Microhabitat, and What a Room Costs Besides the Rent

It is the turn of the year, 2014 into 2015, and a woman in Seoul is doing her accounts on top of a suitcase. Her room is small and has no heating. When her boyfriend visits, it is too cold to take anything off, and they agree to wait for spring. The suitcase is her table. The notebook on it is exact to the last won: rent; the herbal medicine she takes for hair that is turning white too early; cigarettes; one glass of whisky at the bar she always goes to. She cleans other people’s flats for a day rate, and the day rate has not moved.

Then two prices change. Her landlord, who has left the rent alone for years, puts it up. And on the first day of 2015 the best-selling cigarettes in Korea go from 2,500 won a packet to 4,500. Miso does what careful people do. She takes on more work. She switches to a cheaper brand. She goes through the numbers again, and the year still ends short. So she looks down the list of what her life costs, and she crosses out the room.

That is the premise of Jeon Go-woon’s Microhabitat, and it is usually passed on as a joke with a moral folded inside it: a woman gives up a roof for whisky and cigarettes. Told that way, the film turns into one of two stories. Either it is a lesson in thrift, and the ending is her punishment, or it is a romance of freedom, and the ending is her crown. It is neither, and it takes some care to be neither. Miso packs a suitcase and a list of the five friends she once played in a band with, and goes to ask each of them in turn for somewhere to sleep. Every one of them has a room. And every one of them, it turns out, has paid for that room with something that is not money.

Jeon put it plainly when she brought the film to the New York Asian Film Festival. Speaking through an interpreter, she said she had wanted to convey the idea that “to have your own place in Seoul, every one of us has to give up on something in their lives”. Her first friend, she went on, has given up rest; the second has lost her dream; the third is in debt; the fourth has never been able to leave his parents. Miso’s trade is the only one that the people around her, and many of the film’s viewers, have felt free to call a vice.

This essay is about that difference: about who decides which lines in a life count as necessary, and what the film does, and declines to do, with a woman who drew the line somewhere else. It is not an argument for giving up a home, and it is not an argument for whisky. It is an argument that a budget is a moral document, that everyone’s has a line in it they will not cut, and that a woman whose line was a glass and a cigarette was being no less serious than anyone else. The film’s ending declines to say whether her choice was freedom or its price, and this essay will not say it either.

This essay discusses the whole film, including its last scenes. If you would rather meet Miso first, do; she is good company. When the essay reaches the ending it says so again.

Microhabitat, Sogongnyeo in Korean, was written and directed by Jeon Go-woon, and it is her first feature. It was produced by Gwanghwamun Cinema, a small company she co-runs with filmmaker friends who take turns working on one another’s films, and by Motto Pictures. It runs 106 minutes. Esom plays Miso and Ahn Jae-hong plays her boyfriend, Han-sol. The five old bandmates are played by Kang Jin-ah (Moon-yeong), Kim Gook-hee (Hyeon-jeong), Lee Sung-wook (Dae-yong), Choi Deok-moon (Rok-yi) and Kim Jae-hwa (Jeong-mi). The film premiered at the Busan International Film Festival in October 2017, where it won the CGV Arthouse Award, and opened in Korean cinemas on 22 March 2018. At the Seoul Independent Film Festival in December 2017, audiences voted it their best feature, and in 2018 Jeon won the Blue Dragon award for best new director.

The story, in outline. Miso has been a professional housekeeper for three years. Han-sol wants to be a cartoonist; he works in a factory and lives in its dormitory, so their dates are evenings in her cold room, or films seen on the tickets he gets for giving blood. His one hope is to afford a home for the two of them.

Start with the numbers, because Miso does, and because the easiest way to misread her is to assume she never did the sums.

She is paid by the day. In the arithmetic the film’s own trailer lays out, a day’s work brings her 45,000 won, and it goes on whisky, cigarettes, dates and rent. The official synopsis adds the detail that makes the rest inevitable: when the new year comes, prices go up and her day rate stays where it was. The biggest of those rises was not invented for the film. On 1 January 2015 a tax increase took Korea’s best-selling cigarettes from 2,500 won a packet to 4,500. At her day rate, one such packet is now a tenth of a day’s work.

As for the rent, her landlord asks for 50,000 won more a month, and he is sorry to ask. Nobody in this part of the film is a villain.

