Blowfish

For readers of Han Kang and Sheila Heti, an atmospheric, melancholic novel about a successful sculptor who decides to commit suicide by artfully preparing and deliberately eating a lethal dish of blowfish. Blowfish is a postmodern novel in four parts, alternating between the respective stories of a female sculptor and a male architect. Death is the motif connecting these parallel lives. The sculptor’s grandmother killed herself by eating poisonous blowfish in front of her husband and child, while the architect’s elder brother leapt to his death from the fifth floor of an apartment building. Now, both protagonists are contemplating their own suicides. The sculptor and architect cross paths once in Seoul, and meet again in Tokyo, while the sculptor is learning to prepare a fatal serving of blowfish. The narrative loosely approximates a love story, but this is no romance in the normal sense. For the woman, the man is a pitstop on the road to her own suicide. For the man, the woman foresta