Why South Koreans keep buying books they admit are shallow

- When I Want To Die But I Want To Eat Tteokbokki appeared in 2018, it opened up something rare in South Korean publishing. Part memoir, part therapeutic dialogue, the book was grounded in author Baek Se-hee's experience of clinical depression.

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Classified as a Korean essay by local bookstores, it stood out because it offered a vulnerable personal narrative.

Seven years on, the same category looks very different. Bookstores across South Korea showcase row after row of pastel-coloured volumes repeating variations of the same lines:

You Are Enough Just By Existing.

Even Standing Still Is Moving Forward.

Happiness Lives In Ordinary Days.

These are what the industry loosely calls healing essays. They are short, comprising brief paragraphs or fragments and designed for skimming. Unlike memoirs anchored in life experience, they function less as narratives and more as collections of quotable phrases.

And they sell.

In the monthly bestseller charts of South Korea's largest bookstore chains - Kyobo Book Centre, Yes24 and Aladin - at least two or three of the top 10 titles are these healing essays.