By Hitomi Tanaka

　　　A Fish Crawling on a Stone is the first novel written by Yu Miri and was printed in Shincho in 1994 as an autobiographical novel. However, after publication the woman who was the model for the second heroine sued the author and the publisher for violating her privacy and required them to withdraw the book. She won the suit in 1999, after which Yu Miri published the revised edition of the novel. Now, everyone can read the revised edition of A Fish Crawling on a Stone.

　　　The following is a summary of the story. The heroine of this novel is Yong Panhyan, a Korean resident in Japan and a playwright attached to a theatrical company. She wrote a work and it was decided that it should be performed in Korea, so she had a chance to go her motherland for the first time. In Korea, she met Paku Rifa, a friend of one of Panhyan's colleagues in the theatrical company, who had lived in Japan until she reached 4th grade in elementary school. Panhyan saw Rifa's face and thought "I tried to wipe away the fear that Rifa's face might swell up." Panhyan couldn't see Rifa's face straight because of her feeling of fear, and stayed away from Rifa at first when she saw her appearance, but afterwards as their relationship developed she became interested in Rifa's inner character. Finally the story finished when Rifa entered a religious community.

　　　The theme of the novel is how to come through a hard "life." Panhyan shoulders the burden of being a Korean resident in Japan while she has lived to search hard for a place to live, and Rifan has a problem because of her face, but she has lived nobly. It shows that they has tried to live through a hard life.

　　　In fact, an incident that happened in Korea showed Yan that a Korean resident in Japan lives a halfway existence . She was placed in a situation where she had to buy a ticket by herself at a station, but she couldn't speak Korean well. She is puzzled when she cannot use Japanese at the counter. The Koreans who saw her ignored her when she was speaking in Japanese or insulted her and surrounded her instead. The reason why the Koreans discriminated against her was because they found that while Panhyan looked Korean, she could not speak Korean well because she is a Korean resident in Japan.

　　　But she said, "On the contrary, both the Korean language and also Korean as a nation convey a bad impression." She avoided speaking Korean and she denied herself as a Korean. She was unable to find her own country whether she was in Japan or Korea. That's why she struggled because her existence was neither one thing nor the other. The feelings she experiences as she tries to overcome such difficulties drive her to various kinds of behavior.

　　　In her private life Panhyan has intimate relationships with three men. One of them is a married person. She denies her own existence while trying to find it through relationships with others. But she is unable to find her place even when she is with men, which is why she has relationships with so many of them. All she got from them was only emptiness.

　　　In the last part of this novel, there is an expression, "Hatred connected me with this dirty world." Panhyan finally reached this thought through various kinds of experience.

　　　The author of this novel, Yu Miri, is a Korean resident in Japan and as a woman she experienced various kinds of things. This novel was written as an autobiographical novel, so many parts of this novel are based on her experience and feelings. She tries to keep writing this kind of novels to sublimate past sorrows.