Excerpt from Tailbone by Che Yeun, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Don't touch that switch. That's for the billboard up there. I switch it on and off every night and morning. No one else."

"No one else," I repeated. "Got it."

The lodging house had always been in her family, she explained with pride. Her father had bought the land just after the war, and when he died, her mother had turned it into a boardinghouse for young women—in the years when you couldn't think of anything worse than a young woman living alone. But they did live alone, there had always been women who lived alone, and many had done so right here.

She showed me to my room, how to shut the window properly so mosquitoes couldn't come in, where to plug in a light. How to ignore the rectangular stain on the wall, where an air conditioner unit had been ripped out. How to lock my room from the inside and outside.

"These girls are thieves," she said. "Not all of them, but enough of them. They never leave without taking something from the others."

We went back out into the hall and down to the other end, where a small kitchen led to a small bathroom, just two shower stalls and a toilet. With a firm hold, the landlady showed me how to switch on the boiler and wait for ten minutes until the hot water came.

"You know, this neighborhood wasn't always a dump. The Japanese used to live here, lots of them, the colonial leaders and businessmen, they built some really nice houses here and gave themselves the best of everything, the oldest persimmon trees and the cleanest wells. It's good soil, giving soil. And they knew it."

"Persimmon trees? Where? I've never seen a persimmon tree."

"Oh, it's all gone now. They covered up the wells too. But we have that same water running underneath. Giving water. You can't dig anywhere without hitting a vein. Makes everything lush. It's all the mountain runoffs. They run through this part of the city. Right under our feet. And once, it was the richest and the most powerful who flocked here to drink from it. You didn't know that, did you? You thought this was just like all the other shitstain neighborhoods? Of course that's what you thought."

The landlady spat out a bitter breath. She ran her hand over my door, which had been painted over so many times that a thick layer bubbled. "Well, I guess that's all gone. We used to have persimmon trees and quince trees and magnolias on every corner. Now it's just a forest of cheap efficiency units."

"Cheap is good, though. People will always need something cheap."

"Not cheap like this. None of you girls should be living here. I would rip out my eyes if I knew my daughter was living like this."

"You have a daughter?"

"No. And that's for the best."

Her footsteps spiraled down the stairwell.

I spread out on the floor of my new room. I took out my old bath towel from my bag and wrapped it around me. From another room somewhere, the stink of cigarettes wafted in. I lit up a cigarette myself and decided to smoke the whole pack. I kicked up a leg and stretched it towards the opposite wall. There would be no room for any kind of bed, not even a mattress, not that I could afford it. A soft buzz vibrated through my floor, maybe the electricity for the yellow billboard on the roof.

I passed out like that, cigarette in my hand. I woke up and saw that I'd received dozens of calls and text messages from my mother.

Where are you?

What do you want for dinner?

I can make anything you want, its just us two again

I also saw that, in my short sleep, I'd burned a hole through my towel. At first the burn upset me, like I'd damaged something. But when I brought my towel to the communal shower, I discovered that the hole fit perfectly over the plastic hook on the wall.

* * *

Morning brought strange sounds I'd never heard before. The sounds of a neighborhood where everyone lived alone. No families, no playgrounds, no toy shops with stuffed animals piled up against the windows. But we had convenience stores on every corner that sold cigarettes, booze, and frozen hot dogs all day and night. The occasional roars of delivery trucks and motorcycles that used our alleys to get around the traffic of the main roads, to cut through the city.

Excerpted from Tailbone by Che Yeun. Copyright © 2026 by Che Yeun. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.