My mother delivered a blow to her wriggling fish. Pink fluid oozed from its head. She cut off the fins, peeled away the skin with one brisk movement and noticed that the pink, skinned mass was still struggling. She slit its throat. Then came the delicate part: removing the poison-laden intestines, ovaries, and liver without piercing them. I watched her work. She never gave me permission to handle fugu.

“Do you like your job?”

“Why?” she asked as she made a gash in the belly.

“I’m curious.”

Holding open the abdomen with the tip of her knife, she pulled out the guts, setting the toxic organs to one side and placing them carefully in a bag before she put them in the bin. She glanced over at the counter where I was working and suddenly cried:

“The ink!”

MY AUNT WAS heavily made-up and dressed in a smart tailored suit. She laughed when she saw my mother and me in our traditional outfits. How could anyone dress like that in this day and age! Chastened, my mother forced a laugh. We set the table in the kitchen, arranging the cushions carefully on the tiled floor.

My aunt went into raptures over the fugu sashimi. She never ate it in Seoul, the chefs claiming to have a licence to prepare it were all Japanese, she didn’t trust them. Twenty grams of toxic flesh was enough to asphyxiate a man, those Japanese chefs would be only too happy to kill off a few Koreans. She wrinkled her nose. But what was that grayish color in the octopus dish?

“Your niece pierced the ink sac,” my mother complained. “She’s not to be trusted with a knife.”

She filled the bowls with tteokguk, poured soju into the glasses.

“That job at the guest house is making her look pale, don’t you think?”

My aunt said that she’d always thought me sickly-looking. It was probably because of the air in Sokcho, she added, sweeping the dirty kitchen walls with her eyes. I concentrated on eating my soup, studying the reflection of my face in its surface. My spoon created ripples, smudging my nose, making my forehead undulate and my cheeks bleed into my chin. My aunt thought the tteokguk was bland. I was too intent on ladling it into my mouth to actually taste it. My mother added soy sauce to it, splashing her sister, who cried out, saying she’d paid a lot of money for the silk she was wearing. My mother turned to me, trying to avoid an argument:

“You’re not saying anything. Speak to your aunt.”

I said something about Kerrand.

“Him again!”

“He’s French.”

My mother sat up. My aunt sneered that Frenchmen were all talk, only a fool would fall for their slick charm.

“What do you know about France?” I said under my breath.

My mother said we should change the subject. We didn’t know what we were talking about. And we certainly knew nothing about comics. I helped myself to more soup and fugu.