Vol.12 Summer 2011
Special Section
The New Imagination Trends in Modern Korean Fiction Interviews
Novelist Pyun Hye-young Novelist Park Min-gyu The Place
Jangheung: Where Writers Bloom
ISSN 2005-2790
FAQ What is list_Books from Korea, and where can I find it? list is a quarterly magazine packed with information about Korean books. Register online at www.list.or.kr to receive a free subscription.
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Foreword
Korean Writing Takes On the Modern World Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look After Mom has recently captured the hearts of American readers. This is a good example of Korean literature’s progress within the context of world literature through stories that move the general reader. Understanding the new currents in Korean literature that are represented by Shin’s success calls for some background on the radical adventure of the Korean literary imagination since the 1990s. Shin and other writers whose writing careers took off in the 90s show us a literary world distinct from the one we saw in the previous generation. This issue of list_Books from Korea focuses on writers with a new imaginative power who have already found a place for themselves in world literature or will likely do so in the future. This new, radical imagination we see in Korean literature since the 90s has a close relationship to the 1997 financial crisis as well as Korean society’s rapid absorption into the world market economy in the aftermath. The winds of globalization that swept over all sectors of society in the latter part of the 90s became an indomitable force that contributed to the continuing quantitative growth in the 2000s and put the Korean economy in the top 10 worldwide. When it comes to keeping up to date with other developed societies and globalization, Korean society seems to have come closer to the world standard than ever before. The dream of a modern society that Koreans had in mind a hundred years ago as it embarked on a new phase of modernization seems more complete than ever. In this context, Korean literature, too, no longer limits itself to the confines of race and nation as it strives for the common ground of world literature. The new generation of writers deals with the lights and shadows of modernity—the poverty in the abundance of Korean society—and creates a new narrative through a subversive imagination and a re-examination of traditional narrative styles on the other. Writers in the 2000s have been able to speak to their readers thanks to their unending, fierce re-examination of core ideas that composed modern literature—national identity, modernity, class, masculinity, and reason. This led to a multifaceted deconstruction of narrative styles that Korean literature had traditionally maintained. In other words, if literature as a product of modernity has its roots in reason and logic, Korean literature of the new century is shifting gears into an adventure of a radical imagination, taking a close look at the flip side of reason and logic. Commercial popular culture flourished in Korean in the late 1990s and the widespread use of the Internet brought digital culture to every home. The younger generation idolized the stars of pop culture, which in turn became a way of life. Computers and the Internet were installed in schools, at work, and in homes at a staggering rate. By the end of that decade, Korea had the highest percentage of Internet users in the world. Koreans became active participants in cyberspace, learning new sensibilities and desires that brought new relationships and pleasures. While colonization, division of the peninsula, military autocracy, and other historical experiences formed a bond called historical guilt among the previous generation, political guilt no longer functions as a common denominator for the current generation that grew up in the fertile soil of consumer pop culture. Personal desires are held in higher regard than social awareness, and literature and the arts take a different form in a world where pop culture and the Internet reign. Writers who rose to prominence in the 2000s accelerate this trend and actively attempt to incorporate the imagination of popular culture and lowbrow style into their work. This functions as an opportunity for Korean literature to move beyond the usual Korean topics of war and division, or race and nation. In this context, Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look After Mom emphasizes motherhood as the common denominator. It is time for Korean literature to undertake an adventure of a new imagination. By Park Sungchang
Copyright © Horang, My Grandpa’s Last Year, NURIMBO
list_ Books from Korea
Vol.12 Summer 2011
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KLTI Overseas Publication Grants
KLTI Overseas Marketing Grants
Applicant Qualifications
Applicant Qualifications
- Any publisher who has signed contracts for the publication rights of a Korean book and can publish the book by December 2011. (The book should be published by then.) - Or any publisher who has already published a translated Korean book in 2011 based on a contract for the publication rights of a Korean book
- Publishers who have published Korean books in translation and are planning to hold promotional events which require the author's presence - Other events not directly involved with the author's presence can be supported only in exceptional cases confirmed by LTI Korea.
Grant
Grant
- Part of the total publication expenses. - The amount varies depending on the publication cost and genre of the book. - The grant will be awarded after publication.
- Roundtrip airfare and accommodation expenses for the author - Other expenses for marketing events and advertisements can be supported only in exceptional cases confirmed by LTI Korea. - The amount will be decided by LTI Korea after due consideration of the marketing plan and scale. *Grant will be provided directly for the author or the overseas publisher in two payments, before and after an event.
How to Apply - Register as a member on the website (http://eng.klti.or.kr) and complete the online application form.
Application Documents to be Submitted 1. Publisher's profile, including its history and major achievements (e.g., its previous publications related to Korea (if any), the total number of books it has published so far, etc.). 2. Publication plan including the dates and budget for translation and publication in detail. 3. A copy of the contract between the publisher and the translator. 4. A copy of the contract between the publisher and the copyright holder. 5. The translator's resume.
How to Apply - Register as a member on the website (http://eng.klti.or.kr) and complete the online application form.
Application Documents to be Submitted 1. Publisher’s profile including its detailed history and major achievements (e.g., its previous publications related to Korea (if any), the total number of books it has published to date, etc.). 2. A copy of the contract between the publisher and the translators 3. A copy of the contract between the publisher and the copyright holders 4. Marketing event plan and detailed statement of expenses
Application Schedule and Announcement of Results
Application Schedule and Announcement of Results
Submission period: 2011. 1. 1 ~ 2011. 9. 30 Grant notification: April, July, and October
- Application schedule: every month - Announcement: selection to be announced early each month
Contact
Contact
Name: Mina Park, Youngju Cha Email: grants@klti.or.kr
- Name: Mina Park, Youngju Cha - Email: grants@klti.or.kr
Contents Summer 2011 Vol. 12 01 06 07 08 10
Foreword Trade Report News from LTI Korea Bestsellers Publishing Trends
Special Section
The New Imagination Trends in Modern Korean Fiction
12 14 17 20
Korean Society and Novels Since 1987 From Politics to Ethics:
Jung Yi-hyun, Kim Ae-ran, Jeon Sung-tae, and Kim Yeon-su
Experimenting with the Imagination: Hwang Jeong-eun, Kim Tae-yong, Pyun Hye-young, Yun Ko-eun, and Han Yujoo
Popular Culture Connects with Literature: Kim Young-ha, Park Min-gyu, Kim Kyung-wook, Kim Junghyuk
Interviews
24 Novelist Pyun Hye-young 30 Novelist Park Min-gyu
Excerpts
28 Ashes and Red by Pyun Hye-young 34 Pavane for a Dead Princess by Park Min-gyu
Overseas Angle
44 Korean Novels Take Influence in Young Vietnamese Lives 23 Book Lover's Angle: Charles Montgomery 73 Writer's Note: Kim Min-jeong
The Place
36 Jangheung: Where Writers Bloom
Theme Lounge
40 Love of the Missing: Modern Korean Fiction by Women, 1990-2010
Reviews
46 Fiction 66 Nonfiction 74 Children's Books
Spotlight on Fiction
49 Mouthwatering by Kim Ae-ran
Steady Sellers
65 The Rainy Spell 79 The Barnyard Duck that Flew Away to the Sky
Meet the Publishers
80 Jaeum&Moeum Publishing Co. New Books 82 Recommended by Publishers 90 Index 92 Afterword
list_ Books from Korea
Vol.12 Summer 2011
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Contributors Bae No-pil is a reporter with the JoongAng Ilbo and a writer for list_ Books from Korea's online newsletter. Cho Yeon-jung is a literary critic. She made her debut in 2006 winning the Seoul Shinmun New Critic’s Award. Choi Jae-bong is a reporter at the
Culture Desk of The Hankyoreh newspaper.
Eom Hye-suk is a researcher in
children’s literature and a critic of illustrated books. She also works as a translator. Her major written work is Reading My Delightful Illustrated Books.
Han Mihwa writes on the subject of
publishing. Her written works include Bestsellers of Our Time and This Is How Bestsellers Are Made, Vols. 1, 2.
Hur Yoonjin is a literary critic. She
is the author of 5:57: Critical Essays by Hur Yoonjin. She is a contributing e d i t o r a t t h e q u a r t e r l y Mu n y e Joongang.
Jung Yeo-ul is a literary critic. Jung
lectures at Seoul National University and the Korean National University of Arts.
Kang Yu-jung is a literary critic.
In 2007, she published Oedipus’ Forest. Currently, she teaches at Korea University and is a member of the literature editorial committee for the quarterly publication Segyeui Munhak.
Kim Dongshik is a literary critic and a professor of Korean language and literature at Inha University. He is a contributing editor for the journal Literature and Society.
Kim Hyoung-joong is a literary
critic. He is a professor of Korean Literature at Chosun University and is an editorial board member of the journals Literature and Society. He was awarded the 28th Socheon Lee Heon Gu Prize in Literary Criticism in 2008 and has published various books of criticism, including An Analysis of Literature and the Mind.
4 list_ Books from Korea
Vol.12 Summer 2011
Kim Inae is a children’s writer, critic,
and translator. Among her works are The Cat with Two Feet and Across the River Tumen and Yalu. She is on the editorial board of list_Books from Korea.
Kim Ji-eun is a writer of children’s
stories and a critic of children’s literature. She currently lectures on theories of writing fiction for children in the Department of Creative Writing at Hanshin University.
Kim Min-ryoung is a children’s
critic. She won the children’s writing category of the Munhwa Ilbo New Writer’s Award in 2006 and the criticism category of the Changbi New Children’s Writer Award in 2010.
Pyo Jeonghun is a book reviewer,
Yu Gina is a film critic and professor
Pyun Hye-young has published
Yu Youngjin is a critic of children’s
columnist, translator, and freelance writer. He has translated 10 books into Korean and written Books Have Their Own Destiny, A Short Introduction to Chinese Philosophy, and An Interview with My Teacher: What Is Philosophy? the short story collections Evening Courtship, AOI Garden and To the Cages and the novel Ashes and Red. She won the Hanguk Ilbo Literature Award in 2007 and the Lee Hyo-seok Literary Award in 2007. She is on the editorial board of list_Books from Korea.
Richard Hong is a book columnist
art at Kwangwoon University and on the editorial board of list_Books from Korea.
and the head of BC Agency. He translated 13: The Story of the World’s Most Notorious Superstitions, appeared on KBS 1 Radio’s “Global Today,” and writes columns for The Korea Economic Daily and Posco News.
Lee Kwang-ho is a literary critic
Shin Hye-eun is a full-time lecturer
Kim Yeran is a professor of media
and professor of creative literature at Seoul Institute of the Arts. His works include Love, Anonymous, and Of Political Insignificance.
Nguyen Thanh Nam has been
w o r k i n g a s a n e d i t o r f o r Tr e Publishing House for nine years, and currently is a rights manager.
Oh Yunhyun writes children’s
books. Currently, he is editor-in-chief of the culture and science section of SisaIN, a weekly magazine, and is a member of the World of Children’s Story Society. His books include Tori Is Escaping from Game Land and The Amazing Mystery of Our Body.
Paek Eunyoung is the founder of
the copyright agency Carrot Korea Agency. Formerly she translated Chinese dramas and documentaries, which led to translating books, when she became interested in foreign rights. Now she works on selling the foreign rights of Korean books and buying Chinese rights.
Park Sungchang is a literary critic
and professor of Korean literature at Seoul National University. His works include Rhetoric, Korean Literature in the Glocal Age, and Challenges in Comparative Literature. He is on the editorial board of list_Books from Korea.
of primary education at Soong Eui Women’s College.
Shin Junebong is a journalist at the
Culture Desk of the JoongAng Ilbo. He received his MA from Goldmiths, Un i v e r s i t y o f L o n d o n , a n d i s interested in theoretical analyses of literature, cultural phenomena, and customs.
Son Minho writes for the travel and leisure section of the Joongang Ilbo. He is the author of Son Minho’s Literary Touch 2.0.
Yang Yun-eui is a literary critic. She
won the literary criticism category of the 2006 Joongang New Writer’s Award.
Yi Soo-hyung is a literary critic and a
senior researcher at the Seoul National University Academic Writing Lab. He studied contemporary literature, and has taught at Hongik University, Seoul Institute of the Arts, and Korea National University of Arts.
Yoon So-hee is a children’s writer. She has written such works as Prejudice, Aram’s Secret, and 7 Stories to Help You Study. She is the winner of the 13th MBC Children’s Writing Prize.
of film and digital media at Dongguk University. Her works include Yu Gina’s Women’s Cine-Promenade and Find Yourself Through Film (coauthored with Im Kwon-taek). She is on the editorial board of list_Books from Korea. literature and a teacher at Ja-un Elementary School. He is the author of The Body’s Imagination and Fairy Tale.
Translators C h o Yo o n n a s t u d i e d En g l i s h
l i t e r atu re at Yo n s e i Univer s ity and earned her MA in conference interpretation at the Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. She is a freelance interpreter and translator.
Choi Inyoung is an artist and
translator. She has been translating for over 20 years. She specializes in Korean literature and the arts.
Christopher Dykas studied German Studies and Politics at Oberlin College. He resides in Seoul where he works as a freelance translator and broadcaster.
Giuseppina De Nicola attended
the Korean Literature Training Program at KLTI in 2003. She is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Seoul National University. She works as a translator and interpreter and has a translation grant from LTI Korea for the translation in Italian for Shin Kyung-sook's An Isolated Room.
H. Jamie Chang received her
undergraduate degree from Tufts University. She is a Bostonian/ Busanian freelance translator.
Jung Yewon studied interpretation
and translation at GSIT, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Jung is currently working as a freelance interpreter/translator. Jung received the Daesan Foundation Translation Grant in 2009. She is currently working on No One Writes Back, a novel by Jang Eun-jin.
Kari Schenk was the co-recipient of the
commendation award in the 2006 Korea Times contest for new translators, and in 2010 she attended a special course in translation at LTI Korea. She lectures in English at Korea University.
Kim Hee-young is a freelance
translator. She is currently working on the translation of a collection of the experiences of comfort women titled Histories Behind History.
Editors Kim Stoker earned an MA in Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii. She is currently a full-time lecturer at Duksung Women’s University.
Krys Lee is an editor, translator, and
fiction writer. Her short story collection will be published by Viking/Penguin in the U.S. and Faber and Faber in the U.K., in 2012.
Peter J. Koh is a freelance translator
and interpreter who completed KLTI's Special Workshop in 2009 and Intensive Workshop in 2010. He currently resides in Seoul.
Sora Kim-Russell is a freelance
translator. She teaches full-time at Ewha Womans University’s Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation and is currently translating a novel and a short story collection.
Sue Y. Kim received her BA in English Literature and International Studies from Ewha Womans University. She currently resides in Los Angeles, and is working on a novel in the Creative Writing program at the University of Southern California.
Yang Sung-jin is currently a staff
reporter at The Korea Herald, covering new media and books. Yang wrote a Korean history book in English titled Click into the Hermit Kingdom and a news-based English vocabulary book, News English Power Dictionary. His homepage is web.me.com/sungjin.
Yi Jeong-hyeon is a freelance translator.
She has translated several books and papers on Korean Studies including Korean Traditional Landscape Architecture, and Atlas of Korean History.
PUBLISHER _ Kim Joo-youn EDITORIAL DIRECTOR _ Kim Yoonjin MANAGING DIRECTOR _ Lee Jungkeun
Kim Ungsan graduated in German
Literature from Seoul National University and also studied at the Free University of Berlin. He earned an MA degree in Comparative Literature. Currently he is working on a PhD in English Literature.
Vol.12 Summer 2011 A Quarterly Magazine for Publishers
Cover Art Kwon Doo-hyoun was born in 1969 in
Gangneung. Since 2003, he has had 11 solo exhibitions and been part of group exhibitions for IGE 2007, Art Singapore 2007, Paris Photo, Art Karlsruhe, and Art Sydney. From 2002, he has been active as an artist, working on creating and experimenting within a new genre of photography called Ambiphoto. NEWart@email.com. www.newart.asia
EDITORIAL BOARD Kim Inae Kim Yeran Park Sungchang Pyun Hye-young Yu Gina EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Kim Sun-hye MANAGING EDITORS Cha Youngju Kong Min-sung EDITORS Kim Stoker Krys Lee ART DIRECTOR Choi Woonglim DESIGNERS Kim Mijin Lee Jaehyun Jang Hyeju PHOTOGRAPHER Lee Kwa-yong PRINTED IN _ EAP Date of Publication 2011. 5. 31
list_ Books from Korea is a quarterly magazine published by the Korea Literature Translation Institute.
