In following the fates of these two women, their fragmented friendship, and their equally fragmented country, the novel explores the themes of haenyeo culture in the face of progress, the price of anger, and the role of understanding in achieving forgiveness.īaby divers Young-sook and Mi-ja begin their training as haenyeo female divers of Jeju Island on the same day. The country’s struggles to recover from its trauma is mirrored in the broken friendship between the two divers that takes half a century to repair. Young-sook and Mi-ja form a close friendship as they learn to become divers together, get married, have babies, and both suffer through a particularly difficult period of South Korea’s history right after World War II. While the diver’s history proceeds in chronological fashion, the narrative of each segment of her life is bracketed by chapters taking place in 2008.
The rest of the book consists of Young-sook’s life story told from her first-person perspective. The activity taking place in 2008 is described by an omniscient narrator perceiving Young-sook as an eighty-five-year-old woman. There are two distinct points of view employed in the novel. The action of the story primarily takes place on Jeju Island off the coast of South Korea, with additional episodes occurring during a diving expedition near Vladivostok, Russia. It follows the friendship between two divers named Young-sook and Mi-ja, spanning episodes in their lives from 1938 through 2008. The Island of Sea Women explores the culture of South Korean female divers known as the haenyeo.
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