The Disaster Tourist

Interesting concept that critiques the tourism industry and human damage to the environment, though I wish we got a deeper exploration.

Wow, I have to give Yun Ko-Eun at A+ for cleverness. Maybe somebody has thought this up, but I don’t think so: a tourist agency that centers itself on disasters. Mostly natural disasters like volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsuanamis. And you go there afterwards and survey the damage, talk to the locals, and even do volunteer work, helping out the locals! <br /><br />Her writing, especially in the beginning, grabbed me too. I came upon these sentences and they conjured up what I think she had intended the mind to conjure up, and I just remember as I was reading it saying “wow, that’s clever” but not in an interfering way that would distract me from the story (‘Yona” is the main protagonist in the novel):<br />• Recently, whenever Yona went into work, she’d felt like a dandelion seed that had somehow drifted into a building.<br />• These facts were as quotidian to Yona as the changing colours of a traffic light.<br /><br />And then Yona goes to a restaurant in which you have to take off your shoes, and the restaurant loses her shoes. And get this—when she bought the shoes, they had a sale…" the shoes she had lost were actually part of a pair and a half. The store she’d bought them from offered a second right shoe for free with the purchase of each pair. If only the first two of her three shoes hadn’t been stolen at the restaurant, the remaining survivor wouldn’t have taunted her from the hallway of her apartment when she got home."<br />I mean…how clever is that??? ? <br /><br />Yona, a young Korean woman, works for a South Korean tourist agency, Jungle, that specializes in tours of post-disaster areas. One tour is not selling well, and the company tells her to play the role of a tourist and see if she can troubleshoot what the problem is. The disaster is a sinkhole that swallowed up a bunch of people in the middle of the day. She goes to a hotel as part of a disaster tour in an island off of Vietnam named Mui. Part of the problem was that since the disaster, rain had fallen and the hole was not a lake and that’s what it looks like—a lake. Who gives a damn about looking at a lake? But she soon discovers not all is what it seems. For example, a local man is crippled as a result of the sinkhole and relates his remembrance of the day of the sinkhole disaster to the tourists. Later on, Yona circles back to the area and sees the man walking normally….no limp. ? So there is something off there. There’s a whole lot of things that are off but to relate them to you would be giving away parts of the storyline and I wouldn’t’ want to do that… <br />?<br /><br />Here is a nice assessment of the novel by three writers that I think captures the overall essence of the novel:<br />• An endless surprising and totally gripping read, ‘The Disaster Tourist’ is as hilarious as it is heartbreaking. It questions every aspect of life we so often take for granted, smashing apart any easy distinctions between natural and artificial, normal and abnormal, peaceful and violent, personal and political. There could not be a more prescient moment for this too-real fiction about how we create our own disasters on every scale and what resilience might mean in the face of catastrophe. — Elvia Wilk, author of ‘Oval’<br />• A gripping literary thriller about disaster, adventure, and a crisis of conscience that will resonate with any traveler. — Jennifer Croft, author of ‘Homesick’ and winner of the Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘Flights’ Jim: Holy bologna. I just read a bio of Ms. Croft…now I have to get the novel she wrote and then I have to get ‘Flights’…what an amazing person — <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Croft">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennife...</a> <br />• A labyrinth of catastrophes and cataclysms, ‘The Disaster Tourist’ is a precisely penned novel that lays bare the human condition. Mysterious, evocative, and rich. — Sarah Rose Etter, author of ‘The Book of N’<br />This was a real treat to read, and I hope I have convinced you to put this on your TBR list!!! ? ? <br /><br />Notes:<br />• Translated by Lizzie Buehler, MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa and currently a PhD student in comparative literature at Harvard University — her writing and short translations appear in Asymptote, azalea Magazine, Litro, The Massachusetts Review, and Translation Review. In addition to The Disaster Tourist, she has translated Yun Ko-eun’s story collection Table for One (Columbia University Press, April 2021). (Jim: I did not know this…goodie…another work I can read by this wonderful author!)<br />• About the author: this is her first novel translated into English. It was written in 2013 and has become available in English this year. She has several novels and short story collections published In South Korea. She is a recipient of the Hankyoreh Literary Award, the Lee Hyo-Seok Literary Award, and the Kim Yong-ik Literary award. She lives in Seoul.