[K-LIT REVIEW] 'Mrs. Shim is a Killer' offers deep cuts

Brooding films with assassin protagonists are a tired trend, but Kang Jiyoung’s "Mrs. Shim is a Killer" cuts away the stereotypes to get at the heart of the genre. The titular character is a 51-year-old former butcher looking for a new line of work.

A widowed mother short of modern skills, Mrs. Shim unexpectedly finds the strange and cutthroat world of murder-for-hire that has plenty of use for someone experienced with knives when she answers a job ad in the newspaper for the Smile Detective Agency. “You can wash your hands clean when you’re dead,” a fortune teller advises, summing up the colorful collection of malcontents who make up the novel’s cast of characters.

Most of them arise like Mrs. Shim from humble origins, doing anything they can to survive and prosper in a rough-and-tumble world of economic desperation. The author enchants with a delicately woven series of overlapping plotlines that both surprise and entertain, while also bringing in interesting and relatively obscure facets of Korea’s culture, such as ghost weddings and fortune telling.

Most chapters are told