The narrator and Yan Kerrand’s visit to the Korean border moves from a winter landscape treated as a tourist attraction to an argument about a war that has never formally ended. On the way to an observation point and museum, the pair encounter military restrictions, a border that refuses to yield a clear view, and exhibitions that turn the division of the peninsula into public display. The excursion matters not only for what it teaches Kerrand about the frontier, but for what the narrator insists he must understand about living beside it.

Background and Approach

The border is present in the landscape before the excursion begins. Walking along Sokcho’s beach, the narrator sees the electrified barbed-wire fence running along the shore and recalls that North Korea is barely sixty kilometres away. The coastline is both a place of beauty and a marked political edge. When Kerrand approaches across the beach, he admires the winter landscape, but his tourist’s appreciation does not yet account for the danger and history embedded in what he sees.

The later drive makes the approach to the border feel less like travel through an ordinary region than passage into an abandoned one. Wind sweeps clouds across the road; skeletal village remains, cardboard boxes, plastic waste, and blue metal sheets punctuate the view. The narrator says that Gangwon Province has been left to rot since the Korean War. She has handed Kerrand the car keys despite hating driving and never intending to take him there herself. Her instructions to drive faster and her translations of the road signs make her both guide and reluctant participant in the visit.

Checkpoint and No Man’s Land

At the checkpoint, a young soldier makes the pair fill in forms while a loudspeaker repeats the rules: no photography, filming, leaving the marked route, loud voices, or laughter. The restrictions define the visit before the landscape does. After the narrator returns the papers, the soldier salutes and the fence opens onto no man’s land. The escorted convoy eventually turns away, leaving the pair alone on a road winding between snow-filled ditches. The transition from official supervision to isolation gives the space a strange double character: it is a regulated destination, but also a place where the visitors are conspicuously exposed.

A sudden braking interrupts the drive. Kerrand has mistaken a woman in a pink jacket, hunched beside the road, for someone about to cross. He signals for her to go ahead, but she remains still, her hands crossed behind her back. As they drive on carefully, the narrator sees her watching them in the wing mirror until the bend hides her. The moment offers no explanation of the woman’s presence or thoughts; its force lies in the unanswered encounter, set against the route’s procedures and the danger implied by the border.

At the observation point, cold and military control become part of the visitors’ physical experience. A tteok stall stands in the car park, its smell of cold oil reaching them as the wind whips their coats against their legs. Kerrand’s sketchbook protrudes from his pocket as they climb to the lookout. Visitors can pay five hundred won to look toward North Korea through binoculars, but the view is blocked by fog. The ocean lies to one side, mountains to the other, and ahead there is only mist. The apparatus promises access to the other side while the weather withholds it; looking becomes an activity organized by the border but unable to overcome its separation.

The Museum and Its History

The pair return to the car park and see an old woman they had encountered earlier, now talking to the woman at the tteok stall. When the old woman notices the narrator, she approaches, speaks to her, and strokes her cheek with a rough hand. The narrator pushes her away, and the woman whimpers. Kerrand calmly puts an arm around the narrator’s shoulders. The brief gesture of care occurs not in the museum but at the edge of the organized tour, amid an encounter neither visitor can readily interpret.

At the museum entrance, payment is taken through a sterile box with a microphone. The narrator asks whether the fee is for two; the woman inside answers in English, and a rubber-gloved hand points the visitors onward. The narrator chokes back the humiliation of being addressed in a language other than her own in front of Kerrand. Inside, the scale and emptiness of the building make their shoes ring across marble floors. Kerrand wanders distractedly until a display of leather helmets prompts him to ask for a translation.

Its account traces the conflict between North and South Korea from 1950: the North was supported by the Soviet Union and China, and the South by the United States and the United Nations. The armistice was signed on 27 July 1953, establishing the frontier along the 38th parallel. The displayed figures describe a border four kilometres wide and 238 kilometres long, among the world’s most heavily militarized, and estimate that two to four million people, civilian and military, died during the three-year conflict. The narrator’s translation also makes plain that no peace treaty has ever been signed. The museum supplies dates and measurements, but those facts describe an unresolved condition rather than a finished past.

The Limits of Looking

The narrator’s attention settles on a display of schoolchildren’s shoes from the North and blue-packaged Choco Pies, unlike the snack’s trademark purple packaging. She wonders whether the pies are genuine and whether they contain cake or were specially made for the museum. Her questions focus on ordinary objects whose authenticity cannot be confirmed from behind the display. This small uncertainty echoes the larger limits of the visit: the other side is made visible through exhibits and binoculars, yet remains inaccessible and partly unknowable.

The excursion’s political meaning becomes explicit when the narrator tells Kerrand that France’s beaches may bear scars from past wars, but the beaches here are still waiting for a war to end. Hotels and neon signs, she says, cannot make the situation secure: the peninsula remains in limbo, in a winter that never ends. She supports that claim with a recent example: the previous summer, a tourist from Seoul was shot by a North Korean soldier while swimming in the sea, unaware that she had crossed the border. Kerrand apologizes. The narrator looks down, her hands shaking. The account changes the visit’s terms. What could have remained a scenic outing or a lesson in military history becomes a confrontation with the possibility that an ordinary act, swimming, can cross an invisible line and become fatal. The fog at the lookout has withheld the view; the narrator’s testimony supplies the danger that the view cannot show.