<br /><br />Reviews (yea, she has some impressive entities raving about this book!!!):<br />• <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/too-close-to-home-on-yun-ko-euns-the-disaster-tourist/">https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...</a> <br />• <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/09/the-disaster-tourist-by-yun-ko-eun-review-life-under-late-capitalism">https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...</a> Following a spate of recent fiction considering the strange intersection of our work and leisure lives – novels such as Ling Ma’s apocalyptic satire Severance and Sayaka Murata’s oddly affecting Convenience Store Woman – The Disaster Tourist offers up another fresh and sharp story about life under late capitalism.<br />• <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/08/disaster-tourist-yun-ko-eun-capitalist-satire-pandemic-work/615151/">https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/a...</a> <br />• <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.ecolitbooks.com/2020/08/book-review-the-disaster-tourist-by-yun-ko-eun/">https://www.ecolitbooks.com/2020/08/b...</a>

Despite it’s short length I didn’t fly through it as I would usually which means I probably didn’t enjoy it as much as other books. However it’s definitely a unique and original read. It’s also pretty though provoking, in regards to tourism and the environment.

“Disaster Tourism”. What do these two words mean to you? Perhaps you have not put them together in your mind before.<br /><br />But disaster tourism is not a new phenomenon. People have always been interested in gazing at post-disaster spaces, for a variety of motives, and the act of deliberately setting out to visit them is growing in popularity. Nowadays the tourism industry has packages in place for people to visit locations that have been subjected to either man-made or natural environmental disasters. It is considered a sub-sector of dark tourism, defined as: <i>“the representation of inhuman acts, and how these are interpreted for visitors”</i>. Examples might be visiting Auschwitz, the German Nazi concentration camp in Poland, or Phnom Penh, Cambodia to view the skulls found after the Khmer Rouge regime. Disaster tourism has a slightly different emphasis. It includes visiting Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which was the scene of an explosion in 1986—or Kathmandu after the 2015 earthquake—or New Orleans after hurricane Katrina in 2005. Unlike dark tourism, these disasters are not necessarily characterised by distress and atrocity, or sadness and pain. Perhaps you have been on such a tour, or even considered working in the industry.<br /><br />So this is the underlying theme of <b>The Disaster Tourist</b> a 2013 novel by the South Korean writer Yun Ko-eun. It begins in South Korea, but a lot of the action takes place in Vietnam on the island of Mui (possibly based on the real life Mũi Né).<br /><br />We focus on Yona Ko, who is a programme manager for Jungle: a Seoul company which specialises in curating holiday packages in disaster zones. She has worked there for 10 years and knows exactly why people choose to visit areas ravaged by tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. They will experience three progressive stages. First of all is shock, followed by sympathy and compassion, and maybe discomfort and gratitude for their own lives. Finally comes a sense of responsibility and the feeling that they had learned a lesson, (and maybe an inkling of superiority for having survived). That was the received theory, and what the company used to turn into a profitable concern, by <i>“surveying disaster zones and moulding them into travel destinations”</i>. Jungle prided itself on offering <i>“thirty-three distinct categories [of crisis], including volcano eruptions, earthquakes, war, drought, typhoons, and tsunamis, with 152 available packages.”</i><br /><br />We may consider this to be a supremely cynical ethos, but Yona is good at her job, and diligent. She is <i>“skilled at quantifying the unquantifiable”</i>, looking at the frequency and strength of disasters, and the resulting damage to humans and property. She transforms this data into colourful graphs on her desk, irrespective of the human pain and loss represented, and any human consequences which give rise to inhuman algorithms. Yona takes great pride in her work, voyeuristic and exploitative though it may be. Yona never considers that aspect, and at 33 years old is solely focused on success in her career, putting all personal and ethical considerations aside.<br /><br />Pausing a little, this is an interesting modern phenomenon, but varies from country to country, and what is about to happen in this first chapter blows the differences between cultures wide open. There has been a spate of recent fiction considering the strange intersection of our work and leisure lives. The Japanese writer Sayaka Murata gave us <i>“Convenience Store Woman”</i>, and here we have a comparable novel by a Korean writer, Yun Ko-eun. Both are satires, fresh and sharp stories about life under late capitalism.