PLANT LADY

Little shop of horrors.

Yoohee’s plant shop, located in a quiet neighborhood in Sejin City, South Korea, is a dream realized. As a teenager, Yoohee considered plants “a comforting presence, like a steadfast friend.” As an adult, she’s more philosophical: “‘Humans are just like plants’…With a little attention and tenderness, you could nudge them back onto the right track”—in some cases, anyway. The men Yoohee has known have proved resistant to her hypothesis. Take Hoyoung, the shop’s first male customer, whom Yoohee is seeing romantically: He’s careless and worse with her plants, yanking off the odd leaf or snapping the odd branch. At one point, Yoohee asks Hoyoung to be more considerate with the plants, and he responds gracelessly, moving her to grab the shovel she uses to attack weeds and bring it down on him “with a swish. The blade struck its target.” This is the first of several occasions when Yoohee will use brute force to redress a wrong, eventually expanding her scope to include wrongs perpetrated on other women. (Ultimately, Yoohee’s harrowing backstory is offered up as if to explain how she became someone capable of murder.) Like many agenda-driven narratives, this one requires a cartoonish strain of villain—in this story, the human male—which leads to flat characterizations. Nevertheless, Kang, a Korean writer, has terrific composure in capturing both the cozy vibe of the plant shop and the violence Yoohee unleashes within it. Kang gestures toward the thriller—she introduces a detective to her story—but her audience is those who aren’t in it for a traditional thriller’s payoffs; they are in it for the thrill of guiltlessly playing bystander to vigilantism enacted on behalf of a justifiably aggrieved group.

A tidy little feminist revenge fantasy with thriller signposts.