The Trunk is a novel about a woman who works as a ‘Field Wife’, a hired out temporary spouse for the rich, and what happens when one of her previous husbands hires her for another year of marriage. Inji took a job at matchmaking service Wedding & Life’s secret division, in which people can pay for a field spouse to have a fixed term marriage with, when she didn’t know what to do with her life, and now she’s had five of these husbands. The most recent husband wants another year with her, and soon various people in her life, and secrets from the past, start to appear, in this satirical novel that explores modern marriage, sexuality, and gender expectations in South Korea.
This novel wasn’t what I was expecting from how it is presented, as it is marketed as a feminist thriller, and between that and the title, I was expecting the protagonist to be involved in something like murder. Actually, the book is more about ideas of love and marriage, queerness and the space for people’s lives and relationships to be more fluid, with a plot that is more focused on the protagonist’s relationships to other people and things in the past that have impacted those relationships. There are some thriller-like elements—like her finding more shady stuff out about the company she works for, or the guy who won’t stop pursuing her, or the mystery of how her schoolfriend died—but the book is really more meditative and character-focused, with a lot of satire as well, rather than a thrilling page turner.
The first half of the book focuses on Inji’s work in the company and some of the people in her life, like her closest friend and the old granny who lives by her, and all of the characters are given a lot of quirks to explore how people’s lives aren’t straightforward. There’s also her current husband, a rich music producer she has avoided finding out much about, and a guy who has started turning up at her work, demanding to know why she’s not interested in him, and both of these two seem like something dramatic is going to happen, but then the second half of the book tells more of the story of her and her best friend, and their other friend who died after Coming of Age Day. as well as Inji’s revelations about a manager at her company. This all makes it quite a varied novel, but I enjoyed that it wasn’t a straightforward thriller, and instead questioned a lot of things about relationships, sex, and love that people tend to expect.
Fiendfully Reading 
You must be logged in to post a comment.