Twenty-five-year old Yu-jin wakes up with ‘the smell of blood’. He soon finds that he is covered in blood (whose?), and there are bloody footprints all over his room. Yu-jin is epileptic and has taken meds from his childhood. But when he voluntarily skips the meds, to fend off numbness (drugs’ side-effects), he suffers from seizure and memory loss. He remembers sneaking from his room after 11 pm to go for a run. Everything else is a blank. Yu-jin slowly staggers downstairs only to discover his mother’s body, throat slashed from one end to the other. He delves into his muddled thoughts to figure out what had really happened, since all signs suggest that he is his mother’s killer. The question ‘why’ hangs in the air, alongside the smell of blood as Yu-jin begins the quest to find out the murderer. And what he finds pushes him further to sift through his mother’s secrets and uncover the true nature of his identity.

Korean novelist Jeong You-jeong’s, The Good Son (originally published in 2016, translated to English by Kim Chi-young in 2018) opens with such an interesting premise. It’s a very cleverly constructed thriller that unfolds within small space (a triplex apartment) and a handful of characters. The author also brilliantly uses the time-worn technique of unreliable narrator. Here the narrator (Yu-jin) has the most unreliable memory and the past he pieces through his mother’s journals is also fragmented and doesn’t clearly assess the truth in a situation. You-jeong’s story demands little suspension of disbelief, and in turn she steadily guides us deeper into Yu-jin darker psyche.

Frequent readers of crime thrillers can easily predict the twists, but the narrative structure also doubles up as a character study. Yu-jin’s relentless inquiry of his self makes the book truly unputdownable. The novel puts us in a preoccupied position that you just want to keep turning the next page and take one step closer to the answers. In stories featuring psychopath, you’d always witness some people acting like fools to give the anti-hero a chance to evade their grim fate. As The Good Son moves toward the ending, we get a bit annoyed by the utter foolishness of a certain character, which culminates into a predictably dark resolution. Otherwise, The Good Son is a devastating read, a gripping psychological thriller exploring the darkest recesses of a disturbed individual.

 

The Cipher – A Challenging and Incredibly Bizarre Horror

“…what if it is me? What if somehow I’m crawling blind and headfirst into my own sick heart, the void made manifest and disguised as hellhole, to roil in the aching dark of my own emptiness forever?”

American author Kathe Koja’s The Cipher (1991) was part of, or you could say it spear-headed, the bunch of weird horror fiction that emerged in the early 1990s (published by Dell Publishing under the print of Abyss Books). The paperback original horrors appeared under ‘Abyss’ were considered to be antithetical to the main-stream horror fiction of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, VC Andrews, etc (Mr. King however praised the titles published under the Abyss Books). The weird horror authors (mostly unknown), who gravitated towards hallucinatory prose and existential tension, penned stories that elude easy categorization. Readers who feel gross-out horror are not their cup of tea would have a particularly hard time going through this line of books.

Koja’s The Cipher actually doesn’t have a heavy dose of yuckiness as some of the splatter-punk horror genre novels of the 1980s. Yet Koja’s unpolished and relentlessly bleak prose makes us squirm with unease. The horrific phenomenon at the center of The Cipher is unexplainable. It’s a black hole, I mean literally. The novel’s characters aren’t the clean, all-American suburbanites, but disaffected young slackers, plagued with fear and anxiety, and living in an exceedingly dirty tenement. The book opens with Nicholas, a wanna-be poet and video-store clerk cajoled by Nakota, the bitchy wanna-be artist stuck in the shitty job of waitressing, to visit the mysterious hole in the storage closet of Nicholas’ broken-down apartment building. Nakota aka Shirke is cunning and manipulative, but Nicholas deeply loves her, knowing very well that his love may never be reciprocated. He knows she wouldn’t do be anywhere near him if not for that hole.

Nicholas describes the hole as, “Black. Not darkness, not the absence of light but living black. Maybe a foot in diameter, maybe a little more.” Nakota names it ‘Funhole’ and it becomes the focus of her obsession, just as Nicholas is obsessed with Nakota. She wants to find out the reason for the hole’s existence or what it can do. She experiments with a jar of insects, throwing it down the black hole, only to discover the strange mutations before its death. She sends a mouse inside, witnessing the grim results. Finally, Nakota pressures Nicholas to borrow a camcorder from the video store. She lowers the camcorder and gets a recording which is quite psychedelic. Nakota can’t stop watching the video, and the ensuing confrontation with Nicholas results in Nicholas accidentally dipping his hand in the Funhole. And things turn weirder when Nakota unveils the strangely symbiotic relationship between Nicholas and the hole.

