The suspended state created by the division of the Korean Peninsula

The suspended state created by the division of the Korean Peninsula shapes Sokcho as a place where an unfinished war is at once physically present and easy to mistake for scenery. The border is measured, policed, and marketed as something to look at; for the narrator, it is also a force that gives the coast its peculiar atmosphere of danger and waiting. The novel makes that suspension legible through concrete contrasts: barbed wire beside beaches, a paid viewpoint obscured by fog, and the bright preparations of a resort town built beside a conflict without a peace treaty.

A border made physical

The narrator first encounters the division as part of the coast’s visible geography. An electrified barbed-wire fence scars the beach, while North Korea lies less than sixty kilometres away. The distance is short enough to make the border feel close to daily life, but the fence converts that nearness into a line that cannot simply be crossed. The landscape is not an abstract political map: its barriers run alongside the shore where people walk and the town receives visitors.

The journey inland to the observation point extends this geography into a controlled route. Gangwon Province appears worn and sparsely developed, with skeletal village remains, cardboard boxes, plastic waste, and blue metal sheets beside the road. At a checkpoint, a young soldier makes the visitors complete forms while a loudspeaker repeats prohibitions: no photography or filming, no leaving the marked path, and no loud voices or laughter. An armed convoy initially escorts them through the no man’s land, then turns away, leaving them to continue alone between snow-filled ditches. The movement is therefore neither ordinary travel nor unrestricted exploration: each step is permitted, bounded, and watched.

Looking across, and failing to see

At the observation point, the border becomes a view offered for a fee. For five hundred won, visitors can look toward North Korea through binoculars. The narrator and Yan Kerrand climb to the lookout in a wind that whips their coats against their legs; the cold is so intense that their eyelids stick to the metal eyepieces. But fog fills the space ahead. The ocean lies to one side and a wall of mountains to the other, while the intended view remains unavailable. The apparatus promises visual access, yet the weather makes the political divide present chiefly as distance and obstruction.

The museum gives the visitors a more explicit account. Its display traces the conflict between the two Koreas from 1950, identifies the Soviet and Chinese support for the North and the United States and United Nations support for the South, and records the armistice signed on 27 July 1953. The frontier follows the 38th parallel; the demilitarized strip is four kilometres wide and 238 kilometres long. The conflict caused an estimated two to four million civilian and military deaths, and no peace treaty followed. These figures explain why the landscape is not simply a memorial to a concluded war: the armistice stopped the fighting without resolving the division.

The museum’s exhibits also bring the national history down to the scale of ordinary objects. Among the displays that hold the narrator’s attention are schoolchildren’s shoes from the North and blue-packaged Choco Pie, unlike its familiar purple packaging. She wonders whether the cake inside is real or whether the items were specially made for the museum. That uncertainty matters: the divided country is encountered not only through military statistics but through the uncertain status of familiar things, made strange by the border and by their presentation as exhibits.

Touristic spectacle and local knowledge

The observation route turns a dangerous political space into a destination for visitors. The museum charges an entrance fee, and its attendant addresses Kerrand in English rather than the narrator in her own language, making the narrator feel humiliated in front of him. The facility’s sterile entrance and rubber-gloved directions sit uneasily beside the scale of the history it presents. The border can be consumed as an excursion, but the person who lives nearby is not necessarily treated as the primary knower of it.

That mismatch appears elsewhere along the coast. The town’s resort identity coexists with fencing, bunkers, and guns protruding from their openings. During a rainy visit near a temple, the narrator points out the military installations and contrasts the beaches of France with those of Sokcho. Kerrand describes the beaches of Normandy as colder and emptier, marked by war but belonging to the past. The narrator answers that the Korean coast is still waiting for the end of a war that people have grown used to treating as unreal. Hotels and neon signs have been built, she explains, but beneath their appearance of normality the situation remains precarious. The contrast is not simply between two national histories; it is between a war remembered as finished and a conflict whose unfinished status continues to organize the present.

The narrator makes that continuing danger concrete by recalling that, 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. The episode collapses the distinction between holiday landscape and militarized territory. A visitor can enter the danger without realizing that a line has been crossed; the apparent openness of the beach does not mean the boundary has ceased to matter.

Sokcho as a condition of waiting

The border’s suspended time resonates with the town’s broader rhythms. Sokcho is dressed for Seollal with strings of lights along its main street and an inflatable dolphin above the steel arch, yet this festive display does not erase the visible wear of the place. Elsewhere, the narrator sees a film-location boat filled with stuffed animals and bouquets of last summer’s flowers, faded and rotting in ice. The boat rocks in the wind and creaks; its frozen, neglected offerings make waiting tangible without turning it into a single dramatic event.

The narrator describes Sokcho as waiting for tourists, boats, men, and spring. That list connects the peninsula’s unresolved political time to ordinary forms of suspension: seasonal change, arrivals, work, and relationships. The town’s beaches can be sold as attractions, but they remain edged by the fence; its streets can glow with lights, but the war’s ending remains deferred. This is why the division is more than historical background. It shapes what can be seen, where people can go, and how the narrator understands home. When she insists that Sokcho is her home and all she knows, local attachment becomes a way of speaking from within the landscape rather than viewing it as a visitor’s spectacle.

The idea of an endless winter gives this condition its clearest form. Winter is not only the season of snow, cold metal, and obscured views; it names a time that has not reached its promised transition. The novel does not suggest that every aspect of Sokcho is reducible to the division, or that the town is literally motionless. Instead, it shows how the unresolved border inflects its beaches, tourism, public memory, and sense of the future. The persistent question is not only what lies across the line, but how long a place can continue to live beside an unfinished ending.