Almond, a historical fiction novel written in Korean by Sohn Won-pyung and translated into English by Sandy Joosun Lee, tells the first person account of Yunjae, a near-orphaned, high school boy with alexithymia. Alexithymia is a neurological disorder that makes it difficult to recognize, feel, or display emotions. Yunjae spends his early years encountering situations where his lack of emotion and empathy worries his mother. After his mother’s fears were confirmed with his diagnosis, she desperately tried to make Yunjae study emotions so he can grow up normally, with the help of his grandmother. Tragically, Yunjae witnesses the murder of his grandmother, and his mother beaten unconscious. He is unable to understand how that was such a bad thing. Now, Yunjae has to live through his high school years with a half-baked sense of emotion and empathy. There, he meets Gon, the school’s bully that only has issues with empathy, but has extreme emotions. Yunjae is unable to be affected by Gon’s bullying, and they learn more of each other’s struggles, which strengthens their grasp on natural human thinking. In the final scenes of the book, Yunjae and Gon go through a traumatic experience, where Yunjae is briefly able to understand grief and why his family’s incident should be taken seriously. Although the author does not suffer from the same neurological condition, Sohn Won-pyung, specifically Sandy Joosun Lee, had a talent for accurately describing emotions in a way that someone learning them would. For example, “to love,” was explained to Yunjae as “to discover beauty” by his grandmother. This definition surprised me on how simple, yet immensely effective a few words can be in describing the indescribable. Along with other unique definitions of emotions, or emotional scenarios that Yunjae had witnessed, Sohn Won-pyung’s writing had me wondering how other emotions could be described. To conclude, because of Sohn Won-pyung’s effective and realistic writing, and Sandy Joosun Lee’s skillful translation, of such a nuanced topic, Almond is able to tell the reader how intricate the simplest of everyday things could be, and gets them to appreciate how much, or even how little, can be said about a thing in order to blow its grasp into unimaginable proportions. As you read this book, pay attention to when Yunjae goes into analysis about an emotion/emotionally charged experience, and learn about how Yunjae’s relationships are important to his character growth.
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