Synopsis
From the award-winning author of The Eyes Are the Best Part, praised by The New York Times Book Review as “violent, smart, gruesome and wildly original,” a provocative journey into a perilous world of voyeurism, scandal, female rage, and vengeance . . . pursued with a very sharp kitchen knife.
Molka: an abbreviation of molrae-kamera, a “sneaky camera” hidden to capture covert images and videos for voyeurs.
In an unassuming Seoul workplace, IT technician Junyoung’s network reaches throughout the entire building. He sees every entrance. Every lobby. Every bathroom. The women in this building may be cold and dismissive, but he can always pull up his favorite images of them and remember who holds the real power. Until one, Dahye, sets herself apart from the rest.
Dahye, ever the romantic, yearns to be cherished after years of living in the shadow of her perfect older sister, who tragically drowned years ago. Only her boyfriend seems to appreciate Dahye. He’s rich, handsome, and generous—and she’d do anything to hold on to the happiness he brings her.
But when a hidden camera scandal rocks the city’s elites, Dahye’s dreams of a fairy-tale romance twist into a grotesque nightmare. Her boyfriend abandons her. Her parents reject her. Her grip on reality begins to shatter as visions of her dead sister suddenly appear. And as Junyoung’s interest in Dahye turns to obsession, and the truths of their troubled lives are revealed, Dahye must go to extreme lengths to bring the truth to light . . .
Review
Monika Kim turns her eye to the Korean patriarchy in her sophomore release, Molka, which revolves around the horrors of privacy invasion by way of miniature spy cameras, aka molka, and the stripping away of consent via technological means. Inspired in part by 2019’s “Burning Sun” scandal, which saw a number of Korean celebs sharing in an online chat room secretly filmed spy camera footage of themselves raping drugged women, as well as the persistent and illicit use of hidden spy cams for the purpose of voyeurism plaguing Korea.
IT tech worker, Junyoung, has installed hidden cameras throughout the women’s bathrooms of the company he works for and routinely spends his workday watching the feeds he’s set up. He barely knows the names of any of his women coworkers, but all are familiar to him by association with the color of their underwear or pubic hair stylings. It will likely not come as much of a surprise to learn that Junyoung is a perverted creep with daddy issues, regularly verbally abuses his mother, and mistakes a coworker’s professional friendliness as a promise of deeper intimacies and sexual offerings.
That coworker is Dahye. Like the other women she works with, she has no idea she is being stalked through the bathroom stalls of her workplace, but she’s heard plenty of horror stories of Korea’s molka epidemic and the thousands of women who, every day, have their most intimate moments anonymously uploaded to the Internet without their consent by complete strangers. Dahye is involved with Hyukjoon, the son of a wealthy corporate media CEO, but their relationship is far from perfect, as Dahye eventually learns, much to her chagrin.
What follows is a twisted love triangle of sorts, one defined by stalking, betrayal, hidden cameras, date rape, toxic men with entitlement issues, and the erosion of consent, autonomy, and agency. And that’s not even getting into the ghostly aspect haunting Dahye. Throughout Molka, Kim explores the deeper issues of Korean patriarchy, as well as the disparities in gender politics and justice. Late in the book, we learn of a college student who was sentenced to ten months in prison for posting a nude photo of her ex-boyfriend, who she caught showing private pictures of her to his friends online. The police refused to do anything, stating she didn’t have enough proof, and so she took matters into her own hands.
While the cast and setting are predominately Korean, American readers will no doubt find plenty of familiarity throughout Molka. The horror stories depicted throughout Kim’s work are universal in this era of invasive technology, regardless of which side of the Pacific you live on. In fact, the day of Molka’s release, Futurism published a story detailing how police across the US are using automated license plate readers to stalk women. This, on top of various law enforcement agencies using Ring doorbell cameras in an attack on American’s civil liberties. Let’s not forget, too, about the userbase of the Nazi bar formerly known as Twitter, who use Elon Musk’s built-in AI chatbot, Grok, to make millions of sexualized deepfake images of women and children without their consent on a daily basis and with zero safeguards for the victims of this sexual violence.
If there’s any criticism to be lodged against Molka it’s that, in distilling these issues through three central characters, it feels almost quaint and doesn’t go quite far enough in its examination of illegal mass surveillance. While the issues Kim writes about are significant, not to mention widespread and with a number of systemic issues that go hand-in-hand, the technology used to carry out these acts of violence have exploded exponentially between the time Kim spent writing Molka to the book’s publication. This should not be construed as an attack on Kim or her work in anyway whatsoever, though. There’s just no escaping the fact, particularly these days, that the real world is scarier and can be even more awful than fiction. At the end of the day, Molka is a terrific, gut-churning read that gets under your skin, makes you feel dirty and, at times, complicit.
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