Seoul Before Sunrise by Samir Dahmani

It's a bit quirky for a book about a young Korean woman to be by a Frenchman and translated into English, but we live in a big, quirky world. And creator Samir Dahmani lived in South Korea for several years, so this is a world he knows - well, he clearly didn't grow up as a girl there and move to Seoul for university, but you know what I mean. (The translator is Nanette McGuinness, for the record.)

Seoul Before Sunrise is a moody, quiet story - told in what looks like watercolors, mostly soft and muted, with lots of deep blues and blacks for this mostly-nighttime story. It's Seong-ji's story: she came from a provincial city, did well enough on her standard tests to get into a good accounting program in a Seoul university. But her best friend, Ji-won, got into a slightly better university, and now the two of them will not be as inseparable as they were before.

This is a big deal for Seong-ji. The reader realizes, fairly quickly, that it's not that way for Ji-won: she's fine with moving on, going on to the next thing in her life, while Seong-ji is mourning her past, unsure and tentative and at sea in the new big impersonal city.

Seong-ji works overnight at a convenience store to help pay for her school: it's quiet and slow, with just a few random customers over the course of a shift. One customer in particular, a woman in her thirties, forms a weird friendship with Seong-ji - the older woman is quirkily bohemian, not concerned with any of the things Seong-ji has been taught are most important (looks, popularity, career), and spends her nights breaking into random people's apartments just to be there and experience their lives.

(She talks in vague generalities, I'm afraid: like a lot of similar characters in a lot of media, she's meant to be the voice of passion and art and mystery, so her creator keeps everything muddy and nonspecific and applicable to everything in the world even when that's not as useful as more specificity would be.)

Her new friend drags Seong-ji along on various break-ins - which are totally fine, since she works for a property-management company, so she has keys and codes to get in anywhere she wants, and, anyway, she never takes or breaks anything. Seong-ji is too much of a mouse to argue against this, and, besides, is intrigued with this new world she discovers - the world of strangers' lives at night.

There are experiences which don't seem to be in normal default reality, but Dahmani doesn't want to pin these down to being a real intrusion of fantasy into the night world, or an altered psychological state, or anything else - again, he's keeping things vague to cover all of the possibilities.

Well, there's one possibility a close reader will have realized really early: Seong-ji likes girls. She really liked her friend Ji-won, and finally realizes that. She catches up with her old friend to let her know, which does not go well at all.

And then the book ends confusingly, with Seong-ji disappearing for the last section, even though this is entirely her story. Dahmani leaves it vague - yes, again - about what actually happened - and lets the reader guess or speculate what happens next for Seong-ji. It's a frustrating ending, but in character with the earlier vagueness.

Seoul After Sunrise is a book of mood and vibes and feelings, carried by strong art that makes that mood live and true. I would have preferred if the words were a bit more pointed, but that's not the book this creator wanted to make.