<br /><br />For a long time English people (of whom I am one) have been wary of American companies, who (it is said), want your heart and soul when you sign up with them. There is a sense that your life is not your own, and your free time is always given at the company’s discretion, rather than as a contractual right. This more extreme form of capitalism is creeping into Britain too. But Japan seems to have pushed capitalism even further, as the only country with “collective capitalism”, which relies on cooperation, but ignores the fact that the means of production are private. This does provide benefits for workers, but it also places a high demand on them and their families. Long hours and high levels of discipline are commonplace, resulting in high levels of stress and even death by overwork: “karōshi”.<br /><br />So what of South Korea? Unless you live there, is is hard to appreciate the mindset, and in this first part of the book Yona seems almost like an automaton, having no emotional component. Perhaps this is a natural human defence mechanism; to not engage your feelings and thereby protect yourself. Not only is Yona subservient to the company, but she is also submissive to the males socially.<br /><br /><input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="40927aff-6256-4ce1-8c2d-aeeef09009b7" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="40927aff-6256-4ce1-8c2d-aeeef09009b7">When her supervisor, a slime-ball called Kim begins groping and harassing her, Yona tries to avoid him, but otherwise does nothing. Depending on where you live, the accepted social code for dealing with this varies. Tellingly, Yona is worried not <i>“because her boss was sexually assaulting her [but because] Kim only targeted has-beens.”</i> So Yona remains passive, even when others think of objecting. For Yona, her job is her life, but increasingly she finds herself marginalised at Jungle, and fears for her position in this cutthroat organisation.<br /><br />Kim offers her a way out. She is given an assignment: to pose as a tourist, going incognito on a Jungle tour whose future is on the cards. It is one of the tours being considered for cancellation, as it is in decline, and is to a desert island called Mui. Yona is to report back, and her findings will determine whether the company should still offer it. Yona is angry when she finds that the tour she has recently created is now assigned to someone else, but feels she has no choice but to accept this new job. If Yona decides the trip should be cancelled, then Mui is in trouble, but she hopes her job will be secure.</label>.<br /><br />This is a turning point for how we view Yona. We might either have felt pity for Yona's perceived impotence, or felt irritated at her apparent acceptance of a degrading position. We have been inclined to see her as just a cipher, an Everywoman in Korean society, but the writing now cleverly emphasises her more as an individual. The novel’s power dynamics have changed; not only for Yona, but the dynamic between Yona and the reader has also been tweaked. And this is a little disturbing. Yona had been <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="cb2a1ac7-750d-454b-8352-440c295e1661" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="cb2a1ac7-750d-454b-8352-440c295e1661">abused</label> at Jungle, but now we wonder if perhaps we misinterpreted the reasons for her neutral reaction. Now Yona has power, and is not under threat, yet she still doesn’t seem to care about anything. If anything, Yona now seems consciously amoral. <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="3dd1635d-e04b-49b2-8029-6c63ab6d18e5" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="3dd1635d-e04b-49b2-8029-6c63ab6d18e5">Mui’s attraction is its 1963 massacre, when the Kanu tribe attacked the Unda and a sinkhole opened to swallow the corpses with their decapitated heads. The writer buys “Unda skull-shaped decorations” from a street vendor, a small but telling example of how genocide has clinically been transformed into an opportunity for commercial transactions and profit. One evening, the tourists have to choose whether to stay overnight with an Unda or a Kanu family. The next morning, the vicious tribal massacre is reenacted for their entertainment. When standing at the site of this historic massacre, Yona maintains her business composure even to herself:<br /><br /><i>“Standing in front of the volcano’s crater, the group took pictures, made wishes, and threw their flowers like they were bouquets. The bouquets drew an arc as they fell into the crater. To Yona, the whole action felt like neatly placing trash into its specific waste receptacle.”