All correspondences should be addressed to the Korea Literature Translation Institute at 108-5 Samseong-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea 135-873 Telephone: 82-2-6919-7700 Fax: 82-2-3448-4247 E-mail: list_korea@klti.or.kr www.klti.or.kr www.list.or.kr Copyright © 2011 by Korea Literature Translation Institute ISSN 2005-2790
Cover art © Kwon Doo-hyoun, kdha0980, ambiphoto, 2010
list_ Books from Korea
Vol.12 Summer 2011
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Trade Report
An Agent’s Take on Selling Korean Books Overseas I have been working as a literary agent for the past 10 years. About 80 percent of my work involves selling foreign rights for Korean books, a job that was fairly rare just 10 years ago. Now, whether I want it or not, handling foreign rights sales has become my daily business routine. The pace of foreign rights sales of Korean titles has recently picked up. Sometimes prices go up due to heated competition. Yet the major markets are limited to Chinese-speaking countries or Southeast Asian nations. Korean books are sold to Europe, the United States, and Latin America, but the genres are fairly restricted to children’s picture books and certain novels. Children’s books take the center stage in Korea’s overseas sa les drive. Korea’s educationa l cartoons and children’s workbooks carve out a large share in the Chinese market. Samsung Publishing, for instance, tends to receive a flurry of orders from Chinese publishers as soon as it publishes new titles in Korea. Educational comic books are particularly enjoying a spike in foreign rights sales thanks to the fact that the genre is not commonly available in other foreign markets. I-seum’s educational comics series is a case in point, as the company has secured a significant share in China and Southeast Asia, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign rights income. Korean titles in the self-help and nonfiction fields are expanding their market position overseas, but literary titles are lagging behind by a wide margin.
More efforts should be devoted to the export of Korean books. One particularly pressing issue is the absence of competent translators in the target markets. As a result, only picture books with little text are favored. Simple introductory materials in English are far from enough to convince foreign publishers interested in Korean books. Nonetheless, I believe there are more opportunities for selling the rights to Korean books in overseas markets. Compared with the past, far more publishers and agents from Europe and Latin America showed keen interest in Korean books, especially workbooks, pop-up books, and educational books for children at the Bologna Children's Book Fair this year. Educational comic books from Korea also attracted strong attention from foreign agents. All in all, it is time for local publishers to consider introducing books from various genres and fields into foreign markets. As an agent, I wish our publishers and writers will be able to reap the benefits in terms of royalties thanks to the sales of more Korean books in foreign markets.
Survival Series by I-seum publishers that have been published overseas
6 list_ Books from Korea
Vol.12 Summer 2011
By Paek Eunyoung
News from LTI Korea
KLTI Participates in Book Fairs in Abu Dhabi and Bologna This year, Korea was invited to the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair’s “Market Focus.” The Korea Literature Translation Institute, which joined the event for the first time, put on display translated versions of Korean titles in Arabic and formed a network with publishers in the Middle East. During the event, the institute held a Korean literature forum titled “Middle East Meets Far East” in which novelists Kim Joo-young, Yi Mun-yol, and poet Kim Min-jeong shared their insights. A forum was also held at Zayed University in Dubai, bringing Korean literature to students already familiar with Korean pop culture. The exchange marked a major step forward in breaking open new markets for Korean books, while providing a much needed stimulus that will encourage Korean publishers to produce translated versions for the Middle East market.
In late March, the institute also took part in the 48th Bologna Children’s Book Fair. In particular, Changbi Publisher’s A House of the Mind: MAUM won the prestigious Ragazzi award in the children’s book categor y, demonstrating the keen interest in Korean children’s titles and illustrations. In a similar vein, K LTI held forums under the title “Fantasy of Korean Literature for Children” at universities in Rome and Venice in a bid to expand the publishing and academic bases for Korean children’s books. Baek Heena, the illustrator of the 2005 Bologna book fair and author of bestselling titles Cloud Bread and The Moon Sorbet, as well as children’s literature critic Kim Ji-eun and Kim Kyungyun joined the events, helping introduce the latest trends in the children’s literature of South Korea.
KLTI Forums Held in U.S., France, and Spain KLTI has been organizing forums since 2009 in order to help introduce Korean literature to readers outside of South Korea. In the first half of 2011, three such forums were held in the U.S., France, and Spain, as part of efforts to strengthen the human network of writers, translators, and publishing professionals related to Korean literature in a way that promotes the export of Korean books. The first forum of 2011 was held in the U.S. from April 27 through May 2 in the Los Angeles and Berkeley areas. This largescale event was made up of four chapters, piecing together films, Korean society, Korean American writers, and Korean literature. During the event, Korean films dealing with Korean literature as subject matter were screened. Leading Korean writers including Kim Joo-young, Ch’oe Yun, and Jung Young-moon, as well as critics and journalists joined the forum. From the U.S.-side, scholars specializing in Korean literature and movies, and Korean American writers such as Leonard Chang and Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut shared their views on the topics through in-depth discussions. The forum coincided with the high-profile U.S. debut of Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look After Mom, timed perfectly to help solidify the position of Korean literature in the U.S. market and explore new opportunities by featuring not only literature but also related fields such as film. The French forum kicked off on May 4 for a three-day run, covering Avignon, Aix-en-Provence, and Arles. The academic forum’s themes were “Issues Stemming from the Local Reception of Korean Literature” and “The Translation and Distribution of Korean Literature;” readings by writers were also held. Well-known Korean writers and critics including Yi In-seong, Jo Kyung-ran, and Jeong Myeong-kyo exchanged their views with French counterparts such as Claude Mouchard and Philippe Picquier, drawing keen public attention.
In addition, K LTI’s Spain forum was held May 16-19 in Madrid and Malaga. As Haïlji and Kim Ae-ran had their novels, La Confesión and “¡Corre, papi¡” published in a Spanish translation version, respectively, the two joined the forum and met with Spanish publishers, scholars, and readers through public lectures and readings. In the second half of 2011, the venues for KLTI forums are set to include the western region of the U.S., Germany, China, and Japan.
list_ Books from Korea
Vol.12 Summer 2011
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Bestsellers
What We’re Reading
The 2010 Yi Sang Literature Prizewinning Stories
Please Look After Mom
Will You Be My Friend?
Fiction
Emotional Coaching for Children
Nonfiction
The 2010 Yi Sang Literature Prizewinning Stories
Greatest Fish
Gong Ji-young, et al., Munhaksasang Co., Ltd. 2011, 352p, ISBN 9788970128610 The book is the latest collection of the 35th Yi Sang Literature Prize winners of 2011. This powerful novel revolves around a character mirroring the author’s own experiences with the oppressive violence exacted on humans in cyclical turns of history and reality, juxtaposed with the excruciating pain individuals are forced to endure.
Koo Byung-mo, Jaeum&Moeum 2011, 210p, ISBN 978895707542 ‘Gon’ is a man with gills. He came to have gills as he turned and twisted to keep his life at the face of drowning. The novel is hinged upon Gon and other mysterious characters, with their entangled fates complicating and deepening the storyline. Why have we lost the world symbolized by Gon? And why do we have to miss and love somebody? Why are we so scared about this? The novel sheds light on the ultimate answers in thought-provoking prose.
Please Look After Mom
A Very Ordinary Romance
Shin Kyung-sook, Changbi Publishers Inc. 2008, 320p, ISBN 9788936433673 A feature-length novel by one of the most celebrated Korean novelists, Please Look After Mom is a highly engaging and refined story that takes the form of recollections of a mother through the memories of her family. In recent weeks, Korean readers have been paying renewed attention to the novel as its English-language edition climbed to the Amazon.com bestseller list following a high-profile debut on the U.S. market.
Baek Young-ok, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2011, 288p, ISBN 9788954614306 Known for her ability to capture the feelings of love and desire of today’s women, Baek Young-ok throws in eight stories whose subjects include a clerk falling in love with receipts, a father falling ill due to his own breast cancer, and a cat falling for the main character’s lover. The common thread that ricochets through the stories is human desire and feelings that are rarely understood and yet clearly present at a deeper level.
The Road Not Traveled Is More Beautiful Park Wan-suh, Hyundae Munhak 2010, 268p, ISBN 9788972754671 A master storyteller, Park Wan-suh, offers a collection of moving stories that she draws from small, oftneglected things in life. The essays range from her wonder at nature to her feelings towards people she's known, in her trademark writing style that attempts to embrace what she encounters with warmth and love.
Will You Be My Friend? John Lee, Bible Life 2010, 263p, ISBN 9788984812963 John Lee gave up his career as a doctor, a path of wealth and respect, to become a Catholic priest and then flew to Africa to help people in need. The book chronicles the records of what he had done in the eight years before he died of cancer. His exemplary life was made into a documentary titled “Don’t Cry for Me, Tonj,” and his candid account of what he learned and felt in Africa is bound to have a lasting impact on readers.
A Night of Seven Years
Emotional Coaching for Children
Jeong You-jeong, EunHaeng NaMu Publishing Co. 2011, 524p, ISBN 9788956604992 In this fast-paced novel, Jeong You-jeong weaves a sad, mysterious and biting tale of father and son. A central incident involves what is called “the Disaster of Lake Seryeong” and the survival of a 12-year-old boy named Seo-won. The novel shows how he grows up, only to mix it with the mysterious death of his father in an exquisite style that will certainly keep readers turning pages quickly.
Joe Pek, et al. Korea Economic Daily & Business Publication, Inc. 2011, 276p, ISBN 9788947527897 All parents are eager to bring up their children as well as possible. This book is concerned with socalled ‘emotion coaching’ tips that parents can use for their children. In a departure from education theories, the book explains specific communication techniques based on real cases, which will benefit not only parents but also teachers.
8 list_ Books from Korea
Vol.12 Summer 2011
These totals are based on sales records from eight major bookstores and three online bookstores from February to April 2011, provided by the Korean Publishers Association. The books are introduced in no particular order.
Secret Garden Drama: Visual Comics 1
Pulbang Mom
The Bad Boy Stickers
Learn the World of Occupations with One Picture Book
Children's Books 3 Minute Classic
Leafie, a Hen into the Wild
Pulbang Mom
Park Jae-hee, Little Seed Books 2010, 255p, ISBN 9788964231159 The book dispenses life wisdom through books widely recognized as the classics. With the bulk of content drawn from the radio broadcast version, the book connects must-read titles with the life of today’s people. The virtue of the book is its creative use of the classics in a way that reinterprets the idea of the canon, while delivering tried-and-true wisdom.
Hwang Sun-mi; Illustrator: Kim Hwan-young Sakyejul Publishing Ltd. 2000, 199p, ISBN 9788971968710 This book was published 10 years ago, but its strength remains the same, with total sales nearing 1 million copies. This title, a milestone in Korean children’s literature, is widely regarded as canonical for its thought-provoking theme, unique characters, and fast-paced narrative.
Noh Kyunghee; Illustrator: Kim Ryeong-ha Dong-A Ilbo 2011, 198p, ISBN 9788970908434 Based on the most popular episode of an MBC documentary series, this children’s book is about a single mom diagnosed with cancer who is raising her two children. In a graceful and moving style, the book portrays her last six months during which she spends her remaining time with her beloved children.
Raising My Children Without Getting Angry
Survival in the Jungle 6
The Bad Boy Stickers
Hong Jaecheol; Illustrator: Lee Taeho Ludens Media, Co., Ltd. 2001, 176p, ISBN 9788994110066 Natural science knowledge meets lively and detailed photographs in the engaging format of education cartoons. Several kids go though exciting adventures in a Borneo cave, with the animals and plants are explained for readers. This is the sixth installment of a longtime best-selling series.
Hwang Sun-mi; Illustrator: Kwon Sa-woo Woongjin Think Big Co., Ltd 1999, 104p, ISBN 9788901068596 Renowned Korean children’s book writer Hwang Sun-mi illustrates a familiar scene of a Korean classroom while depicting the psychology of Korean children. A teacher tries to manipulate the behavior of students by issuing ‘Good Boy’ and ‘Bad Boy’ stickers while main characters confront the teacher by issuing ‘Bad Teacher’ stickers.
Shin Chul-hee, Kyunghyang Edu 2011, 248p, ISBN 9788965180227 Shin Chul-hee has been a consultant for the past 25 years who offers advice on children and youth. Based on his rich experiences, Shin offers essential tips on raising children properly and helping children develop better habits through corrective play activities, based on the principle that parents should fully understand their children’s bad habits.
Secret Garden Drama: Visual Comics 1 An Editorial Department, Booklogcompany 2011, 240p, ISBN 9788994197142 A visual comic book adapted from the blockbuster TV drama “Secret Garden,” which gained huge popularity among local audiences. The book depicts a romance between a super-rich man and a poor woman in an entertaining fashion, with their souls switched overnight, and a host of other surprising developments spicing up the storyline.
Why? Phonics 1 Lee Eugene; Illustrator: Kim Hong-sun YeaRimDang Publishing Co., Ltd. 2011, 208p, ISBN 9788930232616 A comic book aimed at helping students learn English. An adventure story unfolds in a way that prompts readers to practice making sounds in English. The story is interesting enough to encourage readers to keep listening to the same vocabulary words. The book also comes with a complementary CD.
Learn the World of Occupations with One Picture Book Cho Eun-ju and Yoo Soo-jung Illustrator: Ma Jung-won; Jinsun Publishing Co., Ltd. 2009, 270p, ISBN 9788972216193 Some 300 occupations are classified and introduced to children. They can browse their favorite jobs and explore what each job entails in detail, as well as learn about the qualifications and education needed for such jobs. The book is a useful guide for children who want to draw up a plan for the future.