What she will not do is borrow. When Han-sol, who is still paying off his student loans, talks about raising money so that they can live together, she tells him that her goal is to live without debt. The line is easy to pass over, and it is the key to her whole budget. Everyone else in the film who has a room is paying for it in some currency, and one of them, as we will see, is paying for it with twenty years. Miso has decided that the one thing she will not sign is a claim on her future.

Nor is she giving up on rooms. Three critics, Jeremy Clarke, Jared Mobarak and Phoebe Chen of MUBI’s Notebook, all record her plan: to live rent-free for a while and put money aside for the deposit on a cheaper place. A monthly rental in Korea generally asks for a deposit up front, and a woman living from day to day cannot easily save one while she is also paying rent. The list of five names is not a flight from housing. It is her way back to it.

Now try the other budget, the one the thrift reading recommends. The sum is this essay’s, not the film’s. Suppose she had given up the cigarettes instead, a packet a day: at 4,500 won, that comes to about 1.64 million won a year. At the film’s press screening, Jeon said that it was hard enough to save 100 million won, and that even 100 million would not find you a house. On those figures, Miso’s abstinence would take some sixty years to reach a sum that was already not enough. Chen made the same point in fewer words: giving up daily cigarettes will never turn anyone into a property owner. The thrift reading asks her to surrender the only things she has, in exchange for a room that thrift was never going to buy.

Jeon has said that the character started with herself. In her twenties, she told the film magazine Cine21, she was determined to live somewhere better, so she got used to not eating and not buying, and the strain of living that way became severe. Miso stands at exactly the opposite pole from the woman she was then. None of this makes Miso’s choice wise. It makes it a choice: made with numbers, by someone who knew them, after the careful options had run out.

This essay will not recommend whisky or cigarettes, and it will not lecture anyone about them either. The film does neither, and its director has been unusually clear about why she put these two things, and not others, at the centre of Miso’s budget.

Part of it is adulthood: they are things you are only allowed once you are grown up, Jeon said at the press screening, with long histories of their own. In New York she added a darker gloss: they stand for how hard reality is to bear without getting drunk on something. And she declined to pass them off as self-care. They may not be physically good for Miso, she said, but psychologically they are a way of looking after herself, and she called that a duality. It is a more honest account of small comforts than most films manage.

Part of it is class. Expensive liquor, she told Cine21, is a dream that someone with nothing is not supposed to have, which is exactly why it is Miso’s. And part of it is gender. She put the cigarettes in because Korean society portrays women who smoke far too negatively, and films hand a woman a cigarette whenever they want to mark her as tough, when gentle and kind women smoke too; it is only a taste. Through that choice she wanted to reflect, quietly, a feminism of her own.

The film’s official synopsis opens with a single line: “No home, but I have my thoughts and my taste.” The Korean word rendered here as taste, chwihyang, covers preferences, the things a person is drawn to. The line is written in Miso’s own voice, and it is a claim about property. When the room goes, taste is what is left that is hers. It cannot be evicted.

This Library has argued the underlying point before, in “Pleasure Is Not a Reward for Finishing Everything”, which described how capable adults organise pleasure like dessert after an impossible meal: first the work, the family, every message, and then permission may arrive, which it rarely does. Miso keeps accounts too, real ones in a notebook, and she has done something with them that very few people do. She has moved the glass out of the dessert column and into the fixed costs. It is not a reward for a good week. It is a rent of another kind.

The same essay made an honest concession, and it matters here more than anywhere. For a woman whose income barely covers her rent, it said, putting pleasure off is often not a distortion at all; it is an accurate description of a life with too little money in it. Miso is exactly that woman. The film’s quiet provocation is to take the one person that argument set aside, the one who really cannot afford it, and have her refuse to wait anyway. It does not praise her for it. It keeps her company while she does it, and it counts the cost.

Set her beside another cleaner. In Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, a man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo keeps a small, fixed set of pleasures: old cassettes on the drive to work, a paperback before sleep, sunlight through the leaves, photographed at lunch. This Library’s essay on that film, “Perfect Days and the Difference Between Solitude and Emotional Absence”, noticed who is allowed to be read as content: a man who withdraws into a small, orderly life is seen as austere and dignified, while a woman who lives the same way needs a defence. And whoever copes by keeping plants and taking baths is told her life is in order, while whoever copes by drinking is told something is wrong. Miso also cleans for a living and has a usual place at the end of the day; hers happen to be the pleasures that get called vices. Before the film is over, the richest of her friends will tell her that a woman without a home has no business with either.

The list is a plan for somewhere to sleep, and Miso arrives at every door with a tray of eggs which, as the critic Richard Gray noticed, she can barely afford. She is not coming to take.

