Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon

Published by Simon & Schuster on August 6, 2013

In 1954, at the age of 25, Yohan leaves a prison camp in a UN truck and boards a Japanese cargo ship crewed by South Koreans. Captured by Americans after he was buried in snow during a bombing, Yohan is the only prisoner who declines repatriation to North Korea. Instead, he accepts an offer to apprentice for Kiyoshi, a Japanese tailor in Brazil, a country of which he has never heard where people speak a language he does not understand. Snow Hunters follows several years of Yohan's new life, with flashbacks to his interment and to his younger days, both before and after his country was divided.

Paul Yoon's debut novel is characterized by fine prose and honest emotion. It is filled with powerful images of war and poverty and of lives that are both unburdened and unaided by technology. The novel is built upon resonant scenes of Yohan's life: helping a blind prisoner play poker with medics; dancing in the snow with a tipsy nurse on Christmas; sitting with two Brazilian children, apparently orphaned, as they sell trinkets; Kiyoshi's tears when his hands become too unsteady to pin a jacket; Yohan's habitual search for lost or discarded objects. This is a story of small kindnesses in an unkind world, of people helping each other in surroundings of misery, of kindnesses repaid in unexpected ways.

Several themes echo through Snow Hunters: fate; the unitary nature of the world we all share; the changes -- generally for the better, temporarily for the worse -- that people and places undergo; the impact that seemingly insignificant people have on others; the simple pleasures of life; the changing perceptions of time ("how time could completely abandon someone" when love enters a life). Snow Hunters is a short novel, written with an economy of language that more writers should emulate, but the story is bigger than it first appears. The ending is perfect in its ambiguity because, for Yohan, it isn't the ending. He has more life to live, and how it will turn out is, as always, a mystery.

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