4 ideas
Ryu Yosop, a Korean-American pastor in New York, returns to his home county in Hwanghae Province, North Korea, decades after the war. His elder brother Yohan, a Christian youth leader who took part in the 1950 killings of communist neighbours, dies just before the trip, and his ghost travels with Yosop. In the village, the ghosts of perpetrators and victims from both sides gather to recount the massacre.
The title plays on 'sonnim' (guest), the Korean folk name for smallpox, a disease that arrives from outside and must be ritually hosted and then sent away. Protestant Christianity and Marxism are cast the same way: foreign doctrines that entered Korean villages and turned neighbours into enemies. On this view, the violence is an ideological fever breaking out in a host community rather than something native to the people who carried it.
The novel's chapters follow the stages of a Hwanghae shamanic gut, a ceremony for pacifying the restless dead. Each ghost, whether killer or killed, Christian or communist, must be allowed to speak their own account in full. Only after every side has been voiced can the dead be released, which makes collective testimony across the divide the precondition for laying a conflict to rest.
North Korea's official memory, enshrined in the Sinchon museum, attributes the massacre to American troops. The novel argues that local Koreans killed one another, driven by ideology fused with older grievances between landowning Christian families and tenant or servant families who turned communist. Blaming an outside power erases the neighbour-on-neighbour violence that both communities need to confront.