Lemon
By Kwon Yeo-sun
Translated by Janet Hong
(2019, translated 2021)
Other Press
(Crime Novel)


Kwon Yeo-sun’s novel is about the unsolved murder of an eighteen-year-old high school girl, Kim Hae-on, whose body was discovered in a public park sixteen years ago. An extraordinary beauty in life, in death she came to be known to the citizens of Seoul as “The High School Beauty Murder.” Though the inciting action of the novel involves the decision of Da-on, the murdered girl’s surviving younger sister, to reexamine the dead-end case, Lemon is not a traditional crime narrative. Instead, it is a study in the long-term impact of loss. The Kim sisters had already experienced the loss of their father, who died in a car accident while they were in grade school. Da-on’s mother is inconsolable. In an effort to alter her deceased child’s fate, she petitions the government to change Hae-on’s name posthumously. The mother is so broken by the tragedy that she is unable to prevent Da-on from pursuing plastic surgery to alter her face to look more like her beautiful older sister. Da-on is disappointed that she never achieves Hae-on’s beauty, though she finds solace in the pain she endures through her surgeries. After realizing that both she and her mother are mired in their sorrows, Da-on does what she can to revisit the weeks and days before and after the murder and interview those who knew the two suspects in the case. One, the scion of an upper-class family and the high-school playboy was one of the last people seen with her sister. The other was a poor nobody who, under badgering by the police, panicked, misspoke, and endured the full force of their aggressive investigation. In the end, the police failed to turn up sufficient evidence to bring a case to trial. Strangely, Da-on is not the only contributor to Lemon’s complex and disorienting narrative. Sang-hui, a transfer student who only knew of Lemon’s tragic end as an outsider, provides clarity on what she remembers of the facts of the case. She also shares her shock at what Da-on has become, an almost unrecognizable woman, unkempt and overweight,  who appears much older than her actual age. Da-on finds comfort in being accepted into the lives of adult Han Manu, the delivery driver whose life was dragged through the mud by the police, and his half-sister, Seonu. This sister provides her brother with an alibi that provides Da-on some comfort, though by this point in the story, Kwon has warned us too many times that memory and narrators are unreliable. Finally, there is Taerim, the classmate who wound up marrying the playboy. Her story may be the most difficult to comprehend, as we learn it through overhearing fragments of what she reveals to her therapist. She too has endured an insurmountable tragedy: her child was abducted and never found. Lemon is a tantalizing, slippery, and deduction-resistant novel. One character admits that they know who murdered Hae-on, though they neither name the killer nor share their evidence. At least two confess to something during the course of the novel, but are they confessing to the murder or to some other transgression? Kwon ends the novel with many unresolved questions. None of the women experiences any explanation for the random and violent ends of their loved ones. To some extent, even the victim does not appear to comprehend why she was killed. For all these reasons, Lemon is very much an anti-detective novel, committed to denying the reader the reassurance that the wheels of reason and justice roll on.

“If there was an opposite of how my mother’s eyes had once blazed with pride and hope as she gazed at my sister, it was how she gazed at me in that moment. I realized then that we hadn’t returned to reality. In fact, we would never return, unless we adjusted our course drastically. What awaited us was a lifetime of twitches and convulsions, of endlessly performing and aborting and repeating actions, just as some patients with anxiety disorders shake and blink and are unable to sit still, out of fear of losing themselves.”