I didn't expect a novel about a North Korean mole ordered to return to Pyongyang to include an account of a sex orgy at a love hotel. But Yong-ha Kim's entertaining work, which packs a potpourri of action into just one day, completely dispels any assumptions I might have held about modern Korean fiction.
One morning Ki-yong, a North Korean operative who has spent two decades under cover in Seoul, logs onto his office PC and reads a cryptic message ordering him to rendezvous with a mini-submarine on an isolated beach.
After so many years of living under cover, he'd thought his masters in Pyongyang had forgotten his existence, and he's filled with dread at the prospect of returning to an uncertain fate.