BITTER AS THE WEDGE OF A LEMON

A finely crafted Korean novella about a murder, Lemon gets progressively bitter and harsh.

One of the most exciting aspects of reading books from around the world is learning about a facet of another culture. My book choice for this week was Kwon Yeo-sun’s Lemon (translation by Janet Hong) and it led me to some cultural preoccupations around beauty that both amused and bothered me.

South Korea is often called "plastic surgery capital of the world". In South Korea, plastic surgery is not stigmatized as it is in other parts of the world. It is even a common graduation gift.  The word “blepharoplasty” also entered my vocabulary this week; the procedure has to do with the removal of excess skin from the eyelids.

This preoccupation with beauty—on the part of both women and men in that nation—is largely attributed to the influence of Western culture and western beauty ideals that have to do with large eyes and sharper, more angular features. What is also interesting is how there is a feminist movement now that’s refacing the lives of young South Korean women—Escape the Corset—and giving them the courage to ditch unrealistic standards of beauty. I had to share an image I found in a story on CNN on virtual humans used for marketing.

“Lucy” is believed to represent the Korean gold standard of beauty and, at least until recently, women sought to fit their faces into such a mold, with an oval frame being the most sought after of them all. It reminded me about how India defined classical beauty in women when I was growing up; those who possessed a round face were the lucky ones. Me? I couldn’t even enter this contest for I failed the very first requirement:-)

The opening chapter of Lemon ends with this heartbreaking plea from Da-on, a sister who has not come to terms with her elder sister’s horrific end. To the reader it’s the first introduction to the national fuss over appearances.

“Does this mean I’m still not free? That’s I’m not free, not one iota, from those smooth, fair, irrelevant details from sixteen years ago, those endless memories of my sister’s loveliness, which had made me undergo plastic surgery, turning my own face into a crude patchwork of her features?”

Kwon Yeo-sun’s novel is told through several interconnected enigmatic stories titled “Rope”, “Poem” and so on. Published in 2021, Lemon was her first work translated into English. The novel itself is an expansion of her 2016 short story "You Do Not Know". According to this review on Vulture, Kwon’s novels and short stories have earned her  many literary awards and quite a reputation, too, for she’s “biting in her criticism of South Korean culture and the country’s government.”

I found her novella gripping. The tautness of the writing and the tension in the plot reminded me of Parasite, the Korean movie that wowed audiences a few years ago. These Korean creators go for the jugular, quite literally, too, it seems, and they know to craft lean and mean stories imbued with tension and raw emotion. On the face of it, Lemon is a simple story about a murder.

In the summer of 2002, right around the time Korea hosts the FIFA World Cup, nineteen-year-old Kim Hae-on is killed in what becomes known as the “High School Beauty Murder”. The suspects in this story also reminded me of two sets of people caught up in the class conflict in Parasite. There’s the rich kid Shin Jeongjun, whose car Hae-on was last seen in; then there’s the poor delivery boy Han Manu, who witnesses Hae-on in the passenger seat of Jeongjun's car just a few hours before her death. But when Jeongjun's alibi turns out to be solid—and he, conveniently, is shunted off by his parents to study in America—and no evidence can be pinned on Manu, the case is closed.

While Lemon is quite obviously about Da-on’s search for the truth, it’s also meditation on all the things skewing the life of a family in the years after such a devastating loss. Often, the survivors wallow in a grief tainted by guilt. They’re battered by nihilistic thoughts. They cannot move on.

“Life has no special meaning. Not his, not my sister’s, not even mine. Even if you try desperately to find it, to contrive some kind of meaning, what’s not there isn’t there. Life begins without reason and ends without reason.”

Lemon presents the aftermath of this murder from the point of view of three women, each of whom gives us a fresh perspective on the events in the summer of 2002 and the circumstances in the lives, after two decades, of all those connected to the murder. I’m now on a second read of this short work to pick up clues I may have missed the first time around; Kwon never reveals the name of the murderer but there are hints, all through this chiseled work, pointing to the identity of the perpetrator.

The extraordinary quality of this psychological thriller is not the resolution of the murder. It’s the relentless, incisive probing of feelings in a brief work. Lemon is obviously written by an exemplary craftsman but I felt that translator Janet Hong also matched the writing word for word and feeling for feeling.

This would be a great pick for a book club. It’s a fast read and offers many topics for discussion: class conflict, cultural feelings about beauty, corruption and inequity. Beyond that, this book makes us contemplate outward beauty and inward angst. It makes us introspect on beauty itself, the visual experience that ensnares us in a fleeting instant and is often so fleeting in itself.

In my view, Lemon is also a warning to all society, that perfection of any kind at all is unattainable for human beings. Hae-on  represents the most shallow notion of “extreme, staggering beauty”. Inside that “perfect” package, she is vacuous and unseeing, with no sense of right and wrong. Her younger sister, the tubby one with wisdom and rectitude, is always taking care of an older sister who may even turn up without underwear to school.

When Hae-on dies, Da-on is dazed. A few years later, to please and appease her mother, she tries hard to surgically capture her sister’s beauty in her own face but to no avail. That’s not all. Let me just say that the hopelessness of the aftermath of this murder leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, like the sour harshness of a wedge of lemon.