MANILA, Philippines - Please Look After Mom won Kyung Sook-Shin the 2011 Man Asia Literary Prize, the first time that a woman has won the honor in its five-year history.
It is a stirring story of a family's search for a mother who goes missing at the Seoul train station.
The mother is Park so-nyo and she gets separated from her husband as they were on their way to their son's house. Nobody knows how she disappeared or why she disappeared. As her children and her husband conducts a search for her, they are swamped with recollections of the time they have spent with her, memories that are both crushing and comforting.
They begin to realize how much Park so-nyo has sacrificed for them, selflessly giving her time in seeing to their well-being. What is most crushing for them to learn is that they don't even know her interests and passions beyond the home.
It was especially difficult for eldest daughtor Chi-hon, who were not as close to her mother as her other siblings. Their conversations always seemed strained.
When she asks her mother if she liked being in the kitchen, for example, Chi-hon's response was "I don't like or dislike the kitchen. I cooked because I had to. I had to stay in the kitchen so you could all eat and go to school. How could you only do what you like? There are things you have to do whether you like it or not."
One of the most "crushing" parts of the novel actually comes early on: Chi-hon and her siblings were trying to come with flyers for the search when they realized that they didn't even have a recent photograph of their mom.
The novel is told from the points of view of the children, the husband and the Park so-nyo, who "appears" by the end of the book.
Instead of employing the first person point of view, though, Shin chooses to tell her character's tales in the second person. This intensifies the feelings guilt and responsibility that the children and husband feel.
What happened to her? Where did she go? Why did she disappear? Did she do it on purpose? Will she be gone forever?
Some readers might find the narrative too sentimental at times, which is how like some mothers are. But like most moms, too, the book is sincere. To paraphrase Franz Liszt's epigraph at the start of the novel, she "loves as long she can love."
As Janet Maslin observed in The New York Times, Shin "has turned the book's title, which initially sounded like an order, into something much more powerful: a prayer."