Gu Byeong-Mo, The Old Woman with the Knife trans. Chi-Young Kim (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2022). Originally published in Korean in 2013.
Also featuring: Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori (London: Granta, 2019). Originally published in Japanese in 2016.
Hello, armchair readers, welcome back. I’ve been reading this and that since I last wrote here, but nothing that really moved me to write about it. I even considered writing a newsletter about the things I don’t like in detective fiction (random unexplained traumatic incidents, obvious endings, boring or stereotypical villains…). But to be honest I prefer using this newsletter to write purely about the books that touched me and that I want to recommend to other readers.
Gu Byeong-Mo’s novel The Old Woman with the Knife is narrated from the perspective of a sixty-five-year-old woman, Hornclaw, who is at a crossroads in her career. She’s built up an enviable reputation, but is aware of her skills growing weaker. What’s more, she’s being challenged at work by a younger colleague, Bullfight, a man who seems to have a strange interest in her and her past.
Hornclaw’s field is called ‘disease control’ in the book. This is the chilling euphemism given to contract killing. Hornclaw works for an agency that kills people for money, and although some of the earlier scenes made me think there would be some underlying moral at play, that’s not the case. It’s a financial transaction, pure and simple; Hornclaw uses her extraordinary strength, wit, and training to kill people who are in the way of someone rich enough to pay to have them murdered.
So this isn’t exactly a murder mystery. Rather, it’s a mystery with a lot of murders happening along the way, each of which might or might not have some bearing on the central puzzle. Some the descriptions of violence are so intense I had to take a break; there were a couple I skimmed. I know I don’t do spoilers but here’s a small one – skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want it – the dog doesn’t get brutally murdered. There’s a dog, and the dog is a complicated presence; she unsettles the perfect self-sufficiency of the narrator and she reflects the reality of ageing and death. I spent way too much energy worrying about whether Bullfight was going to come and torture that dog, and now you don’t have to.
Spoiler over! I admired the novel for its relentlessness. As it explores the vast grief and trauma that marked young Hornclaw’s life, it never makes death or pain seem cute or palatable. It’s a devastating book in some ways but with its own sly humour, which ricochets from the very dark to the surprisingly sweet. It’s like life in that way, with absolutely no sentimental filter applied. The ending is absolutely stellar: no spoilers here at all, but the mix of ambiguity, revelation, and playful symbolism made me glad I didn’t give up on this book.
I read The Old Woman with the Knife right after finishing another book about an unusual woman who is uniquely good at her job: Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, which I learned about from this brilliant essay by Irish writer Naoise Dolan. The parallels between the two novels were really striking. Keiko, the protagonist of Convenience Store Woman, doesn’t find it easy to fit into normal Japanese society as an autistic woman. However, she finds intense satisfaction at being an extraordinarily good convenience store employee. Both novels describe the business and technicalities of work in satisfying detail. Like Hornclaw, Keiko’s routines are unsettled by a disruptive, violent man, and the plot’s main arc is driven by her efforts to resolve the problems he causes. There’s even an echo of that unsentimental approach to violence in Keiko’s reflection that stabbing a baby with a cake knife would be an efficient means of stopping it crying. (Unlike Hornclaw, Keiko is a fundamentally gentle person with no ambitions to murder, however.)
Hornclaw and Keiko are both isolated, in different ways. They are not able to call on the networks of kinship and solidarity that are more available to people who fit easily into social norms and follow typical trajectories. On one level this is the classic problem of the single woman in any society that prefers women to be daughters, wives, and sisters rather than individuals. The specific qualities of a vast metropolis – Seoul and Tokyo, in these cases – are play a part. Anonymity is a feature of daily life; Hornclaw can blend in on a crowded subway car and kill in front of crowd, and Keiko thrives on the repetitive, scripted interactions of a typical urban convenience shop. And there’s something about the nature of work, and the possibility of dedicating oneself to one’s calling, that grounds both of these novels.
Ultimately, the mystery of both novels becomes: why should ‘normalcy’, in the guise attending to an unpleasant man and his problems, even matter to these extraordinary characters? Reader: I don’t think it should, and I suspect that Sayaka Murata and Gu Byeong-Mo agree.
I bought The Old Woman with the Knife from the marvellous No Alibis Bookstore in Belfast. You can find out more about the book and how to read it here.
I borrowed Convenience Store Woman from the University of Birmingham Library. You can find out more about the book and how to read it here.