</i><br /><br />Yona does not feel even a flicker of shock or sadness. Working at Jungle has desensitised and hardened her, and she now fully accepts Jungle’s ethos that human life is a commodity.</label> This adds another dimension; and it is a very chilling one.<br /><br />There are four other Korean tourists: a mother and daughter, a recent college graduate, and a writer, as well as a local guide. These characters are vividly portrayed, and each has a disturbing side. The one who made my hair stand on end was the intensely obnoxious child, who appeared to be given no moral boundaries by which to make decisions. Most of the other tourists felt that she should not have been on the tour. All the visitors see everyday inequality, racism, and how poverty takes a high emotional toll. Local children hawk trinkets, <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="da743ab9-8334-46c9-ac5b-0b588024c92c" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="da743ab9-8334-46c9-ac5b-0b588024c92c"> but we and Yona are witnesses to the off-stage lives of Mui’s impoverished citizens, who have all been recruited to act a role. Young boys with the most pitiable expressions are employed to cry for the tourists, but if their tears dry up, they are replaced. Later Yona happens to see a street musician whom she had seen during her tour, but the old man gives her an angry glance and says, <i>“Please. We need time off, too.”</i> She also sees the woman who acted as her host overnight and who attentively painted her nails. But now, no longer performing, the woman treats Yona coldly. We realise grimly that the whole set-up is an act. The most heart-wrenching stories conceal exploitation on a huge scale.</label><br /><br />It is only a small step to a coldly logical horror scenario. As the story moves on, we see Yona’s gradual realisation of what is really going on, and how it is all too easy for her to accept this. Yona’s own complicity in the broader systems at work in Jungle’s interventions on local spaces begin to evolve with a dreadful remorselessness. <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="d207c614-501c-4d49-bfcd-a5913df912bc" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="d207c614-501c-4d49-bfcd-a5913df912bc"> Some citizens are selected to be the victims in a “natural” catastrophe which would guarantee establishing Mui as a thriving tourist destination for years to come. Bodies are piling up, created through a variety of dubious ways such as deliberate traffic “accidents”, to be dumped in manmade sinkholes. But this catastrophe is designed by humans, and so carefully orchestrated that none of those destined to lose their lives in the tragedy get an idea of the whole. Ruthlessly, Jungle pays “compensation” into their bank accounts for their families, and with supreme callousness, lets each individual know how much it will be beforehand. It seems to be accepted practise for these impoverished people.</label><br /><br />Each time we have accepted the hair-raisingly evil business practice, the emotional horror increases another notch.<br /><br /><input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="cb3e9913-cfcb-4c9e-8304-cc5eb15c04ed" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="cb3e9913-cfcb-4c9e-8304-cc5eb15c04ed">Yona discovers that the whole event is scripted in great detail:<br /><br /><i>“The writer was currently fleshing out every possible fact about Mui’s future victims. He didn’t need to be very creative, considering how eagerly people read stories like this, but he did have to decide who would die. The writer’s notebook contained dozens of pre-determined casualties. A mother and son, an engaged couple, an elderly husband and wife who’d lived in harmony their entire lives, a family whose newborn baby was spared, a teacher who died saving her students, parents whose young child survived, an old dog that dashed into the chaos to save its owners.”</i><br /><br />It reads like a soap opera, which is of course what Jungle had hoped for. But there are still twists to come, both for Yona herself, who finds that as Crocodile 75 in the script, she is one of the destined victims and for the company, when a tsunami destroys the entire project, killing employees, citizens and tourists alike:<br /><br /><i>“They had no rehearsals and no compensation, but their stories flowed to the ocean like blood from a head wound.”</i></label><br /><br />In the end, Nature always wins.<br /><br /><b>The Disaster Tourist</b> is an easy read, in terms of the vocabulary and structure. A good Goodreads friend who lives in South Korea has described what academics scathingly call “Kim Jiyoung syndrome”. This claims that there is a tendency to simplify the language and style, in order to make literature accessible to everyone. If this applies to <b>The Disaster Tourist</b>, then it has been masterfully done. Its accessibility belies its devastating concerns. We read a gripping novel; a conspiracy page-turner akin to those of Michael Crichton. Ethical and ecological dilemmas are there on every page. This is the stuff of nightmares, where <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="4ff50e1b-346a-4a1c-a7c6-57a47450fe49" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="4ff50e1b-346a-4a1c-a7c6-57a47450fe49">“mannikins” are real bodies, and “crocodiles” are predetermined victims. Nobody is fully complicit in the violence and destruction; the sacrifice for money, and the survival of a chosen few literally on the bones of others. </label>. Every single person is to some extent culpable, but also exploited.