April 2017— The French edition of House of the Winds was published in Paris by the Editions Gallimard imprint– Collection Denoël & d’ailleurs, translation is by the award-wining translator Lucie Modde.

HOUSE OF THE WINDS, set in the 60s and 70s of Korea, is a portrait of a Korean family and especially its women whose lives have been deeply affected by its tumultuous history: the thirty-six years of Japanese rule and the Korean War. The narrator is a girl, the youngest of three children, who observes the world around her with a keen understanding of and deep sympathy toward her family of sad women. It is a world full of historical, mythical and ghostly implications where voiceless women roam.

The narrator is our guide through a world in which even birds cry instead of sing (“Everything cried and cried beautifully in Korea”). An American electric iron is so powerful it sets off a coup d’etat. Grandfather dies with a crab-apple in his mouth.

Mia Yun invites her readers into the “folds of history” where Korean women, the descendants of the she-bear woman and the son of the king of heaven, live… “laughing, wailing, spirit-cajoling, poetry-writing, tear-hiding, bosom-bracing, scheming, fire-breathing.”

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