The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun review – life under late capitalism
Following a spate of recent fiction considering the strange intersection of our work and leisure lives – novels such as Ling Ma’s apocalyptic satire Severance and Sayaka Murata’s oddly affecting Convenience Store Woman – The Disaster Tourist offers up another fresh and sharp story about life under late capitalism.
Yona Kim is a programme manager for Jungle, a Seoul company that specialises in curating holiday packages in disaster zones. On trips to areas ravaged by tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, travellers journey through “the following stages: shock ⇾ sympathy and compassion, and maybe discomfort ⇾ gratefulness for their own lives ⇾ a sense of responsibility and the feeling that they’d learned a lesson, and maybe an inkling of superiority for having survived”.
When Yona’s own life is struck by disaster in the form of a predatory boss she numbly agrees to go on a “no-strings-attached business trip” to the island of Mui, whose major attraction turns out to be an underwhelming sinkhole. Here, Yona and her fellow travellers expose themselves to the islanders’ stories of trauma and grief in order to access a second-hand emotion, but end up sinking only into a feeling of boredom or disquietude.
The travellers expose themselves to the islanders’ stories of trauma and grief in order to access a second-hand emotion
Soon Yona finds herself caught up in a scheme to manufacture a more dramatic disaster in Mui in order to save the island’s economy and her own professional standing.
Translator Lizzie Buehler deftly coveys the subtle tonalities of the prose, variously graceful and light (when Yona goes into work, she feels “like a dandelion seed that had somehow drifted into a building”), witty and absurd, then suspenseful, even terror-filled. Descriptions of the climactic disaster are flattened and attenuated, becoming strangely euphoric as the narrative focuses on all the anonymous lives shattered, people dispossessed by forces beyond any of the characters’ imaginations.
Ultimately, the plot details aren’t always precise enough to convey the complexity of exactly what is at stake, or with whom moral responsibility sits, while a tenuous love story adds another layer of narrative complication. But this is an entertaining eco-thriller that sets out to illuminate the way climate change is inextricably bound up with the pressures of global capitalism.
• The Disaster Tourist is translated by Lizzie Buehler and published by Serpent’s Tail (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
