K-LIT REVIEW 'The Rainfall Market' explores Korea's 'healing fiction,' but not for everyone
The cover of "The Rainfall Market" / Courtesy of Penguin UK
A special invitation arrives. An unhappy, dejected character gains access to a magical, parallel world. Mischievous little "dokkaebi" inhabit this world. The dokkaebi — a goblin-like character from Korean mythology — have the power to show visions of personal futures. A human visitor can choose any future from among these visions.
Such is the premise of You Yeong-gwang's "The Rainfall Market." It is a Korean fantasy-fiction novel recently published and translated into English by Slin Jung. It is the latest entrant in Korea’s so-called “healing fiction” genre. The target audience, however, is international.
The premise is familiar: a protagonist—in this case, a disheartened Korean teenage girl in the 2020s — drifts through life, yearning for change. By some magical mechanism, she enters a parallel — or hitherto unseen — reality. The character sees alternate life timelines. Glamorous-seeming paths turn out not to lead to true happiness. Life lessons are learned. There isn’t much of a traditional, plot-driven story here. For some readers, however, this open-ended approach is exactly what resonates. More on that later.
"The Rainfall Market" is also a “global novel” riding on the crest of the K-culture wave. Literarily, it shows major international influences. Call it borrowing, inspiration, cross-pollination — whatever you call it, there is much familiar ground for Western readers.
Elements of "The Rainfall Market" appear influenced by Western-international standards like the Harry Potter books (1997–2007) and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" (1964). Parallels are to be found back to Charles Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol" (1843) and similarities extend to classic movies like "It’s a Wonderful Life" (1946) and "Groundhog Day" (1993).
But most of all, Rainfall Market resembles the 2020 novel "Midnight Library" by British novelist Matt Haig. That book is about a suicidal woman who is transported to a mysterious library, where she reads alternate versions of her own life. An angel-like librarian offers to give her any life she chooses. "The Rainfall Market" is a Koreanized version of the same story.
"Midnight Library" was a top-selling book in the early 2020s in South Korea. It clearly influenced Korean aspirant authors, who have put out many novels of similar type. The list now includes "The Rainfall Market."
Korean literary observers began speaking of a new genre: “healing fiction” — light, feel-good stories with inspirational messages. No heavy thinking. Impressions over story. Feelings over facts. Cute, artistic, vaguely inspiring cover art. And market appeal.
Pay a visit to a bookstore in Korea, and you’ll find tables full of healing fiction books, all with cute cover artwork and cute titles to match. In English sections, such books are plentiful, including many English translations of Korean novels. Foreign tourists — usually women — buy them (the global novel, indeed).
An international market optimization process is at work. The titles, for example, follow this formula: Take a mundane place, and pair it with a mysterious time or condition — there’s your title. Off we go, into magical realism. The title of "Midnight Library" helped pave the way. "The Rainfall Market" fits the bill.
Other attention-getting, early-2020s Korean novels of the healing fiction genre include "Dallergut Dream Department Store" (2020) and its sequel "Uncanny Convenience Store" (2021), "Welcome to Hyunam-dong Bookshop" (2022) and "Marigold Mind Laundry" (2024). There are many others.
Western writers, too, produce works resembling healing fiction. The phrase “no plot, just vibes” emerged in 2020, on social media app TikTok’s “BookTok” community, to describe such novels. BookTok-like internet communities, dominated by young women, are now a major influence on fiction publishing. They can and do get their followers to buy, and they have a taste for “healing fiction.”
Market forces, meanwhile, have been busy at work: publishing-house scouts seek marketable books; Korean authors, responding to the same incentives, produce palatable output, and things fall into place. The presence of K-culture fans in the social media book discussion groups reinforces the trend.
It's interesting to note that "The Rainfall Market" was not originally conceived as a Korean-language novel to be translated later. According to the book’s promotional material and afterward, the author had secured a dual contract in mid-2023 — one for the Korean edition and another for an English translation, all before the novel was even published in Korean.
The prestige boost from the international association must have helped lift the book's domestic sales in Korea between mid-2023 and mid-2024. The English-language international publisher, in turn, could boast of strong Korean sales. Mark it down as marketing cross-pollination on top of the literary cross-pollination.
There are many Korean aspects to "The Rainfall Market." The most interesting is the dokkaebi. They are an engaging feature in a book that can leave more traditional, plot-hungry readers more or less unsatisfied. Each dokkaebi has a character-specific gimmick, like the Smurfs. The dokkaebi base their lives around things like teasing, tormenting, manipulating — and sometimes helping — humans.
Even here, however, the author portrays the dokkaebi in a way that recalls similar characters in Western literature. Did pre-modern Koreans tell “dokkaebi stories” anything resembling the cute and playful dokkaebi of this novel? I don’t know; I suspect not. I suspect that these literary dokkaebi are a modern literary adaptation. They are a Korean element that has been synthesized and packaged into a feel-good novel for international appeal.
British literary critic Tim Parks, in his provocative 2010 essay titled “The Dull New Global Novel,” had harsh words for this sort of novel, just emerging in the 2000s. The marketable global novel aspires towards a dubious end goal of self-commodification. The end goal may not fit with literary excellence. But it may sell.
There is a demonstrated market demand for “vibes”-centric novels like "The Rainfall Market." They are different from plot-and-character novels of years past, and not all will like them. But they’re here. Whether we like it or not — many won’t — the healing fiction genre has a place in pop-literary history.
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What does "The Rainfall Market" say about South Korea? For one, it says there has been a self-conscious internationalization of Korean fiction and a new, self-conscious “global novel” target. Book buyers are on board. So are publishers — at least for now. Such a trend didn’t exist as recently as the mid-2010s, but it is very much a reality in the mid-2020s.
Why was it healing fiction novels that rushed into the breach? One view: they are casually consumable. Traditional front-to-back reading is unnecessary. That is true for "The Rainfall Market." It suits, the argument goes, the lower-attention-span era. BookTok-like internet book communities are glad for it.
Another theory is political. A recent column in this newspaper, titled "'Hell Joseon' blues: Young Koreans flee for a better life," commented on Korean society thusly: “material success is often seen as the sole goal in life…[which] contributes to widespread moral decay. As a result, young people are left with a profound sense of disillusionment, struggling to understand their true life goals…”
These words could easily have appeared verbatim in a review of "The Rainfall Market." The novel draws on Korea’s youth crisis and sense of purposelessness, which form the backdrop for much of its emotional weight. In the afterword, the author, You Yeong-gwang, provides commentary that aligns with this kind of "political" reading.
People attributed the unexpected success of "Midnight Library" not to that novel’s literary value (which is questionable at best), but rather to a social cause: feelings of widespread loss of purpose associated with the pandemic shutdowns of 2020. Seeking to explain Korea’s ongoing healing fiction boom takes us in similar directions.
What will be the legacy of "The Rainfall Market" and other such novels? Critics will say they cannot (will not and should not?) last. But why did they arise in the first place? These are feel-good books, designed for certain types of readers. Shots of inspiration. The literary equivalent of a friendly voice, when you’re down, saying “him-nae” (hang in there). For many, that is enough.
"The Rainfall Market" is available at dbbooks.co.kr.
Peter Juhl is a researcher focused on Korean political and security issues.