지푸라기 왕관을 쓴 여자 (The Woman With a Straw Crown)

The Woman Wearing a Straw Crown begins with Matsuno Hana living an ordinary but emotionally constricted life in Japan. Everything changes when the police call her at work and tell her that her mother, Matsuno Sachiko, has been critically injured in a fire at the small lunchbox shop she has run for years. Hana rushes to the hospital and finds Sachiko horribly burned. Just before being taken into emergency surgery, Sachiko manages to give her daughter one final instruction: find Yoon Dong-ju, the chairwoman of the Korean conglomerate Seil, discover the truth, and “put everything back.” Sachiko dies without explaining what she means. The authorities tell Hana that a gas leak may have caused the explosion, though arson and even a possible hate crime are also considered because Sachiko is Zainichi Korean. Hana is left alone with her mother’s ashes and a mystery that immediately connects the fire to a past Sachiko had spent decades trying to conceal.

Hana has always known that her mother was hiding from something. When Hana was ten, she and Sachiko were living in Korea when their house was destroyed in another enormous fire. Hana remembers being rescued by her mother, being rushed to the hospital and then taken almost immediately to the airport. Sachiko fled Korea with her daughter and settled in Yokohama, where they deliberately lived quietly and inconspicuously. Sachiko avoided neighbors, kept an emergency suitcase packed, and behaved as if someone might come for them at any moment. Hana never received an explanation. Now, after Sachiko’s death, she searches the apartment and finds the old suitcase her mother brought from Korea. Inside is an elaborate mother-of-pearl dressing case with a secret locked compartment. Hana cannot initially open it, but the object becomes one of the main links between Sachiko’s hidden identities and the secrets of Seil.

Hana researches Yoon Dong-ju and discovers that she is the formidable daughter of Seil founder Yoon Chang-guk and the woman who eventually took control of the family empire after a vicious succession struggle. With the help of journalist Maeng Jun-ho, Hana begins investigating the Yoon family. Jun-ho has his own interest in exposing Seil and possesses an unpublished interview in which Dong-ju describes her family history. Dong-ju explains how her father obsessed over sons, fathered children with several women, and humiliated his wife through repeated affairs. Dong-ju, although the eldest legitimate child and clearly talented, was treated as fundamentally secondary because she was female. Her younger half-brothers Yoon Shin-ju, Yoon Pil-ju and Yoon Kang-ju were all damaged in different ways by the grotesque family structure. Shin-ju became violent, entitled and reckless; Pil-ju was weak and emotionally fragile; Kang-ju had artistic inclinations despised by his father. Dong-ju herself learned to survive by transforming resentment into ambition. After her mother’s suicide attempt and eventual death, she decided not merely to succeed within her father’s empire but to take from him the thing he loved most: Seil itself.