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How is one's personality be formed? Are our characteristics completely shaped when we are born or do we gradually shape our personalities as we grow up? If you can answer these questions without any doubts, I would like to ask another question. What would you say if I changed the word “personality” to “evil”? , written by Jung Yu-Jung, consistently asks this question to the readers in her novel.

Jung Yu-Jung is one of the best-selling novelists in South Korea, and there are some special features one can notice in her novels. First, a character who is depicted as “evil” works as an essential part in her novel. Before this novel came out, other characters, such as Jumbaki from , Park Donghae in <28>, and Oh Youngjae in have been depicted as indirect metaphors of pure evil. However, in , the main character Han Yujin is depicted as “evil” itself. Second, Jung uses visual imagery to an extent where the readers feel as if they are watching a movie inside their heads, becoming immersed in the story before they notice it. As you read this, I would like you to ask yourself the question everyone has asked themselves: What is pure “evil”?

opens up the story with a very unusual scene. The main character wakes up because of a phone call, and gradually realizes that he is covered in something sticky, maybe even something that feels a little unpleasant. Regarding this tactile sensation to be somewhat awkward, Han Yujin goes down to the 1st floor, and finds his mother's stiff body on the ground. Then, he calmly traces his thoughts and memories to the previous night, when he skipped the medicine his aunt, who is a psychiatrist, gave him. After he skipped the medicine, Yujin went outside in the middle of dawn to calm himself down, because his aunt and mother had always told him that the medicine is to relieve the seizures he gets. As he traces back, he remembers that last night, when he came back home from his secret night run, his mom called him “useless” and that she told him to commit suicide with a razor for going out in the dark secretly. Just then, he remembers that he killed his mother with a razor. After he remembers what happened, he asks himself why he killed his own mother. In this context, in the book, it makes the readers feel that he isn't asking this question because he feels something, but rather because of mere curiosity. As he cleans the house to hide the traces of his crime, he finds his mother's diary, which was basically an observation journal. Reading this journal, he finds out that he wasn't taking the pills to relieve his seizures, but it was actually to control his behavior. In the journal, there is even a description of him by his mother, which was “Yujin is the top-class predator among the psychopaths”. Through reading more and more of this “observation journal”, he realizes that he has been different from everyone else ever since he was young in the sense that he could not feel guilt or fear and that he could not sympathize with other people. While Yujin was reading the journal, he also kills his aunt who came to visit him without feeling any guilt. When his friend, Haejin, comes to his house, he agrees with Haejin that he must turn himself in to the police. However, he comes up with a plan to put the blame on Haejin for the crimes that he committed, and ends up killing Haejin too.

This story is completely told from Yujin's perspective, that is, from the view of a psychopath. Reading through the lines, the readers can sense that Yujin does not have feelings, and this feels alien to some of us. Throughout the whole book, readers sometimes feel empathy for Yujin, because he blames his mother and aunt for his abnormal behavior and tries to rationalize what he has done. At the same time, some readers even feel fear towards him, because of the fact that Yujin does not feel a single emotion even when he commits murder. Then, this question consistently comes up in our minds. How does this “evil” grow inside of our minds? Are we born with with it? Or do we learn it? To answer this question more clearly, we as readers can trace our thought back to the time we read the prologue of the novel. In the prologue, Yujin is at his baptism ceremony in a Catholic church. Just like his older brother, Yujin attempts to complete the course to get baptized, because his mother wanted him to do it. However, right before he gets baptized, Yujin faints because he was feeling very ill. Only his brother gets baptized.

In this context, I feel that Jung Yujung has used the church's baptism as a metaphor to express that evil is inherent in some of us, because after all, Yujin was not chosen by God to be baptized, while his brother was chosen. In the author's note, Jung writes these lines: “It had to be 'I', to become the subject, not the object. To depict how the evil in me existed inside of myself, ignited eventually and evolved as the result.” Therefore in these sentences, we can notice what Jung was intending in this novel. She attempted to delineate how evil exists inside everyone's minds, and that it is only a matter of whether one's seed of evil is germinated or degenerated

People have a tendency to regard “evil” as a being of an another world, a world that normal people do not live in. We also think that we won't be encountering this absolute “evil” in our lives. However, as we have learned by reading , evil simultaneously exists and does not exist in our lives, just like other feelings or states of mind. Even though Yujin has just found out that he has murdered his own mother, his state of mind is as calm if it were a normal part of life. He just wonders about the reason he killed her, without any emotions in his mind.I personally felt out of place by seeing the world from a psychopath's perspective, feeling that they live their lives just as normal people do, and I assume you would feel the same, too.

Lee Taehwi  xongnl1124@gmail.com

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