6 water… 7
7 water… 85
1 water…99
2nd water… 153
8 water… 201
3 water… 223
9 water… 263
4 water… 281
10 water… 325
11 Water … 377
12 waters… 407
5 water… 457
13 Water … 481
Water flow… 513
1 water… 535

Author's Note … 563

“But, but why does this person keep coming towards me?
Without fear, without mask,
“And the fragrant scent of fruit filled my whole body.”

The first character to appear in the novel, who exudes bright and healthy energy like the midday sun, is Eulju, a young farmer in his thirties.
Eulju, who runs a strawberry farm in a seaside village with red, eroded rocks to the south and a mountain called Oknyeosan to the north, enjoys walking with her adult Doberman, Obok-i, who lives with her.
Today, after finishing farm work, I planned to take a walk along the beach with Obongi.
But the truck's starter just won't respond, and after a long struggle, the truck finally gets going and leaves the dark beach.
Of course, for Eulju, a failure of this magnitude is so trivial that it is embarrassing to even call it a failure.
Before coming to my hometown, I worked as a web designer in Seoul and tasted the bitterness of corporate life at an early age. Even younger, I was a promising Taekwondo athlete, but I lost to a powerful roundhouse kick in the semifinals of the Youth Sports Festival.

But there is another joy that allows Eulju to continue living.
It is the existence of Doolhee, the object of one's unrequited love.
Dool-hee, a mysterious outsider living in a three-story house on Oknyeo Mountain, is a character who is secretly and greatly interested in the villagers as she is believed to be related to the incident in which a man fell to his death from a cliff the winter before last. She caught Eul-ju's attention with her round, white face like a honey cake and a nuance of a story full of stories.
Eulju and Doolhee had a few chance encounters at the beach, and while they were feeling that their relationship was progressing little by little, he had to secretly suffer from heartache when Doolhee suddenly changed her attitude and started treating him and Obok as if they were meeting for the first time.
Eul-ju, who was suffering from Dool-hee's neglect and indifference, decided that she could no longer continue like this and "decided to rush to the person's hideout" (p. 19).


The place where Doolhee is, that is, the place where suspicious outsiders come and go from time to time and arouse the curiosity and questions of the townspeople, is the site of a live internet broadcast called [Yok+Bad-ee].
As the name suggests, it is a broadcast where people are exposed to all kinds of abuse from beyond the monitor.
Perhaps the only silver lining is that in exchange for the abuse, they receive a so-called "mutual support fund." The team leader in charge of that broadcast is none other than Doolhee.
According to another employee of the company, the purpose of the broadcast is this:
“The company said that it was doing a kind of hate labor to sound the alarm in this rotten society where money is everything.
“The idea is to boost your immunity by getting a hate vaccine to prevent the highly contagious hate virus, but the real goal is to stop poking fun at others and making fun of them.” (p. 332)

Eul-ju is completely unconvinced by the specious excuse, but since the only way to meet Dool-hee is to go to the very place where she works, he decides to appear and become the butt of the insults.
The toughness he developed as a Taekwondo athlete in his childhood, his unique optimism, and his deep love for Doolhee make this possible.


The form of composition and reconstruction in which the sea and the moon seem to pull each other
Kim Mela's unique writing style overturns conventions and common sense.

While Eul-ju's plan to head to the three-story house on Oknyeo Mountain to properly face Dool-hee and meet again and ask, "Why do you pretend not to know us, Obok and I? Is it okay for people to be so fickle?" (p. 398) is progressing steadily, the story unfolds from Dool-hee's perspective.
Doolhee was captivated by the movie [The Long-Living Crab] in her early twenties, 14 years ago, and became a passionate fan of the director who created the film.
The film director's name is Han Ki-yeon, a person who attracted people's attention with his "engineering background, late debut, tall stature that seemed to have risen to the top of a staircase, and an attitude that rarely smiled" (p. 111).
Above all, she is the subject of a major scandal that shook society, and is now at the center of a scandal as her debut work [Full Belly Cloud] is embroiled in a plagiarism controversy following a rumor of her romantic relationship with a member of the National Assembly who already has a family.


Doolhee grows her affection for Han Ki-yeon regardless of people's evaluations of her, or rather, fueled by those harsh and unfair evaluations.
The way to show affection is to archive everything about Han Ki-yeon on a fan site.
As I was going through my twenties, still harboring feelings for Han Ki-yeon, I received an unbelievable call from the object of my admiration.
“I’m okay.
“Don’t worry” (page 141)
Dool-hee, who had been chewing over the sentence left as a secret comment on the fan site countless times, meets Han Ki-yeon through it and becomes her lover as planned.
What makes the love that these two people create so special is that Han Ki-yeon has a dream of making a new film and “making a change in the world” (p. 195).


Just as any powerful typhoon eventually dissipates, Han Ki-yeon said he would create a temporary film that would change the world with strong winds and heavy rains and then fade from people's attention.
For Han Ki-yeon, film was a persistent pursuit of uncertain possibilities.
And that dedication and devotion made you believe in 'love'.
Love, movies, typhoons… … whatever name you give to that blindness, it all looks the same to you, it means the same thing.
Even if the movie or the typhoon were only fleeting disturbances, you wanted to follow Han Ki-yeon to a destination beyond that. (Same story)

Doolhee is also enthusiastic about making a film that can overturn existing customs and common sense, and realize that dream of overturning it, but it is not easy to create a crack in the existing order.
The two people gradually become exhausted through repeated challenges and failures, and cracks naturally appear in their once strong relationship.
What's interesting is that the past story with Han Ki-yeon is completely reconstructed and written anew from the perspective of Dool-hee in the present.
Writing by distancing yourself from your past self by calling yourself "you," actively using all kinds of materials related to Han Ki-yeon - interviews, emails, court decisions, etc. - and thus writing fiction more vividly than fact.
If, as the novel suggests, "humans make stories out of what they cannot understand" (p. 498), then what is Dool-hee trying to achieve through this passionate rewriting? As Dool-hee's story progresses, the complex and vast structure hidden within the novel gradually becomes apparent, and it is at this point that "Rhythm Nanbada" acquires a unique quality that distinguishes it from any other novel.


I'm looking through the materials from that time and reconstructing what happened at that time.
No, I don't think 'reconstruction' is the right word.
Rather, I would tear those records apart, shred them, and remake them into the stories we need. (p. 128)

At the beginning of the relationship between Eulju and Doolhee, Doolhee and Han Kiyeon, there was an intense attraction towards each other, like the sea and the moon pulling each other.
And that attraction drove the characters forward as it transformed into a desire to dream each other's dreams together and a desire to make those dreams come true.
What awaits at the end?
"Rhythm Nanbada" is like waves that start out calm but then become rough at other times, going back and forth between innocence and passion, making the ending unpredictable. But what's important is that, on the thick layers of this story that Kim Mela has built up, we will all dream true dreams together with the characters.
One dream that everyone dreams at the same time.

I think of the word 'Nanbaada'.
Nanbada is a word meaning 'far sea'.
It is not the sea seen from the land, but the 'sea seen' of a person who has gone far away on a boat, leaving the sea behind.
I feel the relief of someone who has lived through a period of time in these words.
On the sea where I set out to bring back the novel, I was immersed in the power of time and people.
When I close my eyes, I feel as if I have been overwhelmed by the shimmering waves and rays of light.
Suddenly, I realized that the novel, like the sea, flows with its own flow, but it was my own heart that was swept away and floundered.
_From the author's note