In Gwangju in May 1980, a middle-school boy named Dong-ho volunteers in a makeshift morgue, tending the swelling, decomposing bodies of protesters shot by the military while searching for his missing friend Jeong-dae. He stays, lighting candles against the stench and cataloguing the dead, until he too is killed, and the novel follows how that single death radiates through everyone who knew him for decades after.
The living insist on covering corpses with white cloth, singing the national anthem over them, and recording their names, even as those same bodies rot into anonymous meat. The book treats this gap between the ceremonial treatment of the dead and their physical degradation as the precise site where the question of human worth is contested.
A survivor reframes the massacre not as a political event but as evidence posing a question: whether brutality is a fundamental attribute of humankind rather than an aberration, given that the same species produced both the torturers and those who shared food with strangers while facing death. Viewing violence this way shifts the inquiry from who is guilty to what human beings are capable of being.