Blowfish

For readers of Han Kang and Sheila Heti, Blowfish is a haunting, meditative novel about a celebrated sculptor who plans her own death by mastering the preparation of a deadly blowfish dish.

Told in four interlaced sections, the story moves between the lives of a sculptor and an architect, each shaped by intimate encounters with loss. Her grandmother’s shocking suicide and his brother’s fatal fall linger as quiet forces guiding them toward their own thoughts of ending things.

They meet only briefly—first in Seoul, then again in Tokyo, where she studies the precise and perilous craft that may seal her fate. What emerges between them resembles love, but never settles into it: to her, he is a momentary diversion; to him, she is a fragile interruption to despair.

As their perspectives shift and overlap, both revisit the paths that led them here, suspended between the urge to disappear and the need to create. In the end, it is art—demanding, painful, and irresistible—that keeps pulling them back.

Set against the layered cityscapes of Seoul and Tokyo, Blowfish explores grief, desire, and creative obsession, likening the act of making art to tasting something exquisite that might also destroy you.