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Translator's Note

“How can you write a mystery when there is a writer like this!”
Yoshiki Tanaka (Legend of the Galactic Heroes)

"A masterpiece of mystery, with a series of shocking twists and turns from Renzo Mikihiko."
Kotaro Isaka (Golden Slumber)

“After I close the last page
How the author constantly engages the reader's inferential brain
Only then will you realize that you were the one who controlled and stimulated them!”
Translated by Yang Yun-ok

It has eaten away at the inner world of an ordinary family.
A story about a terrible desire

Keizo, an elderly man with dementia, lives comfortably under one roof with his son Ryusuke, his daughter-in-law Satoko, and his granddaughter Kayo.
But their ordinary daily life is shattered when Naoko, the daughter of Satoko's younger sister, is found dead.
Then the truth leaks out from Satoko's mouth.
“This house has never been ordinary and peaceful.
“Everyone just pretended.” (p.193)
A woman who has an affair without hesitation and gives birth to a child as a spoil of war, a man who attempts suicide while turning a blind eye to his wife's infidelity, a woman who is tired of being a dutiful, wise wife, and loving mother, and a man who lives in the memory of a murder he committed in the South Pacific decades ago. This family, who appear to be ordinary people, are actually men and women seething with desire, jealousy, betrayal, revenge, and even murderous intent.
"Baek Gwang" thoroughly exposes how easily broken masks of "ordinariness," "peace," "normality," and "common sense" are.
Renzo Mikihiko fully displays this critical awareness with outstanding literary quality and his uniquely captivating style.
Yukiko, a character described as “a body that arouses men just by existing, a hot, flexible liquid glass that lives as its body commands” (p. 225), reminds us of how powerful desire is compared to morality or ethics.
Also, by intertwining the sweltering midsummer heat that envelops the skin, the primary colorful splendor of a South Pacific island, and the dark, sticky atmosphere of a home, it conveys the dangerous and dark desires that ordinary people hide and barely endure beneath their seemingly peaceful daily lives, and the distorted inner world caused by them, through a sensual metaphor.


I've been wanting to read a mystery like this!
The shocking pleasure of meticulously designed tricks and chain of twists

Would you believe that every element of a novel is designed with a trick? In "Baekkwang," everything is a trick: the characterization, the dialogue, the description of the situation, and even the way the story unfolds.

The character introduced as “a kind and generous man” (p. 172) is called “a boring and unattractive person” (p. 59), or Takehiko, who seduced her by saying “I want to hug you (the man) right now” (p. 115), threatens her by saying “I’m a man who’s only interested in women” and “The pleasure you tasted in my wife’s body was stolen from me, so how about you pay for it in a disgusting way by being beaten by an animal?” (p. 115), or the fact that the see-through clothes “seem to be intended to stimulate the viewer by emphasizing the flesh tone through the black mesh rather than covering it up” (p. 95), easily surpasses the reader’s expectations.
Above all, what is truly soul-stirring is the seven consecutive twists and turns through the narrative technique of ‘confession.’
Each character confesses that they will tell the truth.
But when you hear the confession of the next person, you realize that the confession you heard before was only that person's truth, or the truth for that person, and rather a trick to infer a false culprit.
The unexpectedness of the seven twists and turns that follow the confessions of the seven people shocks the readers.
Readers are simply amazed by the power of meticulously calculated sentences that lead readers to make predictions and then overturn those predictions each time.


“I tried to kill you, but I also tried to save you.”
The truth lies beyond the binary.

『Baek Gwang』 is full of clashes of antonyms.
Good and evil, sin and punishment, love and hate, faith and betrayal, confession and lies, people and dolls (objects pretending to be people), dementia and pretending to have dementia.
If everything in the world were clearly divided into dichotomies, there would be no chaos.
But this novel realistically shows that everyone commits sins without any particular intention, leaving the reader feeling horrified and confused.
The author's skill in freely crossing over conflicting concepts is not only used for the fun of tricks or reversals, but also goes a step further to become a thematic consciousness.
Furthermore, this novel repeatedly overturns the preconceived notions of good and bad people, blurring the boundaries between good and bad and making us think about the clear standards of good and evil.
If what is good to one is evil to another, then what is good and what is evil?
Just as “I melt into the white light of a summer noon and cannot even remember clearly what I did” (p. 168), truth may be something “dim, as if viewed through several layers of cloudy glass” (p. 9).