The Stone Home
A Novel
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- ¥1,500
発行者による作品情報
“It is a privilege to read Crystal Hana Kim’s fiction, which both edifies and enlightens.” —Min Jin Lee
A hauntingly poetic family drama and coming-of-age story that reveals a dark corner of South Korean history through the eyes of a small community living in a reformatory center—a stunning work of great emotional power from the critically acclaimed author of If You Leave Me.
In 2011, Eunju Oh opens her door to greet a stranger: a young Korean American woman holding a familiar-looking knife—a knife Eunju hasn’t seen in thirty years, and that connects her to a place she’d desperately hoped to leave behind forever.
In South Korea in the 1980s, young Eunju and her mother are homeless on the street. After being captured by the police, they’re sent to live within the walls of a state-sanctioned reformatory center that claims to rehabilitate the nation’s citizens but hides a darker, more violent reality. While Eunju and her mother form a tight-knit community with the other women in the kitchen, two teenage brothers, Sangchul and Youngchul, are compelled to labor in the workshops and make increasingly desperate decisions—and all are forced down a path of survival, the repercussions of which will echo for decades to come.
Inspired by real events, told through alternating timelines and two intimate perspectives, The Stone Home is a deeply affecting story of a mother and daughter’s love and a pair of brothers whose bond is put to an unfathomably difficult test. Capturing a shameful period of history with breathtaking restraint and tenderness, Crystal Hana Kim weaves a lyrical exploration of the legacy of violence and the complicated psychology of power, while showcasing the extraordinary acts of devotion and friendship that can arise in the darkness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kim's riveting sophomore novel (after If You Leave Me) begins in 2011 with 40-something Eunju Oh receiving an unexpected visitor at her apartment in Daegu, South Korea. Narae, a 30-year-old Korean American woman raised in New York City by Eunju's recently deceased childhood enemy, Sangchul Kim, has come in search of the truth about her familial origins. What follows is an account from both teenaged Eunju's and Sangchul's perspectives of their year in the Stone House three decades earlier. Billed by the government as a rehabilitation center for wayward youth and women, the Stone House instead operated as a forced-labor camp where innocent civilians kidnapped by the police were enslaved under grueling conditions. The hair-raising narrative chronicles Eunju's time in the camp's kitchen with her mother and a disparate group of women who came to care for one another. Her first run-in with Sangchul occurs at a camp picnic, and they become friends after Eunju is chosen to work with Sangchul and some other boys to thread fishhooks. As Eunju recounts to Narae, Sangchul became a brutal enforcer for the camp's sadistic leaders. Through the suspenseful and nuanced frame narrative, Eunju unearths the full story behind Sangchul's chilling betrayal and reveals the truth about Narae's birth mother. Kim generates empathy for all the characters by showing the anguish and desperation that drive their harrowing deeds. This confirms Kim's reputation as a formidable talent.
