Jeong, You-Jeong: The Good Son

When Yu-jin wakes up, he needs some time to orient himself. But: where does all the blood come from? He is obviously not hurt, but what happened the evening before? When he explores the home, he finds his mother stabbed. Was there some burglary he cannot remember? Yet, there are no signs of any break-in. Did he himself do it? He is confused and not a single memory of the hours before he fell asleep will come back. The body has to disappear, otherwise he would obviously be the main suspect. Nevertheless, he tries to enquire the murder and therefore searches his mother’s room where he finds her diaries – notes that will reveal a lot to him about his family, his step-brother and first of all, about himself.At the beginning of “The good son”, the reader is as confused as the protagonist. He seems to be quite likeable, therefore you first reject the idea of him being a murderer. However, your view of Yu-jin will change a lot, the more you learn about him the more you have to adapt your opinion – not only while reading more of his thoughts on that morning when he makes a body disappear and gets himself deeper and deeper in trouble, but first and foremost when reading the mother’s diaries. That’s when the novel turns into a highly psychological analysis of a young and promising man who doesn’t know himself as good as he thought he would.The plot develops a fascinating cruelty which completely drags you along. The emotions you feel are highly contradictory, between pity and disgust, between the hope that he will get away with it and at the same time that the police come to arrest him. Even though his action is absolutely comprehensible and logical, you reject it, too. I really like those kinds of novels which keep you oscillating emotionally.It is absolutely a crime noir and definitely quite “Asian” in a certain way. Not only the family structures and the pressure on the members differs at lot from our western view, but also the rules according to which people act are different and make the characters sometimes act in an unexpected way. Just as the characters are finely modelled, the plot can amaze a lot and thus offers a lot of unexpected surprises.