By Chung Ah-young
Staff Reporter
With the jobless rate for the young reaching a high of 8.8 percent in March this year, youngsters cannot help but be driven into the margins of society.
A man in his 20s, who is supposed to be economically and socially productive and active, lives a repetitive life surfing the Internet to find a job and wandering around his town just for nothing.
He sometimes joins his friends' social gatherings to celebrate someone's wedding or employment. But he feels he doesn't belong to ``their society'' and becomes estranged from mainstream life.
``Bukowski Goes,'' a new novel written by Han Jae-ho, a rising author who won the Changbi Publishers' best novel prize, penetrates the psychology of a jobless man's anxiety through his wanderings.
With the disappointments of vanishing youth, he has been repeating the same routine for two years after university graduation, spent in writing his stereotyped resumes and comparing the wages of jobs.
Amid his tedious and repetitive routine, one day, he comes to hear about a mysterious storeowner nicknamed ``Bukowski'' who closes his store whenever it rains and goes somewhere.
He decides to follow Bukowski with his girlfriend because he has nothing particular to do. As if in a chasing game, he stalks the man who shuts down his shop at 9 a.m. on a rainy day and disappears.
He travels listlessly following the man from Jongno, Gwanghwamun, Sinchon, Yeouido to Gangnam, which seem to have nothing in common.
His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic encounters with strangers, sordid rooms, dreary embraces and drunken binges.
After stalking him without any purpose, he returns home without knowing anything new about him.
While chasing the man, he sometimes feels daunted amid the crowd going to their workplaces in the rush hours. He doesn't stop applying to companies and has job interviews, but all he gets from them is rejection.