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[Featured Review] Reading and Healing scrap
by Claire Gullander-Drolet
March 5, 2026
The past few years have seen the emergence and global embrace of South Korean “healing fiction.” The concept behind these books is simple: to provide comfort and healing to readers suffering from the stresses and pressures of modern life. The protagonists of this genre are, like these readers, burnt out and exhausted. Seeking a simpler and more purposeful existence, characters in healing fiction retreat to a rotation of cosy locales—bakeries, cafes, laundromats, bookshops—to reevaluate their lives and priorities from a new vantage point. From there, revelations occur, unhealthy jobs and relationships are jettisoned, and selves are fashioned anew. There is an undeniable comfort to be found in this fantasy of quitting. After all, who does not wish for a quieter life less focused on competition, profit, and gain? However, there is also good reason to be sceptical about this fantasy: in our current historical moment, when people face ever greater economic, health, and climate precarity, is opting out really an option?
Kim Jee Hye’s first book, Soyangri Book Kitchen, is a wonderful example of what happens when real-life healing becomes the impetus for healing art. Kim , a former office worker intimately familiar with the intense grind of South Korean work culture, left her job during the COVID-19 pandemic—a decision prompted, among otherthings, by the pressures she experienced as a working mother. She eventually refashioned herself as a bookseller and book cafe owner, much like Soyangri Book Kitchen’s protagonist Yoojin. Yoojin is the proprietor of the titular venue located in the Korean countryside: a book cafe and guesthouse that caters to world-weary visitors from all walks of life. The novel unfolds as a series of character portraits that each speak to a specific mental health issue. In translator Shanna Tan’s deft hands, these characters are rendered with beauty and complexity. There’s Da-in, a famous singer who struggles to reconcile her public-facing persona with her true self; Mari, whose traumatic childhood triggers a pattern of compulsive lying; and Soohyuk, who experiences suicidal ideation after the death of his mother. There are also a number of characters dealing with burnout: Sohee, a portrait of success and diligent work ethic now grappling with a cancer diagnosis; and four friends, Nayoon, Chanwook, Siwoo and Serin, who are questioning their life choices—as well as the narrative of what success and a good life looks like—as they enter their thirties.
Readers of Soyangri Book Kitchen gain insight into South Korea’s rigorous secondary and postsecondary educational culture. The novel also paints a critical portrait of working life where yageun—the practice of working overtime—is endemic, and where the competition to land a secure government position requires several years of full-time study. While these features are specific to South Korean working culture, the broader landscape they depict—markedby extreme economic precarity and an increas-ingly unaffordable housing market—dovetailswith the picture the Lancet Commission sketchesin their 2018 report on global mental health and sustainable development. As inequality heightens in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemicand ongoing war, genocide, and climate disaster, it seems likely that this situation will only intensify and worsen around the world.
To her great credit, Kim resists offering an easy solution to any of these issues. What she offers in Soyangri Book Kitchen is rather an invitation to imagine a life decoupled from the imperative to keep producing, grinding, and staying the prescribed course. This is easier in theory than in practice. As Yoojin observes, “society never stops reminding us that a suc-cessful life is to stand at the top of the pyramid. We aren’t allowed to fall, even if we’re still learning how to walk . . . We grow up with a deep-set fear that the moment we deviate from the path, we’re going to fall off the cliff.” It’s here that books and the act of reading play a crucial role. Books can be “painkillers,” as Yoojin puts it, blunting the pain of hardship and stress by transporting readers to other worlds; they can also offer a roadmap for finding one’s “optimal route” to a life that squares with one's own values rather than a prescriptive path. The novel slyly offers up literary prescriptions for its readers, namedrop-ping authors from Maeve Binchy and Min Jin Lee to Haruki Murakami and coupling themwith the particular life ailments they address. In its abundant references to contemporary Korean works—Kim Honbi’s Reflections on Kindness, Go Soori’s We Can Walk in Midnight, Kim Hana’s The Skill of Relaxation—Kim’s novel also gestures at the extraordinary breadth and scope of Korean literature yet to be translated into English and other languages, and the healing potential contained within these pages.
Because of healing fiction’s immense popularity, there has been a tendency to overlook its politics—to dismiss it as either a variation on a generic ditching-the-big-city-for-country-life theme or as an example of the “no plot, just vibes” narrative beloved by Gen Z BookTok. But there is, I would argue, something profound and quietly radical about Soyangri Book Kitchen’s message of reading for reading’s sake. As Nayoon puts it, “what truly mattered wasn’t whether to open a macaron dessert shop or to stay in her office job. It was the realisation that each and every one of us is an imperfect being made with love.” Learning to listen to each other’s stories is a profound act of care, and it is what will sustain us in the trying times to come.
Writer 필자 소개
Claire Gullander-Drolet
Claire Gullander-Drolet is assistant professor of English at the City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests are in translation studies, multilingual literature (especially of the Korean
diaspora), and the intersections between literature and mental health.
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