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Publishing Trends
Fiction
Gong Sun-ok Tapped as the Next Big Hit
environmental issues, demonstrations against evildoers–are dry and straightforward, but Gong has turned them into a lyrical and moving tale with her writing style, proving her expertise as a writer who has honed her skills for 20 years. By Choi Jae-bong
Nonfiction
Youth Swept Away by ‘Sensitivity Syndrome’
Years Like Flowers Gong Sun-ok, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2011, 260p, ISBN 9788936433840
Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look After Mom has generated a slew of positive reviews and stronger-than-expected sales in recent weeks, heightening public attention toward other talented Korean writers. Shin’s successful debut in the United States, a huge yet difficult market for Korean writers, proves the commercial potential of Korean literature there, and local experts said more Korean writers and their work should be introduced. Among possible candidates who can capitalize on Shin’s popularity in the U.S. are Gong Ji-young and Gong Sun-ok. Coincidentally, all three female writers were born in 1963. Gong Ji-young and Gong Sun-ok differ greatly in terms of literary repertoire and personal experiences. Gong Ji-young, a longtime resident of metropolitan Seoul, prefers depicting modern characters and settings set in a big city; Gong Sun-ok, in contrast, portrays traditional life in rural areas in reflection of her hometown in the southern Jeolla province. Gong Sun-ok’s new feature-length novel, Years Like Flowers, centers on Young-hee and her husband who drift into the countryside as a result of a housing reconstruction project. The couple settles in an empty house where they are strongly drawn to the peach flowers in the corner of the backyard. The pink-colored flowers, however, do not turn to be rosy for the couple as they stumble into a challenge. Concrete mixer trucks from a factory near the village undertake illegal construction work and residents stage protests. Young-hee, who initially tries to distance herself from the elderly female residents, is moved by their earnest and desperate actions, even taking up the job for the head of the resident committee. The novel, made up of 21 chapters, starts and ends with the portrayal of a woman named ‘Musugul-ddeogi’ who is the original owner of the house. Interestingly, she dies about half a year before the new couple ends up at the abandoned house. In other words, the novel gets off to a start with the help of the dead and also wraps up with the same perspective. The protest, led by the elderly women, Young-hee, and a female writer named Hye-jeong, ends up in a legal battle. Although the protesters get defeated in court, Gong brings to life the elderly women’s fight like “water and grass” and clearly presents how their cause is for the public good, suggesting that they are the ultimate winners. The topics–housing development, 10 list_ Books from Korea
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“Flowers blossom only when their time comes. Forsythias have their own blossoming period; camellias go about according to their own schedule, as well. Even flowers can wait for their predestined blossoming period; why are you all dying to blossom prematurely in the early spring?” (from Youth, Because It’s Painful by Kim Rando) “Whether today is the same as yesterday or different from yesterday, I want to be satisfied with myself, and feel a sense of happiness with my life.” (Slow Growing by Kang Se-hyoung) These two passages are drawn from titles which made it to the top 20 bestseller list in the first quarter of 2011. Youth, Because It’s Painful sparked a ‘sensitivity syndrome’ and retained the No. 1 spot on the national bestseller list for two months in a row from February. Kim Rando, professor at Seoul National University, offers a message of hope and comfort to Korean youth in their 20s suffering from frustrations and pain. His writing style is friendly and intimate, as if he’s talking to his own child in a private setting. Young readers who have read the book were instantly converted into Kim’s disciples. The book, which sold more than 500,000 copies on the domestic market, is now set to enter the Chinese market as Kim recently signed a foreign rights contract with a Chinese publisher. Kang Se-hyoung, author of Slow Growing, is a script writer for a popular radio program. Kang has long elicited enthusiastic emotional responses from listeners with writing that is as emotive as a romantic poem for a radio show featuring high-profile singers as DJs. His essay collection celebrating youth, though not at the top end of the bestseller list, has gained popularity at a steady pace. In the collection, modern society offers two phases of puberty: biological adolescence, which occurs in the early or mid-teens, allows youth to discover the attractiveness of the opposite sex, and social adolescence, which tends to hit those in their 20s, particularly when they apply for a job and confront a ‘hostile’ world. Against this backdrop, it is no surprise that Kang’s message of hope and comfort for young Koreans generated positive responses from readers. Another notable book is the late Father John Lee’s Will You Be My Friend? This collection of essays stayed in the top 10 bestseller list for a considerable period of time, attracting keen public attention. The Catholic priest died of cancer at the age of 48 after having worked as a medical and education volunteer for remote communities in Sudan. His strong compassion for humanity and the unwavering spirit of sharing and serving, coupled with his premature death, moved the hearts of many local readers. Lee’s life was also surveyed in a documentary film and various broadcast programs late last year and early this year. Park Wan-suh’s posthumous essay collection, The Road Not Traveled Is More Beautiful, also staged a solid performance in sales at Korean bookstores. Park, one of the most beloved Korean novelists, died in January. By Bae No-pil
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This peculiar drive is now spreading to young adult fiction. The topics for young adult fiction used to be limited to the wandering of youth, deviation, and conf licts with social communities. Encouragingly, themes, topics, characterization, and narrative structure have expanded and diversified in a way that fuels fresh energy into the science fiction genre for youth. The scope of science stories for children—or science fiction—is now expanding in various directions. Science fiction was routinely associated with futuristic perspectives; nowadays, different fields such as politics, social science, pop culture, and history, are illustrated and explained in a scientific fashion. Prize winners at major competitions also exhibit a high level of literary aesthetics based on scientific imagination. Titles targeting 10-year-olds or younger audiences often adopt natural science or ecological science as main themes. Namely, the hottest trend, whether it’s for picture books or youth fiction, is science’s dramatic advance into literature. These books zoom in on specific themes such as the importance of environmental protection, warning signs of ecological destruction, and the harmonious coexistence of humans and other life forms on Earth. Scientific insight, in consideration of the latest trends, is expected to inspire more children’s book writers and readers.
1. Will You Be My Friend? John Lee, Bible life 2010, 263p, ISBN 9788984812963
By Yoon So-hee
2. The Road Not Traveled Is
More Beautiful
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Park Wan-suh, Hyundae Munhak 2010, 263p, ISBN 9788972754671
3. Slow Growing Kang Se-hyoung Gimm-Young Publishers, Inc. 2010, 355p, ISBN 9788934940067 4. Youth, Because It’s Painful Kim Rando, Sam&Parkers 2010, 320p, ISBN 9788965700036
Children's Books
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Science Makes Inroads into Fiction Nonfiction is staying strong in the children’s book category. This phenomenon comes as no surprise given that younger readers have recently been devouring nonfiction titles. What’s notable is that nonfiction’s popularity shows no sign of slowdown and editors are offering more diverse perspectives and advanced editing techniques. In recent days, educational comic books and colorful nonfiction titles are pouring in, emerging as a dominant force. All in all, educational books for children are expected to take center stage for months, if not years, to come. An interesting aspect to note is that this particular trend is affecting not only nonfiction but also picture books and original children’s stories. In other words, knowledge, information, and issues in nonfiction titles are impacting fiction for younger readers. A striking case in point is the full-fledged debut of science fiction for kids. Science stories for children have long been loved, but they were largely ignored as a fringe genre only a few years ago. Now, many science fiction titles are written using literary devices and a solid structure, and are advancing into the mainstream of children’s literature at a rapid pace. Until recently, children’s book writers did not have specific scientific knowledge; science majors, meanwhile, were not up to the task of writing commercially viable stories targeting children. The obstacles, however, have been tackled boldly by a group of pioneering writers who attempt to piece together scientific knowledge, imagination, and reflection.
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1. Goya’s Sister and Brothers Jang Ju-sik; Illustrator: Park Cheol-min Jaimimage Publishing Co. 2010, 49p, ISBN 9788986565621 2. Planet of Robots, Vols. 1-3 Yi Hyeon; Illustrator: Oh Seungmin Prunsoop Publishing Co., Ltd. 3. Clone Choi Jeong-won, Little Giant 2010, 352p, ISBN 9788996444916
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Special Section
The New Imagination Trends in Modern Korean Fiction
Korean Society and Novels Since 1987 Freed from the constraints of history, the new generation of Korean writers is foraging a new path in a direction dramatically different from their predecessors. The June revolution of 1987 marked the end of long military rule in Korea. Korea began to strive towards democracy and diversify culturally. Socialism had failed and the dominance of capitalism around the globe became undeniable. Under such circumstances, literature paradoxically attacked philosophies that saw literature as a vehicle of social change. Literature began to lose its focus after decades of raging against an autocratic government. As the idea of a market economy expanded to include culture and information products, lifestyles also underwent changes. These changes turned the Korean cultural market into a self-regulating entity that pioneered its own market. In this process, literature was subsumed into the cultural market. A literature of political imagination, which dominated the previous era, was relatively weakened, diminishing literature’s political and educational responsibility that had been the hallmark of Korean contemporary literature. In a world where there was nothing left to expose or be enraged about, literature had to reexamine its place in the world. The realm of a personal life thus far veiled behind group ideology emerged in the unfamiliar environment of an information-based society and routines of capitalism. New themes of personal worlds and the problems of living a cultural life emerged in the 1990s. Colorful themes such as a re-examination of the inner world, feminism and sexuality, exploring life in the city, relationships to popular culture, the digital environment, and cyberspace appeared for the first time. This signifies more than just an expansion of themes and topics but a diversification of literary awareness. A revolt broke out against literature’s responsibility to be an objective depiction of reality. Raised with more exposure to mass media than the previous generation, authors who appeared after the 1990s brought in new perspectives. Shin Kyung-sook, Yun Dae-nyeong, and Sung Suk-je received critical attention in the mid-90s; and then came writers with an even clearer generational distinction, Baek Minseok, Bae Suah, Kim Young-ha, Park Seong-won, Kim Yeon-su, and Kim Kyung-wook. Shin Kyung-sook’s The Blind Calf (1993) for example, and Yun Dae-nyeong’s Argot Fishing Dispatch (1995) 12 list_ Books from Korea
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f leshed out the oppressed aesthetic of introversion in Korean literature. Along those lines, Bae Suah’s Backroads with Green Apples (1995) and Baek Min-seok’s Hey, We Are Going on a Picnic (1995) presented new possibilities, and Sung Suk-je’s The Last 4½ Seconds of My Life (1996) and Kim Young-ha’s Pager (1997) opened up a more clearly defined, new aesthetic space. Kim Yeon-su and Kim Kyung-wook are good examples of writers that connect literature from the 1990s to the 2000s. Kim Yeon-su actively engaged in intertextual writing through an imagination rooted in the humanities and explored the political subconscious of his generation. Kim Yeon-su’s works explored a new historical imagination in novels such as Song of the Night (2008), and he reconstructed the personal memories of a generation without privileges. Kim Kyung-wook pulled existence out of the crevasse formed by the political discontinuity between the 80s and 90s and presented us with characters that manifest themselves through cinematic texts. He explored the ontology of the individual within the new media in texts such as Who Killed Kurt Cobain? (2003). Using Eun Hee-kyung’s escape from romanticism in Talking to Strangers (1996) as a starting point, women writers of the new millennium such as Cheon Woonyoung, Yoon Sung-hee, Jung Yi-hyun, and Kim Ae-ran opened up new aesthetic spaces that the previous generation of women writers hadn’t explored. Park Seong-won, Jeon Sungtae, Kim Junghyuk, Park Min-gyu, Lee Kiho, Kim Tae-yong, Pyun Hye-young, Park Hyoungsu, Han Yujoo, and Hwang Jeong-eun created a more diversified narrative space for the 2000s. “Hybridized writing” is not one that is based on the identity born of a shared historical experience, but an intertextual writing that involves contact with a myriad of cultural texts. We see such examples in the imagining of popular culture and adoption of low brow logic in young writers. To a generation that does not form ties based on historical experience, contact with various cultural texts has become important for their literary imagination. What we see in these works is not simply a resistance against a literature of realism, but an attempt to explore different ways of
constructing reality. Young writers who started writing in the 2000s are relatively free to solidify their identities as writers without the constraints of political guilt and debt to political reality. What characterizes this generation is the narrative imagination that ignores all rules and the gravities of reality set in realism. Their narrative adventure is more daring and fundamental than the changes in the 90s when literature was still restricted by reality. The important aesthetic space of the 90s such as the “inner world” and “the ordinary” is no longer enticing to the writers of the new millennium such as Kim Tae-yong, Han Yujoo, and Jo Ha-hyeong, writers who continue to create narrative spaces that transcend space and the ordinary, bringing the narrative potential of the novel to a whole new level. If Korean literature after 1987 strove for implementation of democracy and cultural diversification, it is now undergoing the most radical and diverse literary adventure since modernization. By Lee Kwang-ho
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Special Section
The New Imagination Trends in Modern Korean Fiction
From Politics to Ethics:
Jung Yi-hyun, Kim Ae-ran, Jeon Sung-tae, and Kim Yeon-su The new generation of writers tackles the most pressing concerns of their time, pursuing uncomfortable, but necessary questions.
Romantic Love & Society Jung Yi-hyun, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2003, 251p, ISBN 9788932014487
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The fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s had a great influence on Korean literature, contributing to a decline of the political. Partly because of the fall of the Soviet Union and the decline of Marxism, a great part of the progressive energy that governed Korean literature in the 80s split into sub-themes such as the inner world, everyday life, femininity, and culture. The economic crisis of 1997 marked another watershed, a point many critics tacitly agree on. After the economic crisis, Korean society was drawn into the demands of globalization and a free-for-all market economy that gave into the demands of global financial trends. This period marks the beginning of a new millennium literature in Korea. One notable change is the unspoken agreement among writers on the impossibility of politics. Politics in the traditional sense is actually built on the premise of the resistance of the individual. But when the whole of society is drawn under the influence of consumer capitalism and even the individuals’ subconscious is structured like a product, resistance is impossible. The new writers of the 2000s are relatively free from the political imagination of literature in the 80s. The issues raised in the literary criticism of the 21st century such as the “trivialization of the individual,” “writing in a vacuum,” and “increase of obsessive narratives” are indicators of such a trend. Before the gargantuan capitalist system, writers are no longer able to find a foothold for heroic resistance, or have given up the search altogether. Jung Yi-hyun is one writer who has depicted this reality through the most honest, cynical lens. Jung’s works appeared like a comet on the literary scene in 2002 as an exception to the Korean literary tradition that largely focused on portraying marginalized groups. The backdrop of Jung’s novels is Gangnam, Seoul, which attracts the wealthiest people in Korea and is
consequently the frontier of consumer capitalist culture. It is realistically impossible to even dream of resistance in such a space. Jung chooses to handle this reality through a “politics of masquerade” in the Baudrillardian sense. Jung’s characters happen to be young women with office jobs who are blatantly welladjusted to the system. They are vicious and not ashamed of their desires to climb the socioeconomic ladder. In “Romantic Love and Society,” marriage is a means of moving up to higher social classes. In “Trunk,” fashion and cars are status symbols. The women are so conniving and sly that they are subject to ridicule in the end, which is Jung’s point. By portraying individuals who have become perfect embodiments of consumer capitalism, Jung reveals the phoniness of these individuals and the situation that surrounds them. Jung thus explores ways for literature to remain political in an age where politics to have lost its relevance. Kim Ae-ran is also a writer with a sensitive reaction to the overwhelming dominance of consumer capitalism. For example, her debut story, “Don’t Knock Before You Enter,” or one of her early works, “I Go to the Convenience Store,” have as main characters, unemployed young men and women, a staple in Korea after the financial crisis of 1997, thus capturing the dark cross sections society. Kim’s style, however, differs markedly from Jung’s in that Kim’s characteristic humor sets a completely different tone. The characters we see in her two story collections, Run, Pop, Run! and Mouthwatering, are comic characters who do not despair or pity themselves in spite of the horrid situations they find themselves in. Critic Kim Dongshik describes the likes of Kim’s stories as “family romance without resentment.” Tears and anger, indeed, do not play a great part in Kim’s novels as she regulates them with humor. It is unlikely that Kim’s characters, most of them raised in broken homes, lurking in the margins of consumer society without jobs or friends, know no tears or anger. Nevertheless, Kim bestows them with the power to control their tears and rage. The best example of this is the child abandoned by her father at the amusement park in “Salut d’Amour.” The child goes to the information desk and instead of saying, “I was abandoned,” she says, “My father’s lost.” The change from “I was abandoned” to “my father’s lost” generates humor, which turns sorrow into laughter. But the laughter is laden with meaning because we know that the situation, however funny, is no laughing matter. This makes Kim’s stories of the most miserable, young, and helpless characters appear warm and full of life. Kim Aeran, along with Yoon Sung-hee and Park Min-gyu, is one of the few writers who has learned to keep her sense of humor amidst a nightmarish reality. Another notable trend in Korean literature in the 2000s is the emergence of the theme, “ethics of the other,” also related to the decline of the political after the 1990s. The gradual diversification of Korean society after the Kim Young-sam administration pushed for an open labor market policy in 1992, which became increasingly visible through the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations, made a lasting impact on literature as well. Hundreds of foreign workers flooded into Korea. The number of North Koreans defectors increased as the situation worsened for North Korea while the so-called Korean Wave and the subsequent Korean Dream swept across Southeast Asian countries. International marriages (which bore an uncanny resemblance to human trafficking) between Korean farmers and
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1. Run, Pop, Run! Kim Ae-ran, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2005, 268p, ISBN 9788936436902 2. Mouthwatering Kim Ae-ran, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2007, 309p, ISBN 9788932018041
Southeast Asian women increased exponentially at internationally unprecedented rates. Thus, the most pressing discourse in Korea today is the diversity discourse. Writers are no exception, taking a keen interest in the subject. Jeon Sung-tae has been writing on this topic for the longest. He deals with the sensitive subject of North Korean defectors in “People Crossing the River,” and the inner world of Korean intellectuals helplessly exposed to the process of dis-identification in foreign lands (Mongolia) in “Korean Soldier.” What separates Jeon from other writers who have shown interest in this polarizing social issue and depict marginalized people as main characters, is his awareness of the dangers that in portraying “the other” one is always at risk of generalizing. Through constant re-examination, he maintains a balanced perspective where “the other” is neither idealized nor degraded. The best example of this is Wolves A polyphonic novel featuring six equal voices, the narrative adamantly refuses to reach a uniform conclusion or reconciliation by following a single perspective. Wolves opens an important new possibility for the exploration of “the other.” In essence, portraying an outsider or “the other” through the novel inspires the question, Is it possible to linguistically render “the other?” This question is connected to one of the most important questions in modern thought since the linguistic turn. “The other” in the sense of Levinas or Derrida is always an absolute exterior. They are not objects of understanding but of hospitality. This, then, makes it difficult to argue against the notion that the very attempt to render the other through one’s list_ Books from Korea
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Special Section There is more. The lover’s premature disappearance is also, philosophically or ethically, played back as a variation on the theme of, can we reach “the other?” or can we understand or linguistically render “the other?” The woman always dies too soon and therefore remains an entity impossible to grasp beyond the language of the masculine symbolic system. “The Comedian Who Went to the Moon,” “Blessed New Year to You All,” and his other romances are wonderful examples of this variation. As is evident in the stories, women are always the unreachable other. Outsiders are always objects of hospitality, not generalizations in the guise of understanding. This is where Kim’s “search for the ever absent woman” narrative has arrived. No writer understands the impossibility and importance of portraying the other through language as he does. His success in this endeavor will no doubt have a great influence on Korean literature as it progresses through the age of diversity. Wolves By Kim Hyoung-joong
Jeon Sung-tae, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2009, 301p, ISBN 9788936437091
native language is a part of generalizing the other. Is there a way for a writer whose craft is based on words to overcome this obstacle? Kim Yeon-su devotes himself to answering this question. The lover (usually a woman) in Kim Yeon-su’s stories, which often take the form of romances, is always missing. In “If I Climb the Snowy Mountain Another Month Later,” the woman exists in the form of an incomprehensible will. Whoever You Are, No Matter How Lonely, the long separation between lovers has turned the woman into a construct of memories that the narrator is endlessly reminded of, and in Song of the Night, the lover leaves behind a letter that is legible only at the beginning and takes her life at the start of the novel. In “The Comedian Who Went to the Moon,” the lover disappears into the moon in the wild. In some of Kim Yeon-su’s best works, the woman has always existed as an “absent manifestation.” The interesting thing is that the narrative of “searching for the woman who got away too soon” adds more than the melancholy of romances to Kim’s stories. First of all, the narrative is a driving force behind the post-structuralist theme of epistemological skepticism in regards to official textual records. In the end, the novel within the novel written by the protagonist of “If I Climb the Snowy Mountain Another Month Later” fails to record their love in words. “Bu neng shuo” is Chinese for “can’t speak.” How can words express her and the love they shared? How can words express war and the memories of the unspeakably horrific battles and turmoil? What contributes to Kim Yeon-su’s greatness is that he does not present himself as the usual “lonely novelist baffled before the imperfection of words.” Instead, he endlessly strives to reach a state of absoluteness beyond words and snowy mountains, wandering in a thick fog.
