With a protagonist who becomes fixated on routine after surviving a fatal accident and a colorful cast of supporting characters that includes an aspiring actress who essentially lives in costume, a young boy determined to keep his neighborhood mailbox standing, a playwright who hears ticking noises throughout her drafting process, and a tourist who finds himself stranded in Korea after suddenly developing an intense fear of flying, it would appear that the people who populate Kim Heejin’s No Matter How Odd are all ruled to an extent by some preoccupation or other. The novel itself is unmistakably preoccupied with names.

The characters call attention to the sometimes prophetic, sometimes ironic natures of their names. The narrator’s name, Jeong Haejin, is homonymous with a Korean word meaning fixed or decided—fitting for a character whose obsessive-compulsive disorder often results in her feeling as if her life is indeed fixed, a series of rituals that she must perform to maintain order and ward off further misfortune. In fact, Haejin is performing one such ritual—swerving to avoid manholes on her bike ride home—when she has a literal run-in with would-be actress An Seungri. Immediately upon introducing herself, Seungri remarks, “Bleak, right?” While her given name means victory in Korean, her surname, An, is a negation word, rendering the meaning of whatever follows null and void.

In this way, the author uses names to reveal aspects of the story, whether facets of a character’s personality or clues that foreshadow a character’s fate. These names will offer no such revelations to most readers of the English translation, in which they stand alone. But fortunately, both for readers and for me as the translator, the fascination with names and the multiple levels of meaning on which they operate is not limited to these brief, one-off puns and instead runs throughout the novel, underscoring its plot. While translating, I reasoned that what might be lost in choosing to translate the names as mere names, unadorned with explanation, might well be recovered through the careful and considered translation of the countless other moments in the novel that challenge its characters—and, by extension, its readers—to ponder the purpose of the names we ascribe not only to people but to their lived experiences, especially of disability.

The question of whether and how to name disability remains at the center of ongoing debates in several anglophone societies. Certain prescriptive solutions, such as the proposal of people-first language (people with disabilities) as an alternative to identity-first language (disabled people), seek to name disability without foregrounding it. However, for many of us, our disabilities are foregrounded. This may be due to a sense of deep cultural identification with a disabled community, as is the case for many Deaf people, or an inadvertent result of the myriad ways that our society hinders our full access and participation largely on the basis of our disabilities, as the scholar-activists who first developed the social model of disability explained. Whatever the reason, many disabled self-advocates insist not only on naming our disabilities but on centering them as core components of our identities. Still, we in the Anglosphere have not yet reached a consensus on this and likely never will. Perhaps that is for the best, as no matter how many of the same diagnostic criteria we meet, every disabled person experiences and positions their disabilities in ways that are specific to them. Even in a set of guidelines recommending the use of people-first language in communications about disabled people and communities, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises first consulting with the person or people being discussed and using the language that each individual or group prefers whenever possible. In a world in which the right to self-determination is often regarded as conditional or earned rather than inherent, the act of encouraging disabled people to determine the language used to discuss their lived experiences is a vital means of preserving that right for those who are often among the first to be deprived of it.

In its depictions of disability, No Matter How Odd would appear to champion this same approach as a best practice—naming not as prescription but as affirmation. In the excerpt that appears in this issue, Haejin encounters a being whom she cannot immediately classify. This uncertainty troubles her. “What exactly are you?” she asks, going so far as to inquire about the properties and elements that comprise him. When she says that he resembles a shadow, the being readily accepts this designation, despite lacking a strong sense of identification with this term or any other. Haejin then asks the shadow his name, to which he replies that he doesn’t have one. More specifically, he explains: “I still haven’t met anyone who would give me one. Honestly, as you know, names exist more for others to use.” When he invites her to choose a name for him, as she is the first person to interact with him and thus to have any use for a name by which to call him, Haejin is clearly overburdened by the task.

Their interaction reveals two distinct understandings of names and their purpose. The shadow believes that names exist primarily for the use and convenience of others. “You’ll need something to call me from now on—shouldn’t you pick a name that works for you?” he reasons. For him, a name is not personally meaningful or at all intertwined with his self-concept. On the other hand, Haejin places great significance on names. Yet while she understands names as being externally ascribed by some authority, such as a parent or an owner, she seems to find the certainty and exactitude afforded by these ascribed names to be empowering rather than restrictive. As reluctant as she is to choose a name for the shadow, she is incredibly forthcoming when naming her own disabilities. Though these names were ascribed to her, she has clearly adopted them and incorporated them into her understanding of herself. Throughout the novel, Haejin demonstrates ownership over her compulsions, her routines, and her obsessive-compulsive disorder in her narration and her conversations with others. Her approach to naming disability does not draw a dividing line between her disability and her personhood but instead interweaves the two.