The first friend, Moon-yeong, works so hard at a large company that at lunchtime she hooks herself up to a glucose drip in the office, putting the needle into her own arm with a skill she once learned; she means to work harder still and move to a better job. She has no room to spare, and perhaps no strength to share one. Miso does not argue; she only came, she says, to see how her friend was doing. Moon-yeong’s room costs her rest.

The second, Hyeon-jeong, played keyboards and wrote songs. She welcomes Miso gladly into the home she shares with her husband and his parents, and through the wall Miso hears the husband object. Her in-laws ran a restaurant for thirty years, and Hyeon-jeong, who cooks for all of them, admits how tired she is of it. She falls asleep in the middle of a conversation. In the morning Miso cooks breakfast for her and goes. Jeon’s word for what this friend has given up was her dream. The film does not ask whether she should have married. It shows a woman who opened her door to an old friend at night and was too tired to finish a sentence.

The third, Dae-yong, was the drummer, and her junior in the band. His marriage ended after eight months. His wife wanted a flat, so he bought one, and the repayments will take more than half his pay for twenty years; the flat he bought to keep her is now, in his word, a prison. He has a spare room, and Miso cleans the whole place for him. Then Han-sol, who lives in a men’s dormitory, says he cannot bear her staying with a man, and she moves on. Dae-yong’s room costs him twenty years.

The fourth, Rok-yi, sang. He still lives with his parents, and they are so eager for a daughter-in-law that they set about marrying him to Miso. His mother is delighted to hear that she does housework for a living, as if that settled it; the family puts on a little concert for her; and the next morning Miso finds the doors locked and has to let herself out another way. It is played as comedy, and it is funny. It is also the plainest moment in the film of a woman’s skill being mistaken for her destiny. Rok-yi’s room costs him his independence.

The fifth, Jeong-mi, played guitar. She has married money, has a child and lives in a large house, and when Miso turns up she remembers that Miso once got her out of debt and tells her to stay as long as she likes. It is Jeong-mi who says, cheerfully, that having a child is the one real suffering in life, and then corrects herself: the one real blessing. At last free of rent, Miso starts to save. Then, at dinner, Jeong-mi’s husband asks what his wife was like at university, and Miso tells him about their wild years. Jeong-mi throws her out, with a lecture about whisky and cigarettes and some money towards a deposit. Miso leaves the money behind.

Jeong-mi’s room costs her the person she was before it. The film is careful here, and this essay should be too. The past she keeps from her husband is hers to keep. Miso, who says too much, is not blameless in that scene, and Jeong-mi’s lecture, unkind as it is, comes from a woman who has done her own sums and does not want them reopened at her own table.

Put the five rooms side by side and the pattern is plain. Nobody in this film has a room for the rent alone. What each of them pays besides the rent (rest, a dream, twenty years, a life of one’s own, a past) is invisible because it is the normal price. Miso’s payment is the only visible one, because she refused to make it, and that is why hers is the only one anyone asks her to explain. The film never turns the friends into warnings. They are tired and funny and generous. They paid. So did she. The film’s quarrel is with the price.

Look again at what Miso does in each of those homes. She cooks for Hyeon-jeong. She cleans Dae-yong’s flat from end to end. In Rok-yi’s house, the skill that earns her living is exactly what makes his mother want her for a daughter-in-law. Housework is her trade, and the film is careful about the terms on which she does it.

She sells it by the day. She gives it as thanks. She refuses it as a destiny. The work Hyeon-jeong does as a role, cooking for in-laws who once cooked for a living, Miso does as a wage and as a gift, and the difference between those arrangements is most of what the film has to say about women’s work. The critic Brooke Heinz saw it: Miso has all the cooking and cleaning skills others think ideal in a domestic woman, and instead of using them to meet that standard she uses them “to connect people together and express gratitude”. Phoebe Chen saw the other edge. Cleaning, she wrote, is almost the only thing Miso has to offer in exchanges both emotional and financial, and the film shows that labour without dwelling on exhaustion or turning her into a saint.

Jeon has said where her anger at that division comes from. At five or six, she told the French site Cineserie, she noticed at family holidays at her grandmother’s house that only the women cooked, and that the men’s table got the dishes while the women’s got what was left. She wants her films to denounce that, and to comfort women a little by showing that another world is possible. Microhabitat does it without a speech: it lets one woman do the work on her own terms, and lets us see what those terms cost.

