Squid

Squid recurs in the novel as food, memory, and an animal sought at sea. It passes through hands and settings: prepared in a fish-market household, dried and examined in a café, remembered through a childhood warning, and pursued by boats whose lights spread across the dark water. These appearances connect ordinary care and appetite with labor, bodily unease, and Yan Kerrand’s troubled account of making art.

Preparation and Family Life

The narrator’s mother prepares squid at home above the port’s loading bays, in an apartment reserved for fishmongers. Squatting over a bucket, she mixes fish liver, leeks, and sweet potato noodles for stuffing. She demonstrates how to spread the mixture evenly and gives her daughter a squid to fill. The liquid splashing from the bucket runs toward the kitchen drain, placing the work in a lived-in space where seafood preparation is messy, practiced labor rather than a decorative culinary custom.

The narrator visits her mother on Sunday evenings and stays until Monday, her day off. Since her daughter moved out, her mother has found it difficult to sleep alone. Her instruction in preparing squid thus takes place within a relationship sustained by repeated visits and shared work. Even as she teaches a technique, she puts her liver-stained gloves on her daughter’s hips and comments on her being young and pretty but unmarried. The gesture brings together food preparation, physical scrutiny, and the mother’s hopes for her daughter’s future.

Squid belongs to a broader household world of specialized fish preparation. The mother’s Soondae is reputed to be the best in Sokcho, and she is also the only fishmonger there licensed to prepare Fugu. The novel distinguishes these skills rather than treating seafood cookery as one undifferentiated craft: making squid stuffing is shown directly, while the careful removal of Fugu’s poisonous organs belongs to the mother’s expertise alone. Her daughter watches that work but is never permitted to handle Fugu herself.

Food, Appetite, and Childhood Belief

The narrator remembers her mother warning her as a child that eating squid with milk would make tentacles, or perhaps worms, grow in her veins. She laughs at the recollection and guesses that the warning was intended to keep her from drinking milk, which she cannot digest. The story turns an ordinary pairing of foods into a bodily threat: squid is not only something to eat but the imagined source of an uncanny change inside the body.

In a café, the narrator tells this memory while Yan Kerrand turns a dried squid tentacle in his fingers. She asks whether he likes it; he indicates that he prefers wine, which is scarce in Sokcho. His attention remains on the tentacle, and she regrets having spoken. The moment is small, but it places her inherited food story beside his quiet, concentrated handling of the animal. Her phone vibrates with Jun-oh’s name, and she puts it away, leaving the conversation and the squid as the immediate focus of the scene.

Other meals in the novel establish the pressures surrounding food without identifying every dish as squid. At a port stall, the narrator weighs the size of each mouthful before eating a seafood pancake with her mother. Her mother speaks of the coming Seollal meal and needing Fugu, while the market has only Octopus available. The narrator then eats and drinks rapidly, losing control. This contrast matters to the squid’s wider setting: seafood is at once market supply, skilled preparation, family care, and a source of difficult bodily feeling, though the pancake itself is not specified as containing squid.

Tentacles and Artistic Creation

Squid also enters Yan Kerrand’s reflections on his work. As he explains that a story can move away from its creator and continue to draw itself, he tugs at the tentacle in front of him. He describes a repeated cycle: an unfinished story persists even as he imagines another, and he feels compelled to finish the work already underway before beginning again. His fingers claw at the tentacle as he speaks. The scene does not make the squid a simple emblem for his creative block; rather, the physical object gives his account a visible, tactile counterpart, as he handles something separate from himself while describing a story that seems to escape its maker’s control.

The animal’s tentacles also carry the force of the narrator’s childhood warning, which had imagined them growing inside a person’s veins. Together, the remembered threat and Yan Kerrand’s handling of the dried tentacle make the squid unusually available to thought and touch. It remains food, but it can also prompt unease and hold attention without resolving into a single symbolic meaning.

Fishing and Recurrence

At night, squid fishing shapes the port’s activity. The narrator watches men prepare their waterproof clothing at the soup stand, then board twenty-four boats at the jetty. They string bulbs along the boats from stem to stern, using the lights to lure squid out at sea. From the pagoda at the end of the jetty, the narrator watches the vessels leave in a slow procession. Seen from shore, the fishing lights become a marine counterpart to a starry path; the image grows out of practical work, not a departure from it. The boats’ departure also gives the animal a presence beyond the kitchen and café: squid draws people from the port into the dark water and organizes the nightly scene around its capture.

Squid returns as prepared food when Jun-oh comes back to the guest house close to midnight after a snow-delayed bus journey. The narrator has made ginger calamari for him, but he declines because he has already eaten and is watching what he eats. The offered dish meets a refusal, giving food a different relational function from the mother’s instruction: cooking is an attempt at care, but it cannot guarantee a shared meal. Later, the narrator tells Yan Kerrand that she would like him to taste her cooking. Across these moments, squid moves between work, memory, appetite, and offering. Its recurrence binds the port’s economy to the private negotiations of eating together—or not eating at all.