Beasts of a Little Land

Korea, 1917, under Japanese occupation. Jade's family sells her into a courtesan school in Pyongyang. Across the city, JungHo begs and scrapes to survive as an orphan. The two children meet and become friends, though the years ahead will send them down very different roads.

Grown into a sought-after performer, Jade falls for HanChol, a rickshaw driver whose schooling she pays for from her own earnings. JungHo loves her too, and drifts toward the anti-Japanese resistance, then the communists gathering in Manchuria. When HanChol's family refuses to accept a former courtesan, Jade has to choose between him and the friend who has loved her since childhood.

Juhea Kim follows this triangle and a widening cast of merchants, gang leaders and revolutionaries across five decades. The story moves from occupied Pyongyang's courtesan quarters to Seoul's modernizing cafes and the battle lines of Manchuria, through the political purges of a divided, mid-century Korea. Tigers, hunted almost to extinction on the peninsula, recur as the animal each character carries within.

It is Kim's first novel, historical fiction paced to one woman's choices rather than to plot, and it stays close to a small circle of lives while the history of a country moves around them.