Interestingly, most other characters in the novel who live with potentially disabling conditions discuss their experiences with as much candor as Haejin describes hers, but they rarely if ever ascribe names—let alone the designation of disability—to these conditions. Playwright Baek Sujin describes hearing an incessant ticking whenever she is working on a new play, but unlike other characters, she never uses the term tinnitus. She mentions having unsuccessfully sought treatment for this condition multiple times before deciding to fill her home with clocks so that their ticking would provide an objective rationale for what she is experiencing. She avoids the messy semantics of naming disability by reframing her condition.

Similarly, British national Mark finds himself stranded in Korea after what was meant to be a short tourist stop, unable to return home due to an unprecedented panic reaction that overcomes him when it is time to board the plane to leave. Despite frequent trips to Incheon Airport over the subsequent seven years in an attempt to overcome this newfound fear, some aspect of the process manages to trigger the same reaction each time. Dareumi, a precocious neighborhood boy, is the only character to name Mark’s experience a panic disorder in as many words. And certainly many readers who live with panic disorders would concur, recognizing elements of their experiences in the ones that Mark describes. Yet Haejin does not use the term panic disorder when discussing Mark’s condition and opts instead to use the far less pathological word fear.

Initially, readers may find this a surprising decision on the part of a character who discusses her own disability in notably unequivocal and clinical terms. However, this choice aligns with the approach that Haejin and the novel as a whole appear to take to naming disability. Through her conversations with Mark, Haejin learns that he has not quite come to terms with the sudden onset of his fear and struggles to ascribe the language of disability to himself, still conceptualizing his condition as separate from and foreign to him. As readily identifiable as his experience may seem to disabled and non-disabled readers alike, Mark does not explicitly name it, and thus Haejin does not presume to name it for him.

Contemporary Korean literature has often sidestepped overt portrayals of mental illness and neurodiversity by avoiding naming them outright even as the narratives present characters and experiences that suggest the presence of these conditions. It is perhaps due to this tendency that Korean literature in translation has earned a reputation in the Anglosphere for being uniquely melancholic, as countless reviews and scholarship evoking the abundance in Korean media of han—a concept often purported to be untranslatable but widely understood to be a collective, essentially Korean sentiment of unresolved resentment and sorrow born of a long history of injustice—will attest. The pervasive sense of despondency that reviewers of Korean literature in translation often detect in these narratives may readily map onto readers’ own understandings and experiences of disability. Yet as long as disability remains unnamed on the page, non-disabled readers are likely to miss even its vestiges, while disabled readers may grow doubtful and frustrated reading so deeply into representation so subtle that it may as well not exist.

For a long time, I firmly believed that representation in media was valid only when it was named in no uncertain terms. Naturally, this did not stop me from identifying with characters who exhibited the traits and tendencies that I knew, from personal experience, by certain names: anxious, autistic, depressed. Yet without the words written out on the page or uttered by the people on the screen, I never gained any clarity or satisfaction from these so-called instances of representation. Instead, I was left frustrated and unsettled, the way I imagine Haejin must have felt at first as she struggled to pin down a word, any word, to describe the shadow.

However, reading and translating this novel prompted me to challenge my conceptions of names and representation. In opting not to take a single, all-encompassing approach and instead tailoring each decision to name or not to name disability to the characters and their individual articulations of their experiences, No Matter How Odd presents an exceptionally nuanced example of disability representation that resonates more for me than any other approach that I have encountered in literature thus far. In all my yearning for overt representation, I had neglected to consider that while, like Haejin, I find assuredness and identification in the language that was ascribed to me to name my disabilities, not every person with ostensibly similar experiences will find the same empowerment in these terms. The choice not to foreground disability or to forgo naming it at all may be the result of any number of personal factors, such as a lack of identification with certain terms, a fear of stigma from using particular language, or a sense of distrust toward authorities whose approaches to naming can be violent and pathologizing. Reading the novel’s empathetic depictions of its characters’ various, complicated relationships to disability, I was reminded that this tension is a valid experience of disability that deserves representation as well.

In life, as in the novel, disability is so much more than its designations. Now I know that as long as I was seeking representation with such a narrow understanding of what it meant to truly depict disability in a nuanced and meaningful way, I was likely never going to be satisfied. Rather than a perfect mirror or parroting of my experience, the representation I found in No Matter How Odd felt more like an encounter with a group of strangers with whom I instantly meshed. There is a familiarity to their mannerisms and an unspoken understanding that settles over us, leaving me with the vague suspicion that we have met somewhere before. But when the time comes for us to go around and make our formal introductions, I shake off that sense of déjà vu, cast aside whatever it was that I thought I knew or remembered, and lean in close so I can listen for their names.

Read “By Any Other Name, an excerpt from Kim Heejin’s No Matter How Odd, here.