Mrs. Shim Is a Killer by Kang Jiyoung

First published in South Korea in 2010; published in translation by Harper Perennial on April 21, 2026

Mrs. Shim Is a Killer is only the second crime novel from South Korea that I can recall reading. The first, The Plotters, is notable for its strong characterizations and careful storytelling. Mrs. Shim Is a Killer adopts a lighter tone but is equally enjoyable, albeit for different reasons.

The novel is impressively constructed. Each chapter holds a delightful surprise. The chapters are linked together, but for most of the novel, each chapter introduces, and focuses upon, a new character. Each character comes with a unique backstory. Because the novel’s destination is never clear, the plot is unpredictable.

There is a farcical edge to Mrs. Shim Is a Killer, first noticeable when Mrs. Shim, with very little contemplation, agrees to become a contract killer in exchange for a bar of gold. Mrs. Shim (first name Eunok) is an ajumma, which roughly translates as middle-aged woman. She is 51 when the novel begins. She just lost her job at a butcher’s shop because the owner was arrested at a gambling den. Her husband owned his own butcher’s shop but he died after driving his car into a pub. Since her husband was nearly blind, the police decided that he committed suicide so Eunok received no insurance payout. She had to sell her husband’s shop to pay for damages to the pub.

Eunok is still caring for a son and daughter and doesn’t know how to cope with her financial woes. Because an ajumma cannot easily find employment, she doesn’t expect anything to come of the ad seeking an ajumma for a high-paying position at a detective agency.

Korean detective agencies do the usual investigations into cheating husbands, but the story suggests that a couple of agencies are willing to solve a client’s problems by eliminating their source. The Smile Private Detective Agency provides that service. The firm’s CEO, Park Taesang, was its star killer, but he wants to recruit someone new to take on that role. Eunok’s skill with knives, honed during her career as a butcher, makes her a perfect fit, if you don’t count the fact that she has no history of murdering people.

Kang Jiyoung’s decision to turn a middle-aged widow into a knife-wielding assassin was clearly made with tongue in cheek, but Kang makes it easy to suspend disbelief. In the universe created by the story — a universe in which an ajumma is such an unlikely person to hold any job that isn’t menial, much less the job of assassin — the job offer and Eunok’s easy acceptance of her new profession seems natural.

Until the novel nears its end, each chapter tells a new story, each as interesting as the last. Each chapter sheds a different light on the chapters that came before. One story is about a cop who sacrificed his relationship with a son who now wants him dead because he arrested the villain who his son believed to be his true father. Another is a variant of Cyrano de Bergerac, involving a man who took credit for writing a love letter that was actually written by someone else (the story ends with a murder). Other stories are equally offbeat. Kang’s ability to flesh out the primary story with engaging background tales assured that my interest never wavered.

Only as the story approaches its end does the focus return to Eunok. By that time, her son is an apprentice killer for a rival agency, although mother and son are hiding their professions from each other. At the same time, the rival CEOs of two detective agencies want to kill each other, a development that pits mother and son assassins against each other. At the same time, another novice ajumma killer (this one the wife of a cop) enters the story.

Readers may need a spreadsheet to keep track of all the characters and their relationships to each other. The novel often has the feel of a comedy of errors as characters take extreme actions to conceal the truth from each other. The story is entertaining precisely for that reason. The plot follows unexpected routes as it hops from character to character and it is wildly impossible to accept at face value. Nevertheless, the novel’s construction is so clever and the characters are so sympathetic that the unlikely story did not distract from the pleasure I took in following it to its unexpectedly happy and satisfying destination.

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The White Book by Han Kang

First published in South Korea in 2016; published in translation in Great Britain in 2017; published by Crown/Hogarth on February 19, 2019

The unnamed narrator of The White Book decides to write about white things, expecting to be transformed by the experience. Most chapters of The White Book revolve around a white item on the list. The white door on an apartment she rented. Rice cakes before they are steamed. A handkerchief falling from a balcony rail. The Korean phrase “laughing whitely,” meaning cheerless or forced laughter. Frost that causes leaves to fall from trees, “incrementally lightening their burden.” The chapters are short, sometimes only a single paragraph. A couple of sections are written in verse.

The narrator associates some of the white objects with “oppressive fragments of memory” that “constantly drift to the surface” as she walks the streets of a bleak and unfamiliar city (presumably Warsaw) that is cloaked in white fog. She has seen footage taken by American aircraft showing how the rubble of the bombed city looked like white snow.

Sugar cubes remind the narrator of her of her childhood. From her mother, she learned of the white newborn gown that was used during the premature birth of her mother’s first baby. The baby died after two hours and the birthing gown became a white burial shroud. She imagines her mother’s white breast milk that the baby will never consume. Had that death not occurred, the narrator would not have been born. For that reason and others, the narrator is living a haunted life.

To some extent, The White Book is a meditation on color and light: the way objects in the dark may appear as a hazy white glow; the way the moon can be bright white or pale blue or mottled; the way a stage becomes an island of white light surrounded by a dark sea. It is also a meditation on culture. The narrator spreads a white skirt on her mother’s grave and burns it, white smoke ascending so that her mother’s spirit will be able to wear it. She performs the ritual while wondering whether anyone believes in its literal truth, but appreciates the silent solemnity of the act.

Some topics suggest the transitory and impermanent nature of all things: pristine snow that darkens with a city’s grime or mutely disappears; waves that become “dazzlingly white” before shattering in “a spray of white:” a white dog that sickens and dies; sturdy white bones that shatter and turn to sand; the ash of a cremated body; the white hair of lovers who will soon part from each other forever. Small white pills ease pain, impeding the body’s progress toward the white light that is said to be death. Yet sugar cubes remind her of her childhood, memories that “remain inviolate to the ravages of time,” evidence that time and suffering do not bring everything to ruin.

We come to understand that the narrator has suffered losses, including a lost love that makes her fearful of loving again, and that she was once on the brink of suicide, but now holds those thoughts in reserve. She is surrounded by dreariness but also delicacy — a white butterfly, white reeds growing in a marsh — and that balance between light and dark is one that could change at any moment, in either direction. Through abstract associations of light and whiteness, The White Book portrays a woman who has lived on the edge between life and death, but who is slowly reconstructing herself, as the city to which she has traveled is still reconstructing itself after the bombings that failed to destroy it completely.

Fragmented storytelling risks a loss of the narrative cohesion upon which readers depend to help them find a story’s meaning. Han Kang wields the form with great skill, allowing meaning to coalesce as the fragments accumulate. If the story is sometimes depressing, it is ultimately uplifting, and the prose (for which the translator, Deborah Smith, presumably deserves some credit) is always exquisite.

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