Description "A party of pure immersion. Full of stories I'd love to see made into films." —Actor Park Jung-min What is real and what is fake? Standing at that boundary, this book asks: what does it mean to be "honmono"? The first thing that catches the eye about Honmono is its title, whose meaning isn't immediately clear. "Honmono" is a Korean transliteration of the Japanese word 本物 (honmono), meaning "the real thing." The term once gained wide recognition online as slang mocking obsessive fans or difficult customers. In an interview, the author explained that just as this originally positive word came to be used with a twisted meaning, she wanted to speak to our current era—one in which falsehoods become truth simply because enough people believe them. This collection explores the boundary between "real" and "fake" while posing a fundamental question: what does it truly mean to be real? In the title story "Honmono," the narrator Munsu, a male shaman with thirty years of experience, realizes one day that the spirit he has served—Grandmother Jangsu—has left him. Just then, a young shaman in her twenties named Sin-aegi moves in across the way and tells him that the grandmother spirit came to her instead, saying, "You've grown too old" (p. 145). This shakes the very foundation of Munsu's belief that his own faith was the "real" one. Munsu struggles to keep up appearances as a "real" shaman even while living as a "fake" one—refusing to take on horoscope readings that he considers beneath him, work fit only for a "quack shaman" (p. 122), even as he searches for a prop blade for his rituals. Though he resents Sin-aegi, who mocks him by saying, "What would someone who's just faking it know?" (p. 120), he still finds himself worrying over the shouting he hears from her house. He is left to keep asking himself "what is real, and does it truly exist in a place separate from the fake" (from the afterword by Yang Kyung-eon). Meanwhile, the clash between middle-aged Munsu, who has served Grandmother Jangsu in the traditional way, and the young shaman Sin-aegi—who seems to stand "on equal footing with the grandmother spirit" (p. 144)—vividly captures the friction between old and new generations so common in today's society. In this way, "Honmono" goes beyond examining individual desire and anguish, boldly raising questions about broader social issues such as generational conflict and the clash between tradition and modernity. An Overwhelming Narrative That Draws You In Without Pause— A Glimpse of the Future of Korean Literature, Shining With Talent Worth Stealing Another story that tackles these themes with timely specificity is "Smooth," which portrays, in the style of a black comedy, a single day in the life of Dewey, a third-generation Korean American who works as an agent for the world-renowned artist Jeff and is visiting Korea for the very first time. Dewey, who had been so ignorant as to imagine Korea as "a crime-ridden district lined with shops selling snake wine and dog meat" (p. 69), is in some ways "more American" (p. 69) than actual Americans. While in Korea for Jeff's exhibition, he gets lost and unwittingly finds himself swept into a crowd of people carrying "American flags and 'Taeguk-gi'" (p. 84). Amid this "festival" (p. 86), he encounters warm, kindhearted elderly people and begins to feel a sense of connection and belonging to Korea. But the moment one of these warm strangers refers to Gwanghwamun Square as "Syngman Rhee Square," the story—which up to that point we had been enjoying almost like Jeff's smooth, spherical artworks, where "anxiety and lack had been sanded away" (p. 82)—suddenly leaves us with a chill. The opening story of the collection, "Guilty Club: Touching the Tiger," is narrated by a member of the Guilty Club, a fan group devoted to world-famous film director Kim Gon, made up of so-called "real" (p. 12) devoted fans. Kim Gon has faced public moral criticism for an incident from his past, but the members of the Guilty Club believe that the role of a "true" fan is to cover it up and stay silent. The narrator, too, driven by a desire to be "real," denies the incident—but when Kim Gon actually admits his wrongdoing and apologizes, she feels something inside her break open. Later, while visiting a zoo in Chiang Mai and taking part in a "touch the tiger" experience, she comes to understand what that feeling truly was. In this way, "Guilty Club: Touching the Tiger" uses the familiar world of fandom culture to vividly portray the contradictory desire known as "guilty pleasure," while also questioning how easily we label something as...