We will find out the girl is Mi-ja, the city-born, orphaned daughter of a Japanese collaborator, who is caught stealing from Young-sook’s family’s fields when she is seven years old, on a day that Mi-ja will later describe as the one of the best in her life. This frame sets up a mystery: Who is the woman Young-sook denied, and why did she lie? What happened between them? See wants us to know this, though Young-sook refuses to acknowledge it. She begins in a familiar way: a not-so-chance encounter on a beach on the remote Jeju Island off the tip of South Korea sets an old woman’s mind on the past a family of Americans asks Young-sook, who lives on the island, if she recognizes a woman in a black-and-white photograph, and of course she does.

In her latest novel, The Island of Sea Women, Lisa See tackles the notion of women’s fiction head-on. Nor is there a woman who has lived completely free of a man’s world.

There is no life without family, friendship, connection, even if these are disastrous. But there is no human life in which a woman is not relevant - as a mother, daughter, lover, friend, neighbor, boss, enemy, if not existing purely as a self. To describe a novel as “women’s fiction” is to say that female lives are not as interesting, not as necessary or as worthy. Descriptors are warnings, created for readers who find stories about people of a different race, culture, sexual identity, societal or physical experience hard to follow, or vaguely discomforting, or simply irrelevant. IT’S BEEN ASKED BEFORE, but what exactly is women’s fiction? The definition according to the Women’s Fiction Writers Association - “layered stories in which the plot is driven by the main character’s emotional journey toward a more fulfilled self” - drips with subtext.

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