Yan Kerrand arrives at Old Park’s guest house

Yan Kerrand’s arrival at Old Park’s Guest House begins with a brief request for temporary shelter and becomes the point of entry for a French artist whose work will take shape amid Sokcho’s winter landscape. The encounter introduces both the practical narrowness of the guest house and the distance between the town as the narrator experiences it and the town Kerrand later renders on the page.

Arrival and First Impressions

Kerrand arrives muffled in a woollen coat, sets his suitcase down at the narrator’s feet, and removes his hat. The narrator notices his Western face, dark eyes, and hair combed to one side; he looks straight through her without seeming to see her. Speaking English, he asks to stay for a few days while he looks around for something else. His passport identifies him as Yan Kerrand, born in 1968 in Granville, France. He appears younger than his photograph, with less hollow cheeks.

The first exchange is formal but quietly unsettling for the narrator. She gives Kerrand a registration form, but he hands over his passport so she can fill it in for him. When she offers him a pencil to sign, he takes a pen from his coat instead. As the computer freezes, he removes his gloves and inspects the dust and a cat figurine above it. His close attention to the worn reception area makes the narrator feel compelled to excuse the state of the guest house, though she has worked there for only a month and is not responsible for its condition.

A Room in a Quiet Guest House

The guest house is nearly full despite the scarcity of winter visitors. A Japanese climber and a young woman recovering from facial plastic surgery occupy rooms in the main building; the woman’s boyfriend has joined her for a ten-day stay. Business has been slow since Old Park’s wife died the previous year, and Old Park has closed the upstairs bedrooms. With the narrator and Old Park also living there, Kerrand must be lodged in the other building.

After dark, the narrator leads him through a narrow alley past Mother Kim’s stall, where the smell from the pork balls lingers in the cold. Ice cracks underfoot as they cross another alley and reach the porch. Kerrand’s room is pink, with a plastic mirror imitating baroque ornament, a desk, and a purple bedspread. It is so small that his head brushes the ceiling and there are only two steps from wall to bed. The narrator chose it because it would take less effort to clean. The communal bathroom stands across the courtyard, but a covered walkway shelters the route; Kerrand does not object. He examines the wallpaper stains, sets down his suitcase, and insists on giving the narrator five thousand won when she tries to refuse it.

The Town Entering the Drawings

Kerrand’s arrival eventually places Sokcho inside the world of his comics. The narrator later discovers online that he signs his work Yan and that the tenth, final volume of his best-known series is due the following year. The series follows a globe-trotting archaeologist through a different location in each book, using monochrome ink wash, a lone central figure, and almost no dialogue. In the drawings the hero often looms over other figures, while people around him are reduced to shadow-like presences obscured by details such as a chair, stone, or leaf.

When the narrator sees Kerrand’s later drawings, she recognizes Sokcho’s hotels, a frontier represented by barbed wire, and the cave with its Buddhas. He has carried places from her world into the imaginary travels of his hero, rendering them in grey. Asked why he does not use colour, Kerrand says he sees no point in it. He points instead to a snowy mountaintop beneath a high sun, where a few lines define the rocks and most of the page remains blank. The narrator comes to see the snow and light in that white space: the image seems to emerge not from ink alone, but from what the paper leaves open. The frames appear to stretch and blur, as if the central character were pressing against their boundaries, and time seems to expand.

The Sketchbook Left Behind

After Kerrand’s departure, the narrator opens the sketchbook he left behind and finds images that carry the winter landscape beyond the recognizable town. His hero stands on the shore beside an old, one-legged heron, with a snow-covered mountain behind them. The bird’s beak sends out water that becomes a river and then flows into the sea. In later pages, faceless, ageless walkers leave faint yellow and blue traces in wet sand; the sea spreads beyond the beach and into the sky, while the place itself appears to form and dissolve at once.

The story in the sketchbook then seems to fade from the narrator’s grasp. The bird closes its eyes; the pages become blue. A man feels his way through winter beneath the waves, leaving behind an afterimage of a woman’s body, whose lines narrow to a fine thread of ink and a long scar. The arrival that began with a suitcase, a passport, and a request for a few days’ lodging thus opens onto a visual transformation of Sokcho: a town recognizable in its hotels and cave, but also made into an unstable, vanishing threshold of snow, sea, and ink.