Review: “Tongue” (“혀”) by Jo Kyung Ran (조경란)

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TONGUE by Jo Kyung Ran (the author’s preferred Romanization), begins with a broken relationship; a 7 years’ relationship ends and the narrator loses her connection to food, up to and including her sense of taste.

Unusually, however, for Korean fiction, it does not have any scenes in Korea nor does it have any Korean content. The narrator, in fact, is an chef of Italian food. This makes for a refreshing break from the usual Korea-centric nature of Korean modern literature.

The plot is an intertwining of the narrator attempting to deal with the break up (rather whimperingly and unsuccessfully), discussing her multitude of thoughts on food and cooking, memories of her family, and daily life. If you are not at least interested in food, this might be a difficult book to read, even though the other plot elements are strong. . But food, the cooking, serving, and eating of it, is Jo’s metaphor for relationship and she often discusses it here with a sensuality that crosses the border to sexuality.

The novel’s end is foreshadowed at various points throughout the book, but when the ending does come, although it is shocking, it is written with a restraint that verges on gentility.

As usual in Jo’s work, the symbol’s are strong, describing love she says, “Falling in love is like carving a word on the back of your hand. Even if you rub it out as hard as you can, a faint residue is left behind. So you have to be certain that you really want it. Make sure you think about it.”

That last semi-didactic sentence is also very Jo-ish, driving the final point in hard. In fact, in some cases Jo seems to try a bit too hard, particularly in her often idiosyncratic descriptions of spices (Basil express sadness and draws scorpions? MY Italian cooking would disagree!).

Jo switches voices throughout the piece, by which she separates her own thoughts about herself and her relationships from the more prosaic details of day to day life. Speaking of day to day life, there is of course a suicide in the story, a sad death, as well as a bit of mutilation – again, themes that Jo’s work seems to feature, particularly the suicide/death theme. Also, Jo’s narration, clearly reflecting the shattered nature of her narrator, hops from place to place and mood to mood, seemingly arbitrarily, and this might put off a western reader more used to linearity than piecing together the life of a fairly well shattered psyche. Many reviewers on Goodreads mention some version of this fractured narrative style, but it is a style that Korean fiction often uses (e.g. Cho Se-hui’s The Dwarf) so it seemed quite natural to me, and as you continue to read Korean fiction, the style becomes less opaque and more descriptive.

The characters eat at an alarming pace – if I ate the way the narrator does, I would shortly end up in intensive care or the morgue, but this seems to generally fit in well in a story whose theme is obsession. When the final betrayal of the narrator takes place, and the end-game begins to kick into action, the tone changes and, if you have been able to handle the mood and subject swings, your reading will speed up.

The book is well translated by Chi-Young Kim, which is as normal, and it has again bolstered my conviction never to eat foie gras!

Definitely for the fan of post-modern, women’s revenge fiction, and quite possibly interesting to foodies. I rather enjoyed it (and don’t normally like post-modernist-type fiction), while my podcast partner, Barry from SeoulABC, although he gave it five stars, was put off by some of the writing tactics I have previously mentioned, so just be ready for them and the book will take you some places you might not expect to go.

Source: Morning Calm, Night Terrors: Korean Modern Literature in Translation