Mrs Lorimer, who has lived across the landing from me for close on twenty years, spent last spring emptying her flat. The sideboard went first, then the good china, then a cabinet of figurines that I had never once seen her dust, and each load left in a van with a charity's name on the side. By June the rooms held a bed, a chair, a kettle and a radio. I asked her, over the stair rail, whether she was well. She told me with great composure that she had never been happier, that happiness was a matter of taking away whatever had been making one unhappy, and that she had simply gone on taking until there was nothing left to object to.
I thought the theory bracing and slightly alarming, and then I thought no more about it until the autumn, when I opened Jeong You-jeong's Perfect Happiness and found the same theory in the mouth of a woman who applies it to people.
Some facts before the argument, for readers new to Jeong. The novel appeared in Korean as Wanjeonhan haengbok from Eunhaengnamu in 2021, and the news agency Newsis reported in an interview at the time that it had gone straight onto the bestseller lists. As I understand her account in that interview, it is the first of a planned trilogy about desire. The English edition, translated by Sean Lin Halbert, was published by Creature Publishing in September 2025, and a French edition from Philippe Picquier, Un Bonheur Parfait, had appeared the year before. Jeong's earlier Seven Years of Darkness and The Good Son are already available in English, and reviewers, who cannot resist a label, have taken to calling her the Stephen King of South Korea.
The protagonist is Yuna Shin, a wife and mother whose theory of happiness, as the novel states it, runs against every shelf of self-help. Happiness is not something one adds to a life. It is what remains once the possibility of unhappiness has been removed. Around that theory move her second husband, Eun-ho, her six-year-old daughter, Jiyoo, and her estranged older sister, Jane, with varying proportions of fear and loyalty. Her first husband has disappeared, after a trip that involved the child. The English edition has anglicised at least one name (Jane is, as I understand it, Jae-in in the original), and I follow the English edition here.
Yuna never narrates her own book. It is told by three of the people who live closest to her, and by none of them is she seen whole. Eun-ho remembers a wife, Jiyoo a mother, and Jane a sister from whom she is estranged. Each reconstructs the same stretch of time from a different angle, and the reader, who holds all three accounts at once, knows more than any one of them. A review in Necessary Fiction locates the suspense with some precision: it lies less in whether Yuna is responsible than in what she might do next.
The most unsettling of the three registers is the child's. According to Necessary Fiction, nightmares and half-waking states blur what the characters have actually witnessed, and the child's point of view is the obvious place for that blurring to do its work. A six-year-old's memory is already an unreliable instrument, and the book, if I have understood it, asks us to treat it as evidence. The reader must work out what the girl saw and what her fear arranged afterwards, and since the fear has a single source, the two are not easy to separate.
The detective work falls to the people least equipped for it. The Korea Herald describes a husband weighed down by guilt and an estranged sister who begin to piece together Yuna's earlier movements and her long-told lies, and I like the modesty of the arrangement. Nobody in the book has a badge, a laboratory or a hunch that the narrative rewards. They have a stock of remembered evenings, and the labour of the plot consists of laying those evenings side by side until a pattern shows. That is also, I think, why the reconstruction is slow. Remembering honestly is a slow business, and doing it beside someone one has spent years avoiding is slower still.
I think the method is the argument. A theory of happiness as subtraction has to be shown in what is missing, and the novel shows it in the people around her. Eun-ho submits to her demands in exchange for peace, according to the Crime Fiction Lover review, which also describes Jiyoo as a child who grows up anxious and careful never to provoke her mother. Jane has subtracted herself by distance. Each of the three narrators belongs to a household that has been reduced, a little at a time, to keep one person content. Nobody is forced to give anything up in the manner that thrillers usually force, with a weapon or a deadline. They hand it over, evening by evening, because the alternative is a worse evening.
The method has a cost, and the reviews are candid about it. The Crime Fiction Lover reviewer found the shifting viewpoints hard to follow, partly because the characters are so often tagged as wife or mother rather than named, and the two husbands in particular blur. World Literature Today, by contrast, praises Halbert's translation as so smooth that its choices disappear. I suspect both are right and that the cause is the same: a prose that declines to announce whose head we are in will read smoothly and, now and then, lose its reader.
A Scottish reader will hear an older note. In 1961 Muriel Spark, who was born in Edinburgh, published The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, whose heroine is a charismatic schoolteacher in the Edinburgh of the 1930s, convinced of her own gifts and of her right to arrange the lives of the girls who adore her. Spark, too, keeps her subject at a distance. We see Miss Brodie through the girls she has formed, and it is one of them, Sandy, who sees her most clearly and acts on that clarity, to Miss Brodie's lasting cost. In Jeong's book Jane sits in something like Sandy's chair: Necessary Fiction singles her out as the character who sees Yuna most clearly, while Eun-ho and Jiyoo are drawn to her.
