Park Hye-jin, the editor at Minumsa who acquired Kim Ji-young, told me that the novel’s virtue lies in its broad social impact.
There are plans to translate it into eighteen languages, including English (the Japanese version quickly became a best seller), and it will soon be turned into a film. It’s been touted by celebrities and was given to President Moon Jae-in by another prominent politician. The novel has sold a million copies, one for every fifty people in South Korea. The name in the book’s title, “Kim Ji-young,” is the Korean equivalent of “Jane Doe,” an everywoman.
One day, while taking a coffee break with her baby, she heard male passersby refer to her as 맘충, or “mom-worm,” a nasty epithet for mothers who have the gall to leave their homes. She wrote the novel in two months, inspired by her favorite English-language writer, Rebecca Solnit, and maddened by the turns her own life had taken as a Korean woman and the treatment she faced as a new mother. In October 2016 the Korean publishing house Minumsa released a short novel called Kim Ji-young, Born in 1982, the latest in a series of works of fiction by “today’s young writers.” The author is a former television scriptwriter, Cho Nam-joo, born in 1978, who had published well-received short stories.
