Kwon Yeo-sun’s Lemon, translated from Korean by Janet Hong, feels like a literary
experiment masquerading as a crime novel. Broken into eight vignettes, and full of psychological
suspense, Lemon is a fascinating, albeit confusing, investigation into the motivations behind
violence.
In the summer of 2002, as Korea is hosting the FIFA World Cup, Kim Hae-on is found
dead in a flower bed of a park in Seoul. Known for her unthinkable beauty, Hae-on’s murder
becomes a topic of intense speculation, and the local police push to charge a suspect. With
limited evidence, however, no case can be made. Told by the victim’s sister Da-on, and her two
classmates Taerim and Sanghui, a story unfolds of their trauma, grief, and attempts at revenge.
From the beginning, we are made aware that Da-on is an unreliable narrator. She seems
to know that she is the perpetrator of her own pain, by creating a dreamscape world in which she
relives Hae-on’s muder over and over. Plagued by the realization that she may never have loved
her sister, Da-on adopts strange coping mechanisms that further isolate her from reality. As her
mother attempts to posthumously change Hae-on’s name, claiming that it was the reason for her
premature demise, Da-on slides further into the bizarre. She even goes so far as to change her
entire appearance to mimic her sister’s features, getting multiple plastic surgery procedures and
losing extreme amounts of weight. These warped attempts to honor Hae-on are confusing and
degrading. We never meet Hae-on, only learning about her through others’ memories, but in their
eyes she is reduced to a caricature praised for her beauty, youth, and otherworldliness.
Hae-on easily fits into multiple female stereotypes. Da-on knows her sister as the
beautiful airhead who has hit her prime at the age of eighteen; Taerim paints her as the “other
woman,” viciously stealing away her man; and Sanghui views her as an unattainable ideal,
detached from reality. But who is Hae-on really? And even more pressing, who is her murderer?
Kwon has no urgency in answering these questions. Instead, she seems content to let her
characters dissolve into grief and confusion, unable to find closure.
Lemon is a murder mystery that goes against type: The mystery is alive and well, but
readers are never given the satisfaction of a tidy conclusion. However, if you look closely, the
right clues are all there for you to find, along with a few red herrings to throw you off the trail.
Consider the neutral observations made by Sanghui, and Da-on’s conviction that her sister was
wearing a yellow dress, despite all evidence to the contrary. Parse through Taerim’s mad rants to
her psychiatrist and a lifeline operator, which are as near to a confession as Kwon will yield.
Wonder when Da-on admits she’s known the murderer all along: “that's why I did what I did, and
I know I’ll never be free from this crime until the day I die.”
Kwon writes in a way that would enthrall my high school English teachers. In the span of
less than 150 pages, she has created a multiperspective commentary full of symbolism and
meaning. Kwon’s nods to the power of poetry, Da-on’s obsession with the color yellow, and the
cancer and death of one of the initial murder suspects, Han Manu, all seem to glare with
importance. However, understanding every element on the first read is an impossibility, all the
more so because they serve as distractions from solving the mystery of Hae-on’s murder. Despite
Kwon’s persistence with ambiguity, one clarity that emerges is how little she wishes us to
prioritize the murder. Rather, Lemon is about the three women who have to survive it.
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