There is one more turn to her trade. Her living depends on other people’s rooms. Late in the film, a young woman whose flat Miso cleans has to give that flat up, and Miso’s job goes with it. Miso’s response is to ask whether she has eaten, and to sit down with her over the meal she wants. A woman without a home, losing her work because someone else is losing hers, still asks the first question of care. The film does not make her a saint for it. It makes her someone who knows exactly what a room is worth.

The scene most people remember is that cold room. It is a scene about heating, and about money. Ahn Jae-hong, who plays Han-sol, said at the press screening that the cold room felt to him like the world itself, with the two of them holding on to each other inside it.

Han-sol is easy to be hard on. His cartoons have gone nowhere, and when Miso sleeps in Dae-yong’s spare room he cannot bear it, so she leaves. Some viewers have been hard on him; Jeon was not. She has called him a very Korean male character, and then argued that he is less macho than most, because he has no problem with Miso smoking. What crushes him, in her account, is the convention that a man must provide for the woman he loves, in a society that looks down on a man who cannot.

Then he gives up drawing and volunteers for a job in Saudi Arabia that will clear his student debts in a couple of years; the posting pays three times his wage, with an allowance for the risk. He is selling two years and some of his safety to buy the home he hoped for. Miso, who rarely cries, weeps when they part. Ahn Jae-hong has said he believes Han-sol means to come back. The film does not say.

Nobody is the villain of this parting. What separates them is a student loan, and the film makes that plain by giving the hardest part to a man who loves her and cannot afford to stay. It makes one more thing plain. Miso, the woman who seemed to need nothing but a glass, a cigarette and her own mind, needed him. Her budget had three lines she would not cut, and the third was a person.

The Korean title, Sogongnyeo, means A Little Princess. It is the name under which Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel of 1905 is known in Korean, and the word itself came from Japanese. An article published by Korea’s National Institute of the Korean Language explains that sogongnyeo began as a character-for-character rendering made when the English title was translated into Japanese. A Japanese translation published in Tokyo in 1910 already carries the title Shōkōjo. So when the film went to Japan as Shōkōjo, the word was going home.

Burnett’s story is about Sara Crewe, a rich pupil at a London boarding school who loses everything when her father dies. She is moved into a bare, unheated attic and put to work as a servant, and she holds on by a single idea: that conduct, not money, is what makes a princess. “If I am a princess in rags and tatters,” she tells herself, “I can be a princess inside.” She thinks of Marie Antoinette in prison, in a black gown, her hair white, and decides the queen was more of a queen then than when everything was grand. When the girl first sees the attic, Burnett writes: “She seldom cried.”

The film’s official synopsis calls Miso a lovable modern-day little princess, and the critic Richard Gray reported that Jeon likened her to Burnett’s heroine: a woman in financial trouble who still manages to be a shoulder for her friends. Once you know the book, the echoes are hard to miss. A servant’s work. A cold room. A dignity that does not depend on money. A woman who rarely cries. Even white hair is in the book, on a queen.

What the film removes is the ending. In Burnett’s novel a benefactor lives next door; he fills the attic with food and warmth and books, which Sara puts down to a kind of magic, turns out to have been her father’s friend, and restores her fortune. Microhabitat has no one next door. The nearest thing to a benefactor is the richest of her friends, whose money comes with a lecture, and Miso leaves it behind. The film keeps every part of the fairy tale except the rescue. That may be the most exact thing it says about its own title: in Seoul in 2015, conduct does not get you a room.

The English title ends up in the same place. A microhabitat is the small, particular place where a small creature can live, and Cine21’s interviewer reported that Jeon took Miso’s name from the Korean word for it, misoseosikji, in which miso means minute; miso, as Jeremy Clarke pointed out, is also the Korean word for a smile. A very small creature, and a smile, looking for the smallest place in the city where she can go on being what she is.

The figures behind the film deserve a little space, because they show that her notebook was not eccentric.

Korea has two common ways of renting a home. Under jeonse, the tenant hands the landlord a large lump sum at the start, pays no monthly rent, and gets the sum back at the end. Under wolse, the tenant pays rent every month, usually on top of a smaller deposit. In the land ministry’s housing survey for 2014, the year Miso’s story begins, households paying monthly rent made up 55 percent of all renting households, the highest share since the survey began in 2006, and 82.3 percent of those monthly renters said their rent and loan repayments were a burden.

