After enduring decades of Japanese colonialism followed by a devastating civil war, South Korea rose from the ashes, acclaimed as “the miracle on the Han River” for its explosive economic development. But this success has come at a terrible price. The nation today has the lowest birthrate in the world and one of the highest suicide rates. The crushing requirements of unfettered economic growth are fraying familial and civic ties, leaving South Koreans on the precipice.

Che Yeun’s debut novel, Tailbone, depicts this precipice through the first-person lens of an unnamed teenager struggling to survive the global recession of 2008. In her final year of high school, her grades plummet, and she drops out. There is no refuge at home. After losing his managerial job in the financial crisis of 1997, her father toils as an underling to much younger bosses, spending his nights pouring drinks for them, returning home drunk and angry to take out his frustration on his wife. She despises her mother for her weakness, hating her acquiescence to her father’s abuse and to her sad and lonely life.

One sticky summer day, the girl runs away from home and rents a room in a women’s boardinghouse where the only rule is no smoking and the stairwells are strewn with cigarette butts. The place is in a decaying, dead-end Seoul alley, with neighbors who illegally dump their garbage on each other’s property. Even the landlady warns her away:

“None of you girls should be living here. I would rip out my eyes if I knew my daughter was living like this.”

The girl finds a role model in Juju, who is approaching 30 and, along with the rest of the boarders, “dated old desperate idiot men to feed their hunger for pretty things. When the hunger grew, they added new idiot creeps to their contact lists on their phones. When even that wasn’t enough, they fooled around with credit cards and payday loans. As the bills mounted, they hunted down even more lonely idiot creeps to settle their accounts for them.”

From her blonde dye job to her tinted contact lenses to her surgically enhanced bust, Juju is a do-it-yourself Frankenstein’s monster. Like that doomed creature, she is desperate for human love, which she thinks she has found with Min, who drives a flashy car, wears fancy suits, and is engaged to a woman from a wealthy family.

Juju shows the girl how to apply for loans under the protagonist’s mother’s name. When she suggests using her father’s name instead, Juju advises, “Always go with mothers…Mothers comply. Even after they find out you’ve thrown them in debt, they just quietly accept the situation and pay off the loan themselves. Mothers don’t call the police or fight back.”

With her ill-begotten gains, the girl blows her money on junk food, makeup, and cigarettes. Free to be an “irresponsible selfish slob,” she fritters the days away, eating corn dogs, dyeing her hair, and aimlessly riding the metro. On a train, an older man asks if she’s being sex-trafficked. “We really used to be a country full of girls like that,” he tells her. “Sold all over the country…That’s how poor they used to be. How poor we all used to be. Before the war and after. But all that’s gone now. Now it’s just girls like you, healthy and educated and sure and lazy. That’s what happens when you’re free to go anywhere you want.” Despite South Korea’s hard-won prosperity, women are still selling their bodies to survive.

The only path out that the protagonist can imagine is to become a flight attendant. Then, she might find a rich man and trap him into marriage, or at least be kept in a nice apartment. But she can’t afford the tuition for the training, and Juju tells her she’s too short, anyway. A departing boarder has left behind a flight-attendant uniform, which she wears around town as a status symbol, basking in the looks of admiration it garners. She also wears it when she engages in sex work for the first time.

When she returns home with the cash she has just earned, her mother refuses her money and turns her away:

“After you left, the house got quiet. That’s when I realized, you were such a loud child. Not your mouth. But your whole body was loud. Everything you needed was screaming at me all the time. A respectable family. A nice bed. A cozy dinner. We never got you that digital camera. There was too much I couldn’t give you.”

Through the blunt yet incisive narrative of one teenage girl, Tailbone presents a frightening portrait of a nation whose rapid economic success has been achieved at the cost of rapid social disintegration. A society built on relentless competition means close bonds — between women, romantic partners, and even parents and children — are tested to the breaking point. Yeun’s bleak and all-too-plausible novel warns us that at the bottom of South Korea’s precipice yawns a very dark abyss.

Born in Korea, Alice Stephens is the author of the novel Famous Adopted People. Her historical novel, The Twain: A Tale of Nagasaki, is forthcoming in February 2027.