Blowfish

About

A sculptor and an architect cross paths once in Seoul, then again in Tokyo. The sculptor has decided she is going to die — she is learning to prepare a fatal serving of blowfish, the same method her grandmother used to kill herself in front of her family. The architect carries his own death: his brother leapt from the fifth floor of an apartment building. For her, he is a detour on the road to suicide. For him, she is a reason to postpone his own. Kyung-Ran Jo moves between Seoul and Tokyo with the precision of someone mapping two cities' worth of grief. The prose is spare and devastating, tracking two people who have each decided to end their lives and are surprised to find that meeting another person at the same precipice changes the calculation. Blowfish is a novel about two people contemplating death — and the unbearable intimacy of recognizing your own despair in someone else.