Sunja The boarding house, Yeongdo
Book I
The story begins on a small island off Busan, where a hard-working couple keep a lodging house for fishermen and their daughter grows up gutting fish and cooking for the boarders. A market errand there sets the whole family saga in motion. Yeongdo is a real island, today a district of Busan reached by bridge.
Book I
inferred The novel opens on the fishing island of Yeongdo in Busan and names it, but the family's boarding house is invented; this marks the centre of Yeongdo District, which sits far south of the Osaka setting.
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Sunja Arrival at Osaka
Book I
Newly married and pregnant, the heroine leaves Korea with a kind pastor and crosses to Japan, arriving in Osaka to join his brother's household. The great railway terminus at Umeda stands for that threshold, the moment the family becomes a diaspora in a country that will never treat it as its own.
Book I
inferred The book brings the young couple to Osaka by ferry and train in the 1930s without naming a terminus; this marks Osaka Station in Umeda, the city's main railway gateway of the period, as a representative point of arrival.
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