A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 17

How about a quirky ‘foreign’ film: Seoul Police Link 17,000 Shoes to 2 Feet:

In South Korea, where people often remove their shoes before entering homes, restaurants or funeral parlors, it is a nagging problem: people walking off with others’ shoes, either by mistake or, sometimes, intentionally.

Still, Detective Kim Jeong-gu’s jaw dropped recently when he opened the warehouse of an ex-convict in Seoul and found 170 apple boxes packed with 1,700 pairs of expensive designer shoes, sorted by size and brand, and all believed to have been stolen.

“Shoe theft is not unusual here,” Detective Kim, 28, said. “But we gasped at this one.”

The 59-year-old suspect, a former convict identified only by his last name, Park, was a onetime used-shoe vendor who had been convicted twice in the past five years of pilfering shoes and operated around funeral homes, the police said.

In the spirit of some of my favorite international movies — Tampopo (1985), Waking Ned Devine ((1998), and Local Hero (1983) — what about a story with a South Korean cop (Protagonist) who is given a bizarre case: Peoples’ shoes are being stolen. Outside funeral homes. Hundreds, maybe thousands of victims.

Perhaps the cop is about to retire and he can’t close this last case.

Maybe he’s a brand new cop and is given the case as part of a ritual hazing the established police put rookies through, giving them the worst possible assignment.

What if the cop is a female?

What is the thief’s motivation? Simply a shoe fetish? Or some other more mysterious motive?

What if in the process of the investigation, the cop discovers that s/he has a burgeoning shoe fetish?

Whatever the Plotline, a writer could use it to explore the quirky, unusual aspects of the South Korean culture. [Of course, you could transpose the story to any country].

What do you think? What would you do with this story idea?