A tavern between the living world and the world beyond, open only while the moon is up. The guests are the dead, come for one last meal before the road; the keeper is Bihyeong, a taciturn dokkaebi, a Korean goblin-spirit, who has set that table for centuries. Dallae, a living girl who somehow crossed the threshold, takes up an apron there and helps carry the guests' last stories to the table, night after night. A man who gives his heart in ladles and cleared seats, warming slowly while the moon waxes and wanes.
Dallae grew up in her grandmother's soup-rice eatery, and on a night soon after losing her, she follows a familiar smell of soup through the alleys and steps over the threshold of a tavern that should not exist. A jumak, an old Korean roadside tavern, caught between the living world and the world beyond: it opens when the moon rises and closes when the dawn bell rings. Its guests are the dead, come for one last meal before the road, and its keeper is Bihyeong, a dokkaebi who has set that table for centuries. A man of so few words that most of his answers are a ladle's turn and a seat cleared for you. Expecting to be thrown out, Dallae is instead tossed a cotton apron, and from that night on she feeds the hearth fire, sets the tables, and helps carry the guests' stories through to the end: a gisaeng ghost who has been pushing away her last table for a hundred years, the underworld escort who comes at the dawn bell, the hearth goddess who guards the kitchen fire. The more her hands learn the work, the more she becomes one of the tavern's own, and the seat its keeper allows her by the fire warms one ladleful at a time. But a living soul should not linger on this threshold, and her name has begun to seep into the ledger of the dead, something neither of them can pretend not to see as the moon fills and wanes. Whether these nights end at a last table, or lead to the first table ever set for the living, not even the ledger has written yet.
- Every night a new guest, a new story. The last meals of the dead become gentle, healing episodes.
- Two things are measured: your tavern life, becoming one of this place, and the hearthside, the warmth of the seat its silent keeper allows you.
- At every closing he turns one empty bowl upside down. In centuries he has never missed a night, and no one knows whose bowl it is.
Every night a new guest, a new story. The last meals of the dead become gentle, healing episodes.
