The narrator’s relationship with Yan Kerrand

The narrator’s relationship with Yan Kerrand is shaped by an imbalance between looking and being looked at. He first draws on her knowledge of Sokcho to help him make a story, while she gradually comes to want a more intimate recognition: not to show him her world, but to become visible within his art. Their closeness gathers through small physical gestures, shared work, and pauses that neither turns into a clear declaration. As Kerrand prepares to leave, the narrator understands that his attention has changed her sense of herself, even though he has not offered the kind of recognition she desires.

An Encounter in the Kitchen

Their relationship first takes shape through the narrator’s work in the kitchen, which she regards as her domain. While she prepares tiny octopuses with shallots, soy sauce, sugar, diluted bean paste, sesame, and slices of sticky rice cake, she turns to chop carrots. Their grooved surfaces appear strangely continuous with the flesh of her fingers in the knife blade’s reflection. The image unsettles the boundary between the food she handles and her own body, before Kerrand enters asking for water and watches her work intently.

His gaze disrupts her concentration. She nicks her palm, and blood wells onto the carrots, hardening into a brownish crust. Kerrand takes a handkerchief from his pocket, stands close, and holds it to the wound. The gesture is practical care, but it also establishes a pattern between them: his looking can make her newly conscious of herself, and physical closeness arrives without either of them explaining what it means. Her response that the cut was not deliberate leaves the moment unresolved rather than turning it into a confession or an avowal.

The Guide to His Story

Kerrand later asks whether Sokcho would make a good setting for a story. The narrator answers that it depends on the story, refusing to treat the place as a ready-made subject with a single meaning. He leans toward the table as if confiding a secret and asks whether she will help if he sets the story there. When she asks how, he says that she should show him things. Their arrangement begins with her as guide: she can direct his attention toward the place and its particulars, while he remains the artist who will shape what he sees into a work.

That offer gives the narrator a role in Kerrand’s creative process, but it also defines the limits of their connection. He needs her way of seeing; she becomes useful to his work as someone able to show him her world. The distinction matters because his artistic interest does not automatically amount to personal recognition. The relationship can be collaborative and intimate in its circumstances while remaining unequal in what each person wants from it.

A Gaze That Changes Its Object

Later, when Kerrand’s hand brushes hers, the narrator recalls other occasions when he took her hand, in the kitchen and at the museum. The recurrence gives those touches a history, but it does not make their meaning certain. She is weary, and her thoughts turn to the woman who might appear beside Kerrand’s character: whether a woman must be perfect to earn that place. Kerrand, meanwhile, says that once something is drawn in ink it is fixed, and that he wants to be sure it is perfect. His artistic demand for certainty meets the narrator as a standard against which a woman’s appearance may be measured.

Kerrand cannot resolve the drawing by force of precision. He wonders whether he can convey everything with a single stroke, gathers his drawing boards, tears off the top sheet, and throws it away. He then wishes the narrator a happy Seollal. The scene places his pursuit of a perfect image beside the narrator’s unease about the conditions for appearing in it: the work is discarded, but the question of who can be represented, and on what terms, remains between them.

The narrator later describes a change in the way Kerrand looks at her. At first, she says, he did not see her; he only sensed her presence. At some point, his gaze became physically hard and made her encounter an unfamiliar self, a part of herself that seemed to exist on the other side of the world. She wants more of this altered self-recognition and imagines living through his ink. Yet his praise is limited to her good eye and her ability to help him see. What he values is her perception as a resource for his work, not necessarily her as its subject.

The Desire to Be Drawn

The narrator makes the gap explicit: she does not want to be Kerrand’s eyes on her world; she wants to be seen by him and drawn. Her longing is therefore not simply a wish for proximity. She wants his art to return his gaze to her, giving her a place within the images he makes instead of leaving her in the supporting role of guide. The difference between looking through her and looking at her becomes the central tension of their relationship.

She also recognizes the limits of the terms on which that longing can be understood. She insists that it has nothing to do with love or desire, and stresses that Kerrand is French and a foreigner, making such a possibility out of the question. At the same time, she admits that his changed gaze has affected her and that she wants to be the only one he sees. These statements do not settle the feeling into a conventional romance; they show the narrator trying to name an attachment whose force comes from being seen, while resisting the idea that it can become a shared romantic future.

That conflict intensifies when she returns to Kerrand’s room while he is in the bathroom and finds a wet, crumpled ball of paper in the waste bin. Unfolding it, she sees a torn woman with only enough of an outline to complete in her imagination: the figure is asleep, chin resting in open palms. The abandoned drawing gives material form to what the narrator fears and wants at once: a female image that has begun but has not been brought to life. She dips a finger into the ink and traces her forehead, nose, cheeks, chin, veins, and collarbone. Ink gets into her eye and seals her eyelids; to see herself again in the mirror, she must pull out her eyelashes one by one. The act turns the wish to enter Kerrand’s art into a painful, bodily intervention, but it does not make him draw her.

Farewell and Unfinished Recognition

On the fourth morning, the narrator is sorting laundry when she tries on trousers forgotten by the girl with bandages. They swim around her thighs but will not fasten at the waist. She pulls them off, nearly in tears, and discovers a run in her tights. Kerrand appears at the laundry-room door holding a bag of clothes. She tugs at her sweater to hide her legs and tells him she is sorting colours. He puts down his clothes awkwardly, then changes his mind about having them washed: his bus leaves at ten the next morning.

Kerrand says that he will send her a copy of the book when it comes out. She tells him not to feel obliged. He sits down to lower himself to her height, and the smell of detergent and kerosene makes her light-headed. He says that he would like to thank her somehow before leaving. She hurriedly puts the clothes in the machine and wants to get away, but he puts a hand behind her knee and leans toward her without looking up, resting his cheek against her thigh. The contact is intimate, but the scene supplies no explanation that would make it a declaration. The washing machine’s heavy, repetitive turning briefly falls silent and then starts again, while the two remain caught in an encounter whose meaning neither states.

The narrator answers his offer of thanks by saying that she would like him to taste her cooking. Kerrand has been looking at the washing machine, seeming already elsewhere and too tired to continue struggling; he stands and murmurs that of course he will. Her offer brings the relationship back to the form of care and shared work established in the kitchen, rather than securing the recognition she has asked for. His promised book and her wish to be drawn remain unequal tokens of a connection that has mattered deeply to her but is still unfinished at the moment of his departure.