In the survey for 2017, the year the film premiered, the ministry looked separately at young households, those headed by someone aged 20 to 34. Of the young households that rented, 71.1 percent paid monthly rent, against 60.4 percent of renting households in general, and 10.5 percent of young households lived below the government’s minimum housing standard, a threshold that covers floor space, a kitchen, a toilet and a bath of one’s own, daylight and heating. Reporting on the film’s press screening, one Korean newspaper called Miso’s the generation that gives up dreams, hope and, in the end, a home.

None of these figures describes Miso. They describe the room she was trying to rent. They also explain something Phoebe Chen noticed: everyone who raises a price on Miso is sorry about it. The landlord who raises the rent, the shop that raises the price of a packet, the bar that will, before the film is over, raise the price of her glass: none of them sets the price, and all of them pass it on. Miso has given up her room, but she has not escaped rent. It is inside everything she buys.

This is the ending.

After Jeong-mi’s, Miso looks at room after room, and none is within reach. She sleeps in all-night cafés and washes her hair in public washrooms. The job goes; Han-sol goes. At her usual bar, the price of a glass goes up by two thousand won.

Then the film jumps ahead. Years later, the old bandmates meet at a funeral and wonder what became of Miso. Nobody has been able to find her; her phone seems to have been cut off.

And then a white-haired woman who looks like Miso walks through the city, and at night she sits in a small tent pitched beside a road.

The film does not say that she is Miso. It lets her resemble Miso, and it stops there. This essay will not say more than the film does.

Critics have said more. One found it clear from the closing moments that Miso is still out there, on her own and enjoying her cigarettes and whisky; another found the ending forced, for the sake of pathos; a third called the final shot as heartbreaking as it is hopeful. The white hair, Jeon told Cine21, was largely a visual idea: she had pictured a woman with white hair walking down a street, smoking, and thought that the image alone would bring catharsis; she wanted to show a woman’s will to keep the pleasures she is not supposed to have, and to go on to the end.

That is a maker’s account of an image, and it deserves respect. The film, though, is more careful than the account. It shows a white-haired woman at night in a tent beside a road, and it lets the catharsis and the cold sit in the same frame. A catharsis for the audience is not the same thing as a good life for the woman in the tent, and the film does not confuse them. Nor does it hand down a sentence. A lesson in thrift would end on regret; a romance would end on a free spirit. This ending offers neither. It offers a tent, a road and the night.

One detail stays with you. Burnett’s Sara comforted herself with a queen whose hair had gone white in prison. The woman at the end of this film has white hair too. The film keeps the white hair and leaves the comfort, if there is any, to us.

Two months after Microhabitat opened, Korean cinemas released Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, in which another poor young woman in a small Seoul flat stops being reachable, and the film hands her absence to a man’s suspicion. Microhabitat neither solves its vanished woman nor mourns her. It lets her, perhaps, walk on.

Microhabitat reached Japan late and quietly, on a streaming service in June 2021, under the title of Burnett’s novel. A Japanese viewer may hear that title first, and think of a girl in an attic.

Japan’s figures on homelessness say something about the film’s last image, and more about the months before it. The health ministry’s national count, made each January by the municipalities, which patrol their areas and count by sight, found 2,481 people in January 2026, 192 of them women. Roads overtook city parks as the most common place to find someone. The count follows the definition in the 2002 act on support for homeless people: people who, without good reason, make city parks, rivers, roads, stations or other facilities the place where they sleep and live their daily lives.

A woman in a tent beside a road would be counted. Miso, for most of the film, would not: a woman sleeping on friends’ floors and in all-night cafés is outside the definition, and outside the count. Tokyo once tried to measure part of that hidden number. In a survey carried out over the winter of 2016 to 2017, the metropolitan government estimated that on an ordinary weeknight about 4,000 people without a home were staying in internet cafés, manga cafés and similar places across the city, about 3,000 of them in insecure work.

These figures do not compare Japan with Korea, and this essay does not either: the two countries define and count homelessness in their own ways. What they show is how a way of counting can see a tent by a road and miss a woman on a friend’s floor. At the end of the film, Miso’s friends could not find her. For most of it, neither could any statistic.

For a woman living in Japan far from her family, the five names on Miso’s list may be the part of the film that stays longest: a list like that is written in advance, over years of friendship, and the film shows both how much it can hold and where it runs out.

Now the objections, made as strongly as they can be.

