Complete Happiness
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Summary
"It's something you can't tell anyone."
Half-Moon Marsh is shrouded in mist year-round.
Every morning, a woman brings her daughter here to feed the ducks, her movements unhurried and precise. Her name is Shin Yu-na, and to the outside world she is the perfect woman: beautiful, rational, never out of order. In her daughter Ji-yu's eyes, her mother's love is an incontrovertible doctrine: love means obedience, and a good daughter must never say no.
Yet the bathroom at home always carries a sweet, raw smell that never washes away, the ducks often let out shrill, mournful cries late at night, and the father who promised to stay with her has suddenly vanished. Ji-yu discovers that the people who once briefly warmed her seem to have been quietly subtracted from her life by some force.
In her dreams, the mysterious faceless figure in a raincoat draws closer step by step, eyes hidden in shadow fixed on Ji-yu as if to devour her. "It" demands in her mother's voice: Ji-yu, what did you see out there?
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Adult readers who enjoy psychological suspense intertwined with family ethics
- Readers interested in childhood-perspective narration and unreliable narration
- Readers concerned with covert control in parent-child relationships
- Novel readers accustomed to feeling atmosphere build over continuous reading
Not a good fit for
- Readers seeking a light, healing reading experience
- Readers sensitive to oppressive atmosphere filtered through a child's perspective
- Suspense readers expecting fast-paced plotting and clear-cut solutions
Reading tips
- Read over two or three consecutive evenings to preserve the continuity of atmosphere; avoid fragmented reading, which weakens the oppressive feel.
- Pay attention to the gap between each of the mother's "doctrinaire" statements and Ji-yu's inner reactions—that is where the book's tension lies.
- After finishing, revisit the opening duck-feeding passage to reconsider the unease seeded in that everyday action.
About the publisher
Guowen Runhua Culture Media (Beijing) Co., Ltd. is a book planning organization whose main publishing areas are foreign literature, science fiction and social novels, with 34 titles in its catalogue. Its representative list combines Korean and French literature, ranging from Choi Eun-young's Even with the Faintest Light and Kim Cho-yeop's The World Just Left Behind to Georges Perec's W: My Private Auschwitz; works such as Hwang Sok-yong's The Familiar World and Welcome to the Bookshop in Hyunam-dong reflect an attention to social reality and everyday experience. Its translators and authors include Xu Lihong, Xue Zhou, Fan Yanmei and Wang Jin, indicating a stable translator base for introducing contemporary foreign fiction. Because public information is limited, other publishing areas are not described here.
Contents
- 版权信息
- 第一部 她的鸭子们
- 第一章
- 第二章
- 第三章
- 第二部 她是谁
- 第四章
- 第五章
- 第六章
- 第三部 完全的幸福
- 第七章
- 第八章
- 第九章
- 后记
- 作者的话
FAQ
Is this a pure horror novel?
Does the child's perspective make the story hard to follow?
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About the author
Ding Youjing is an author for whom publicly available information is currently limited. The library holds two of this author's works, The Origin of Evil Seeds and Complete Happiness. Judging from these two books, Ding Youjing's writing spans the common categories of suspense and mystery fiction and foreign literature, tending toward narratives framed by suspense and mystery while carrying the expressive concerns of foreign literature. Since basic details such as nationality, dates of birth and death, and English name are not clearly recorded, this introduction can only present the author's writing through the works themselves: using the narrative structure of suspense and mystery to carry observations of human nature and circumstance. The titles The Origin of Evil Seeds and Complete Happiness also form a certain tension, suggesting that the writing may move between crime and happiness, darkness and light. Readers may take these two works as a starting point for understanding this author, while further biographical and creative information remains to be supplemented by public sources.
Public information about Chang Yi is limited. It is currently known that two of the author's works are classified under documentary literature and foreign literature, with the representative titles A Criminal Profiler's Notes and Complete Happiness. Judging from the subject matter, Chang Yi's writing touches on criminal psychology and profiling while also exploring the theme of happiness, spanning both true-crime documentary and reflections on life. The writing emphasizes presenting real cases and psychological analysis, seeking to bring observations of human nature and social reality into a documentary style. The contrast suggested by the titles—crime tracking on one side and the pursuit of happiness on the other—also implies an interest in the psychological states of people in extreme and everyday circumstances. The available material is not yet sufficient to reconstruct the full picture of the author's life and work, and readers may turn to these two books to understand the direction of the writing.
