Almond

The Prologue begins with a brief epigraph-like quote, establishing that the novel is “about a monster meeting another monster” (1). Yunjae then says that he will not reveal whether the story ends tragically or happily, both to get the reader more interested in the story and because those words are ultimately meaningless.

Yunjae describes the incident that led to his mother’s hospitalization and his grandmother’s death. He says that six died and describes each of the six—a college student, two men at the front of a parade, a police officer, Yunjae’s grandmother, and the perpetrator of the crime himself. Yunjae says he watched the entire bloodbath blankly.

Yunjae jumps back in time narratively to his childhood and describes the first major incident that demonstrated his alexithymia. When he was six, his mother was late picking him up from kindergarten and he wandered off on his own, coming to a bridge. He spat down onto a car, unafraid of the height. He stumbled upon an alley and found a middle school boy being beaten to death. Yunjae goes to a corner store and tries to get help, but because of his expressionless face and lack of vocabulary, the shopkeeper ignores him.