Yeonamm-dong's Smiley Laundromat: My Thoughts

A Book About The Power Of Human Bonds And Community

Hello!!!

This is Joyie and welcome back to my little bookish corner of the internet where I talk all things books!

This week I read Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki. With this, I've now read ten books in 2025 which I personally find very impressive. Now I'm just two books away from my reading goal of twelve books. Have you been reading anything this week?

Last week I mentioned reading Yeonamm-dong's Smiley Laundromat by Kim Jiyun, translated into English by Shanna Tan. I'd been seeing that book at bookstores for a while and found the cover very warm and inviting. So, one day on my way home from work, I dropped by and got myself a copy.

As the name hints, it's based around a laundromat, situated in a block of Seoul bustling with retail stores, cafés and restaurants. It's a warm, cosy, open 24×7 laundromat with a coffee machine and a well-stocked bookshelf.

On a table in this laundromat, someone leaves a notebook, and people,waiting for their laundry to get done, start writing on it. This leads to many heart-to-heart exchanges as the book’s various characters start writing in the notebook about their various struggles in life, and reading those, other characters try to provide answers or just emotional support.

The book is structured in five chapters. Each chapter tells its own story with its own characters. However, these characters make appearances in each other’s stories as well. So it's like a collection of interconnected short stories. I really enjoyed this structuring.

The cast of characters is very diverse and so are their stories. We have an old widower who lives alone in his forty year old house with his dog, a housewife struggling financially while also having to worry about her young daughter, an aspiring scriptwriter who currently works as an assistant to a very famous scriptwriter, a young college student who finds out that her boyfriend has been sharing intimate details of their relationship with his friends over a group chat, a young man trying to catch a scammer his younger brother fell victim to which pushed him to commit suicide, and finally the first old man’s son, a successful plastic surgeon who is struggling to support his son and wife in the US.

The book to me didn't feel like something you could make a literature course on. But neither did I expect it to be. At times I also thought the writing was a little immature because things seemed like they were getting resolved a little too easily. But you know what? Life is always sucking bad enough, I need this positivity. That's exactly why I bought this book.

I just had one bone to pick, not with the story, but with the translator and the editor. In the first chapter, one sentence is translated differently in two places. I think when you're doing translation work (and I do translation work), you have to make sure that you're being consistent. Otherwise it gets confusing for the readers. But also, weren't there editors? Proofreaders? This is such a bad oversight, and one quite easy to catch. I wish it hadn't happened.

But overall, I really loved this book and the point it makes about human bonds and the importance of community.

What about you? Have you read this book? Or any other translated Korean book? I'd love to know!!!

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That’s it for today, I'll be back in your inbox next week.

Until then,

Joyie 🌻