As a schoolgirl and student she is harassed in public, as a young woman searching for a job she is discriminated against in favour of men. As a child, she and her sister watch on as their younger brother is favoured by absolutely everyone, including their own mother (who sometimes seems to enact this injustice against her will).

It is, after all, an examination of inequality, presenting Jiyoung as the everywoman who has experienced discrimination, intimidation and unrealistic expectations every day of her life on one basis alone: her gender. Her behavioural quirks are never explained, but nor is this the point of the novel. Kim Jiyoung is a case study, but in so much more than a fictional sense. The reason for this (and the footnotes peppering the text) is only fully revealed in the final chapter, in which we learn that we have just been reading a psychiatrist’s report on his patient, Kim Jiyoung, who was referred to him by her husband when she started displaying signs of ‘abnormal behaviour’, chiefly by mimicking other women she knows. Aside from biographical events and reported conversations, we learn very little about her – thoughts and feelings, if expressed at all, are only relayed to us at considerable remove. From her very name to the life she leads as a stay-at-home Seoul mother, who used to work at an advertising agency but gave up her job to care for her daughter, everything about her is ordinary.

Kim Jiyoung, the novel’s main protagonist, has often been described as an everywoman.

Cho nam joo her name is