The Cipher contains what critics call ‘stream of conscious writing’, which is full of mordant sense of humor (“If I could have broken his neck I would have, just for the pleasure of the silence after the snap”) and detailed description of all things unclean and unsavory. The novel actually fascinated me for the way Koja conjures the implacable climate of unpleasantness. The author makes us strongly feel the mood of decay and smell the odors, possibly emanating from the Funhole. There are lots of fiery verbal exchanges which some times turn violent. The sexual acts are described in as much joyless (and queasy) manner as possible. Although Nicholas is not a very likeable character, you could feel his desperation as he crawls between the claustrophobic spaces, hungering for love and preparing for that inevitable doom. The novel does feel too long, especially in the episodes related to Nakota & Malcolm’s gang of agitators. And Nakota was not only an unlikable character, but remains a cipher throughout (described as the woman with ‘a special selfishness that can barely recognize the existence of others’). Nevertheless, this tale of ‘evil space’ is a smart allegory on obsession, unrequited love, human frailty and the emptiness of modern life.

 

Obasan – A Poignant Inquiry into the Anguish-Filled Historical Past

““Life is so short”, I said, sighing, “the past so long, shouldn’t we turn the page and move on?” “The past is the future”, Aunt Emily shot back.”

During World War II, after Pearl Harbor, thousands of Canadians of Japanese descent, like their American counterparts, were sent to internment camps. The Canadian government of the time confiscated those displaced families' home and properties (in fact, the internment and relocation smoothly worked due to the fund raised by selling the confiscated properties). The camps were under government-forced curfews and some of the Canadian-Japanese were forcefully repatriated to Japan. It was only by April 1, 1949, the Canadian government revoked this undemocratic practice. In September 1988, the then Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney offered federal apology (and a compensation package). Joy Kogawa’s first and most popular novel Obasan (1981) was a semi-biographical exploration of the trauma and persecution Japanese-Canadians experienced during this particular historical period. 

Born in Canada in 1935, Kogawa, her parents and older brother found themselves relocated from Vancouver to a ghost town in the interior of British Columbia (Slocan) by the year 1941. Kogawa incorporates her own story alongside other wartime experiences to build the life of Megumi Naomi Nakane. Naomi is the protagonist and narrator of the novel which begins in 1972. She is an unmarried 36-year-old teacher, called 'spinster' by one of her mischievous student. She receives news of her uncle Isamu’s death and immediately takes off to see her obasan (aunt). Obasan and Obaji (uncle) were like Naomi’s (and her elder brother Stephen’s) adoptive parents, ever since their father died due to illness and mother disappeared in Japan during wartime. 

Naomi anticipates the arrival of Stephen and Aunt Emily’s arrival for the funeral. Emily is Naomi’s mother’s sister, also an unmarried woman who has spoken up against the racism and persecution, the wartime Canadian government used against the peaceful, law-abiding Japanese Canadian families. When Naomi receives a parcel from Emily, she begins to recall her childhood experiences which turned bleak when their family began to disintegrate in 1941. She wonders about her mother and the reason she returned to Japan, and also the way uncle and aunt avoided talking about her mother’s fate. Six-year-old Naomi’s traumatic experience also includes her encounter with a pedophile neighbor (in real life, author Kogawa’s father was a pedophile which she disclosed in her memoir ‘Gently to Nagasaki’; Kogawa’s novel The Rain Ascends is about a daughter discovering that her father is a pedophile).

Obasan is a beautifully written novel, not just about the detailing of suffering inside the internment camps or systemic xenophobia, but also about grief, truth-speaking, and human’s compulsion to make sense of the past. The aunt characters are brilliantly etched: one lives in silence with stoic resolve; and the other fights for justice. Kogawa’s writing style brings out the smallest of details and she is able to express emotions using mesmerizing descriptive language (and metaphors) that bestows a dreamlike quality to the novel (especially in the childhood perspective of Naomi). The predominant theme in the novel revolves around perils of silence and repression (“Gentle mother, we were lost together in our silences. Our wordlessness was our mutual destruction”, Naomi painfully remarks). Family or a democratic nation, hushing-up voices and feigning ignorance can only bring ineradicable damages.