Sokcho Fish Market

Sokcho Fish Market is a working place of family labor and uneasy encounters, where the narrator’s private obligations repeatedly meet the public life of the town. Its aisles and stalls connect her to her mother’s livelihood, her French origins, and Yan Kerrand; at dawn, its tanks and unloading area also become the setting for her attempt to prepare a pufferfish. The market’s importance lies not in a single dramatic event but in how ordinary visits gather pressure and consequence.

Setting and Work

The market is presented through movement and work: the narrator walks its aisles to collect food her mother has set aside, and later finds her mother strapped into her work apron, shucking shellfish. Her mother’s tools are off-limits to the narrator, who stands beside her and looks into the tanks instead. The boundary is small but telling: mother and daughter share the market, yet do not share its work on equal terms. The mother’s labor is active and skilled; the narrator remains at her side, still in her mother’s bad books, until an offered apple briefly interrupts the silence.

The market is also the place where family care takes practical form. The narrator’s mother gives her food, including leftovers and, on another visit, an apple she says the doctor has told her to eat. The narrator has already arranged a health-centre appointment for her mother and waits while further tests are required. That medical errand belongs to the surrounding area rather than necessarily to the market itself, but it clarifies the responsibilities that accompany the narrator’s visits: concern for her mother is expressed through appointments, food, and presence, even when conversation between them is strained.

Family History and Public Visibility

The narrator’s connection to the market is shaped by a history that remains visible to other people. While crossing its aisles to reach her mother’s reserved leftovers, she notices the looks directed at her. Her French origins continue to be a subject of gossip, decades after her French father seduced her mother and disappeared. The market is therefore not simply a familiar family workplace. It is also a public space where the narrator is made conspicuous by a past she did not choose and cannot leave behind merely by going about an errand.

Her mother’s stall gives that public setting a particular intimacy. The narrator returns to it for food and stands near her mother during work, but the relationship remains marked by reprimand and silence. The mother’s gesture of peeling and offering an apple makes care tangible without resolving their tension. At the market, affection is often conveyed through something handed over, while embarrassment and disapproval remain present in the same encounter.

Yan Kerrand’s Visit

The market becomes a meeting point when Yan Kerrand appears at the far end of a row. The fishmonger women compete for his attention, smiling and waving raw octopus at him. His arrival changes the atmosphere around the narrator: her mother sees him, checks that her stand is clean, smooths her hair, and reapplies her lipstick. The market’s workday display becomes a social scene, with the women’s gestures making Kerrand’s presence conspicuous before he reaches the narrator.

Kerrand approaches pleasantly surprised to find her there and asks whether she has time to talk about progress on his story. The request catches her in front of her mother and the fishmongers. Humiliated, she arranges to meet him at seven in a small café opposite the market, near the tsunami shelter. Her mother scrutinizes Kerrand and, after he leaves, asks what he wants from her. In this episode, the market is a threshold between the narrator’s relationship with her mother and her developing connection with Kerrand: a private conversation is deferred to the café across the way, but it has already become visible to the family and to the surrounding crowd.

Tanks, Violence, and the Predawn Visit

A later visit recasts the market in darkness and at the hour before her mother wakes. The narrator walks through the unloading area with a torch; its beam catches octopuses moving in their tanks. Containers of orange washing-up liquid and the smell of acid accompany the water and the amplified sound of her footsteps. The scene narrows the market to its working surfaces and sounds, before the bustle of the daytime encounters.

Among the pufferfish, the narrator recognizes her mother’s fish. Her mother has removed their teeth to stop them harming one another. The narrator chooses the fish she considers the stupidest, believing this leaves her conscience clear, but its violent fin-beating after it is taken from the water unsettles her. She panics and strikes it too hard, crushing its head with her fingers, then wraps it in a bag so it will not leak on the way to the guest house. The killing is not cleanly controlled: an intended choice becomes physical mishandling, and the fish’s injury must be contained during the journey.

The sequence gives the market a role beyond that of a backdrop. The narrator carries one of its animals away to prepare food for Kerrand, and the market’s ordinary trade becomes bound to care, fear, and harm. Across its repeated appearances, the place holds together acts that do not comfortably align: her mother’s work and provision, the narrator’s obligation and shame, Kerrand’s arrival, and the narrator’s attempt to turn a living fish into a meal.