Huh. I'm left mostly perplexed by this. It feels like it was either a hot mess of vaguely connected ideas, or else the connections were deep and subtle and relied entirely on cultural associations that , not being Korean, I couldn't access.

Possibly part of it was the translation. You've got to look a bit suspiciously at a translator when a book written in Korean has a Korean character say to other Korean characters, 'You know that Korean saying You can live with a fox, but you can't live with a bear?' And then he proceeds to explain what it means, to his Korean interlocutors. 

Anyway, whatever this book was trying to do, I didn't get it.