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1. I’m a Ghostwriter Kim Yeon-su, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2005, 266p, ISBN 9788936436858 2. Song of the Night Kim Yeon-su, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2008, 345p, ISBN 9788932019000
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3. Whoever You Are, No Matter How Lonely Kim Yeon-su, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2007, 392p, ISBN 9788954603980
Special Section
The New Imagination Trends in Modern Korean Fiction
Experimenting with the Imagination: Hwang Jeong-eun, Kim Tae-yong, Pyun Hye-young, Yun Ko-eun, and Han Yujoo
Prologue: Young Writers Examine Korean Society After the Democratization Movement Young Korean writers who have emerged in the 21st century charm readers through their imagination and literary experimentation. Hwang Jeong-eun, Pyun Hye-young, Kim Tae-yong, and Han Yujoo represent the group of young writers who have overturned the unwavering tradition of realism in Korean literature. These writers experiment with narrative in unusual ways and create works that are unconventional compared to a traditional Korean narrative. Depicting a multifaceted portrait of Korean society where “structural democracy” is permitted but “democracy in practice” is still miles away, the writers render characters fighting against the “desire to consume,” which takes hold of the masses with a powerful influence no match for democracy.
Hwang perceptively portrays the pain of those living in a space that cannot possibly be represented by the word “slum,” a space always in danger of falling into ruin. She illustrates the fiery trace of lives that cannot be compensated for, and life’s suffering that cannot be converted into money. The stories from her collection The Seven Thirty-two Elephant Train also depict the marginalized pushed out to the edge of the city lines. Her stories lend voice to the small, frail voices drowned out by the extravagant noise of the city and the groaning of the masses barely audible under the sound of cell phones and TVs—voices so painful to hear that one is tempted to cover the ears. Her stories contain these disappearing voices. Hwang Jeong-eun’s novels are an open-mic rally for the homeless and the abandoned children.
1. Hwang Jeong-eun: Chased to the Periphery of the City For Hwang Jeong-eun’s wretched characters, survival is such a pressing issue that democracy is the least of their problems. With real estate prices through the roof and the cost of living changing daily in a metropolis, especially in Seoul, one has to first and foremost survive in the struggle to secure a living space. The winds of redevelopment tear through the city under the guise of “designing a stylish city.” The laws of capitalism continue to push for something newer and more efficient, and the majority who cannot stay on top of these trends must suffer under the high cost of living and housing. In “One Hundred Shadows,” Hwang Jeongeun gives us shrewd commentary on a ruthless society that defines someone’s neighborhood as a trivializing “slum:” “Don’t they simply label the area “slum” because it’s an area to be leveled at some point, and things get too complicated if you think of it in terms of someone’s livelihood or living space?” Can we violently label a space where someone eats, sleeps, and raises children with the term, “slum?” Society has too easily integrated the term into its vocabulary and “othered” the space referred to as such, because the slums are nothing more than future sites for fancy apartment complexes, where even the memories of the so-called slums will disappear without a trace.
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1. One Hundred Shadows Hwang Jeong-eun Minumsa Publishing Group 2010, 196p, ISBN 9788937483059 2. The Seven Thirty-two Elephant Train Hwang Jeong-eun Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2008, 293p, ISBN 9788954606080 2
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Special Section 2. Kim Tae-yong: Pushed Out to the Margins of “Family” and “Us”
3. Pyun Hye-young: The Terror of Death, the Catastrophe of the City
The world Kim Tae-yong paints is a wasteland where the expectation of closeness or drive for common emotions such as love or friendship has disappeared, Kim Tae-yong’s works take a critical look at the demise of all human relationships through characters that are already free from the pressures of having to search for meaning in life. The lives of Kim Tae-yong’s characters do not progress in chronological order. They appear to be living without purpose or meaning, and sometimes enjoy schizophrenic delusions like the main character of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. What does it mean to live with “your wits about you” in a society where depression and mental illnesses spread like diseases? Kim Tae-yong’s characters makes the very effort of normal vs. abnormal meaningless. Through characters that cannot communicate with others or escape from pain and anxiety no matter how hard they try, Kim shows us the extremes of modern man’s isolation and disconnectedness. In Pig on the Grass, a father who cannot communicate with his son ironically feels he can talk to his pig by oinking at it. The dejection of a father who cannot communicate at all with his closest kin but feels he has formed a connection with an animal satirizes the impossibility of the modern man’s inability to communicate in a strangely comic way. Kim Tae-yong’s full-length novel Straight Out reexamines the meaning of reading and writing, the reader and the writer, and the novel and the story. His novel casts doubt on the premise of “language as a means of communication.” Kim Tae-yong is a writer who understands deep down how easily words are misunderstood, how quickly stories fall apart, and how easily the world is distorted. For a perfectionist dreaming of the perfect form of communication, perhaps silence is the most effective way of communicating. However, human beings are fated to use language to work through the very impossibility of communication. Kim’s novel examines the fate of man where one has no choice but to use language to retain thought in a world where language invariably betrays intention.
Pyun Hye-young’s novels are about people who wander inside a labyrinth for eternity. Her protagonists are people who do not know where to go even when presented with the opportunity to escape from their humdrum routines. Corpses, ghouls, monsters, and other uncanny characters roam about her narratives as though it is the most natural thing. Her novels are teeming with characters like zombies or Frankenstein-like creatures that pose a threat to normal life. She has an unsurpassed talent for depicting the grotesqueness of life through the perspective of death. Her novels are also portraits of the powerless modern man who has been robbed of the opportunity for normal life. Pyun’s story collection, AOI Garden is so full of corpses that it would be appropriate to say that corpses, rather than people, are the main characters. The modern man makes financial preparations for death with insurance policies and braces for death scientifically through medicine. But mankind today is more terrified of death than ever, and there is also the intensified horror of a life more painful than death. Pyun’s work seeks to get to the problem of life through issues with death. Dead bodies and patients connected to unwarranted deaths, incomprehensible deaths, and inexplicable deaths that occur far too often in contemporary society but cannot be explained appear in Pyun’s work. If only a part of one’s husband, wife, or close friend’s corpse turned up, would one recognize the body? Pyun’s “Corpses” makes the readers ask themselves this awful question. Her stories deal with death, corpses, and ghosts with more composure than Hollywood horror movies such as “The Others” or “Sixth Sense.” Her works are also reminiscent of Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty” or Francis Bacon’s cold, grotesque paintings. Further comparison of Pyun’s novels with films brings one’s attention to the apocalyptic of “I Am Legend” or “The Road.” The height of Pyun’s end-of-the-world imagination is found in Ashes and Red, her first full-length novel about the bloodcurdling end of a city taken over by an epidemic with unknown causes.
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1. Pig on the Grass Kim Tae-yong, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2007, 304p, ISBN 9788932018201
3. Heading for a Breeding Farm Pyun Hye-young, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2007, 252p, ISBN 9788954603591
2. Straight Out Kim Tae-yong, Jaeum&Moeum Publishing Co. 2010, 408p, ISBN 9788957074961
4. AOI Garden Pyun Hye-young, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2005, 266p, ISBN 9788932016207
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The city takes on an important meaning in Pyun’s works. The city provides various conveniences, but we never know when a wolf might escape from the zoo. An earthquake or a fire can turn all manmade structures into weapons that destroy those they were meant to serve. The city is at once a blessing and curse of civilization. Pyun illustrates city inhabitants through her composed narrative as they struggle to survive and walk the path of doom without realizing just how dependent they are on modern conveniences the city provides. These city people who follow trends like others, as others do, afraid of what others might think, are becoming increasingly accustomed to a uniform life, dream, and tastes.
4. Yun Ko-eun: A Lighthearted Imagination The moon suddenly becoming two and the Earth multiplying to six Earths, a school that teaches people how to eat alone, a fortuneteller one can pay to dream on one’s behalf, a self-run motel where a guest isolated in a snowstorm ends up the victim of road kill, paranoia inspired by a sudden outbreak of bedbugs, and a novelist who writes on toilet paper at a department store bathroom are some creations of Yun Ko-eun’s lighthearted imagination. Depicting unwelcome situations in life told in a lively tone, Yun successfully creates an alienating effect by depicting various ailments of contemporary society. Through her writing, readers meet their world rendered in a new, unfamiliar light. In “Table for One,” we see a woman who cannot get along with her co-workers and eats lunch alone. She signs up for classes at a school that teaches people how to eat alone. She meets other students at the school who share the same fear of “ending up alone” and becomes accustomed to the fear. “Invader Graphics” is about a writer who has made her debut but has yet to write a hit. The last writing space she finds as refuge from her disapproving family is the fancy bathroom at a department store, which she finds to be the ideal writing space with its endless supply of toilet paper to write on, not to mention “free” electricity and Internet. But she cannot tell when this place, too, will be taken away from her. At “The Park Hyeon-mong Dream Co.,” customers get custom-made dreams and someone to dream for them. Like everything else, dreams can be chosen, bought, and sold. The greatest appeal of Yun’s stories is the transforming power that turns a grim reality into a charming story, turning a miserable world into a space where captivating stories unfold.
5. Han Yujoo: Questioning Language and Stories Han Yujoo’s characters watch superman and ponder the finite nature of time, feel ashamed of the violence of civilization watching footage of the 9/11 attacks, and question the future of civilization at the news of whales committing mass suicide. They are fed up with living in a media-addicted society where all human experiences are translated into the language of media and images. The author herself is a “media child” raised in cyberspace, but dreams of a world of music in which novels cannot be easily translated into “other languages” and storytelling itself hardly communicates the whole of the story. Han Yujoo dreams of a novel that, like music, knows when to keep silent and does not hope to be completely understood.
To the Moon Han Yujoo, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2006, 246p, ISBN 9788932016962
She attempts to speak through the novel, one of the most flexible media forms available, but is keenly aware that the novel is composed of a limiting medium we call language. As a result, her novels accept the irony that they are using language to reject language, just as mankind is enslaved by mass media whose original intention was to aid communication. In her story “Death Fugue” she astutely points out that, “The photo albums own people, not the other way around.”
Epilogue: A Tattered World, a New Story What new paths of resistance can the novel take in the face of the nation and the capitalist powerhouses that invent increasingly sophisticated technologies of oppression? Young writers of the new millennium continue to experiment between the sense of responsibility that urges them to write new stories illustrating the reality today in which the revolution of democracy’s success is being undermined by capitalism, and the desire to revive old stories that continue to this day. These writers keep readers on the edge of their seats with stories that defeat our conventional beliefs about the novel form, and use experimental styles that no longer put storytelling in the forefront. By Jung Yeo-ul Table for One Yun Ko-eun, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2010, 398p, ISBN 9788932020495
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Special Section
The New Imagination Trends in Modern Korean Fiction
Popular Culture Connects with Literature Kim Young-ha, Park Min-gyu, Kim Kyung-wook, Kim Junghyuk Leaving behind the political of their predecessors, writers since the 1990s seek inspiration in the media-saturated, consumer-oriented masses of individuality.
1. Seek Within Popular Culture and Deliberate Through Literature Novels provide us with a multi-dimensional rendering of society’s cultural landscapes and desires. The language of the novel harnesses and gives form to desires drifting in reality; characters in novels and their conversations, sex, jobs, and lifestyles reflect the desires and deficiencies of their contemporaries. One great change that took place in Korean novels after 1987 was that personal desire was brought to the foreground. Contemporary novels began when the one-dimensional specimen of a fictional character evolved into an entity with individuality. Along those lines, it is notable that in Korean novels after 1987, a major part of personal desire is inspired by outside stimuli. One could argue that traditional novels such as Honggildongjeon are spawned by social circumstances of discriminating against second wives’ children, but the desire of novels after 1987 come in greater variety and class including objects represented by brand names. The desire of novels from 1990 and beyond preserves character types and their lifestyles. They turn on the computer the moment they wake up in the morning, listen to music on the Internet, and prefer the anonymity of 24-hour convenience stores. They are more comfortable around manmade structures than nature, and prefer the no-hassle relationships they form online than ones offline. The interesting thing is that a great part of this manmade 20 list_ Books from Korea
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world consists of a cultural form called popular culture. Their memories are shared with songs of popular singers, the names of fashionable clothing brands, and commercial film productions. Popular culture provides a well from which to draw one’s literary sensibility. The important question is whether to use popular culture as a prop, or reevaluate and adopt it as a serious source of literary sensibility. Adopting it would first require self-reflection because adoption is a means of showing active support or rejection. Some writers who have adopted popular culture into their works include Kim Young-ha, Kim Kyung-wook, Park Min-gyu, and Kim Junghyuk. All four writers use popular culture as a crucial ingredient but the reason or context for this usage varies. While Kim Young-ha recruits popular culture to protest against the hegemonic ideology of a stratified society, Kim Junghyuk chooses aspects of popular culture fit for those with non-mainstream tastes. For Park Min-gyu, on the other hand, the use of popular culture is meant to bring in marginalized subcultures rather than the major items and issues of the day, which sets itself apart from popular culture as a generation marker in Kim Kyung-wook’s stories. The variety of uses thus divides popular culture and puts them in different dimensions, and in the process popular culture formerly thought of as a habit or a custom is re-examined. As such, the critical examination of popular culture produces literature.
2. Kim Young-ha: Popular Culture as Anti-Ideology Popular culture shows us the polar opposite of sobriety in Kim Young-ha’s novels. For instance, the children in the story “Emergency Exit” have received no education in traditional culture widely considered common sense. They are more accustomed to making spontaneous decisions we consider vulgar. The popular culture Kim Young-ha is interested in can be found in places that have nothing to do with lofty cultural elitism. The backdrops of these stories are spaces popular but at the same time isolated like someone alone with a computer. As the ironic title, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, reveals, the rules of the world as we know it do not apply in Kim’s world. Kim does not attempt to hide his desire to simply snuff the values and rules of the world. His indulging in anti-normative desires becomes a reality through the Internet. His characters are anonymous creatures in a parasitic relationship with the Internet rather than social individuals, with their otaku sensibilities satisfying desires through online play forbidden offline in real life. They work as online suicide helpers or form secret societies that go on trips to get hit by lightning, and live in the confines of a room with a computer in order to illegally copy and sell software. They enjoy strictly nonsensical, private lives far removed from pesky rules. Relationships, love, and sex are all possible with a computer and a little bit of imagination. In other words, what Kim Young-ha’s characters eat, wear, and drive represent their identity. Their beloved items created by popular culture are modern and cutting-edge. The myriad cultural items we use speak for life itself.
