Description "She is my... question. The most profound, most difficult question ever given to me." A girl grows up in an orphanage, never knowing whether her parents are alive or dead. One day she discovers she has a special ability: by touching another person's wound, she can literally "read" their thoughts. As a child, when she pressed her palm against a friend's bleeding injury to stop the bleeding, she dimly became aware of this power through a flood of words pouring into her mind — but she grows up never imagining she could actually use it. Meanwhile, a businessman named Mun O-eon happens to learn of her ability, and he understands better than anyone how it might be used. After leaving the orphanage, she lives a difficult life until she comes to him seeking help. O-eon gives her a new name, new clothes, and a new life — and builds an enormous mansion to hide her from the world. Though he uses her and shows no hesitation in being cruel to others, he also offers her a kindness and consideration she has never known in her entire life, and she begins to develop complicated feelings for him. That is, until he commits an act against her that can never be undone. After 'that incident' — one that leaves her feeling deeply betrayed — she closes her heart to him completely. O-eon, wanting her to finally understand him fully, longs for her to use her ability to read him. But she answers only with fierce hatred: "I could read every person in the world if I had to, until the day I suddenly drop dead. But you — I will never read you." Into the space between them comes a live-in reading tutor. She is the narrator of this story, and she watches — with both suspicion and curiosity — the relationship between the 'young lady' with her extraordinary power and O-eon, who regards her as his own 'most profound question.' "Do you prefer comedy to tragedy?" "Does it matter? It's all a lie anyway." A woman with the mysterious power to read others' hearts through touch, and a man who longs to be read by that very power. As you follow the story of Absolute Verse — cloaked in mystery, or perhaps strange romance — you come, almost as if entranced, to realize that this is ultimately a story about the act of 'reading' itself. Reading another person, like a text, is something we do from the moment we are born until the moment we die — and that act inevitably produces distortion. To read another person is impossible without some degree of misreading. If that is reading's essential irony, is there truly no way to overcome it? If someone possessed a special power that could erase the barrier of reading altogether, could we then understand one another without any misunderstanding at all? Absolute Verse seems to pose this very question to its readers. And if there exists a desire to read another person exactly as they are, and a desire to be read by another without any distortion — can we not call that love? In that sense, this novel might also be described as a story about profound love. Another fascinating aspect is that, from beginning to end, we hear the story of these two people only through the testimony and perspective of 'I,' the reading tutor who narrates it. This suggests that even this story itself is built upon an inevitable distortion. For instance, the narrator presents two different versions of the circumstances the 'young lady' faced before she came to O-eon, then asks us: "Which version seems more plausible, and more fitting for them?" In the end, we can only guess at the truth through her telling of the story — and this creates yet another layer within the novel: 'reading that includes distortion.' Perhaps, the author seems to suggest, that is simply the fate of every story.