Book Review: The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-Eun (trans. by Lizzie Buehler)

Book Review: The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-Eun (Translated by Lizzie Buehler) https://t.co/kPwRkgOgib

Short Review: 8.5 out of 10
1/3

— Josh (garik16) (11-5) (@garik16) September 7, 2020

Short Review (cont): When a woman who works for a company marketing areas of disaster for tourists gets sent to one as a vacation by her sexually harassing boss, she finds an absurd place where exploitation is seemingly happening all over.

Really strong Korean satire.

2/3

— Josh (garik16) (11-5) (@garik16) September 7, 2020

The Disaster Tourist is a short novel by Korean author Yun Ko-Eun, translated from the original Korean text by Lizzie Buehler.   The review which brought the novel to my attention considered it to be SF/F, but I'm really not sure that designation fits, nor is it advertised as such online, so I won't use the designation here.  What it is however is definitely literally fiction that is very much a satire on the real world, and its treatment of many people in different ways.  Like I noted above, this is a "Short Novel", that probably could've been called a novella, but it packs a lot into its page time, and is well worth your time as a result.


-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Yona is 33, and has worked for the past ten years at Jungle, a travel agency that specializes in tourism packages to places devastated by catastrophe - massacres, volcanos, sinkholes, tsunamis....you name it.  Jungle creates packages for tourists to visit these places and "enjoy" what they see there, as a vacation, and Yona has grown to be really good at her job as one of its employees.  But when Yona is sexually harassed by her boss and realizes that no one at the company is willing to really help her in a way that actually cares what happens to her, she tries to quit - because what else can she do?  But her boss offers her an alternative: go on one of Jungle's "Vacations" to one of its worst-performing packages, a location hit by a devastating sinkhole decades ago, and act as an undercover employee to determine whether the package should be canceled for real.

But what Yona finds on the trip is a dismal place, where the horrors of the past are treated not just like an exhibition, but like a boring one.  And when Yona's scheduled departure from this place, the Desert Island of Mui, goes awry, she discovers far more happening under the surface of the package than she expected, and realizes she has a choice to make over the place's future.....

or does she?
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The Disaster Tourist is speculative only in that as far as I know, the business at its center doesn't yet exist, but honestly I can see it really doing so even now somewhere.  And its general practice absolutely does exist to some extent: the exhibition of suffering for the ends of entertainment/tourism.  The company involved here, Jungle, takes advantage of this on a mass scale, selling packages to disasters around the world - some supposedly for people to actually do some volunteer work but most just for people to gawk at and be "educated".  And as a big company, all it cares about is how profitable these disasters are, as opposed to anything else, like what the disasters mean to the people suffering them or the comfort of their employees, with it preferring to pressure its unwanted employees into quitting rather than caring for them or firing them when they get out of line.

So yeah Jungle as a company is a clear satire of capitalist companies, but The Disaster Tourist goes beyond that with both its character of Yona and the setting of Mui.  Mui itself is reliant upon the disaster tourism to function, so when it goes away, the island literally has people decide to fake another disaster to try and reattain the moneys from outsiders.  And yet those moneys aren't going to the actual people there, but rather to an outsider company that has decided to invest heavily in the area because it's so cheap, a company with a generic name (PAUL) and no clear owner or face.  But the actual people are left to suffer, forced to obtain licenses to remain on their own land, and their livelihoods aren't even considered in it all - meanwhile the disaster tourism industry in the area fetishizes suffering long gone at this point for profit that never goes to them.

And then there's Yona.  As with anything else in this book, Yona isn't a good person - after all she's spent her career in the disaster tourism industry without even bothering to contemplate how it affects the actual people there.  And when she sees it first hand, she's more uncomfortable with it all than anything else, not really horrified.  She mostly cares about the company leaving her in the dust, and leaving her adrift with no potential future.  That Yona makes one effort to change things in the end is more the result of realities crashing and crashing into her than any face turn.....and the book does not treat her kindly for it all.

But that's a great example of what this book is showing it to all be about: a world where pain and suffering is commodified, where that commodification doesn't even result in reparations to those suffering, and where the people who consume this and work with it can't find it in themselves to care.  And when they do, it's as a result of selfish motives at best, and what impact they have is limited...and doesn't quite go the way they expect.  It's all really well done, and I don't want to go much further, except to say this is one book that you should read, and I'm real glad it got translated.