Serin feels stuck. She lives in an apartment block that’s slated for destruction; her sister blew town without a backward glance; and she’s never better than okay at school, or friendship, or her hobbies. Out of desperation, she submits a letter of application to the Rainfall Market. The stories say that if your letter stands out, you’ll receive a ticket to the Rainfall Market. Once there, you can choose a new life—whatever you desire. Serin only half-believes in the Market, until she receives a golden ticket, ordering her to come to a certain address on the first day of the rainy season. She can stay in the market until the end of the rainy season, by which time she must have chosen her new life, contained within a magical Dokkaebi Orb.
But wait, there’s more! Serin is the one lucky duck from among the ticket-holders who has a special Golden Ticket (shades of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a very much darker piece of fiction), meaning that she can try out however many lives she wants before choosing the one she wants to keep. Yet as she moves through the Rainfall Market, peering into futures that could be hers, she always finds something lacking from them that she can’t live without. Worse, she begins to realize there’s something badly wrong in the market; and if she doesn’t figure out what it is, her life could be in danger.
You Yeong-Gwang’s The Rainfall Market (translated by Slin Jung) reminds me of a video game—one of the dreamy, indie ones from Annapurna that would win acclaim for its art design and people would admit on social media that it made them cry. It has a video game’s quest-like structure: Serin conceives of a life she’d like to live, asks her magical cat Issha to bring her to the relevant Dokkaebi Orb. Then she has to accomplish some small, weird task for the orb’s keeper before she’s allowed to look into the future it contains. If it were a game, you’d be solving small, whimsical puzzles in between cut scenes that are kind of a downer, taking breaks in between to pet the kitty.
(The kitty is very good. We love the kitty.)
You Yeong-Gwang is clearly having a ball with Serin’s mini-quests. At every stop, the resident dokkaebi identifies the human experience they seek and consume: One takes away serenity, another takes words from human hearts, and a third takes from humans desire to keep themselves clean. Some of these traits matter to Serin’s brief encounter with that dokkaebi. More often, they don’t. Coherent world-building isn’t really the point, because Serin is building agency, not expertise. The unpredictability of the tasks she’s given requires her to think on her feet, consider new ideas, and find greater trust in herself (and Issha) that she’ll be able to handle the next weird, unexpected thing that’s thrown at her.
While video games let the player bring their own tastes and experiences to the character we play as, a novel requires more investment in the protagonist. And this is where The Rainfall Market really lost me. As the only Golden Ticket holder, Serin doesn’t have any travel mates who could chat to her and help bring out aspects of her character through dialogue. (Her only companion is Issha, who is a very good kitty but who cannot talk.) As a window shopper for possible lives, she isn’t trying to form lasting connections with the denizens of the market, nor with the occupants of the lives she visits. By design, Serin is a bit of a blank, existing in the world of the Rainfall Market mainly to react to what’s happening around her.
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The Rainfall Market
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As such, this book has the quality of parable. Don’t we all feel stuck, and isolated, and beaten down by our circumstances? Don’t we all wish for something different, even before we manage to articulate what that might be? The lesson Serin learns in the end isn’t quite that of It’s a Wonderful Life, although she does come to realize that the life she wants to leave behind was more valuable than she had initially supposed. I thought of it more like the lesson of “The Fisherman’s Wife,” a fairy tale that I love despite how much it comes off like “women, amirite?” Serin’s life is not necessarily the best of those she samples. But she does begin to see the burdens that other people’s lives—glamorous and desirable as they may seem from the outside—have placed upon them. We are all looking for an escape, but escape isn’t always quite the, well, Golden Ticket that it may seem.
The Rainfall Market rests comfortably in the genre of healing fiction, which has begun to reach English readers after many years of success in Korea and Japan. Serin’s journey is episodic and lightly fantastical, with a magical cat for company (don’t worry; the cat will be okay), and she’s able to win out in the end with the help of the friends she makes along the way. That she and her friends are thinly drawn is perhaps beside the point. Serin’s escape from her life feels as universally relatable as does her ultimate desire to slip back into it, albeit with a renewed belief in herself and a sense of hope for her future.
It’s an open question whether healing fiction would work better for me, a dog person who recently lost her dog, if the magical cats were magical dogs. As it is, I tend to finish these books feeling a little unsatisfied. Certainly that was true of The Rainfall Market. I expected it to be gentle and silly and life-affirming—and it’s all of those things. But it turns out that I want even my comfort reads to have a little sharpness to them, and The Rainfall Market keeps its claws resolutely sheathed. A fun, harmless debut for fans of The Midnight Library and The Cat Who Saved Books.
The Rainfall Market is published by Ace.