Sokcho as a place of waiting

Sokcho as a place of waiting gives the town’s winter landscape a human rhythm: life is held in suspension, with arrivals, departures, and seasonal change continually anticipated but not yet complete. The image connects the town’s departure of young people and the harbor’s nightly preparations with the narrator’s experience of waiting for Yan Kerrand to leave and reckoning with what his departure means for her own story.

A Town Suspended Between Seasons

Sokcho is described as a place where winter and fish seem to seep through everything, while the town waits. The waiting has several objects at once: tourists, boats, men, and spring. These are not interchangeable promises. Tourists and men suggest people who may come and go; boats belong to the working harbor; spring marks a change in season. Gathering them into one image makes waiting the town’s condition rather than a single character’s temporary feeling.

The expectation of spring does not cancel the winter that surrounds it. Instead, the seasonal change remains ahead, as an anticipated release from the present. The town is therefore defined by a tension between what continues and what is expected: winter persists, while the possibility of movement is repeatedly named. The image gives the setting a suspended quality without suggesting that nothing happens there; activity continues, but it unfolds within a season and a town figured as waiting.

Leaving and Staying

A conversation with Kerrand brings the town’s stillness into focus through its young population. He observes that there do not seem to be many young people in Sokcho, and the narrator answers that they all leave. The exchange makes departure a familiar pattern of local life, not simply the exceptional choice of a visitor. The narrator’s response is brief, but it supplies a social counterpart to the town’s waiting: people are expected to go, while Sokcho remains the place left behind.

Kerrand asks whether the narrator is bored. The question follows the observation about young people leaving, but the evidence does not record her answer. Its place in the exchange nevertheless brings individual feeling alongside the broader pattern: the town’s apparent lack of movement raises the possibility of boredom, without establishing that this is how the narrator understands her life. The restraint matters. Sokcho is not reduced to a dull place; its waiting includes routine, work, and an unsettled question about what staying feels like.

Kerrand’s Departure and the Narrator’s Story

The image of waiting becomes intimate when Kerrand decides to return to France. After pausing, he tells the narrator in French that she is right: he has been too absorbed in his hero for too long. He says he will not waste any more of her time and gives a definite departure date, four days away. The decision turns an open-ended stay into a short countdown. Yet its motive is also tied to his work: his attention has been occupied by the hero of his story, and he has concluded that he should leave.

The narrator experiences the departure not as a neutral change of plans but as an abandonment bound up with authorship. She objects inwardly to Kerrand leaving with his story of Sokcho and putting it on display halfway across the world. She also feels that he has no right to leave her in the town with her own story withering on the rocks. The contrast is sharp: Kerrand can carry a version of Sokcho elsewhere, while the narrator fears that her own story will remain behind and diminish. The town’s waiting thus becomes a question of who can leave, whose account travels, and what happens to the person and place left in its wake.

Harbor Time

After three days pass, time itself seems to move slowly, like a ship coasting over waves. Kerrand remains in his room, and the narrator returns to her own room late at night, when she is sure he is asleep. Their separate rooms and the approaching departure keep the waiting close and private, but the narrator’s repeated evening walks take her back into the working life of the port.

There she sees fishermen preparing to go out for squid. They linger at a soup stand and adjust their waterproof clothing against the wind before boarding the twenty-four boats at the jetty. Bulbs strung on cables from stem to stern are lit to lure squid out at sea. These preparations give the harbor’s waiting a practical shape: the fishermen ready their boats and lights before setting out, and the narrator returns to watch as the fleet prepares to leave. The scene does not dissolve the town’s suspension; it shows movement beginning within it, through repeated labor and departure.

The port’s pattern stands beside the narrator’s countdown to Kerrand’s departure. The fishermen prepare to go out, while Kerrand stays in his room and the narrator walks the same evening route. Sokcho is therefore neither wholly motionless nor simply a place people abandon. Its waiting holds departures, work, and anticipated change together, leaving the narrator amid a town whose boats can set out even as her own future remains unresolved.