Description Includes 'Good Neighbor,' winner of the 2022 Oh Yeong-su Literary Award, and 'Home Party,' winner of the Excellence Award at the 2022 Kim Seung-ok Literary Award. Novelist Kim Ae-ran returns with a new short story collection eight years after Summer Outside (Munhakdongne, 2017). I Said Goodbye includes seven short stories in total, including 'Home Party,' praised as "a story that sharply demonstrates the author's singular ability to capture the particles of emotion drifting through social spaces and give them clear expression," which won the Excellence Award at the 2022 Kim Seung-ok Literary Award, and 'Good Neighbor,' winner of the 2022 Oh Yeong-su Literary Award. While Kim Ae-ran's signature strengths—strong emotional resonance and layered dilemmas that build up a world in multiple dimensions—remain fully on display, readers will encounter a slightly cooler, more unsentimental Kim Ae-ran than before. The true protagonist of this collection might be called 'space' itself. As the story puts it, "Many events in plays begin with 'invitation' and 'visit,' 'intrusion' and 'flight'" ('Home Party,' p. 42). Just as this line suggests, the stories in this book unfold as characters visit someone else's space. That space might be an elegant, stable home that hints at the owner's taste and comfort ('Home Party'), or an overseas house made affordable by low prices and cheap living costs, enabling "the first luxury of a lifetime"—a month-long trip ('Little House in the Woods'). It might be a rented apartment that has been lovingly cared for but must now be prepared for a new owner ('Good Neighbor'), or a bookstore opened by quitting a job and pouring in all one's savings ('Lemon Cake'). Space matters so much in I Said Goodbye because it functions not merely as a backdrop but as the very substance of the characters' lives. For Kim Ae-ran, who has long depicted with singular insight what a single room can mean in our society, certain spaces become places that reveal a person's economic and social standing—comprehensive, complex sites where an entire personal history is contained. This is why the conflicts surrounding space in this collection amount to collisions between different standards for living one's life. Entering someone else's space is, in other words, an event that takes you beyond the boundary of the life you've lived as yourself. In 'Home Party,' Kim Ae-ran asks: "How difficult is it for one person to stand in another's place?" (p. 24) Does visiting another's space become a path toward expanded understanding of others, or a path of intrusion that suppresses each other's standards? In a reality where it has never been harder to step beyond the boundary of 'me' toward 'we,' where the scenery before our eyes and the people we relate to increasingly become numbers reducible to money, Kim Ae-ran's question arrives with even greater urgency. And that question can be rephrased this way: after experiencing shared resignation and disappointment, when a new starting line unfolds once again, what has truly changed from before, and what has been preserved? Or, what should change, and what must be preserved? That, perhaps, is the Kim Ae-ran-style greeting we need now, at a time when asking after someone's well-being and peace has become more urgent than ever. Yi-yeon felt a small satisfaction in her ability to treat her subjects without prejudice. It was less an innate temperament than the result of cultivated discipline. 'When I was young, I really used to judge others over every little thing...' Over the years, her heart had been worn smooth and rounded by the currents of time. What Yi-yeon had actually come to realize, after some twenty years of lending her body to various characters, was simple: 'How difficult is it for one person to stand in another's place?' And from that came misunderstanding, conflict, drama. ('Home Party,' pp. 23–24) She knew that in life, certain tensions must be overcome, and certain performances must be carried safely through to the end before stepping down from the stage—that this had nothing to do with the world's approval or love, nor with pretense or courtesy, but was, quite literally, a matter of existence itself. ('Home Party,' pp. 39–40) Wherever I stayed, however briefly, keeping my surroundings tidy was a long-standing habit and point of pride. It wasn't like that when I was young—it was a habit formed after I moved out and started living alone. And at such times, I felt a little better...