The difference is one of temperature. Spark's comedy lets us enjoy Miss Brodie's vanity until the moment we are not allowed to, and her power is public, exercised in a classroom and defended by a slogan. Yuna's power is domestic and almost wordless. She governs by mood, and her household lives by the forecast. Jeong offers no comedy to stand on, which is why her novel is the more claustrophobic of the two and, I think, the less forgiving.
The Crime Fiction Lover reviewer gave the book three stars, finding it slow, short of the suspense of The Good Son, and unconvincing on how Yuna became so extreme. I take the first two complaints seriously. A reader who comes for the speed of Jeong's earlier work will find the pace of accommodation instead, and a house in which people adjust their behaviour a degree at a time does not move briskly. The third complaint I am less sure of. The novel does supply a childhood: World Literature Today reads Yuna's conduct as traced to years of feeling abandoned in her grandparents' house, and the Crime Fiction Lover review adds a mother who indulged her selfishness. What the book does not supply is a sufficient cause, and I count that as discipline. A sufficient cause would give the reader somewhere to put her, a diagnosis to file her under.
The author's own phrasing points the same way. In the 2021 interview, as I read the Newsis report, Jeong called Yuna a malignant narcissist and said that she was not a psychopath. Necessary Fiction, as I read it, describes the book as a portrait of a sociopath, which is exactly the shortcut her distinction resists. Whatever one makes of the clinical terms, the choice declines to treat Yuna as a monster from somewhere else. She is an ordinary appetite carried to its limit, and she is recognisable because the appetite is.
The same interview gives the author's stated purpose. She wanted to question a society that displays its happiness constantly and makes the display compulsory, and to ask whether a display of that kind is the thing itself. The author's afterword, the Crime Fiction Lover reviewer notes, ties the character to that social obsession with happiness. The argument is persuasive and somewhat larger than the book needs. A reader in Edinburgh does not require the Korean context to recognise the mechanism, which is a household in which one person's contentment has become the only public utility.
Reviewers place Jeong within the wave of Korean genre fiction that has been reaching English readers for about two decades, and the shelf label is crime. I would put the book with the novels of domestic climate, the kind in which a crime occurs and the climate is the subject, and I would put it there partly to explain why a three-star verdict from a crime reviewer and an admiring one from a literary magazine can both be sincere. They are asking the book different questions. The first asks how fast it goes. The second asks what it is doing, and that, I think, is where it earns its keep.
The title does something in both languages. The Korean wanjeonhan can mean complete as readily as it means perfect, and as I understand the word it carries the sense of nothing missing. Perfect Happiness is the natural English rendering, with an added edge of the finished and unimprovable. But the arithmetic of the book is that completeness is reached by subtraction, and a sum that ends when there is nothing left to take away is a sum that ends at zero.
I shall say little about what happens to those who are subtracted. The plot summaries have done that already, and the book's menace seems to me better located in the ordinary hours than in the events, in the habit of reading one person's face before deciding what to say. A reading that hurried to the worst would miss the long middle where the damage is done.
The distinction I keep returning to is one that Mrs Lorimer never has to make. She subtracted what was hers to remove. Yuna's arithmetic requires other people's lives as its terms, and that, more than the cruelty of any single act, is what the novel indicts: the premise that one person's completeness may be paid for by the incompleteness of everyone near her. Mrs Lorimer cleared a flat; Yuna clears a family, and that difference is the whole moral arithmetic of the book.
When I told Mrs Lorimer what I was reading, she considered it and said that it sounded like a very short book. She may be right about the arithmetic. I notice that her door now stands open to the stair, and that the neighbours who go in stay longer than they used to, there being nothing in the room to do but talk. I cannot say that is happiness, and I doubt she would claim it. It is, at any rate, a sum that comes out with other people still in it.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): Wanjeonhan haengbok (완전한 행복), Jeong You-jeong, Aladin Bookstore
☞ English Edition: Perfect Happiness, You-Jeong Jeong (translated by Sean Lin Halbert), Amazon
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
Sources
- World Literature Today, review of Perfect Happiness by You-Jeong Jeong (Creature Publishing), November 2025.
- Crime Fiction Lover, review of Perfect Happiness by You-Jeong Jeong, 14 October 2025.
- LTI Korea Library, original works record for Wanjeonhan haengbok (Eunhaengnamu, 2021) and its translated editions.