Well, I guess the jury couldn’t ignore the wealth of prizes this author has collected: the Manhae Literature Prize, the Dong-in Literature Prize, and the Yi Sang Literary Prize, as well as France’s Prix de l’Inaperçu. Restrained, eh? They couldn’t come up with anything more encouraging than that? Was I missing something? Was it going to improve?Ī million-plus-copy best seller in Korea, Please Look After Mom is the stunning, deeply moving story of a family’s search for their mother, who goes missing one afternoon amid the crowds of the Seoul Station subway. It seemed to me that this was a rather pedestrian story in rather plodding prose about an ageing mother who goes missing on a crowded subway and her guilt-stricken adult children’s search for her. I was about a quarter of the way through Please Look After Mom (translated as Please Look After Mother in the UK) and was bored witless by it so I decided to re-check its nomination for the Man Asian Literary Prize to see why I should have been enjoying it. Hmm, perhaps I should have guessed that an ‘international best-seller’ with a million sales in Korea alone would be a disappointment…
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