<br /><br />And yet it doesn’t quite reach 5 stars for me. <b>The Disaster Tourist</b> has been hyped as a book about the “me-too” movement. However the sexual harassment was not developed as a theme, but was essentially a mere plot device. Admittedly there was a big difference <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="a24c189d-c653-40c0-8eda-645ef6f70c53" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="a24c189d-c653-40c0-8eda-645ef6f70c53">once we got to Mui.</label> From being a passive, accepting character mainly because of her gender, Yona then began to feel more in control, and as a consequence we began to feel more involved with the story. But then it is largely ignored, except for a long section <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="e5f4ddde-74ae-4cce-b40e-26061612e023" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="e5f4ddde-74ae-4cce-b40e-26061612e023"> where Yona is is stranded on Mui, without her passport, phone, and only a few coins, with little hope of relief.</label> Even so I am not sure this is a specifically feminist issue, but more a human one! I was also unsure about the unnecessarily sentimental love story, which just seemed to be added in for no reason. <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="14986269-9158-4414-9ae2-6f53df50b132" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="14986269-9158-4414-9ae2-6f53df50b132">How could Yona fall in love with an islander, when in every other context they were to her mere pawns or commodities? Is it to show her liberal tolerance, that she falls in love with someone from another class and culture? It seems trite, and has a hollow ring.</label> Finally there were some translation issues which irked me sometimes. One example is this: <i>“These facts were as quotidian to Yona as the changing colours of a traffic light.”</i> Really? <i>Quotidian</i>? That's not a word which is in my daily vocabulary. It sounds straight out of a pretentious literary novel—or more likely, a thesaurus. Yet Lizzie Buehler apparently won an award for this translation. <br /><br />Nevertheless <b>The Disaster Tourist</b> is a book well worth reading. The philosophical and ethical issues addressed are disturbing and complex ones. The indictment of tourism, with its industrial and often-imperial overtones, is carefully nuanced and focused to make the reader uncomfortable. We see the systems of global capital at large, and how they affect different people and places in different ways. We see how the sites of some people’s trauma become the consumables offered in trade for tourists seeking an “authentic experience”. And we also see as a necessary consequence, the side effect of moral righteousness. One tourist comments: <i>“Isn’t this the reason we’re on this trip? […] To avoid repeating history?”</i> and the others agree, repeatedly voicing justifications to themselves about bearing witness. Some even expiate their guilt by doing community service in the place they visit, such as digging a well (which ironically is never used). Cynically, the author tells us:<br /><br /><i>“The travellers expose themselves to the islanders’ stories of trauma and grief in order to access a second-hand emotion.”</i><br /><br />We are forced to question the whole area of dark tourism. Yun Ko-eun show us the various motivations of the tourists, but invariably the tour is designed to fulfil the inner longings of the traveller, rather than to provide a true meeting of place and person. And we see the wanton destruction of the ecological system, and the ways that humanity’s trash on a huge scale, pollution, and capital all interrelate and increase, circling the globe.<br /><br />Our protagonist Yona has choices, which are cleverly exaggerated to form this relentlessly dark, near-future speculative satire. Yet the situations are common and believable. Capitalism often asks workers to sacrifice their ethics for their jobs, as we saw at the beginning. Tourism often exacerbates and profits from economic inequality, with tourists snapping shots of “quaint” people and customs. We watch the Korean consumers’ desires for <i>“something exotic, the spirit of adventure”</i>. Jungle is an exaggeratedly ghoulish enterprise, but as we have seen, its offerings are not that far from tourism packages which exist in the real world. Worst of all, observing tragedy from afar, as we all do when we watch the World News, often desensitises us; deadening our emotional impulses and processing our natural human reactions to accept disaster. We have seen it all before. <br /><br />Yona has a purely capitalist world view, without a moral dimension: she relates to everything to herself and sees others as commodities. By the end she learns that to Jungle, <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="b7964e09-c03f-4828-9f23-91fe7d96f1dd" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="b7964e09-c03f-4828-9f23-91fe7d96f1dd"> her life is worth three hundred dollars.