The first is the plainest. Alan Ng, reviewing the film for Film Threat, asked it outright: is this not simply a very bad decision, cigarettes over shelter? By most measures a roof is worth more than a pleasure. A room protects a body in ways a glass cannot, and a tent beside a road is not a lifestyle but a danger. This essay concedes all of that. What it does not concede is that thrift would have bought the room; the sum this essay did earlier, on the director’s own figure, says it would not. The thrift reading is right about the stakes and wrong about the exchange rate.

The second is aimed at the film’s charm, and it lands. Microhabitat is gentle and funny, its heroine is played by an actor who began as a model, and Jeon has said she did not want Miso to look squalid just because she was poor, and that, as a new director and a woman, she resolved that her first film had to be loved; elsewhere she called Miso a fantasy-like character. Philip Gowman, reviewing it in London, found one thing uneasy: how elegantly a homeless woman keeps herself, washing her hair in public washrooms. A comfortable viewer can leave this film thinking that losing your home has a certain chic. That is a real cost of its loveliness, and the only answer this essay has is the last image, which is not chic at all.

The third is Phoebe Chen’s, and it is the subtlest. Borrowing Lauren Berlant’s idea of cruel optimism, she suggested that what sustains Miso is less the whisky than the feeling of choosing, and that the pleasures she chooses are themselves bought over a counter, inside the same system of prices that has priced her out: her agency is real but lateral, a sideways step when the way up is closed. This essay agrees with the description and differs on the weight. A sideways step is still a step. But Chen is right that the film’s rebellion comes with a receipt.

The fourth turns this essay’s own frame against it. To say that everyone in the film paid for a room is one step from saying they paid too much, and from there it is a short walk to treating the friends as prisoners, as at least one admiring review did. The film does not, and Jeon, asked in New York whether the friends were caricatures of social pressure, put it more simply: everyone gives something up. A price is not a punishment. Hyeon-jeong’s tiredness is not proof that her marriage was a mistake, and Jeong-mi’s silence about her youth may be a bargain she is glad to have made. A reader should check whether this essay has kept to that.

This Library’s essay on Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own as a Condition for Intimacy, Not Only Creativity”, argued that what has made Woolf’s argument last is that it is materialist. She did not prescribe courage; she named a sum of money and a door that locks, because together they make refusal possible. Microhabitat runs that argument on a woman who cannot afford both the door and the self she keeps behind it. Miso keeps the self and gives up the door, and from then on every refusal costs more. She declines to be married into a family and has to let herself out of a locked house. She declines a friend’s money and sleeps in a café. Woolf’s materialism predicts the price exactly. What it does not predict is that she keeps paying it.

So this Library’s position is not that Miso chose well; the film does not say so, and the woman in the tent is not a verdict either way. The position is narrower. Every room in this film costs something besides the rent, and the costs nobody examines are the ones that look normal: a drip at lunch, a kitchen full of in-laws, twenty years of repayments, a parent’s house, a past kept quiet. The one cost examined, loudly, by nearly everyone was the only one a woman chose for herself. That imbalance is worth some anger, and the anger belongs where the film points it: at a city where a packet of cigarettes can go from 2,500 won to 4,500 overnight while a day’s pay stays where it was, and where no amount of going without will add up to a door.

Her reasons were good ones. She would not borrow against her future, she had seen that thrift did not end in a room, and she kept the few things that made her a particular person rather than a tenant. None of that is a reason to follow her. All of it is a reason not to laugh.

So, once, to you. If you keep accounts, on paper or in your head, there is probably a line you would cut last. It may be a class, a flight home, an afternoon, a glass, a person. Nothing in this film asks you to give up a roof for it, and nothing in this essay does either. But you owe nobody an apology for having that line. And when someone tells you it is the obvious thing to cut, it is fair to wonder what they gave up for their own room, and whether anyone ever asked them to explain.

This is a reading of a film. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and it is not advice about money, housing or health. The film was not screened for this essay: its story comes from the official record, the reviews and viewers’ accounts described above, and the director’s interviews in Korean, English and French; dialogue is paraphrased, never quoted as exact, and her words are given in this essay’s translation where they were not published in English. The figures carry their year and definition and compare no countries. If you are in Japan and at risk of losing your home, or have already lost it, the local consultation desk for people in financial difficulty, the jiritsu sōdan shien kikan, is the place to start; it can also tell you about help with rent and about temporary shelter.

What has your own room cost you, besides the rent?

Which line in your budget would you cut last, and who taught you which one to cut first?

Whose small pleasures do you call dignity, and whose do you call a vice?

If the rent went up tomorrow, whose door would you knock on, and whose would you open?