Franz Kafka searched for his connection with the world through metamorphosis and Murakami Haruki looked for his orientation in this busy world through a faint sense of pantheistic existence. In Castella, Park Min-gyu portrays his version of metamorphosis and pantheism. Simply put, it is the hope of finding miracles in this plain world, a belief that there is always some force that transcends our present life, that will arrive from out of the blue to save us from the insipidness of everyday existence.

Park Min-gyu’s fridge is empowered with humanity. Everything in the world can be put into this container and turned overnight into some warm, flat and soft castella sponge cake, which is able to forgive and embrace all. With the help of the author’s imagination, we find that the world and the soul become interchangeable. The world is the soul’s projection and the soul becomes a self-dependent world that encompasses all things.

In the stories in Castella, we see, in silhouette, a child’s desolate loneliness, refusing to accept the world as it is and deciding, resolutely, to see and to create with the soul’s eyes. He roams among the mundane and the divine throughout this miraculous adventure. Just like the castella itself—we live on it, and yet it contains the world.