</label> With savage irony, it is too late for her to understand that Mui’s inhabitants’ lives are worth more than that, too.<br /><br /><b>The Disaster Tourist</b> is a biting critique of dark tourism, and our over-commodified society, as well as a satirical and suspenseful eco-thriller, getting the point across that climate change is inextricably bound up with the pressures of global capitalism.

| | <a href="https://wishfullyreading.wordpress.com" rel="nofollow noopener"> blog</a> | <a href="https://tragedies-and-dreams.tumblr.com" rel="nofollow noopener"> tumblr</a> | <a href="https://ko-fi.com/wishfullyreading" rel="nofollow noopener">ko-fi</a> | |<br /><br /><i>The Disaster Tourist</i> doesn't tell a very memorable or engrossing story. If you've read the summary you know exactly what to expect from this book. We are introduced to Yona who is thirty-three and works as trip coordinator at Jungle, a travel company that specialises in organising disaster themed vacations. Yona is sexually harassed by her boss and seems like she would rather leave the company. She then agrees to go on a paid vacation in which she will have to determine whether Jungle should cancel this package. This vacation takes her to Mui, a fictional island not far from Vietnam. The disaster tourists that are travelling alongside Yona don't seem all the impressed or shocked by Mui's desert sinkhole. Yona then is left stranded to Mui and finds herself agreeing to take part in a morally questionable enterprise.<br />As a critique of disaster tourism this book doesn't really offer anything truly compelling or thought-provoking. Most readers will be aware of the voyeuristic and exploitative nature of this brand of tourism and of the motivations of those who wish to participate in it (wanting to raise awareness, witness sites of devastation in order to understand them).<br />The author's style does very little showing. Unlike with books like <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/45011012.Temporary" title="Temporary by Hilary Leichter" rel="noopener">Temporary</a> or <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/38357895.Convenience_Store_Woman" title="Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata" rel="noopener">Convenience Store Woman</a> readers will never gain an insight into Yona's job or her mind. She remains a surface character whose actions are either obscure or unbelievable. The tone of this book was also kind of a miss for me (definitely not as darkly funny or insightful as it wanted to be).<br />What could have been an irreverent look at tourism ended up being a forcibly surreal tale that wasn't half as clever or inventive as it tried to be.<br /><br />

i really enjoyed this dark and surreal commentary on capitalism, human selfishness, justification of corruption, and the exploitation of desperate communities. <i>the disaster tourist</i> centers on a particularly reprehensible area of the (already problematic) tourism industry: disaster tourism, where tourists visit locales that have been devastated by natural disasters. that's fucked up, right?<br /><br />there's a steadily increasing atmosphere of dread as our protagonist, yona, slowly realizes that things on the small island of mui are not quite what they seem. fouls, mannequins, crocodiles. mui's manufactured unreality eventually becomes more vivid than reality itself, and i really enjoyed seeing it all unfold.<br /><br />the marketing and blurbs for this book include a lot of buzzwords; some more apt than others. i would agree that this is an "eco-thriller," and it's certainly concerned with climate activism and capitalism. but i'm a little troubled by this being marketed as feminist and part of the #metoo movement. yona is sexually assaulted by her boss before she embarks on her trip, but the novel does not explore this deeply. i interpreted it as the cementation of yona's powerless; she is at the mercy of her boss, and consequently, the corporation. there doesn't seem to be a larger commentary beyond her character's position of exploitation. and it's interesting that we're at a cultural point where slapping on the word "feminist" can help sell books.<br /><br />ANYWAY. <i>the disaster tourist</i> is translated from korean, and sometimes i found the writing to be clunky or confusing. but i'm really glad it was translated into english, because it's a super interesting read. the author also includes a very wholesome afterword about how thrilled she was to have her work translated. i'd definitely be interested in reading more from ko-eun!

