4 ideas
Reseng is abandoned as an infant in a trash bin and taken in by Old Raccoon, who runs a Seoul library called the Doghouse that almost nobody visits. Reseng grows up reading among the stacks and is trained into the trade as an adult hitman, with his book-shaped mind and his killer's job formed in the same room.
The trade separates designing a killing from carrying it out. Clients hire plotters, plotters draft the scenario and pass instructions down, and assassins execute without knowing who ordered the job or why. Because each link sees only its own task, no one holds the whole picture, and responsibility is spread thin enough that everyone can treat the killing as someone else's decision.
When the dictatorship gives way to democracy, the demand for eliminating inconvenient people does not disappear; it moves from the state to the market. The old craft guild of plotters loses ground to corporate-style outsourcing firms that compete on price and volume for chaebol and political clients. The apparatus survives the regime change by changing its business model.
The novel presents murder through workplace details: fees, commissions, turf between firms, aging workers, disposal logistics, and fear of being made redundant. Treating the work as a job, deadpan and comic, shows how normalization operates.