I picked up “Winter in Sokcho” by Elisa Shua Dusapin because of the vibrant cover that captured the small-town South Korea aesthetic perfectly. This original French work is translated into English by Aneesa Abbas Higgins.

If you have followed me for a while, you know that I have been focusing on Asian Literature in translation and works of the Asian diaspora for a while. However, when it came to literary fiction from South Korea, I had only read Han Kang so far. December of 2025 brought Choi Jin-Young’s “Hunger” and Elisa Shua Dusapin’s “Winter in Sokcho” to me to open up this world of weird literature and identity crisis.

A sea-side tourist town in the off-season of winter is the embodiment of quiet and unsettled. As the snow falls on the beach, the remaining people of the town are reduced to mere visuals, sans the auditory experience. The burden of existing in dual identities, for the town and the protagonist, becomes more pronounced in this quietness, making this book the perfect winter read.

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The dilapidated guesthouse in Sokcho in the winter off-season is the setting of this story. The unnamed narrator of French-Korean descent is the receptioninst, cook, and housekeeping staff of the place. While she expects a cold and quiet season ahead in the tourist town, the arrival of a French artist, Yan Kerrand, to the guesthouse shakes things up. The frozen town becomes the setting for Kerrand’s next graphic novel and the narrator becomes his guide. She is not fond of the small town, especially in all its winter stillness, but mysterious Kerrand finds charm there. As a cartoonist, he is looking for inspiration. As a Korean woman with foreign heritage, she is looking for assurance of her place in the world. His drawings fascinate her as much as the person does. But this is a story that’s been written a generation ago and is doomed from the beginning.

The narrator’s French father had disappeared from Sokcho after knocking up her Korean mother. With no insight into half of her heritage, the narrator has been living in limbo between Seoul and Sokcho. With her higher education done in the capital, she is back to take care of her mother and stay near her. Her college boyfriend, Jun-Oh, had moved with her. But this winter everything is changing. At just age 24, she is faced with impossible life choices — to stay or to go being the chief among them. This lure of France arrives just at this junction and leaves her just as mystified as before.

In the bleak landscape of Sokcho, this is a story of wanting to be seen. Treated simultaneously as a child and an adult by her mother, she is loathed to share a bed with her and loathed to eat in front of her. The relationship with food described here is manifold. The narrator cooks and cleans for the guests at the guesthouse while her mother sells and cleans fish professionally and cooks for her. She is never eating enough but also never thin enough to her mother’s satisfaction. She is squandering her life away in Sokcho to remain a support for her mother and feels stuck here because of her all the same. When she decides to let Jun-Oh return to Seoul without any strings attached, she is already making a decision.

While stuck in a limbo like this, Kerrand’s unusual approach to life captures her imagination. She asks about France, his work and looks him up online. He is already married and pretty successful. She knows how this story goes from having lived as a product of such a relationship but cannot stop herself from yearning for this other part of her identity to yield something more concrete. She is treated like a foreigner in her own town as the people address her in English in front of Kerrand and her “unbelonging” is complete. As the long procession of people leaving her continue — her father, Jun-Oh, Kerrand — she chooses to stay, baffled and harrassed by her own decisions.

The detachment that flows from Kerrand’s work had promised a clean break from the get-go, but it is the seemingly aloof narrator who keeps clinging on. Sokcho, as a border town situated between North and South Korea embodies her internal struggles and dual identities. She feels doomed to repeat her mother’s mistakes. There is a possessiveness in her about her town, her mother, and her cooking, while Kerrand lurking everywhere is clearly an intrusion upon her small and quiet world. He is a promise of more, of the what-if and the lure of the West.

This story of belonging, not belonging, living in denial, stuck in time also has body dysmorphia sprinkled in. Alongside the relationship with food and body weight, the classic Korean insistence on plastic surgery is present in the narrator’s aunt’s comments about her face and the female guest at the guesthouse with her face wrapped up, recovering from drastic plastic surgery.

This quiet introspective read was strangely unsettling in its conclusion as the inner turmoils of the narrator do not find resolution in this plot. I quite enjoyed reading books about dual identities that explored mother-daughter relationships back-to-back, with my previous read being “Hot Milk” by Deborah Levy, and am looking forward to continue reading more on this theme. Having quite liked “Winter in Sokcho” I am looking forward to catching the screen adaptation as well.

You can grab your copy of “Winter in Sokcho” by Elisa Shua Dusapin here.

(I earn a small commission from every qualified purchase from the link to continue reading and reviewing)

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Have you read or watched “Winter in Sokcho” yet? Or any other South Korean Literary Fiction? What are your thoughts on them?

Feel free to drop a comment or reach out to me across social media at @thecalcuttanbibliophile. I would love to hear from you.