The cover of "Saha" by Cho Nam-joo / Courtesy of Tongbang Books

The purpose of dystopian literature is not to speculate about the future but to warn, and not to see beyond the present but to criticize it. As a genre, it is popular and offers great opportunity for creative vision, but also easily invites unflattering comparison to its greatest works; George Orwell's "1984," Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" all suggest themselves quickly. Comparisons are not limited to literature; Terry Gilliam's film "Brazil" (1985) immediately comes to mind whenever I am confronted by the trademark of many dystopian works: an unhappy ending.

Cho Nam-joo's "Saha" straddles two genres with great effectiveness: it is a dystopian mystery. The reader searches for clues, eager to unravel the secret even as they know they move toward an unhappy destination. What makes "Saha" special is that any comparison with other great works of the genre must be complimentary, as it succeeds utterly in providing a vicious societal critique as well as a powerful warning of rapidly developing trends in our own world.

Social criticism is certainly nothing new for Cho. Her brilliant 2016 novel "Kim Ji-young, Born in 1982" offered such a scathing view of the inherent sexist elements of Korean society that it galvanized Korea's emerging feminist movement while becoming a target for misogynistic criticism, in depressingly predictable irony. Its contemporary setting bolstered its argument with economic and social statistics, providing the narrative with a backdrop of cold facts with which to process the deep unfairness it depicted.

In sharp contrast, "Saha" is set in what seems to be a near future, and the facts we receive are not statistics but stories, sometimes reported as background information, and other times as personal experiences and perspectives clouded by uncertainty. Reasons and motivations are sometimes left for the reader to discern, much as we do today when encountering deep and endemic economic and social unfairness that seems both undesirable but deliberate. A character, when confronted by their parent's workplace death being called a suicide, may be no more certain than we are of the manager's greed as a motivation, but acts with a certainty that we can understand. Despite living in circumstances far from our own, the characters' emotional responses are immediately clear to us in their reasoning, and we empathize with them. The mix of unfairness, powerlessness, marginalization and classification that they are enveloped by is depressingly familiar to our own world and lives.

Potential readers may wish to hear a description of the dystopian world, but as a mystery, spoilers and clues are anathema. Just as the characters skirt along the edge of the truths of their own world, so will this review. Saha Estates is the eponymous housing complex in which so much of the novel takes place that a map of it appears before the first page, the only map in the book. This map provides grounding into the experience of the residents. It becomes easy to visualize the character's interactions in the various areas of Saha, while perhaps giving the reader the chilling realization that it reminds them of their own residence. This estate, on the edge of a micronation called Town, is a sort of informal refugee camp in which people below the lowest tier of Town's social class must scrape out a living together. There is an element of meager hope in the community, whether it is collective child care, a shared vegetable garden or just a friendliness that comes with being neighbors. They scavenge and jury-rig to meet their needs while working odd jobs in Town as informal laborers in positions below those of the lowest level of Town's citizenry.

Author Cho Nam-joo / Courtesy of Ewha Womans University

The story of how Town came to be is in itself a cautionary tale of the eagerness of local governments to attract and appease massive corporations. A village's offer to a corporation of preferential treatment through tax and investment incentives backfires, causing the village's bankruptcy and a resulting takeover by the corporation. Foreign investors, mostly family members of the company, come to own the village's institutions as its inhabitants are bankrupted by financial malfeasance. With an anonymous corporate government council in charge, Town is ruled by an invisible iron fist. Capital punishment can be applied for innocuous reasons, with no driving moral directive beyond improving shareholder value and preservation of the status quo. A description of a failed revolution against this order echoes history's past struggles of union organizers against big business or the citizenry against the state. Saha's residents are refugees of both worlds: from the country outside of Town, which some have fled due to unfortunate circumstances, persecution or criminal past, as well as from Town, where they are not permitted to live or able to enjoy human rights. With each chapter, their mistreatment reaches new depths, and we are left wondering to what extent this is already happening today. Of course, the reader's own background will affect this process. Descriptions of exorbitant and unfair medical expenses and insurance, while striking Korean readers as apocalyptic, would ring depressingly familiar to Americans.

In this distressingly familiar setting, we meet the novel's struggling and mysterious cast. Jin-kyung and Do-kyung are siblings and residents of the estate, though we soon learn where they originally came from and why they are in Saha now. While much of the novel focuses on their own experiences, other chapters offer narratives of other characters, sometimes many years in the past, both to offer more clues as well as to color the rich story of Saha's history. The intersections of their stories fill in the gaps in our own understanding while forcing us to ask more questions. They form a story of human effort, connection and perseverance as well as villainy, oppression and futility. I found myself crumpling the edges of the pages at times as I agonized over the unfairness they described, and then found myself thinking about our own world and all the people around me who suffer such unfairness every day.

This emotional investment holds our attention as much as our eagerness to learn more about what is happening in this shadowy world. As Saha moves toward a resolution of its mystery, we see our new knowledge as somewhat hollow in the post-truth world; what truly happened is less important than we'd hope. References to a pandemic don't just anchor the story to our own world; they force us to ask deeper, darker questions without providing answers. The building crescendo of the story's shocking conclusion opens a new mystery that is left as an exercise for the reader.

"Saha" is an emotionally immersive novel. It takes skill to impress with disappointment, a skill that great dystopian authors show, a skill that Cho Nam-joo exhibits with "Saha." We don't read more of it because it makes us feel happier; we read more of it because it makes us feel more human. We keep reading because we feel we are learning something important, and being warned of something terrible that is happening. We can't put it down because we feel we owe it to these characters, these conjured souls, to learn what happened and what will happen to them … because their stories and lives matter to us.

Jamie Chang's English translation of "Saha" is available through dbbooks.co.kr.

Arlo Matisz is an economics professor at Chosun University in Gwangju.