The attraction of repulsion: The Disaster Tourist, by Yun-Ko Eun, reviewed

Disaster tourism allows people to explore places in the aftermath of natural and man-made disasters. Sites of massacres and concentration camps can be visited; tours operate around Chernobyl, Centralia — the city in America that is perpetually on fire — Aleppo and Fukushima. Tourists can ‘experience’ what it is like to live in a war zone, in extreme poverty or a place emptied by nuclear fallout, and then return to the safety of their homes.

In Yun Ko-Eun’s The Disaster Tourist, translated from the Korean by Lizzie Buehler, the protagonist Yoona works for Jungle, a Korean disaster tourism travel company. She returns to Seoul after visiting an earthquake-hit region of Korea to plan an itinerary; the dead of Jinhae are a commodity, their high number an advertisement for the package, the disaster an opportunity.

In the Jungle office soon after, Yoona experiences a sexual assault. The threat this poses to her job, and therefore her livelihood and life, is a ‘growing and irreparable fissure’; a ‘fracture’, as though the foundations of her life are being shaken by an earthquake. Yoona tries to leave, but is given a month’s holiday instead, and a business trip on one of the package holidays that the company offers that is threatened with discontinuation.

Yoona goes to Mui, a fictional island close to Vietnam. There, calamity takes many forms: the massacre and sinkhole that occurred more than 50 years earlier that have made the island a disaster destination in the first place; the tourists ‘disrupting the lives of the locals,’ who are forced to re-enact the massacre, pretending to be orphaned or disabled — survivors of the sinkhole — to keep alive the island’s tourism industry; and Yoona’s own personal disaster, starting with her getting separated from her party.