This well-crafted novel revolving around the disappearance of an elderly woman at a busy train station in Seoul peels back the layers of her life and those of her family members as they search for her. It’s a compelling but sad book that looks at incidents that occurred from childhood on from the perspectives of the different characters.

Just so you are clear about what kind of reading experience to expect, while the woman’s disappearance is the focal point of the book, it is not in any way a detective or crime novel, nor is there any humor here. I think it’s fair to characterize the narrative as melodramatic. The book is about feelings, attitudes, relationships, responsibility and guilt, and will probably cause you to shed tears more than once. It’s a story in which secrets are revealed and the characters’ identities come into clearer focus. Some of the revelations seem designed to ennoble and glorify the mother’s character a bit too much.

Because my wife is Korean and I have lived in Korea, I tended to view the characters just as people rather than as Koreans, and this may make my reaction to the book somewhat different from that of other readers of the English translation. In other words, I didn’t read it as a peculiarly Korean story but as a human story and the central incident could just as well have occurred to an elderly American woman at Grand Central Station.

While this is a sad story, I wouldn’t call it a tragic one. The sadness comes from relating what happens in the book to our own lives and the regrets we may feel for what we may have said and done in the past – or what we failed to say and do.