1. What Happened to the Guy Stuck
in the Elevator?
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Kim Young-ha Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2010, 290p, ISBN 9788954610117 2. I Have the Right to Destroy Myself Kim Young-ha Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2010, 134p, ISBN 9788954611770
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3. Park Min-gyu: The Aesthetics of Recycling The characters of Park Min-gyu’s novels are addicted to Pac Man, obsessed with baseball, and captivated by superheroes. But the memories of popular culture in Park’s stories lurk in the margins. For example, the boss addicted to Pac Man actually becomes a video game character, and the baseball team disappears from the history of baseball after circling the margins. The Earth Heroes they look up to are nothing like the superheroes from DC Comics. They are reminiscent of what we expect them to be, but more, pitiful and awkward.
Park Min-gyu’s use of popular culture is similar to recycling. In other words, Park adopts the language of popular culture but transforms it, like in the short story, “Jeol,” that adopts the grammar of fantasy historical novels. “Gip” adopts the SF genre, and “Rudi” has a dash of apocalyptic narrative. “The generation of heroes has gone. It’s now “Girls’ Generation,” the author says, and attacks our popular culture of cookie cutter pop groups. In a sense, “Girls’ Generation” is a space of arrival. One cannot tell if it is a shame, a relief, or simply an outcome, but we now live in a time where “we learn about making babies through friends, the end of the world through magazines, the match between Ali and Inoki through TV, and Macs through encyclopedias.” Popular culture is our teacher now, whether or not it is qualified to teach.
Double Park Min-gyu, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2010, 620p, ISBN 9788936435882
4. Kim Kyung-wook: Chronicles of Experience and Collective Sensibility There is a generation of people who aren’t supposed to make jokes on April 1st—that is the day Leslie Cheung suddenly died. There are people who wish the news of his death were a prank. Anyone who watched “Days of Being Wild,” especially if they are in their early 20s, will not say that Leslie Cheung is just another Hong Kong actor. Leslie Cheung was a cultural symbol. Kim Kyung-wook’s “Is Leslie Cheung Really Dead?” evokes the sensibility of a generation through the cultural code of Leslie Cheung. Two college sweethearts remember each other through ABBA songs or “Red Roses on Wednesdays” and it is impossible for them to connect with people who are not familiar with list_ Books from Korea
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Special Section
Baghdad Café, “Betty,” or Kurt Cobain. The cultural icons and tastes of the 1990s function as certificates of authentication in Kim Kyung-wook’s stories. This depicts the self discovery and maturity of Kim’s generation that occur along with popular culture. In other words, Kurt Cobain and Leslie Cheung are culture itself as well as mediums that expressed in the form of culture a sense of loss and loneliness deep within the generation.
5. Kim Junghyuk: Ethics of Minor Tastes The popular culture of Kim Junghyuk comes with the label “B -,” technically popular culture of little value. His characters are attached to this B - culture, somewhat similar to the unusual behavior of outcasts such as otaku and enthusiasts of unusual things. But upon closer examination we find that Kim is occupied with the issue of unconventional taste outside the uniformity of popular culture. By being obsessed with inconsequential things, he critiques a reality where all things have been trivialized as disposable material. Just as the language of an extinct tribe is at risk of disappearing right with it, usefulness is the criterion that determines life and death in contemporary society where market value is everything. Thanks to the few the useless are imbued with other values. Through such exercise, we re-examine a society where everything loses its value after a single use. To construct an ideological world of his own design, Kim Junghyuk invokes objects we waste. Surprisingly, when the object enthusiast Kim draws our attention to an object and gives it a name, the object turns into something else entirely. Popular culture is no exception. He is interested in marginalized popular culture such as graffiti and skateboarding. Through this ‘unpopular’ popular culture, he begins to take apart the uniform culture wearing the mask of the public. By Kang Yu-jung
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1. Is Leslie Cheung Really Dead? Kim Kyung-wook, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2005, 304p, ISBN 9788932016030 2. Who Killed Kurt Cobain? Kim Kyung-wook, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2003, 350p, ISBN 8932014116
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3. The Library of Instruments Kim Junghyuk, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2008, 308p, ISBN 9788954605670 4. Penguin News Kim Junghyuk, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2006, 377p, ISBN 8932016755
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Book Lover's Angle
Sometimes You Have to Laugh: The Lighter Side of Korean Fiction Korean fiction has a reputation as being quite serious and there are also sometimes problems involved in translating humor. Consequently you might guess that there is no lightness in the Korean fiction that has been translated. The good news is that this is simply not true. There is quite a bit of character-based humor in Korean literature. Often, that humor helps readers understand Korean cultural elements in the stories they read. There is a saying in English that, “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down,” and it applies to these kinds of stories. Choe Chong-hui’s Chom-nye explores the difficulties of post-war peasants, and features a clever and rapacious shaman who uses the death of a bride to swindle the mourning family out of all the dead women’s goods and the families’ sole remaining chicken. There is also Chon Kwangyong’s brilliant Kapitan Ri, an excellent summary of the first 50 years of the 20th century in Korea, the main character of which is a highly amusing bad guy. When humor is fused into these meaningful stories, Korean literature becomes more easily accessible. There are also some stories that are just plain funny. Three of these great stories are from the KLTI/Jimoondang Publishing series, “The Portable Library of Korean Fiction.” The Camellias, by Kim Yu-jong, is a “first love” story in which a country bumpkin comes face to face with Jeomsun, a girl from a higher class who loves him. The tone is rough and humorous as Jeomsun is only capable of showing her interest through an aggression that she feels is justified by the boy’s inability to understand that they are actually in love. The young love is complicated by the fact that Jeomsun is the narrator’s social superior, and this causes the narrator to see Jeomsun’s peculiar mix of affection and aggression as a form of class warfare. Of course it is, as Jeomsun pulls stunts that would get a social equal smacked on the head, but Kim plays this for broad comedy and the unnamed narrator’s denseness justifies the lengths that Jeomsun feels she has to go to in order to demonstrate her love. In the end, after various amusing bumps and bruises, love is realized. My Innocent Uncle by Ch’ae Mansik, satirizes idealistic Korean socialists as well as opportunistic Koreans who collaborated with the Japanese colonialists. This is a comic story, with a funny narrator, and it is translated in ways in which the fun comes through. When the befuddled collaborator insists on calling his uncle a “scotchalist” instead of socialist, a modern reader will easily be able to draw parallels to the political climate of today, with clever name-calling standing in the stead of actual argument. Also highly amusing is the narrator’s amazing ability to find that events support his own beliefs, regardless of the fact they often don’t. Finally, Kim Young-ha’s classic short story “What Happened to the Guy Stuck in the Elevator?” is an absurdist look at a day in which everything that can go wrong does go wrong; people reveal themselves to be self-centered, and technology reveals itself to be untrustworthy. The single businessman who narrates, begins his day by breaking his razor after shaving only half of his face, and things just get worse from there. On his way out of the building he is forced to use the stairs because the elevator is stalled. On the 5th
floor he finds the reason: a man is stuck in the elevator door. The rest of the story focuses on the narrator’s continually unraveling day and futile attempts to notify someone about the guy stuck in the elevator. There is an amusing part in which the businessman gives an ‘important’ presentation to his colleagues: an argument for increasing toilet paper efficiency. Predictably, the presentation does not go as he expects. When the narrator finally does reach 119 (emergency) to report the man in the elevator, he is doubted, and when he returns to his apartment, where the hot water has been turned off, he is still in a state of uncertainty about—well— basically everything. Kim carries this off with deadpan humor and situational and verbal irony that masterfully survives translation, and there is at least one Korean pun left in the translation that will surprise and amuse readers who know some Korean. What does it all mean? For me it’s meant an effort to get information about Korean literature out through the KTLIT Wikipedia Project, a project that is slowly filling the Wikipedia with information on Korean authors and fiction. But for you it means a rollicking good time reading Korean fiction! By Charles Montgomery
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1. My Innocent Uncle Ch’ae Mansik Jimoondang Pub., 2003 2. The Camellias Kim Yu-jong Jimoondang Pub., 2002
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3. Photo Shop Murder Kim Young-ha Jimoondang Pub., 2003
* Charles Montgomery is a Professor in the English Interpretation and Translation Department at Dongguk University. He studies Korean literature.
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Interview
Witness to Solitude Novelist Pyun Hye-young We were set to meet near the river. A thick fog was slowly turning the sky an ash grey. It reminded me of a scene from her novel. I pictured the main character, who finds himself all alone in the world. Just then, Pyun Hye-young walked into the cafe, her face a bright red. Pyun has been one of the most prolific writers in Korea in the last decade. I was thrilled to meet her. As I listened to the sound of her voice and watched the changing expressions on the face of this calm and careful storyteller, I found myself feeling somehow comforted. Perhaps even the lonely man in her book sensed her warmth from afar. Yang: You just published your third short story collection right on the tail of your first novel. Was it hard to part ways with your characters? Pyun: Well, in the case of Ashes and Red, I’ve spent so much time talking about it in various publications that, in the process, I felt like I was slowly saying goodbye to that world. Also, the short stories were already written, and I had time to say my goodbyes while the collection was being put together. So the postpartum pain wasn’t too bad. (laughs) Yang: Most Korean writers add an author’s note at the end of their books. But you chose not to add one to Ashes and Red, even though it was your first novel. If you were to add one now, what would you want to say? Pyun: I did not add an author’s note when the book was published because, as a writer, I was concerned about elaborating too much on the content of the novel and over-explaining the character. I still feel that way, but I suppose I would like to thank those who have read the book, those who are reading it now, and those who will read it in the future. Yang: Recently, you have been serializing your second novel online. Is there a big difference for you in terms of writing a short story versus writing a novel? Pyun: If writing a short story feels like running a hundred-meter sprint, then writing a novel is like running a marathon. You take
deeper breaths and can’t stop for rest. I guess I must be out of shape, because I felt a little out of breath. Yang: In the last decade, your writing has carved out a new field in Korean fiction, and your first two short story collections clearly showed where you stand. With Ashes and Red, the motifs that appeared in your short stories seem to be more integrated and expanded. Was there a particular inspiration behind the novel? Pyun: This is a delicate subject considering the unfortunate disaster that has taken place in Japan, but Ashes and Red was inspired by earthquakes. Depending on how you look at it, an earthquake is like “bad luck.” They both strike without warning and can cause even a life that appears strong and stable to collapse in an instant. I read an article on earthquakes in a science magazine. It said that in countries where large earthquakes are predicted to happen, even the slightest tremor can cause fatalities. Not because of the earthquake itself, but because people can mistake a tremor for the “big one” and panic. They might rush out of a building only to accidentally fall to their deaths. Ironically, the desire to live can lead to your death. I felt that this said something about what it means to be human, so I based my novel on it. Yang: Now that you’ve said that, it seems like you must’ve felt the same stress and anxiety as the character in your novel. Was it difficult to write? Pyun: The whole time I was writing, I had to steadily maintain my focus, so that part was difficult. But when I write, I try to keep the furthest distance possible from what is happening to the characters. If I had completely closed the distance between the narrator and the main character, then I would have absorbed the main character’s pain and suffered. But in this book, I maintained a sense of distance from the characters and tried to write in the voice of a distant observer, so I did not internalize their pain. Yang: That sense of distance also seems to enhance the character’s duality. In the novel, the character goes abroad for a job transfer and finds himself lost and confused. Up until the halfway point, it seems clear that he’s a victim. But when he becomes implicated in his ex-wife’s death, he starts to look more like a victimizer who lashes out violently at others. So I guess you could say the character is two-faced? Would you say that this twosidedness is inherent to human desire itself? Pyun: In my opinion, the main character in Ashes and Red is both a victim and a victimizer. He is a victim in the sense that he is thrown into this diseased city, this world of violence, without regard for his own will. But since he plays a role in that violence, he is also a perpetrator. It does not matter whether he killed his wife or not. The man is pushed around by this violent world, but he comforts list_ Books from Korea
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Interview and consoles himself with the thought that he’s a victim while easily turning into a perpetrator at a moment’s notice. He seems pitiful because his existence is consumed by this world, but at the same time, he’s not worthy of endless pity because he is also responsible for his situation. Yang: So I guess, to borrow a line from your novel, you could say he “catches women during the day and rats at night.” Women, or perhaps wives, play an important part in this man’s story. Of your short stories, “Evening Courtship” struck me as a poetic love story. This isn’t directly connected to your work, but could we turn the topic of conversation to romance? Pyun: That’s not something I have much experience with, unfortunately. (laughs) I’m more the type to tell my younger friends that they should date more. Nothing brings people together quite like love or romance, and one of the things we learn from such relationships ultimately is the question, “What kind of person am I?” It is both the only way for one individual to try to understand another individual, and conversely the process through which we realize how little we actually know about each other. I find love, as a way for a person to find out who they are, to be highly recommended. (laughs) You said that “Evening Courtship” is a love story, and I do think it expresses one type of love. To me, the most beautiful moment in love is when you’re itching with the desire to know the other person, to confess your love, and to hear them confess their love, but you have no assurance of what they feel for you. In other words, I’m referring to that feeling of itching with a desire that cannot be put into words, and holding back and hesitating with each other, even while gladly summoning the courage to try. “Evening Courtship” is about sharing your true feelings with another person despite yourself. In that respect, I agree that it is a type of love story.
Yang: So I wasn’t that far off the mark. I can’t wait to read a fullfledged love story written by you someday. (laughs) You mentioned the idea of hesitations that cannot be expressed in words. I can’t help but think that this mentality is similar to the hesitation and indecision experienced by the main character in Ashes and Red. After the main character becomes homeless, things still could have ended in a hopeful way if he had confirmed the existence of “Mol.” But when you look at it from another angle, it is also the process through which his life falls apart. In that sense, can you talk about the meaning behind the title, Ashes and Red? Pyun: I got the idea for the title from the scene where the main character sees the flames of the incineration plant and thinks they are beautiful. You could also say that the key colors of the entire book are ash grey and crimson red. If I had changed the word order around to “Red and Ashes,” then it would have put more emphasis on “grey.” So I put “red” last in order to highlight the red that is left behind in a grey, ruined world. Blood-red signifies death, but it also signifies vitality. So I hope that is how the title will be interpreted. Yang: So that dual meaning applies to both the theme of the novel and the personality of the main character. Pyun: Yes, it does. I like to write about things like irony and the duality of human nature. Yang: I heard that an excerpt of your novel will be translated and included with this interview. Is there a particular reason you chose this excerpt? (pages 95-98 of the Korean edition) Pyun: In that excerpt, the main character experiences loneliness while coming to terms with his ex-wife’s death. When he first hears
“If writing a short story feels like running a hundred-meter sprint, then writing a novel is like running a marathon. You take deeper breaths and can’t stop for rest. I guess I must be out of shape, because I felt a little out of breath.”
critic Yang Yun-eui and novelist Pyun Hye-young
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the news, he can’t believe it. But he relives an unhappy memory from his past that reminds him of his wife. I think of this scene as the first moment where the character begins to realize how alone he is. It also foreshadows the fact that he will have to get by and survive on his own without anyone to talk to about his fear and loneliness. Yang: I thought the most dramatic depiction of the main character’s loneliness was in the final scene of the book—where his only means of communication with the outside world is a public telephone. He’s hit rock bottom, and he’s clinging desperately to the telephone line like a man hanging from a cliff. In fact, the word for “public telephone”—gongjung—is a homonym that can also be read as “midair.” When I think of that scene, with the image of the man talking to the empty air, the excerpt you chose seems all the more meaningful. Pyun: My first version of the ending had the character gazing at a ruined world in which he has to survive on his own. But if I did that, the reader would be left with only the image of an irrational, oppressive world. It felt like all the blame was placed on the irrationality of systems or the world. So I changed it to a depiction of the main character’s daily life. And I depicted this life as one in which he has lost his own name and adopted the name Mol instead, after the name of the person he searched for but was unable to find. So though he has survived, he’ll never be happy. It may be that he will always be alone in the world.
