A bestseller with 3 million copies, a work called the novel of a lifetime.
The story of "Thorn Fish" 20 years later

"The Thorn Fish" is a moving novel about a father's love that saves his son from leukemia.
It is also a novel of memories that readers of all ages, from children to adults, can relate to and read.
The 'thorn fish' has been published for 20 years.
The author published the backstory of the thorn fish around the time when the nine-year-old protagonist of the novel, Daum, turned twenty-nine.
How did Daum grow up? How much did he miss his father? When did he learn of his father's death? Did he ever resent him? Will he eventually come to understand his father's sacrificial love? These are the stories readers have been curious about.


The child was taken by his mother to an unfamiliar land, France, without knowing of his father's death.
I missed my father, but I couldn't miss him enough.
Longing turned into hatred, then into anger, and finally pushed my father out of my memory.
Daum, a twenty-nine-year-old youth who returned to Korea to film as a film lighting director, inevitably encounters traces of his father.
A heartwarming story unfolds about washing away pain and wounds and moving forward with reconciliation and love.

The route displayed on the monitor was passing through the East Sea.

The whiskey was strong, and my body, which had not touched alcohol for a while, couldn't handle it.
I fell asleep.
Meanwhile, the plane crossed the Pacific Ocean.

52 minutes to arrival.
This is the land where I lived for 10 years.
I was away for twice that amount of time.

Is there any special meaning to returning after 20 years?
Should we consider it as the fate of salmon that follows the fate of return?
Let's think about it simply.
It's just a means of making a living.
If I block my ability to make a living by prioritizing my feelings, I am a fool.

--- p.23

I'm back.
The fact that I had finally returned hit me with a sharp pain.
It had been 20 years, and I finally realized the weight of those years.

The nine-year-old boy didn't want to leave.

I cried and begged, struggling, hoping that someone would catch me.
In the end, it was a helpless resistance.

The twenty-nine-year-old man didn't want to come back.

I wanted to go beyond restraining my emotions and completely block them.
I have experienced firsthand that being swayed by emotions is nothing more than reckless self-harm.

20 years have passed anyway.

--- p.36

Suddenly, I felt dizzy, as if I was looking down from a crane at a great height, with lighting equipment hanging from it.
My father died.

Why did I only think that far?

Couldn't you have imagined that he would be dead and buried in the ground?

And maybe they didn't even try to find out where the oxygen was.

If you don't want to admit the truth, it's because there's a truth hidden within the truth that you haven't realized yet.
I was blinded and floundering in the face of that truth.

--- p.97

Can you bear it?
If you're talking about patience, you're wrong.

What I was best at wasn't drawing, it was patience.
To me, patience was like a coin in my pocket.
I could take it out and use it whenever I needed it without having to prepare it separately.
If we're just talking about endurance, I've lived a harder life than a 100-year-old man.

He endured the pain of leukemia that tore away his bones and flesh.
I had to endure it while waiting for the day I could return to my father.
Even though he was a loner in a foreign land, he endured it silently.

--- p.139

One day, there will be no reason to miss that person.

That doesn't mean it's the end.
In the place where longing once was, new hatred takes its place.
When you hate and hate and can't do anything about it, one's existence becomes fleeting.
Even if I suddenly think about it, there is no emotional agitation.
Only then can you be free from one person.

I thought so, and I thought it was true.

Wrong.
I was hiding my weak parts like a turtle inside a hard shell.
I was just trying my best to run away from my dad.

Now you want me to hate you again, and then miss you like I used to?

Hatred is painful, and longing is sad.

I'm not confident.
I want to avoid it.
I'm afraid that the balance in life I've achieved alone without my father's presence will collapse.
Unfortunately, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was already too late.
I wonder if it would have been better if I had never come back to this land.

--- p.177

Painter Park turned his head and looked out the window at dusk.

“It might sound strange to Daum, but honestly, I was jealous of Mr. Jeong.
“Because Mr. Jeong had the following.”
Two pigeons sitting on the windowsill were rubbing their beaks as if asking how the day was going.

“Unlike me, Mr. Jeong must have wanted to live very much.
But you don't care about what you're going to lose.
“He was only saddened by the thought of losing Daum in the future because of his own death.”
My whole body trembled as if I had been shocked by tens of thousands of volts of voltage.

I just accepted my father's death as a fact.
Other things seemed to have nothing to do with me.
Without even thinking that my father might have wanted to live.

--- p.228

What kind of child was I in Sarakgol?

A child as affectionate as her name suggests? A third-grader who can easily solve fifth-grade math problems? A child who can sculpt anything she wants without ever having to learn?
And, the child that his father could not live without was Jeong Da-um.
The child believed that his father was the only person he loved in this world.

But the boy Edouard grew to miss his father and began to hate him.

Young Kane hated his father so much that he ended up driving him out.

My father wasn't forgotten naturally as time passed.
At some point it was forcibly deleted.
And my feelings ended with my dad.

Will life be reset?
Just as a recovery program can restore deleted files, can I also restore my father's existence?

--- p.258