It happened so that the fateful decision – to choose a poor preacher over a shady businessman and emigrate with him to an unknown country – was made by the main character during the 1930s, when the Land of the Rising Sun was treating the Koreans with only marginally more respect than the Nazi Germany had for the Jews.

Let us reference just one episode. One of the book's characters is a Korean bookkeeper who has been living under a fake Japanese name for quite a long time. At the first possibility of having his true origin revealed, the hero commits suicide in order to save his Japanese wife and their children from the shame of being related to a pariah.

It is in these monstrously unfavorable circumstances that the silk-hiding-steel Sunja will have to raise a child, find a job, take the first timid steps in the field of entrepreneurship and simply survive.

In 2017, the novel made the New York Times' Best Books of the Year List. Recently, it has also been adopted into a TV series.