Blowfish

A melancholic sculptor plans to make a final work of art out of her suicide in the weighty latest from Jo (Tongue). The story opens during a winter in Seoul, where the unnamed woman’s gallery exhibition garners widespread attention. Despite her success, she remains depressed, but manages to garner a residency at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. She plans to hang herself from a cherry tree in Ueno Park, but changes course after having a vision of her grandmother, who’d killed herself by ingesting a bowl of poisonous blowfish soup in the presence of her family, including the sculptor’s father, who was then only nine years old. Later, she develops a friendship with a Tokyo-based Korean architect. As the story progresses, the sculptor hatches a new plan to end her life, which involves convincing her architect friend to accompany her to the largest fish market in Tokyo to ferret out a blowfish. Jo’s atmospheric writing distills the novel’s mood from its settings (Seoul is “the color of oxidized blood”; a Tokyo fish market is “slick and slimy with water and blood and discarded guts”), while details about the sculptor’s family history inform her chilling determination to die. It’s a memorable existential tale. Agent: Barbara Zitwer, Barbara J. Zitwer Agency. (July)