It all begins with one strange encounter. Jini is a young scientist, with an instinct for connecting with primates. She stumbles on a trafficking operation in a random, isolated shop in Kinshasa, but despite having a poignant moment of care for the caged bonobo she finds there, she balks when she hears footsteps. Her fear keeps her from acting, and she’s left knowing that she failed utterly to help the young primate. This doubt carries over into her work back in South Korea. Where, as she cradles a rescued bonobo in her arms, the van carrying them crashes; in the chaos that ensues, while being thrown through the air, her spirit is somehow ricocheted out of her body—and into the bonobo’s. Bonobo, by bestselling author You-Jeong Jeong, translated from the Korean by An Seon Jae, depicts Jini’s fight to get back to her body with the help of young vagrant Minjoo, a man who was cast out of his family home.
You-Jeong is often described as “South Korea’s Stephen King,” but that comparison is misleading for this particular title. While parts of this book are suspenseful, and parts are certainly horrific, this is not a horror novel but is instead a rich fiction about the miraculous world happening inside of animals, and how our connections with each other can help make us better. When pulled into Genie’s mind, Jini experiences Genie’s past, seeing both moments that no scientist has ever witnessed of the bonobo’s community and social life, and moments that she’s known about but never seen: the horrors and cruelty of illegal animal trafficking. Both Jini, trapped in Genie’s mind, and Minjoo, watching Jini move in the body of a bonobo, learn to find humanity in the primate’s eyes, movements, and motion.
In some ways this is a straightforward story: Jini is trapped in a bonobo’s body, and they must be put back to rights, to save both human and bonobo. But in the threads of this tapestry are profound questions about what it means to live a fulfilling life, particularly in a contemporary environment in which many people, particularly youth, are feeling massively disillusioned about what, exactly, it is that they should be living for. Minjoo grew up watching his father and mother grind everyday, seemingly in order to earn that same life for their children. His father, tired of his listlessness, tosses him out of the house. By the time he reaches the abandoned pavilion where he’ll encounter Jini-as-Genie, Minjoo is considering dying by suicide simply because he doesn’t see a reason to keep living.
Jini, meanwhile, is haunted by death. She has no guardians—no family, no one holding her—and can only find connection, it seems, with primates that her bosses chide her for getting too attached to. Tired of being told that her way of caring for living beings isn’t the right way, and haunted by her failure in Kinshasa, she even considers quitting her life’s work, and going to study philosophy. There isn’t much point in that endeavor, but she seems to want to flee from the heavy emotional investment she finds herself carrying for the primates in her care.
Ironically, her connection to her primates is precisely what brings her into the most philosophical space of this novel. Her overlapping mind with Genie’s, the way she’s sucked down into Genie’s memories, mirrors a certain idea of the subconscious, of a deeper emotional self whose darkest memories have been sublimated. Genie isn’t present, but sleepwalking, it seems, when Jini’s mind is pushed down. This has a clear metaphorical meaning of course, which is that ever since her capture and imprisonment, Genie is in a kind of fog, not truly able to live, forced only to survive.
Spread outward, it has meaning for Minjoo and Jini as well. While death is inevitable, meaning seems to lie in action. The characters’ fear often entraps them, freezing them in place, and Minjoo is eager to have no responsibilities. But the adventure of Jini and Genie seems to show him that life is about committing to something, about finding those moments of investment and taking the chance of responsibility. In that way, Bonobo is a profoundly hopeful text, one that will appeal to fans of Remarkably Bright Creatures, despite its darker tone: a story that’s fundamentally about a connection between an animal and two humans that inevitably will change the lives of all three.
FICTION
by You-Jeong Jeong
Translated by An Seon Jae
Creature Publishing
Published on September 1, 2026
