The eight stories in this anthology span nearly 60 years, from 1939, when Korea was a resentful and mutinous Japanese colony, to 1997, when South Korea was a thriving democracy and young people there and in Japan were more apt to be united by their involvement in each other's pop culture than divided by ethnic and political hatreds.
Interestingly enough, peace and prosperity seem to have solved little. The passions of the last story are as violent and despairing as those of the first — in a sense more so. At least in the early stories the characters could look forward to a future when peace and prosperity might set things right.
Japan's colonization of Korea in 1910 triggered an influx of Korean farmers, laborers and students, ancestors of a resident Korean community whose uncertain status and identity crises over the generations are the book's unifying theme.