The Good Son by Jeong You-Jeong

Penguin Books, 320 pages, $16 (2016, U.S. ed. 2018)
Translated by Kim Chi-Young

Jeong You-Jeong (or Jung Yoo-jung) is a South Korean writer. “The Good Son” was translated from Korean and has Korea as a physical and cultural background. But Jeong has done a remarkable job of writing a book that crosses cultures. Yes, family rituals are different, the food is different, the names are different, but psychopathy is reassuringly cross-cultural.

One morning, Han Yu-jin wakes up with the smell of blood in his nose. That is because there are copious amounts of blood on him, on his bed, tracked on his floor, and smeared and puddled all over the home he shares with his mother and adopted brother. What has happened, he asks, as panicked thoughts flit around in his head. Did he have a seizure? Yes, he feels that he indeed did have a seizure. Where is the blood coming from? He has no injuries himself, so he warily backtracks the bloody footprints. And there is his mother lying on the floor, dead, murdered. Would he be dead, too, if it were not for his seizure? He can’t remember anything from the night before.

Yu-jin is twenty-five years old and trying to enter law school. He had been aimless, but working towards law school has given him purpose. Now he has a different purpose: He must find out what happened to his mother. His older brother, Kim Hae-jin, is working on a film shoot and won’t be home for awhile. Hae-jin has been living with Yu-jin and his mother since his adoption ten years ago.

Yu-jin’s father and biological older brother died from drowning sixteen years ago. Hae-jin has filled a hole in everyone’s heart. Auntie Hye-won rounds out the small family. She is a child psychologist and has been treating Yu-jin’s seizures with medication. Of course, Yu-jin rebels at taking the medicine. It makes him feel flat and dull. He occasionally stops taking it and, with heightened awareness and energy, he roams the town at night, mostly running up to a nearby observatory. But then a seizure levels him out and the treatment begins again.

That’s where things stand until the fateful morning when Yu-jin awakens with the smell of blood in his nose.

As author Jeong craftily reveals more of the stories of Yu-jin, Hae-jin, dead brother Yu-min, and Yu-jin’s past prowess as a high school swimmer, it is remarkable to see how she constructs the increasing tension. “I’m not crazy, you’re crazy” is what you think every character is saying. Well, someone is cuckoo for Cocoa-Puffs.

Shades of Renfield and Norman Bates, Jeong’s psychopath has a mind ready to peel like an onion.