"Cold noodles in a bowl for beef broth are not cold noodles. It’s just really poorly made beef broth.

곰탕 뚝배기에 냉면을 담아오면 그것은 냉면이 아니다. 그것은 잘못 만들어진 곰탕일 뿐이다"

The Cabinet is a transation by Sean Lin Halbert of 캐비닛 (the Hangeul phonetic rendition of 'cabinet') by 김언수 (Un-su Kim).

I have previously read 김언수's fascinating thriller The Plotters in Sora Kim-Russell's translation - my review.

This is I believe the debut translation by Sean Lin Halbert, who in 2018 was a Fiction Commendation Award winner in the Korea Times' 49th translation awards.

Cabinet begins with a wonderful disclaimer: All the information contained in the novel has been manufactured, modified, or distorted in some way, and should not be used as evidence in any argument, be it in a respected academic journal or a heated bar fight.

The relevance of this immediately becomes apparent in the opening story about Ludger Sylbaris who, in real-life, was one of the few survivors of the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée which otherwise killed almost all the population of St Pierre in Martinique, Sylbaris surviving as he'd been incarcerated overnight inan underground cell. But in Kim's retelling, Sylbaris's prison was a tower not a dungeon and he "was locked away in the prison tower for twenty-four long years. He was put in prison at the age of sixteen, and it wasn’t until he turned forty that he was able to leave its confines. In fact, he was only able to escape with the help of the volcano, and not because he had served out his sentence."

The main strand of the novel consists of a number of similar, but entirely fictitious vignettes, drawn from the files of Cabinet 13, an otherwise unassuming filing cabinet in a municipal records office.

It is called Cabinet 13. But there is no particular reason for the number 13. It only means it’s the thirteenth cabinet from the left. This would probably be a better introduction if it had a fancier name. But then again, what would you expect from a cabinet?

A professor at the office has been researching for over 40 years people he dubs as "symptomers", people who have evolved in mysterious ways past our human norms. And our narrator, Kong Deok-geun, stumbles across the archive and ends up working as a filing assistant for Professor Kwon, who explains to him:

"Modern evolutionists like Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould have argued that species can evolve suddenly after million years of evolutionary dormancy– a theory they called “punctuated equilibrium.”
...
People are showing the symptoms of an evolving species. Without a suitable term from academia, we have decided to call these individuals “people with symptoms” or just “symptomers.” Symptomers break slightly from Homo sapiens as defined by biologists and anthropologists. They exist between the humans of today and the humans of the future– that is, they exist on the branch between species. They are both the last humans and the first of a new kind."

The trigger for such evolution being our hyper-intensive fast-changing capitalist modern world, an example being a group of people who have taken to bear-like hibernation, falling asleep for months on end:

"Modern people cannot fall into a deep sleep. Ever since the invention of electricity and the emergence of monolithic cities, the modern night has fallen into a state of constant unrest. In my opinion, the most lasting legacy of capitalism will be angst. Insurance, stocks, real estate, investments… The entire modern economy is based on anxiety, and as everyone knows, anxiety is the mortal enemy of a good night’s sleep. And insomnia only leads to more anxiety– it’s a vicious cycle. Thus, we are always anxious, internally and externally. Conversely, primitive humans were much more spiritual beings. They worked when the sun was out, and they dreamed and rested once it set. In other words, in order to live properly, you have to follow divine providence and live half your life working, and the other half dreaming."

Another series of stories concerns those whose diet consists of one, seemingly inedible or nutritionless, items - "In Singapore there is a man who lives off newspapers. By now this one should seem quite normal. Compared to ingesting gasoline, glass, and steel, eating newspapers seems almost cute.
...
What should we think of phenomena like these? How can people forgo perfectly fine foods like jjajangmyeon, spaghetti, and stir-fried octopus for gasoline, glass, newspapers, and sawdust? Usually, humans (actually not just humans, all animals) can recognize immediately what they can and can’t eat. It’s what we call the Garcia Effect."

Another is people for whom the border between reality and fiction has dissolved. These people meet their fears, or perhaps the illusion of their fears, in the physical world, including a class who really are eaten by the monsters under their bed.

One particularly poignant story concerns a man with a ginko tree growing from his finger, which he concerns Kong as the tree is taking is literally sucking the life out of the man, although the subject himself is naively delighted:

“Isn’t it splendid! This month it also grew an amazing amount. I guess the manure I applied to it was effective– smelly but effective.
[...]
I have so many questions. How much light should my ginkgo tree be getting? And I heard ginkgo trees are dioecious; do I need to cross-fertilize my ginkgo tree then? If I wave my arm in the air, will it cross-fertilize itself? Or do I need bees or butterflies? Oh, but I hate bees. What then? But it should fine. I can stand butterflies.”

“정말 굉장해요. 이번 달에도 엄청나게 자랐어요. 똥을 썩힌 거름을 바른 게 효과가 있나봐요. 냄새가 좀 나긴 하지만요, 하하.
[...]
물어보고 싶은 게 많아요. 햇빛은 어느 정도 받아야 하는 건지, 은행나무는 암수딴그루라고 하는데 그렇다면 교배는 어떻게 해야 하는 건지, 팔을 벌리고 있으면 알아서 교배를 해주는 건지, 아니라면 벌이나 나비가 해주는 건지. 저는 벌을 싫어하는데 어떻게 하죠? 하지만 괜찮아요. 나비는 좋아하니까요.”

And this story turns out to be the one that gives the novel, otherwise a fascinating collection of odd stories, a narrative spine, as a crime syndicate becomes interested in these hybrid human beings, convinced the Professor created rather than merely catalogued them. The resulting intrigue involves a relationship for Kong with a co-worker suffering from autism spectrum disorders and a torture scene that perhaps needs a trigger warning for the squeamish.

A clever cabinet of curiosities and conspiracies. 4+ stars and recommended.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.