Yang: Considering the recent earthquake in Japan and the explosion at the Fukushima nuclear plant, your novel seems quite timely. Nuclear power stops at national borders, but radioactivity has no nationality. You just completed your second novel, which was published online in serial form. How is it different from your first novel? Pyun: With Ashes and Red, I felt like I was tightening my shoelaces at the starting line, waiting for the gun to go off. But when I wrote my second novel, I had time to check my laces, do a little warm-up, and wave to my friends who had come out to support me. I guess you could say I enjoyed being able to take my time and take deeper breaths while working on something longer. Yang: I look forward to reading the author’s note in your second novel very soon. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. By Yang Yun-eui
Yang: Now that you say that, the name Mol seems like a compressed version of his entire life. In your stories, most of your characters are either nameless or only have a last name. Is there a particular reason for this? Pyun: I chose the name Mol because it doesn’t signify any particular ethnicity or nationality. The Chinese character for mol means “to disappear.” In the end, the main character has vanished from reality. Also, I thought the word sounded like the English word, “mall.” The word “mall” makes me picture a child lost within an enormous maze-like structure or an artificial world. I also often use the name Yujin, the main character’s friend, because it is not limited by gender or nationality. I like names that don’t contain any preconceptions about race, nationality, or gender. Though, of course, it’s not easy to find names like that.
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Yang: That’s true about the characters names, but it’s also true about the setting of the story. In your book, no specific nationalities or place names are mentioned. There is not even much indication of when the story takes place. In that regard, infectious disease or earthquakes seem to play a big role in creating worlds, beyond nationality and time period. I guess you could say it is proof that the whole world faces the same difficulties. Pyun: My short story “AOI Garden” was set in an apartment building in Hong Kong during the SARS epidemic. And, as I said, the starting point of Ashes and Red was a major earthquake. Just as earthquakes give shape to the fear of disaster striking anywhere at any time, disease and epidemics have a similar context. We only experience epidemics through warnings; they don’t exist to us outside of that. Recently, the world was hit hard by the H1N1 virus. I am no expert, so I thought it was nothing more than a type of cold. But socially, there were endless warnings about the dangers of a new virus. An epidemic is where the symptoms are unknown but fear builds with each warning and new set of information. Also, in the case of earthquakes and epidemics, there are always victims, but the rest of the world quickly recovers its vitality. That, too, is part of the nature of everyday life. No matter what horrors we experience, daily life always makes a quick recovery.
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1. Evening Courtship Pyun Hye-young, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2011, 257p, ISBN 9788932021850 2. AOI Garden Pyun Hye-young, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2005, 266p, ISBN 9788932016207 3. Ashes and Red Pyun Hye-young, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2010, 260p, ISBN 9788936433734
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Excerpt
Ashes and Red My ex-wife is dead. My ex-wife is dead. My ex-wife is dead. My ex-wife is dead. My ex-wife is dead. My ex-wife is dead. My ex-wife is dead. He kept muttering the words to himself, but no matter how many times he repeated them, the truth would not sink in. Yujin was just playing a mean joke on him. Yujin knew that he had slept with his ex-wife after she divorced him and married Yujin, and now he had obviously spent the last few days coming up with ways to hurt him. He slid open the door to the balcony. The smell of trash and disinfectant seeped into the room; at the same time, a stunned sorrow spread out from the center of his body. It was not the sorrow of realizing his ex-wife was dead. The emotion he felt was similar to what he had experienced as a child, when he stood before the dark funeral portrait of his deceased mother. They had not let him see his mother’s body. No one in his family wanted him, just a boy at the time, to see what she looked like when she died, her body mangled from the traffic accident. Though he was just a boy, he knew what death was, but he did not yet understand what it meant that his “mother” had died. The reason he had felt sad was his father. His father, dressed in a black suit cut from fabric too heavy for the season, dripped with sweat in the funeral home. He kept glancing at his father in that suit. The suit had been purchased for their wedding, nine years ago. A furniture wholesaler, his father wore jeans and a windbreaker to work everyday. Other than when he attended other people’s weddings, he almost never had reason to wear a suit. The jacket sleeves were too tight on his father, who had grown portly after marriage. The black fabric was wrinkled from bowing to the floor each time another mourner stepped up to the funeral portrait, then from sitting like a stone with his back slumped. The sleeves, which tightened like sausages each time he leaned forward to bow to someone who had come to pay their condolences, looked like they were going to burst. By the afternoon of the second day, the seam in the
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armpit finally gave way and the white shirt popped out. It looked like a white tongue. Everyone was too sad to care or to laugh. The sorrow of mourning enabled them to overlook the ridiculous. He kept glancing at the white fabric. It looked like his mother was sticking her tongue out at him to keep him from crying. Later that night, after he had fallen asleep in the reception hall where several guests were still quietly tilting back glasses of alcohol, he was awakened by the sound of stifled sobs. His father was alone, crying, in front of the funeral portrait. He burst into tears. He cried because of the quiet funeral hall, the smell of spicy brisket soup that had thickened and condensed from boiling too long, the dark faces of the tired people, and the sight of his father bawling his eyes out. He cried from the sorrow of a son looking at his humble father dressed in a torn suit, teary face contorted and clownish, bald head beaded with sweat, and not out of mourning for a deceased mother. The funeral ended, and a month passed. His father called a cleaning lady to help straighten up their neglected house. When she opened the refrigerator, she made a face, took out the containers of side dishes one by one, and set them on the table. They were the last dishes his mother had made. They were moldy and sour with rot. He had been hiding in his room, peeking through the door as she cleaned, but when he saw this, he jumped out and grabbed one of the containers before she could pour it down the sink. It was stir-fried dried shrimp. He hated dried shrimp. Each time he ate it, the shells stuck in his teeth. He stood there, glowering at the hateful cleaning lady, and stuffed his mouth full of moldy shrimp. His stomach ached for days. With no one to take care of him, he had to suffer through it alone, the diarrhea wearing away at his bottom. At last, he understood that his mother was gone. Pain spread through his body and his heart, rising up and down his esophagus with each nauseating whiff of the moldy, mushy shrimp. He had lain awake in bed, late into the night, sick and alone, coming to terms with the fact that he would have to nurse himself back from sickness without his mother. The death of his ex-wife would sink in the same way. Only after his entire body ached because of her, only after all of the words he wanted to say and needed to say had backed up inside of him and overturned his stomach, only after his tongue stiffened with the pain of being unable to speak
even a single word since she was not there to hear it would her death finally become real. He was not sad because she was dead. What he felt was just the bewilderment of finding out while in a foreign country, by someone who was little more than a stranger to him and who had informed him unilaterally and in a voice dripping with suspicion, that the person he had felt closest to in this world was gone. Now more than ever he longed to talk to her. He kept repeating the words she's dead to himself to try to shake off that desire. Even if he could not make himself believe it, she was obviously not there in the apartment with him. So he could not talk to her anyway. Back before their divorce, he had strayed once. The girl was friendly and laughed easily, and she liked him. For a while, he was secretly tormented, wondering whether he really loved the girl and trying to figure out whether she loved him. He would think he was madly in love one day, but the very next day he would think to himself that if this flimsy thing he felt was called love, then he may as well say he loved a dog in the street. While hovering in indecision, he slept with the girl several times. What had bothered him then was not the sense of moral failing or guilt he felt about sleeping with someone else while legally married. It also wasn’t because he felt bad towards his wife. Nor was it because he felt bad towards the girl he had slept with despite not knowing for sure whether he loved her or not. It was the loneliness he felt from being unable to discuss the problem openly with his wife. It was the loneliness of one who harbors a secret he would prefer not to carry. When it came to the waves of feeling that washed over him, the thrill he felt each time he saw the girl, the insecurity of not knowing if she was going to leave him, the anxiety of wanting to be loved by her, the loneliness of having to guess what she was feeling through a single trivial word as she did not let him in completely, and the fact that he wanted to get away from her despite all of that, the only person he wanted to confide in was his wife. His wife was the only person who could have listened to the whole story and told him whether or not the girl really loved him, whether or not he really loved the girl, and just how hard that love would make things for him in the end. But he had known it was precisely for that reason that, of all people, he could never say a word about it to his wife. He was as lonely now as he was back then. He longed to talk to someone about his ex-wife's death and about the
disappointment he felt because she had fled to a world that he was not a part of. But the person he wanted to talk to about her death was, more than anyone else, was his ex-wife herself. She would have wanted to tell him how afraid she was the moment she realized she was about to die, how much it hurt when the knife blade—as he pictured it, he started to cry for the first time—slashed into her flesh, how agonizing it was to realize she was still alive after repeated stabbings, and how frightening it was to expel her final breath as she used the last of her strength to open her eyes and look upon her killer. As lonely as it made him to not be able to tell her about his loneliness, it must have made her just as lonely to not be able to tell anyone about her own death. His tears fell, yet her death still did not feel real. Even if her body were there now, right before his eyes, he would feel the same. But since he was no longer a child, he had to accept her death, whether or not it had sunk in yet, and it pained him to imagine her in pain. He would never see her again, would never share a conversation with her again. The opportunity to talk about the loneliness of keeping secrets they could not share with each other, about the profound loneliness that arose from bearing only the things they were expected to know, was gone forever. Translated by Sora Kim-Russell
Ashes and Red Pyun Hye-young, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2010, 260p, ISBN 9788936433734
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The Face of the Twenty-first Century Novelist Park Min-gyu
A writer who likens writing to a boxing match, Park Min-gyu leaves behind his slacker past for his improved writing self.
Interview
Park Min-gyu debuted in 2003 and was the recipient of The Hankyoreh Literature Award and the Munhakdongne New Writer Award. His powerful imagination, understanding of the minority, and original narratives led him to become an iconic figure in 21st century Korean literature. He was recently chosen as the face of Korean literature in the 21st century in a poll of literary critics, and hailed as “spokesman for the trends of the 21st century,” and “challenging the lethargy of the young generation while seeking a new form for the novel.”
Kim: So the appetite for the arts became an entrance into writing.
Kim: I’m pleased to meet you. You went to last November’s Guadalajara Book Fair in Mexico, didn’t you? Did you buy a lot of Mexican wrestling masks? I recall that you were photographed with a wrestler mask for the cover of your short story collection Double. I’m asking because that image made such an impression on me.
Kim: That sounds like you. (laughs) It seems to me that feeling pleasure and freedom while amusing yourself is an important aspect of art. Throughout you’ve produced a distinctive body of work. In much of your work, the paragraph suddenly shifts mid-sentence into another paragraph, and in Ping-pong the woman’s dialogue was printed in pink and the man’s, blue. In Pavane for a Dead Princess you included the CD meant to be its background music. Your sense of the role of media seems inimical.
Park: I didn’t buy many because before that, I’d already purchased a lot through the Internet. Normally, I watch Mexican wrestling through UCC channels, but since I was able to watch Lucha Libre in real life, it was great. The photograph for Double was taken with me wearing the wrestling masks of El Santo and Blue Demon, two wrestlers I like a lot. I thought it would be fun. Kim: When I read your books, I think of Paul Lafargue’s book The Right to be Lazy. Of course I’m not saying that you’re lazy; since 2003 when you debuted, you’ve diligently published four novels and two story collections. I feel your works contain unusual reflections on laziness and acts as a safeguard for it.
Park: That’s right. At college I rarely showed up for classes. I majored in poetry so I rarely took classes on the novel. There wasn’t any actual reason I had to major in poetry. Watching the upperclassmen at college, I noticed that poetry classes had less homework compared to the fiction ones. I thought it’d be easy, so I did poetry. Even then my main focus was having a good time.
Park: Personally, I like the old-fashioned thick book. I wanted to make Double thicker but I was told that if it was too thick people wouldn’t read it, so it was published in its present skinnier form. And how I change the line or paragraph in the middle of a sentence, and that kind of thing, I do it just because I like it that way. At first I actually thought that was the way it was done. Since I had majored in
Park: I was born in 1969 and spent my childhood in Korea while the country was a developing nation racing towards economic growth. I grew up in an environment that pressured you to be industrious and move with incredible speed. Maybe our generation wasn’t able to appear lazy, or just couldn’t be lazy. But within that environment, I managed to grow up lazily. I was constantly lagging behind. I was incredibly happy…because I was lazy. (laughs) Kim: Perhaps your reflections on laziness is in consideration of and connected to those who haven’t been able to keep up with the pace that society demands. But if you’ve been lazy since childhood, you must have struggled fiercely at school.
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Park: School… It was diff icult. School is where extreme competition is encouraged, the mediocre life is emphasized, and a place where you are warned by being told a straggler’s life means to be defeated. There’s been many times when I hated it so much I just wanted to disappear. If there’s an empty seat in the classroom the teacher would know, so I would move a desk and chair into the storage room and leave. Since I wasn’t studying, I hung out all day long. Kim: I’m guessing you listened to a lot of rock music at the time. Didn’t you once form a band and even have a concert? Park: The band was just a hobby. I like the bands that were playing around the time of the Woodstock Festival in 1969. These days I’m listening to a lot of classic blues music, like Blind Willie Johnson. Kim: I remember that a guitarist was an important character in the short story “The Yogurt-Selling Woman.” When did you start becoming interested in writing? Park: In high school I was really interested in the arts. I didn’t need formal lessons like music or art classes, but since I was focused on the actual practice of art more than grades I ended up entering a creative writing program.
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1. Double Park Min-gyu, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2010, 620p, ISBN 9788936435882 2. Pavane for a Dead Princess Park Min-gyu, Wisdomhouse Publishing Co., Ltd. 2009, 420p, ISBN 9788959133918 3. Ping-pong Park Min-gyu, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2006, 258p, ISBN 9788936433550
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Interview
critic Kim Dongshik and novelist Park Min-gyu
“Maybe our generation wasn’t able to appear lazy, or just couldn’t be lazy. But within that environment, I managed to grow up lazily. I was constantly lagging behind. I was incredibly happy…because I was lazy.”
poetry, I figured that prose also had spaces between the lines. I didn’t know the grammar of the novel, I wasn’t educated about it. So there are reasons like that too.
person could become better by reading at all. But as I kept writing I realized that even a guy like me could change. These days I humbly accept the ‘writing me.’
Kim: It sounds like you were able to be free because you didn’t know the conventions of the novel.
Kim: As you see yourself change through the process of writing, you must also sense that the world we live in is also able to change a little.
