The narrator accompanies Kerrand to the Korean–North Korean border

The narrator accompanies Kerrand to the Korean–North Korean border on a trip that begins as a practical excursion and becomes an encounter with the peninsula’s unresolved division. A journey from the coastal town of Sokcho carries them through checkpoints, a restricted viewing area, and a border museum, where sightseeing is shaped at every turn by rules about movement and vision. The narrator’s translations make the history legible to Kerrand, but the visit also exposes the distance between his position as a visitor and her experience of a place where the war remains unfinished.

Arranging the Journey

The trip grows out of Kerrand’s interest in reaching the border. When he asks Old Park about going there, the narrator explains that a bus can take him only as far as the vehicle checkpoint; reaching the observation point in no man’s land requires a private car. Kerrand wants to rent one, but the rental agency requires an international licence, and his French licence will not suffice. The narrator offers to drive him herself. Old Park agrees on the condition that the guest-house rooms are finished first, and the visit is set for Monday. Kerrand says they can go another day if she prefers, but the plan stands. He declines breakfast before going out for a walk.

The arrangement carries a contrast between intention and action. The narrator hates driving and had never intended to take Kerrand there; once they get into the car, she hands him the keys, and he drives. She translates road signs as they travel. Their route crosses Gangwon Province, where late-afternoon light falls over skeletal village remains, scattered cardboard and plastic, and blue metal sheets. The narrator describes the province as neglected since the war. The landscape is not simply a way to reach a destination: its visible remnants make the region’s history part of the journey before the pair arrive at the controlled border itself.

Crossing into the Restricted Zone

At the checkpoint, a soldier younger than the narrator has them fill in forms while a loudspeaker repeats the regulations: no photography or filming, no leaving the marked path, and no loud voices or laughter. After the forms are returned, the fence opens onto the demilitarized stretch of no man’s land. The view is grey and beige, with reeds, marshes, and occasional trees. An armed convoy escorts them at first, then turns away, leaving them to continue alone along a road winding between snow-filled ditches.

During that drive, Kerrand abruptly brakes because he thinks a woman is about to cross the road. Hunched beneath a pink jacket, she stands still with her hands crossed behind her back. Kerrand signals for her to cross, but she does not move. As he starts forward again carefully, the narrator sees the woman watching them in the wing mirror until the road bends and they disappear. The encounter offers no explanation for the woman’s presence or stillness. Its force lies in the brief, uneasy meeting of gazes within a landscape otherwise organized by barriers, instructions, and controlled passage.

At the observation point, the wind whips at their coats, and a nearby rice-cake stall gives off the smell of cold oil. Kerrand’s sketchbook protrudes from his pocket as they climb to the lookout. A line of binoculars offers visitors a view of North Korea for five hundred won. The narrator inserts a coin and looks through them; the cold makes their eyelids stick to the metal frames. To one side lies the ocean, to the other a wall of mountains, while fog blocks the view ahead. The viewing equipment promises access, but the weather withholds much of what the visitors have come to see.

Back in the car park, the woman from the road is talking with the stall’s seller. When she sees the narrator, she approaches, speaks to her, and strokes her cheek with a rough hand. The narrator pushes her away, and the woman whimpers. The narrator clutches Kerrand, who calmly puts an arm around her shoulders. The moment reverses the roles suggested by the excursion: the narrator has been Kerrand’s guide and interpreter, yet here she is affected by an encounter she does not control, while Kerrand offers immediate physical reassurance.

The Museum and Its History

The pair continue to a museum at the border. At its entrance, a woman speaks through a microphone from inside a sterile enclosure and charges five thousand won for two people. The narrator asks the price, but the attendant answers Kerrand in English. The narrator registers the humiliation of not being addressed in her own language in his presence; a rubber-gloved hand points them onward. Even before the exhibits begin, the visit has made language and belonging part of the experience, with the narrator placed between the visitor she is guiding and the institution addressing him directly.

Inside, the museum feels excessively large, cold, and empty; their shoes clatter over marble as Kerrand wanders distractedly. He stops at a display of leather helmets and asks the narrator to translate its sign. She explains the account of the conflict that began in 1950, with North Korea supported by the Soviet Union and China, and South Korea by the United States and the United Nations. The display describes the armistice signed on 27 July 1953 and the frontier established along the 38th parallel: a heavily militarized border within a no-man’s-land four kilometres wide and 238 kilometres long. It also records two to four million deaths, civilian and military, during the three years of conflict, and the absence of any peace treaty.

Kerrand listens intently, his head lowered and one hand holding back his hair. The narrator’s attention, meanwhile, fixes on schoolchildren’s shoes from North Korea and blue-packaged Choco Pie. She wonders whether the cakes are real or specially made for the museum. Beside the formal account of armies, deaths, and a border’s dimensions, these small objects provoke a different kind of scrutiny: the familiar product and children’s belongings make the division visible through ordinary things as well as military history.

The museum’s final room reconstructs a military camp, with wax figures of men lying on straw, and also functions as a souvenir shop. Visitors can buy Pyongyang alcohol, children’s drawings, and badges bearing images of North Korean leaders. A wax figure behind the counter appears to stare ahead; when its eyelids twitch, the narrator realizes that it is a living sales attendant. She tries to catch the woman’s eye but receives no response. After this sequence of exhibits and strained encounters, the narrator tells Kerrand she wants to leave.

Aftermath and the Meaning of the Border

The return drive takes place in silence as rain pounds the car and the sea rises in spikes beneath it. Kerrand drives with one hand on the wheel and the other on the gearstick; his hand brushes the narrator’s knee. His gloves rest on his sketchbook between them, and traces of ink remain on his nails. The narrator feels uneasy and keeps as close to the door as she can, made uncomfortable by the angle of the seat. The journey back does not resolve what the visit has stirred. Instead, its quiet confines the two travellers together with their discomfort and with the sketchbook that has accompanied them through the border landscape.

The narrator later sets the border’s significance against Kerrand’s understanding of war. She acknowledges that France has its own war-scarred beaches, but distinguishes those scars from the condition of beaches in South Korea, which are still waiting for a war to end. Hotels and neon signs, she argues, can make the coast look ordinary without dispelling the sense that the situation could break open again. Her description of life as suspended in a winter that never ends gives political form to the trip’s contrasts: a tourist destination and a restricted military zone, a view offered for a coin and a fog that obscures it, a historical armistice and the continuing absence of peace. The border visit is therefore more than a tour. It makes the unresolved division tangible through permits, fences, binoculars, museum displays, and the narrator’s insistence that the conflict belongs not only to the past.