Written by: Isabella Constante
What if I told you that in less than a minute, you can travel thousands of miles and find a seaside convenience store stacked with mouth-watering sweets, or detectives doubling as chefs who can recreate your favorite childhood dishes? It’s possible, through the peaceful pages of healing fiction, a genre perfected by Japanese and Korean authors.
How do these stories heal? Syou Ishida’s We’ll Prescribe You a Cat makes it pretty clear. At the Nakagyō Kokoro Clinic for the Soul, patients take a cat home for the recommended duration to treat anything from insomnia to generational trauma. At first, clients meet the doctor suspiciously, but throughout five short stories, it is clear how a fuzzy friend can make all the difference.
Short stories are an integral part of the healing fiction genre. In today’s world, where multiple media forms compete for our attention, these stories offer a low-commitment respite. The popular format begins with an enigmatic location, such as the diner in the Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai. The location of each chapter remains the same, along with each “main character,” who is often an employee of the special place. New characters return to the exact location, usually tucked into the back of an alley without a single sign. As author Kashiwai put it, we must be “really destined” to find these places.
My journey with the East Asian genre began with Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop, where I followed Yeongju, who quit everything to open her dream store. Through Hwang Bo-Reum’s debut novel, I left the rat race and settled into a well-deserved rest. Since then, I have often returned to Korea and Japan through the healing worlds these words create. I hope you will join me next time.