Highway with Green Apples
About
A young woman drives with her boyfriend to an isolated beach town and buys a bag of green apples from a withered-faced old woman — a moment that recurs through the narrative like a half-remembered dream. From there, the story fragments into a mosaic of memory, dread, and daily banality: characters introduced as if flipping through an internal yearbook, weather and time of day taking on the weight of plot. Bae Suah is one of Korea’s most radical prose stylists, and this early novella — written in her twenties — is the first signal of what her work would become: fiction that abandons conventional narrative in favour of something closer to how consciousness actually moves. Not stream-of-consciousness in the modernist sense, but something stranger and more unsettling — the feeling of a life being lived sideways.
