When I travel to new places I make a point to find an indie bookstore to browse through before I leave, and usually that leads to me buying even more books to add to my ever growing library. In March I went to Nashville to see a band called Inhaler, I’m not here to talk about that, but damn I want to see those boys again. My last morning there I went to this little indie place called The Bookshop and it was the smallest curated bookshop I’ve ever been into. You could tell there was intention and careful thought put into all of the books on their shelves, which I can’t say for the big chains of course. There were paper signs posted to displays asking patrons not to take photos of books in the store, which I can’t say I’ve ever considered being an out of place practice.
The Disaster Tourist stood out to me for two reasons: the cover was colorful and eye catching and the plot immediately had the gears turning in my head. Yona works for a company called Jungle, a cutting edge travel agency of sorts offering curated vacations to destinations riddle by tragedy. After being targeted and harassed by her boss, Yona finds herself being pushed out of her position at Jungle. In a last ditch effort to save her job she agrees to go on one of Jungle’s least popular vacation packages for free to evaluate its success. But, it turns out something sinister is bubbling beneath the surface of Mui, the desert island Yona has been sent off to.
Yun Ko-Eun works with a lot of important themes in this book; exploitation, corruption, and morality are only a few. There were no frills or expected twists in this story, only raw observations about the evils at work in this world–unsurprisingly most of them are human. I hadn’t really thought much about people’s morbid curiosity toward disasters/disaster zones, but the happenings on Mui where this takes place reminded me a bit of the show Dark Tourist. Some disasters end up marking our collective history never to be forgotten while others come to pass without much of a second thought. What is it exactly that makes one disaster more interesting or memorable than another? Is it how odd the incident is? Number of casualties? Total devastation?
I would classify this as a literary thriller of sorts. There was a slow build up to the heart of this book while Yona considers her place in the world outside of her job; it all felt very relevant to the burnout we’re experiencing in 2022. Ten years of her life have been spent at a company she comes to realize doesn’t care about her and she ends up going to extremes to help cement her place within the company anyway because it has become all she knows. Her living space is provided by Jungle and her co-workers are the people she sees most day to day. She rarely gets credit for the work she puts into planning new disaster vacation packages. We can all relate to working a job we don’t love for a boss we can’t stand all for the sake of being able to meet our basic needs.
I appreciated how morally gray many of the characters we encounter throughout the story turn out. Without giving anything too majorly important away, Yona is eventually enlisted to help orchestrate a fake disaster on Mui to bolster tourism to the dying island. It seems like her best shot at saving her job, until she realizes exactly the cost of the twisted plan. The people of Mui have been exploited by an old story about warring groups who once lived on the island; there was some level of cannibalism and beheading involved along with a sinkhole. The story has become tired and forgotten over the years, and Mui’s current residents are being exploited for the gains of a corporation to benefit a handful of people at great cost to the people of Mui. It’s an age old story, native peoples being threatened by outside forces in the name of money.
How far is Yona willing to go to save her job? And how far are businesses and corporations willing to go if it means cutting their losses to make a few bucks? What does the cost end up being for those corporations and complicit people if anything? Yun Ko-Eun shows us exactly where greed and self-preservation lead to with finesse, in desperate times and simply just because. It’s not really a tough pill to swallow anymore that we live in a world that values profit over people, and this book doesn’t shy away from this idea. This story is a tough one to describe, but if you want to read a bit of relevant social commentary with some humor thrown in for good measure you should pick up a copy of The Disaster Tourist.
This is one of those books you really have to read for yourself. No amount of my rambling could do it justice and it earns 5/5 stars from me.
The Rummy Writer 