Park: Until I published Castella I didn’t know about the third person point of view. I just wrote everything in first person. If you don’t know something you’re supposed to be ashamed about it, but even when I don’t know something I don’t have a complex about it. Kim: The early work such as Legends of the World’s Heroes or Sammi Superstars’ Last Fan Club reveals a cynical, critical attitude toward heroic characters. In contrast, short stories such as “Nearby” and “Napping,” there’s a focus on the lives of the powerless and sick elderly. I’m wondering now if words like ‘hero’ and ‘the elderly’ are key to understanding your work. Park: I focused on heroic characters because I think Korea’s complex about being on the margins has extended to a collective envy of the hero. Korea has always been a peripheral, weaker country since it’s never really had true power. Basically, I think power is evil. Even today the laws of the jungle still dominate the world. When I look back, I can see that at times when I had power I also caused harm to others around me. My life’s goal—can I call it that? is to grow into an old, powerless man. I want to grow old like a plant, not harming anyone. When you write you discover the original (reality) you and the other you. The ‘I’ in reality enjoys eating meat and playing survival games as a hobby. That person is the ‘I’ who hits someone while playing paintball and feels pleasure. But while writing, I discover a totally different person from the one above. That’s why I learn so much while writing. During the writing process I come to understand this other better person, and I think the person I am in reality improves because of it. I just wanted to write back then so I started writing novels, and I didn’t believe a 32 list_ Books from Korea
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Park: It’s amazing. I feel letters aren’t something that people made but something that’s always been there. People just used the letters that were already there. It’s like there’s something to that script that cause good stories to emerge. And in the letters there’s something in them that causes the writing to endlessly continue. Kim: An introspective relationship seems to form between the writing of novels and violence in your work. Park: Since I was young I went to boxing matches with my father. I liked the attacks and the destruction, and enjoyed the display of power. But as I began writing fiction, the ratio between violence and the elderly (plant-like) stuff of life changed to 49:51. A change occurred. In that moment the people without power who’d get hit, robbed, and pushed down seemed so pitiful and their situation, touching. I got to understanding compassion for the powerless. Kim: Then it seems wrong to view wrestling or the martial arts merely as a cultural interest or hobby. There seems to be a connection to your self-image in the writing of your novels. Park: As I mentioned earlier, I don’t know much about novel writing techniques. Actually the inspiration I get from matches I’ve watched have given me many hints. At first you rush wildly at the other, but as time passes you learn how to step and even rest while you clinch the opponent. I think writing a novel resembles this aspect of martial arts, which is why I glean a lot from watching boxing and martial arts matches. The important point is I don’t have much
knowledge about the martial arts, but the person standing and fighting in the ring is me. Can I say the feeling of running in a ring is like writing? I’m the kind who writes instinctually, with energy. Kim: So it’s not from theory or books that have been given the stamp of literature, but through the intense flow of martial arts or wrestling matches that you instinctually feel the literary, and read it, and capture it. Park: Since I don’t know anything about literature that’s possible. But in the martial arts or wrestling there’s also an introduction, turn, and conclusion. For example, Mexican wrestling resembles a circus or a festival. American-style wrestling is a world away from a well-constructed narrative. The Mexican style of wrestling might be slack and poorly composed, but there are some very subtle aspects to it. That’s why UNESCO should designate it as part of the World Heritage tradition and protect it. (laughs) Kim: The issue of living in a capitalistic world is embedded in many of your works. It’s one of the most important traits of your novels. Park: You could say that the issue of living in a capitalistic world is my subject. I should think harder and seek an answer. It’s the basic question that people of my generation can ask. Looking back, South Korea wasn’t truly a capitalist society during the period of 197080. Though of course, soon after, it raced into becoming a capitalist society. My generation and I were the ones who lived in a fully developed capitalist society and will be the last generation to have complete memories of this.
Park: The form has changed, but choosing to lag behind was around long ago. Personally, I think voluntarily choosing to straggle is a happy road. Suicide is the opposite. I don’t think falling behind is anything to be afraid of, or something to feel defeated by, and most of all, falling behind is definitely no reason to kill yourself. Above all, because the work force is important to a capitalist society, the system isn’t going to just leave the slackers alone. The exploited might feel fear, but the ones exploiting feel fear too, so there’s no reason to be afraid. Kim: Personally, I liked “Nearby” from the collection Double best. We live to reach some goal, but the story ultimately implies that we can only get near it. The word ‘nearby’ makes me rethink the meaning of the blank space inherent in it. How are you spending your time these days? Park: I’m in the middle of writing another novel so I basically just write. When I go to my writing studio I read and write, and when I return home I spend time with the family. My studio’s in Chuncheon, where I’ll spend two to three weeks out of a month. I usually write at night. I like looking up at the sky. If I drive out a little bit, I can see the stars well. Kim: It sounds like we’ll be getting a new novel from you soon. Thank you for your time and your thoughtful responses. By Kim Dongshik
Kim: There must be some moments when you felt that you were imprisoned by a life of capitalism. When was this? Park: It was before I’d debuted, when I was in my early 30s. But one of those days I’d had the thought that ‘Money’s king.’ Before then, I’d lived a life that had nothing to do with making and saving money. I’d been infected with the capitalist virus, much like getting a cold, and this shocked me. I thought hard on this and ultimately handed in my resignation at work. This was when I’d already gotten married and just had a kid. This shock also played a large role in my sudden decision to begin writing. Kim: Your novel Pavane for a Dead Princess takes issue with lookism in society. Lookism is the face of popular culture for capitalism. But why does lookism continue to persist? According to your novel, the envy and shame that the people discriminated against feel is what gives lookism its power. In order to destroy lookism, the novel suggests that instead of opposing it, one should point out how silly it is. You can call this Janus-like life’s strategy toward capitalism; I feel that this is a point of true reflection. Park: That’s where self-introspection lies buried. I used to think that you could change the world but the world didn’t change at all. Now I see that those who wanted to change the world or those who didn’t had the same ambitions. The failure of the generation I belong to is that they knew determination, but they didn’t know how to be enlightened. We were always determined. With our fists clenched, we were resolved. Let’s live a better life, let’s change the world, let’s battle, let’s win, and so on. There was no true awakening. Isn’t it the same structure that governs the conglomerate passing on stocks to the descendents and the middle-class parents that send their kids to after school cram schools all day long? (laughs) Kim: It isn’t a lagging behind caused by external forces but a lagging behind that one voluntarily chooses that often appears in your work. It’s an asymmetrical life’s strategy to coping with a capitalist system.
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1. Sammi Superstars’ Last Fan Club Park Min-gyu, Hankyoreh Publishing Co. 2003, 304p, ISBN 9788984311046 2. Castella Park Min-gyu, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2005, 336p, ISBN 9788982819926 3. Legends of the World’s Heroes Park Min-gyu, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2003, 187p, ISBN 9788982816796
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Excerpt
Pavane for a Dead Princess I called her. No one answered. We sat with sorghum wine and well-cooked food. It was the kind of night where we just sat staring blankly out the window at the dark. About relationships… We probably went on about how it felt. Johann silently listened to me, nodding a few times. I don’t know anymore, Johann mumbled. I mean, I’ve never been in love… I don’t believe in love, and I’ve never even gotten to dragging it out or going more than a few months with a girl… basically, sex is everything to me, I’m that kind of guy. I don’t know why I’m that way, but there it is… but I can kind of guess what type of person must be loved. Want to see? After fishing through a storage-like space Johann took out a light bulb. It was an odd light bulb, huge with a small, sharp needle-like object shooting out from its top. What is this? It’s Edison’s light bulb. Was it in Kyoto or Yokohama? Anyways, I was on a school trip when I bought it at some antique store that was falling apart. I think all people are like this light bulb. The light bulb was stuck in a wooden case that had been made with such care, and a line that looked like it was made out of cloth stuck out of the lower part of the case. Want to see it? He turned off all the living room lights, and as soon as Johan plugged it in, there was a brightness and softness I hadn’t seen since I was born… A warm orange light rose up, round and soft, from the dark. Wow! I exclaimed. In the dark it gave off light like the little prince’s asteroid. I said, It’s like the B-612. Maybe, Johann mumbled. Looking like boys who’d suddenly come out from the
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cosmos, for a long time we were captivated by the asteroid. Was it in elementary school? Anyways, I once lived in Nara for a short while. We moved, and even though we were quiet about it, the news spread like crazy. A rumor spread that Ishida Ayumi had come. If only that had been true, but I do think that Mom looked almost like her at the time. Even after the neighborhood’s women learned it wasn’t true, my mom was really popular with them. A beautiful woman actually has more power over other women than men. I think that was probably the last time I saw my mother’s beautiful face. After that, I never thought of my mother’s face as one of those rare beauties. The light had disappeared from it. My mother had figured out that her man had met another woman, understand? Like a light bulb that’s gone out, one day her light suddenly disappeared. The surface was the same, like glass, but there were more days when she just looked frightening. That’s when I learned, the human soul’s a lot like that filament. Any beautiful woman’s like that… If the light goes out, it’s over. For anyone, the difference between being loved and not is as big as light and dark. Someone who gives off light is always beautiful. The stronger the light, the more the curve of the glass and the shape of the light bulb is bathed with light. Actually, most girls… the ones who’re just so-so…or girls who just don’t have it… No, with both women or men, most people are like light bulbs without any electricity yet. Once they’ve got electricity coming in, anyone can give off that light, a light that’s more beautiful and blinding than any light bulb that’s lost its light. That’s love. All people are like a wire that has a plus or minus charge. Someone meets someone else and brightens the light of each other’s souls. Everyone wants love but the reason they don’t love one another is because each sees the light out in each other. That’s why they ignore the other. When they’re brightened with light, each… And they don’t know that each is brightened because of the other. Female singers or actresses aren’t actually beautiful because of their looks. It’s because
countless numbers of people give them love. An incredible amount of electricity comes in, so they give off an endless amount of light. And that’s not just a simple light… Ordinary people and their endless love collect like fireflies on a summer night. Finally the filament often ends up burning out. It’s because they get arrogant. They start to fall under the illusion that the light is their own. It’s just too bad that it’s the way most light changes. Anyways, they’re finally just individuals. Without receiving love in her life, any beautiful woman’s going to be like a bulb with its light out. She’s going to degenerate into a being uglier than an ordinary woman giving off light. Humans are so dumb because they don’t realize that the light actually began with them. They think that if a single bulb explodes with light the entire world brightens. They don’t know that really, a countless number of lights have to light up for the world to become bright. They give away their energy and stay buried in the dark. And from inside the darkness they envy the others… And since they’re surrounded by darkness…they cast all their votes at them. And so these poor people vote in a dictatorship, and people who don’t seem the type allow people inside some screen to receive their love, because of this. Because they don’t trust, or expect,
You claimed you’d said it without meaning to, but that’s what you said. It’s because she was like that bright light bulb that had just turned on… Those exact words stayed with me even after I left Johann’s house. After walking and walking under the brightly lit street lamps, I called her. She didn’t answer. The darkness of the phone booth, the endless echo of the dial tone, stayed with me. As I was walking back with two magazines…the wait for a bus I had to take as I let it keep drifting past me… the night I took a different bus route… Even now I can’t forget it. A ten o’clock night bus feels like a sleepwalker wandering his same unfamiliar route again and again. Should I go one more stop? After staring out the window I suddenly got off in front of a department store. Heart pounding, I ran toward a row of telephone booths. I made a phone call. No one answered. Even after hanging up and getting my change back… for a long time I couldn’t leave that glass cell. It was because I was worried about her. I didn’t know why, but for some reason Translated by Krys Lee
their own light…or one another’s light… Because they don’t try to discover each other. Ultimately, the darkness of the world begins with one another’s darkness. Meaning, because of people like me. People who’ve just removed their own filament… People who don’t give their love to anyone… So that’s why I fail. To me, the world is like a broken electric board with endless dark bulbs stuck to it. I’m different from you… Hey, what am I doing, talking about all this dark stuff to an amigo who’s just fallen in love? No, no, it’s fine, I said. Staring vacantly… Johann who’d been staring at me held up his glass and said quietly, Well, cheers! To Anios and Anianeus!
Pavane for a Dead Princess Park Min-gyu, Wisdomhouse Publishing Co., Ltd. 2009, 420p, ISBN 9788959133918
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The Place
Jangheung Where Writers Bloom
One of six designated “Slow Cities� in Korea, Jangheung rests near the southernmost part of the peninsula. Filled with more cows than people, this literary breeding ground is hometown to more than 70 contemporary writers.
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Jangheung’s Place in Your Heart Jangheung could be just another place among the southern provinces in Korea with blue seas, charming mountains, and warm breezes. In fact, describing Jeollanam-do’s (province) Jangheung county in such terms is not incorrect. If one has no special connection to Jangheung, it’s just another place in the south with plenty of sunlight—places like Gangjin’s White Lotus Temple (Baekryun-sa) with its narrow paths or Jangheung’s Hwaejin inlet. If you are somewhat more familiar with Jangheung, you might know that if an imaginary line was drawn straight down from Gwanghwamun in Seoul, it would bisect Korea into East and West, with its southernmost point passing through Jangheung. While Jangheung is symmetrically south of Seoul, it’s a poor geographical cousin to Gangneung, which is straight east of the capital. It’s not necessary to elevate Jangheung’s status just because of its linear symmetry with Gwanghwamun, however. Those who have traveled widely would probably refer first to the stirring sight of Eulalia grass fields on Mt. Cheon-gwan, while those of more refined tastes would point out that there are more cows than people in Jangheung county. Successively listing the features of this area brings more information to mind: razor clams, gaebul (edible marine spoon worms), and other marine products from Jangheung are considered to be the most delicious, and the Shiitake mushrooms grown in the region can only be purchased by paying a premium. But there’s more. Jangheung is one of only six “Cittaslow” (Slow Cities) in Korea. All the descriptions so far are points to keep in mind when planning a trip to this area, but they don’t do justice to Jangheung and cannot convey a full understanding of the region. When people
dream of Jangheung, when the heart feels stifled and a sudden desire to run off to Jangheung moves us, we must instead turn to Korean literature to learn about this place. On a map draw a line between Gangjin and Boseong and then stretch this line wide—Jangheung county will be contained within the contours of this shape. But we shouldn’t stop here, because truly finding Jangheung requires us to draw out our emotions as if from a well. These emotions are normally buried under the busy schedules of our lives. Feelings of sadness, longing, and warmth are manifested here in Jangheung through the medium of literature.
Have You Ever Heard of a Literary Tourism Zone? Jangheung can only be reached through literature. This statement is neither baseless propaganda nor an attempt to stir people up; it has a clear, legal basis. Although many people still don’t know this fact, Jangheung is Korea’s first Literary Tourism Zone. In 2008, the Ministry of Knowledge Economy designated three areas within Jangheung County as special zones, and nationwide, Jangheung is the only special tourism zone for literature. In effect, the Korean government has acknowledged that only Jangheung has the ability to draw tourists through literature alone. Jangheung has a long history as a literary center, with a startling 500-year literary tradition. The first example of gasa, an old form of Korean verse, was created in Jangheung by the poet “Gi-bong” Baek Gwang-hong (1522-1556), in his Gwanseo-Byul-gok (a book of gasa verse). Jangheung’s literary tradition continued to be passed down to subsequent generations even after Baek Gwang-hong was gone. He was followed by what came to be known as the “ Jangheung Troupe”:
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The Place Wie Sae-jik, Roh Myeong-seon, Lee Sang-gye, Lee Joong-jeon, Wie Baek-gyu, and others who formed the base of Jeolla province’s literary tradition. Giyang-sa, built in honor of the poet Baek Gwang-hong still stands in Jangheung’s Anyang-myeon, Gisan-ri neighborhood. Part of Gisan-ri has also been designated as a special literary tourism zone. The soul of literary Jangheung county, however, is not to be found in long-lost ancient poetry. Jangheung’s literary magnificence stems from its stature as the blossom of contemporary Korean literature. According to data from the Jangheung County Office, more than 70 contemporary literati hail from this area. The novelists Song Keesook, Lee Chung-joon, Han Sung-won, and Lee Seung-U, the sijo (Korean verse) poets Kim Je-hyeon and Lee Han-seong, and the contemporary poets Wie Seon-hwan, Kim Young-nam, Moon Jeongyoung, Lee Dae-heum, and others all hail from Jangheung. There are so many it’s difficult to list them all. Their literary achievements still resonate in Jangheung. Song Kee-sook’s The Mung Bean General, Lee Chung-joon’s Snowy Road, Han Sung-won’s Port, Lee Seung-U’s “Saem Island” (Saemseom), and other famous works are so numerous that it is likewise hard to count them all. We could describe all of Jangheung as a living museum of Korean literature. In fact, even Jangheung County’s Chief, Lee Myeong-heum, is a poet who has published in various literary journals. Jangheung’s literary fiction heritage has been particularly dazzling, and there is ample reason why the region is called the home of Korean prose. Song Kee-sook’s (b. 1935) works are filled with historically-conscious narratives. Lee Chung-joon (1939-2008) is a representative writer of the 4.19 generation (those that experienced the demonstrations in April 1960 that toppled the Syngman Rhee government) whose works are characterized by sentiments associated with the southern provinces. Han Sung-won’s (b. 1939) works are written from a uniquely religious worldview. In short, each of these major authors represents different genres of modern Korean literature. It is quite surprising that they were all born in the same region yet their works are all so different. If even one of these literary giants had been born in another village, that village would have constructed a literature center, established eponymous literature prizes, and effectively called attention to itself. By contrast, in Jangheung there are so many luminaries worthy of recognition that authorities have already given up on the task of selecting whom to
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honor. Instead, the entire county has been designated as a Special Tourism Zone for literature. This designation, however, creates another conundrum. Where should one go to experience literary Jangheung? First of all, Literature Park is located just below Mt. Cheongwan. Several hundred literary stone monuments dot the park. However, it can hardly be considered the only worthy pilgrimage site for Jangheung. Likewise, at the other Literary Tourism Zone in Gwansan-eup, Shindong-ri, there is little that has anything to do with Jangheung’s gems of Korean literature. It’s just another southern port village with fine views of the ocean. After much thought, I have therefore decided to introduce readers to several literary sites in Jangheung. One of these is still occupied by its owner, while the others are now empty, yet highly recommended.
