Review of Blowfish by Kyung-ran Jo

*Blowfish* by Kyung-ran Jo, translated by Chi-young Kim (2025). Published by Astra House.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

I’ve always and forever been a library girl from the bottom of my heart. When I was a child my mother would always take us to the library and I’d pick out a ridiculous amount of books, and I’ve continued that tradition when I moved home from New York City, after college, in order to keep picking my brain for new stories out there in the world.

During this time while unemployed, in-between applying to jobs, I’ve been spending a lot of time just catching up on my advance copy collection. I’ve been running this blog for about four years now, and I get direct emails from publishers along with advance copies through NetGalley. I typically prefer NetGalley though because I only have so much room in my bedroom, and I don’t like to waste physical copies of books if I don’t plan on keeping them.

I always get really excited when I see an option for a Korean book on NetGalley, as East Asian literature, especially Korean, is something I’m very interested in. I even did my master’s thesis on colonial Korean women writers and what their work did to resist against the expectations of women at that time, so I’ve read a lot of work by Korean women writers in the past century.

I requested Blowfish as soon as I saw it was available because of the synopsis. It reminded me a little of I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Kim Young-ha when I was reading the description, which is also was I was very interested in this book specifically.

Let’s get into the review, as this introduction is getting quite long!

A sculptor and architect dance around death after witnessing suicides in their immediate families.

This is a novel that’s split into two perspectives, with each chapter alternating between the two main characters. One is a successful sculptor who’s work is showcased in both Japan and Korea, and throughout the course of the novel, she’s contemplating about death and the way she’s going to kill herself.

Prior to the events of the novel, or halmeoni, or grandmother, killed herself with a blowfish. Look those up if you’re not familiar—you have to be very careful with what you eat and how you prepare it when you want to consume a blowfish, or you’re going to end up dead. This was an intentional suicide though, as she did this in front of her son (the sculptor’s father) and her grandfather.

The blowfish becomes a prominent image throughout the course of the novel, as the sculptor, while in Tokyo, decides she is going to commit suicide the same way her grandmother once did. She befriends a blowfish shop owner, who warns her about the dangers of consuming and preparing blowfish as an amateur, in hopes that she can get a blowfish (he refuses at first).

As all of this is happening, we meet our second main character in the alternating chapters. He’s an architect who also had to deal with a suicide. One day, his brother called and told him to hurry home, and when he did just that, he found a fresh body in the middle of the roads.

It was his brother, he realizes soon after looking at its mangled form. His brother jumped out of their apartment building, and when the architect realizes just that, he tells him crudely why couldn’t have jumped from a smaller floor rather than the fifth floor.

These two characters do interact with each other, and that’s how we learn their names even, but for the characters their fixations on death represent something else entirely. The sculptor is bent on dying and sees the man as one of the last few people she will engage with, while the architect sees this as a sign to potentially keep on living.

All of this is juxtaposed with rich, lush descriptions of Seoul and Tokyo, as well as the art these two are surrounded by. They’re creatives at heart, so the prose is rich with visuals that make you feel like you’re living in and immersed by the world around them. At the same time, it’s quite sad to see these descriptions, as they’re not able to see the beauty in what they’re surrounded by anymore.

It feels almost lonely to be surrounded by such incredible structures, but it sucks you really into the depressive state these people are living inside of. As someone who has struggled with depression, I really get it.

Overall Thoughts

I really enjoyed this novel, and was shocked to see it had such low reviews from advance reviewers when I took a small peak at the Goodreads while finding the image for the book cover. I think it’s not for everyone, that’s for sure, and it can be very triggering if you’ve struggled or are struggling with suicidal ideation and/or depression.

But the prose in this one is so stunning, and I feel like we’re really in the world of these characters and their heads. I’m glad for the alternating perspectives because it creates a rhythm that picks up the pace. If the author wasn’t alternating these point of views, it would have really slowed down the pace of the novel and I don’t know if I would have finished it.

That said, this is very much a novel of modern Korea. I wasn’t surprised to see this come out in 2010 originally in Korean, especially if you’ve read other books that came out around this period.

In the end, these characters were very fascinating to me and I could really appreciate this book and its love for life, even in someone’s darkest moments. I knew the areas it was describing in Korea and had been there many times before, and I could truly see them right before my eyes.

Read this book if it interests you—you might find it worth it in the end!

Much love to the publisher and NetGalley for the advance copy. I truly do not take it for granted.

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