Janie, a.k.a Jeehyun

Janie is the older sister of Hannah and the daughter of her unnamed mother and her unnamed father. Janie briefly abandons her work of writing a PhD thesis in mathematics in order to first search for her disappeared sister, and then to move from her college in Chicago back to Korea, in order to care for her father in his final days. Janie is also the first-person narrator of the story. While Janie accurately diagnoses the difficult and argumentative behavior of many of her family members, as a character she is primarily unaware of her own negative behavior traits, leaving the reader to infer her true character from the patterns of her behavior.

Janie's two primary negative traits are dishonesty and jealousy. After Janie performs the significant work of finding her disappeared sister Hannah, in Los Angeles, Janie effectively blows up their reunion by...