Kim Ji-young is born in the spring of 1982, and is living 2019 as someone’s daughter, a wife, a colleague, and a mother. She has a husband, Dae-hyeon, and a daughter, and a family the notes call her support. Before the book, the writer wants a word for feminism — they spell it in a slightly off form — as equality of women’s rights and opportunities, covering social and political movements and theories. Oddly, they say, the heroine is not “I,” as most books would have it, but is written in the third person as “Kim Ji-young-ssi.”

The book opens with her childhood and her mother’s story. The mother studied well as a girl, yet sacrificed herself for her brothers, earned money, and looked after them. After marriage she spent her life caring for her mother-in-law. Because that mother-in-law kept hoping for a grandson, a younger sibling under Ji-young was not carried to term — because the child would have been a daughter. A son was born later, and Ji-young grew up as one of three. After the younger brother arrived, she and her older sister lived with the son preference of their parents and grandmother.

In primary school a boy in her pair keeps tormenting her. She weeps and appeals to the class teacher, who tells her the boy does it because he likes her. She cries and asks to change partners, and is later paired with a different boy. In a coeducational middle school, the boys may go in sneakers and running shirts; the girls must wear stockings and heels, an undershirt so that underwear will not show, and are not allowed short sleeves. In high school she attends an academy. One day, on the bus home, a boy she does not know follows her; she is badly frightened and tries to avoid him. Angry at that reception, he swears at her: in the academy he had always sat in the seat in front, smiled, greeted her, and, as he has it, been led on — so why, now, treat him as something strange? The notes stop on that bus. They do not go on into a later shop recap of workplaces, resignation, or later slogans.