Man this was a trip. <br /><br />Yona Kim works for a Korean company called Jungle that curates inclusive holiday packages to disaster zones. She's been there for 10 years but is feeling like something has changed, that her position within the organization has subtly shifted. When she is sexually harassed several times by a fellow co-worker, who perhaps senses her diminished standing, we expect a certain type of book. But Yona isn't interested in joining her voice with the victims, with aligning with what she considers the losers. The incident becomes a launching off point to her taking an extended leave to a disaster destination called Mui. <br /><br />Tribal slaughter to make the tourists shudder and a massive sinkhole - now a wide lake - to excite their imagination. The guests occupy beachfront bungalows with crisp white sheets, rose petals by the bath, a single guest consuming more water than an entire village. They are trundled out to witness the poverty of the locals with a scheduled day for altruistic labour in digging a well. But again, Yun Ko-eun has bigger plans than an indictment of Instatravel and white-knighting voluntourism. <br /><br />Improbably separated from the rest of her tour and left behind, Yona sees what happens in the off season and finds herself having to justify a strange calculus of lives. (Pandemic economics anyone?) A massive, faceless corporation named Paul that despite it's humanizing name seems inevitable in its forward progress of business, widely distributed across thousands of people that are "just doing their job" harbouring no personal malice or ill will and yet inevitably streamrolling over anything and anyone that gets in their way. <br /><br />And then, as if unable to support the massive weight of so much metaphor it has heaped upon us, The Disaster Tourist veers off into Kaufmanesque territory and embeds a meta lovestory amidst a fabricated disaster. It's a lot. Sacrilege to say but I think this would be even better as a TV serialization. This thing reads like a tight one season story arc filled with rich possibility and knowing winks. This thing could become even more scathing, hilarious and plaintive if given some real space to breathe.

Here I am thinking what an absurd and surreal book idea it is to send your protagonist to catastrophe regions as a tourist… Only to find out that disaster tourism or dark tourism isn’t absurdism at all, but a real thing people do in this world. Why am I even disappointed in people’s exploiting and audacity, it is normal apparently?<br /><br />What’s even more normal, and arguably morbid, is that once a region starts receiving endorsements and remedies, tourists start flowing and leaving their money, that region is going to do everything to keep those privileges, at the cost of continuous “disasters” happening.<br /><br />In <i>The Disaster Tourist</i> Yun Ko-eun gives us the story of travel agent Yona Ko who works at such a travel agency and can’t with her job anymore. After enduring her boss’s disgusting sexual advances, she is being offered a special position – she is to visit the island Mui in Vietnam where a massacre has taken place in the past and examine whether the travel package is still necessary or not. After an interesting week, Yona gets lost on her way to the airport and not only does she discover the place is not the place she thought it was, she is also proposed a brand new and highly profitable position. Will she really do it?<br /><br />There are so many social issues being broached here; sexual harassment at work, dark tourism, tourism in general, capitalism, value of human life and karma, possibly. More tragic than anything else, really. Somehow I didn't really enjoy reading it.

