It’s one thing when a K-pop boy band addresses the UN, as global superstars BTS did in September, or when South Korean films likeregularly make foreign critics’ top-10 lists. It’s quite another when soju starts appearing in North American restaurants. Sora Kim-Russell was half joking when she pointed to the newly risen profile of Korean rice wine, which has never had a fraction of the international fame enjoyed by Japanese sake, as further proof the so-called Korean wave is still cresting.
The times are changing, though, even as the novel opens with Reseng looking through the crosshairs at his latest assignment. What had been a slow trickle of work for the library—whether killing Japanese collaborators on behalf of Korean resisters, or the reverse, or doing odds jobs for the military dictatorships that followed the Korean War—has turned into a flood with the coming of democracy.