Lee Chang-dong's adaptation of "Barn Burning" shifts Murakami's detached, existential mystery into an urgent critique of South Korea's stark economic inequality and generational despair. While Murakami's protagonist is an older, relatively comfortable married man, Lee changes the protagonist to Jong-su, an impoverished, unemployed university graduate living in a run-down border town near North Korea. This shift introduces a volatile class dynamic. Ben represents the ultra-wealthy elite of Seoul's Gangnam district—a class of young people who do not work but possess limitless resources, whom Jong-su describes as "Great Gatsbys." Conversely, Hae-mi represents the vulnerable, indebted working-class youth who are forced into degrading promotional work and plastic surgery to survive. By changing the metaphor from burning "barns" to burning "greenhouses," the film localizes the imagery. In rural Korea, abandoned vinyl greenhouses are ubiquitous, cheap, and easily overlooked, making them perfect symbols for marginalized individuals like Hae-mi who have no social safety net. The theoretical framework here is one of class alienation; Ben's "burning" is an act of aesthetic play for a bored aristocrat, while for Jong-su, the loss is existential and total. The "aha" is that the film transforms a surrealist literary puzzle into a materialist tragedy, where the mystery of a missing woman is directly tied to the economic structures that render her invisible.■