Blowfish: A Novel

"Postmodernism is alive and well in Kyung-Ran Jo’s latest . . . Blowfish is a book to chew on and savor, a deft delve into the intricacies of love and art." —Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books

For readers of Han Kang and Sheila Heti, an atmospheric, melancholic novel about a successful sculptor who decides to commit suicide by artfully preparing and deliberately eating a lethal dish of blowfish.

Blowfish is a postmodern novel in four parts, alternating between the respective stories of a female sculptor and a male architect. Death is the motif connecting these parallel lives. The sculptor’s grandmother killed herself by eating poisonous blowfish in front of her husband and child, while the architect’s elder brother leapt to his death from the fifth floor of an apartment building. Now, both protagonists are contemplating their own suicides. The sculptor and architect cross paths once in Seoul, and meet again in Tokyo, while the sculptor is learning to prepare a fatal serving of blowfish.

The narrative loosely approximates a love story, but this is no romance in the normal sense. For the woman, the man is a pitstop on the road to her own suicide. For the man, the woman forestalls death and offers him a final chance. Through the conflicting impressions they have of one another, the characters look back on their lives; it is only the desire to create art that calls them back from death.

Evoking the heterogeneous urban spaces of Seoul and Tokyo, Blowfish delves into the inner life of a woman contemplating her failures in love and art. Jo’s fierce will to write animates the novel; the lethal taste of blowfish, which one cannot help but eat even though one may die in doing so, approximates the inexorable pains of writing a novel.