Blowfish

By: Kyung-Ran Jo

Narrated by: David Shih, Jennifer Kim

For fans of Han Kang and Sheila Heti, an atmospheric, melancholic novel about a successful sculptor who decides to commit suicide by artfully preparing and deliberately eating a lethal dish of blowfish.

Blowfish is a postmodern novel in four parts, alternating between the respective stories of a female sculptor and a male architect. Death is the motif connecting these parallel lives. The sculptor’s grandmother killed herself by eating poisonous blowfish in front of her husband and child, while the architect’s elder brother leapt to his death from the fifth floor of an apartment building. Now, both protagonists are contemplating their own suicides. The sculptor and architect cross paths once in Seoul, and meet again in Tokyo, while the sculptor is learning to prepare a fatal serving of blowfish.

The narrative loosely approximates a love story, but this is no romance in the normal sense. For the woman, the man is a pitstop on the road to her own suicide. For the man, the woman forestalls death and offers him a final chance. Through the conflicting impressions they have of one another, the characters look back on their lives; it is only the desire to create art that calls them back from death.

Evoking the heterogeneous urban spaces of Seoul and Tokyo, Blowfish delves into the inner life of a woman contemplating her failures in love and art. Jo’s fierce will to write animates the novel; the lethal taste of blowfish, which one cannot help but eat even though one may die in doing so, approximates the inexorable pains of writing a novel.

©2010 Kyung-Ran Jo. Translation copyright © 2025 by Chi-Young Kim. Originally published in 2010 by Munhakdongne as Bokeo in the Korean language. This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea) (P)2025 Blackstone Publishing

The Art of Dying vs the Art & Technique of Living

"Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well."
- Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus

This novel hit me in all the right places. It was beautifully written. Careful and taut in its pacing. Character development was fascinating and the architecture/art, life/death, male/female, internal/external, parent/child, sibling/sibling dualities all seemed to work. Plus I really dug the Félix Vallotton painting used on the cover. Took a risk on this one, but it paid off. After my last several novels, I do need to escape the suicide motif for just a bit.