Please Look After Mom

An elderly mother, So-nyo, lets go of her husband's hand in the crowd at Seoul Station and vanishes, and her grown children search the city for her while confronting how little they ever really knew her. Seoul is the anxious present: the station where she disappeared, the subway and streets papered with her photograph, the children's apartments she was coming to visit. Behind it lies the rural hometown in the far south where she spent her whole hidden life.

So-nyo (Mom)

Seoul Station

Chapter 1

In the crush at Seoul Station, So-nyo's husband steps onto a subway train and turns to find she has not made it; the doors shut and she is gone into the city. That instant of a hand let go is the wound the whole book opens, and the family's frantic search begins from this platform.

Chapter 1

explicit The mother goes missing at Seoul Station, the real central railway station, when she cannot keep up with her husband boarding a crowded subway and the doors close between them.

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