The Disaster Tourist is award-winning South Korean writer Yun Ko-Eun’s first novel to be translated into English and one of the most original and inventive thrillers I have had the pleasure to pick up. I am pleased to report that I got what I bargained for and a whole lot more to boot. <br /><br />Thirtysomething Yona Ko has spent the last decade of her life devoted to Jungle, her employer and a company which primarily offers package holiday tours to areas of the world ravaged by disasters, from hurricanes to nuclear meltdowns; it's very much their USP, so to speak, and in a world where anything seemingly goes they are providing something that is clearly in demand by would-be travellers and customers. When Yona is sexually assaulted at work by her boss her role in the workplace is downgraded and she almost resigns, there and then, but then she's surprisingly offered a new opportunity in the business whereby she would travel to the Vietnamese island of Mui to ascertain the likelihood of a natural disaster happening to determine whether it should be kept on the companies books. Aware their tourist revenue is in peril, those with power on the island plan to ”engineer” a sinkhole during a busy festival and have estimated it will kill 100 people; their plan for after the incident is just as brazen: using international aid to redevelop affected areas. Naturally, Yona is disgusted and all hell breaks loose.<br /><br />This is an endlessly intriguing and deeply perceptive novel that is absolute genius and the potent mix of different elements that really shouldn't gel together but actually do are thanks to the author's immense talent and the structure of the book. It may be under 200 pages in length but this is wicked surrealist satire and a powerful and compulsive eco-thriller with a fierce feminist sensibility and is one of the most unique reads of the past five years for me. The narrative is fuelled with both humour and mounting dread and speaks volumes about the human and environmental costs of unsustainable tourism as well as the drawbacks of the capitalist system where nothing is off-limits provided it brings in the money. It is a sophisticated literary thriller that effectively and almost effortlessly blurs the lines between the personal and the political and at once feels both narrow and intriguingly wide in scope enabling it to provide compelling commentary on the protagonist's situation and that of her wider environment. A superb, off the wall, read. Many thanks to Serpent’s Tail for an ARC.

<i>Eight-one per cent of the world’s natural disasters over the past ten years had been floods and typhoons, and the disasters that caused the most casualties were earthquakes. But to Yona, those had just become work. Now, she faced a greater disaster: her feelings.</i><br /><br />Wow, that was a short sharp shock of a novel. And many thanks to @JimZ for insisting I bump this up my ‘to read’ pile. I think this is my first experience with a Korean author, so I have no idea how indicative this is of literature in that country. Suffice it to say that Yun Ko-eun takes an idea that seems straight out of science fiction, turns it into an alarming reality, and also ends up subverting her own premise in the most satisfying way possible. (I was completely wrong-footed by the ending, which is brilliantly, er, executed.)<br /><br />This is one of those books where the less you know about it, the more visceral the impact is. I am always puzzled by the ‘why’ of book-jacket descriptions, and in this instance I think it definitely gives too much away. All a potential reader needs to know is that Yona works for Jungle, a tourist agency that specialises in arranging visits to disaster hotspots.<br /><br />After suffering sexual harassment at the hands of her creepy manager, whom she discovers has made it a career path to inflict his unwanted attentions on his underlings, she is quickly bundled off on a supposed ‘business trip’ to re-evaluate the underperforming disaster site on the island of Mui. What can possibly go wrong, right?<br /><br />It was strange to read a book about travel and tourism in the shadow of a global pandemic that has been a death knell for this sector, which plays such a critical role in so many economies. But Ko-eun also starkly portrays the damage it inflicts on indigenous cultures, especially when it comes to unscrupulous tour operators like Jungle. Not to mention high-minded and privileged tourists, who often act like Royalty visiting the Commonwealth.<br /><br />What puzzled me about the book-jacket description was the statement that this is “an eco-thriller with a fierce feminist sensibility” that ‘engages’ with the #MeToo movement. Huh? Sometimes I think book marketers try too hard to link a book to what is current. In any event, ‘The Disaster Tourist’ is eminently relatable and hauntingly congruous with what is happening in the world right now.<br /><br />Kudos to the effortless translation by Lizzie Buehler. I have no idea how difficult it is to translate Korean into English, but I am sure it can’t be easy.