The Old Woman With The Knife by Gu Byeong-Mo

This is not your usual assassin story--although there are some movies that have aging spies and contract killers who continue to pull of jobs, this one features a diminutive knife wielding woman. Hornclaw is a 65-year-old woman working for an agency that specializes in ‘disease control’, she has a set of knives concealed in her coat, and her skill is in dispatching each target with a quick jab as quietly and conveniently as possible. But Hornclaw is starting to feel her age and the agency she works for is now corporately run, and she wonders if she’ll be retired. She knows the end is near when she spares someone's life who can identify her, and then she becomes interested in his family as well. She has softened involuntarily and sees it is time to change her ways. A great deal of the story deals with the theme of ageing, how we cope with the past and how life changes over time. From the opening scenes, there are vignettes throughout in which Hornclaw and other elderly Korean folk are ignored, overlooked or outright mistreated by younger people. Beware of gray haired knife wielding women, for so many reasons.