Author Han Sung-won’s Ocean & Mountain Den Author Han Sung-won’s house is located on the far western edge of Jangheung. At one end of Anyang-myeon, Yulsan Village overlooking Deukryang Bay, warm breezes blow throughout the four seasons accompanied by gentle rays of sunlight. It is here that Han Sung-won built his house, which he named Ocean & Mountain Den (Haesan-togul). Actually, however, this place isn’t Han’s original neighborhood. His original neighborhood was Hwaejin-myeon, just like that of author Lee Chung-joon. After living far away from home, Han Sung-won came back to his hometown of Jangheung and settled here. Several years ago I visited the author at Ocean & Mountain Den and drank a cup of tea made from leaves which he had roasted himself. When I asked him why he didn’t return to the neighborhood of his birth, he replied, “For all intents and purposes, my current neighborhood is my birthplace.” He then chuckled. Ocean & Mountain Den could actually be described as being shabby. Although there is a pond in the yard, a bamboo forest planted out back, and a roof with red tiles, the grounds do not appear to be neatly maintained. The yard is thick with weeds and the pond water is muddy. But for some reason, this is much more charming—it is a completely natural scene, without any artifice or decoration. The deep blue of Deukryang Bay below Han Sung-won’s house is still fresh in my mind even today. As Han and I exited his house and walked along the coast lined with poetry steles inscribed with his work, I asked him what the source of Jangheung’s literary abundance was. His answer was as follows: “Among the mountains in Jangheung, there is one called Hundred Million Buddhas Mountain. (Ukbulsan) The Chinese character ‘Uk ’ means ‘hundred million’ or ‘the people.’ You can find this in any Chinese dictionary. Therefore Ukbulsan is the people’s Buddha Mountain, or Maitreya (the future Buddha) mountain. In fact, halfway up Mt. Ukbul, there is a boulder called Daughter-in-law Rock which is said to bear the likeness of the Maitreya. Who is the Maitreya? Maitreya is a Buddha dedicated to enlightening mankind and leading them to enlightenment. In the present day, conveying the principles of life is the duty of literature.”
1. Magnolia Park Lee Seung-U, Munidang 1998, 326p, ISBN 8974560887 2. Port Han Sung-won Munhakdongne Publishing Group 1997, 344p, ISBN 9788982810916
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3. This Paradise of Yours Lee Chung-joon Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2003, 460p, ISBN 9788932008424
4. Snowy Road Lee Chung-joon Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 1997, 244p, ISBN 9788932009278 5. The Mung Bean General, Vols. 1-12 Song Kee-sook, Window of Times 2008, 395p, ISBN 9788959401123 6. Sopyonje Lee Chung-joon Yolimwon Publishing Group 1998, 224p, ISBN 8970631607
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1. Birthplace of Lee Chung-joon 2. Bolim Temple 3. Lee Chung-joon Literature Memorial
Lee Chung-joon and Jangheung Despite what anyone might say, Jangheung is author Lee Chungjoon’s home. Although Jangheung is also home to countless literary giants, no other author has incorporated it as extensively into their works as Lee. Wherever one travels in Jangheung, traces of Lee Chung-joon remain. The Daeduk-eup bus stop was where he caught the bus to Gwangju to attend Seo Middle School. One hour away from Jinmok village, where he grew up, is Bolim Temple, where he used to enjoy drinking “Grain Tea” (a Buddhist euphemism for alcohol) with the abbot there. Bolim Temple appeared in Lee’s novel, White Clothes. Two of his novels, The Lost Temple and An Account of Humanist Mu Sojak’s Life, describe Mt. Cheon-gwan, which is famous for its fields of Eulalia grass (pampas grass) in the autumn. The set for the movie “Festival” was located at the easternmost edge of Jangheung, at the Nampo-ri village chief ’s house. According to the records left by Lee more than 30 of his works have been derived from places and events in Jangheung. The movie set for “Beyond The Years” was located near Lee’s childhood home. The set is just 10 minutes away by car from the house in Jinmok village where Lee was born. Behind the movie set overlooking Deukryang Bay is a long mountain range beyond which Jinmok village is located. The highest peak among them, Avalokitesvara (Buddhist Goddess of Mercy) peak, was described by Lee as “closely resembling a seated Buddhist monk wearing robes.” Today the fields below Avalokitesvara peak have been drained for land reclamation, so rice paddies can no longer be found there. When Lee was a child, however, seawater sometimes flooded the fields. In those days, Avalokitesvara peak cast a shadow like a lone crane flying over the rice fields soiled by seawater. That image became indelibly imprinted in Lee’s mind, and he added it to his book Stranger of Sunhak-dong. The image of a crane’s shadow cast on the ground below was also featured in director Im Kwon-taek’s 100th feature film, “Beyond The Years.” Author Lee Chung-joon’s birthplace was Jinmok village in Hwaejin-myeon, Jangheung County. He passed away on July 31, 2008, and was buried three days later on August 2, 2008 in his native village. In 2010, a stone monument called the Lee Chung-joon Literature Memorial was erected near his grave. A foundation stone seven by seven meters forms the foundation upon which a large flat stone was erected. Author Lee Chung-joon wasn’t tall, and he always shied away from attention, which is the reason his monument stone was intentionally kept diminutive.
Author Lee Chung-joon Snowy Road Jinmok village, Lee Chung-joon’s birthplace, is located on a hilltop where about 40 low-roofed houses faced the sea. In his novel Snowy Road, the narrator describes a “five-room house surrounded front
and back with fields.” This was the very house in which he was born. Today, every room in the house contains Lee’s personal effects arranged together with his books, while his photographs hang on the walls. If you sit on the wooden floor there you’ll notice a clear view of the ocean. If you look out over the sea to the left, you can almost make out Sorok Island in the distance, which appeared in Lee’s bestseller, This Paradise of Yours. If you look to your right and follow the shipping lanes, you will see Cheongsan Island where Director Im Kwon-taek shot his famous Jindo Arirang sequence for the movie adaptation of Lee’s Sopyonje. When Lee Chung-joon entered middle school, he left home for Gwangju to study. Around that time, family fortunes took a turn for the worse, obliging Lee’s mother to sell their house. One day Lee’s mother received word that her son would suddenly be stopping by. She implored the new owner of their house to allow him to sleep there for just one night. She was able to borrow the house for a day to see her son to bed. The next morning, Lee’s mother left the house together with her son early in the morning. Mother and son made the uphill trek of about four to five kilometers through thickly-accumulated snow to get to the intercity bus terminal in Daeduk-eup. There Lee caught the bus going up to Gwangju, while his mother went back the way she came. The snow had piled up high that early morning. As she returns to Jinmok village, she tries to step in her son’s footprints dotted here and there in the snow. “My son, my son, please be healthy and happy.” While walking back home on that snowy road, mother is crying so much that she can hardly see. In the epilogue to his novel, Snowy Road, Lee made the following comment: “The narrative in Snowy Road contains many factual elements in the interaction between a student and his old mother. In fact, the scene in which they walk together in the early morning darkness to the bus stop is taken from my very own life. When I got on the bus to Gwangju, leaving my mother behind, I always wondered how she walked back home on that cold, snowy road. I did not dare ask her for fear of the pain her answer might cause me.” Since that day, author Lee Chung-joon never again set foot of his own accord in his childhood home. Even when he led his fans on literary tours to his hometown, he only came to the edge of his old neighborhood before turning back. It was only in 2005, when the County Government bought and restored his childhood home, that Lee entered the house where he had been born. That snowy, inclined road still exists above the hill upon which Jinmok village is located. Now that a new highway hugging the coast to Jinmok has been built, the previous path, which used to be the village’s only link to the outside world, is long forgotten. The brush has now grown higher than one’s head, but we have to walk on that road. We need to walk on the thickly accumulated snow covering the road, stepping in the footprints dotted here and there just as Lee Chung-joon’s mother did. By Son Minho
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Theme Lounge
Love of the Missing:
Modern Korean Fiction by Women, 1990-2010 As Korean women writers move beyond the label of “women” and are recognized as “writers,” a new aesthetic and modern concerns emerge. Prior to the Enlightenment Period, Hangeul was often disdained in Korea— or more precisely, the Joseon era as it was known then—as “female writing,” meaning it was a writing system bef itting only women. During the Enlightenment, however, Hanmun (classical Chinese), which had played the same role as Latin in East Asia, was replaced by the Korean vernacular, and Hangeul, which had previously been used only by the lower classes, naturally became the official writing system. In the hundred or so years since, women who used to be denigrated as yoryu (“female”) have distinguished themselves with their masterful use of artistic language. As modern education for women took deep root in Korean society, women became active beneficiaries of knowledge transmitted through language and, as a result, their self-awakening began to materialize. By the 1990s, women, no longer a minority in need of special protection, had emerged the mainstream in literature. Even in literary criticism, once the exclusive domain of men, women critics—who understood the value of women’s literature and could subject it to proper critical examination— became actively involved. The literature of women writers received such high
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There, a Petal Silently Falls Ch'oe Yun, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 1992, 312p, ISBN 9788932005782
praise and captured the attention of both the market and critics that the 1990s could even be called the decade of women writers. One of the writers who has stood out the most in this new cultural scene is Ch’oe Yun (1953- ). She made her literary debut in 1988 with the publication of her novella There, a Petal Silently Falls in Literature and Society, one of Korea’s leading literary journals. Since her debut novella, which portrays the tragic Gwangju movement through a polyphony of viewpoints in a beautiful and elaborate language, Ch’oe has been investigating what it means to be a woman writer, along with poets Kim Seung-hee and Kim Hye-soon. The Gray Snowman (1992), for which Ch’oe won the Dongin Literary Prize, is another work of hers that shows what time and story and what politics and history are told from a feminine perspective. Most of her works depict women as a mystery whose traces we have to seek out together; women are missing in the symbolic sense, and novel-writing/reading has a ritualistic aspect that deeply mourns the missing women. Since it is impossible to depict women in the existing authoritative language, women in some ways exist only in absentia. Ch’oe’s novel represents a space where women can break their silence and raise their voices. And as demonstrated by the heroine’s act of copying the German translation of a work by an Italian historian in the novel, the voice and language of women are multi-layered. Among the women writers of the 1990s, those that draw our attention include Shin Kyung-sook, Gong Sun-ok, Jo Kyung-ran, and Ha Sung-ran. The literary field of that decade was adorned with so many women that they cannot be mentioned one by one here. What is interesting is that while their work naturally reflects women’s experience, it is rare for these women writers to reveal their own sense of themselves as women. Even when women in the novel break free from uncomfortable relationships and the institution of marriage, their desires come across not as desires of individual women but rather as those of an individual living in a consumer society. As seen in the case of Ha Sung-ran, her microdescriptions—which depict the everyday as though it was exa mined t hroug h a microscope — a re t y pic a l of t he distinguishing characteristics of women’s novels.
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1. The Vegetarian Han Kang, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2007, 247p, ISBN 9788936433598 2. Needle Cheon Woon-young, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2007, 247p, ISBN 9788936433598 3. Rina Kang Youngsook, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2011, 382p, ISBN 9788954614719
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Theme Lounge
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1. Romantic Love & Society Jung Yi-hyun, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2003, 251p, ISBN 9788932014487 2. My Sweet Seoul Jung Yi-hyun, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2006, 442p, ISBN 9788932017150 3. Girl Friends Lee Hong, Minumsa Publishing Group 2007, 304p, ISBN 9788937481253
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Beginning in 2000, several women writers created d iverse ima ges of women. Cheon Woonyoung’s debut work Needle (20 0 0), for instance, portrays a very unique female character. She has protruding cheekbones and a hunched back, and she indulges in meat. Ironically, the tattoos she creates are colorful and beautiful. Cheon’s striking protagonist has become a model of the grotesque dichotomy of beauty and beast. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007) is grotesque in an opposite sense from Cheon’s work. In the former, there is no boundary between the female body and plants. When a video artist has intercourse with his wife’s younger sister, after painting flowers on his own body and hers, the female body turns into a beastly plant. Kang Youngsook’s full-length novel Rina (2006) is the story of a girl named Rina who escapes from a space suggestive of North Korea and crosses a desolate landscape. Unlike Needle or The Vegetarian, Rina shows an affinity between woman and the industrial machine of civilization, rather than between woman and nature. Rina is a work that links together a woman’s life with the tension between regionalism and internationality, which has become a major talking point in Korean society since 2000. While Rina brings up the image of a North Korean defector, the work also evokes countless women of the global village who experience the diaspora both voluntarily and involuntarily. Thus, Rina can be regarded as the point where Korean literature as regional literature meets global reality. The problem of desire which defined women’s literature in the 1990s has been inherited by Jung Yi-hyun in the 2000s. Jung’s debut work Romantic Love & Society (2003) unpleasantly reveals that women are accomplices of consumer capitalist society. Here, we face the fact that women are not free from the pleasures of consumption and wealth accumulation. A female character symbolically named Yuri (“glass”) uses her virginity as a kind of bait for her social advancement and works her way through the “Ten Commandments” one by one to win love. Her virginity, like glass, must be handled with caution, for it loses its value the moment it is “broken.” In Jung’s work, romantic love is but a fantasy that conceals the human desire for material possessions and power. The author does not glorify the fact that marriage is an intellectual game and an exchange of desires. Since Jung Yi-hyun, many women writers have focused on and voiced their comments regarding issues of relationships and marriage in a consumer capitalist society. These coded issues have been frequent themes in Korean classical literature, for they are important occasions for the clash and negotiation of the values of communities. In this respect, works that deal with relationships and marriage, such as Jung’s My Sweet Seoul (2006), and Lee Hong’s Girl Friends (2007) can also be seen as connected to the classical women’s literature of Korea. T he mod if ier “woma n” is not u sed when crit ic a l ly evaluating young women writers of the 2000s. Promising writers like Han Yujoo, Apple Kim, and Kim Mi-wol are not read as women but as writers. If women writers of the 1990s unleashed individual desires that had been hitherto suppressed, their post2000 counterparts battle the invisible true nature of capitalism
and question their inherited desires. For the latter, men as individuals are not the enemy. In Apple Kim’s full length novel The Boy Who Laid Down on the Gallery Floor (2009) and Kim Mi-wol’s The Eighth Room (2009), women hope for love. They seek love because they know it can rescue them from the anonymity of the individual in the neoliberal era caught up in the tide of anonymity—the truth that humans are fundamentally lonely, that there are differences between men and women, and, as a result of such loneliness and differences, women long for men as the Other. The charming male figures in these two novels signal that women, who used to depict men only as the other, have begun to portray them as beautiful. Perhaps the rupture and disorder born out of global neoliberalism are a blessing for Korean literature, which has passed from the 1990s into the 2000s and from the 2000s into the next decade. Perhaps women on the verge of drowning will join with men who are also about to drown, and together they will send out a new call for help in a new language. By Hur Yoonjin
2011 Asia Translators’ Community 2011. 7. 20~21 (scheduled) Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Duxton Hotel
Goal
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- to bring translators residing in Asia together for discussion on issues in Korean literature, to host a workshop concerning the potential market for Korean literature in each respective nation, and to foster scholarly exchange and discussion of the overseas market for Korean literature and the direction of translation - to establish a network of literary translators and scholars of Korean literature in Asia
Participants - translators, literary critics, and scholars of Korean literature residing in Asia - publishing representatives with an interest in Korean literature - local representatives and students of Korean Studies
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1. The Eighth Room Kim Mi-Wol, Minumsa Publishing Group 2010, 267p, ISBN 9788937483028 2. The Boy Who Laid Down on the Gallery Floor Apple Kim, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2009, 294p, ISBN 9788954609456
For more information: Yoo Jae-joon Tel: +82 2 6919 7761 Fax: +82 2 3448 4247 e-mail: njoon@klti.or.kr www.klti.or.kr
Overseas Angle
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Korean Novels Take Influence in Young Vietnamese Lives With so many cultural similarities between them, Vietnamese readers interest in Korean Literature continues to grow.
More Vietnamese readers will now have access to Korean literature thanks to the recent publication of Kim Young-ha’s Quiz Show and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian in Vietnamese, funded by the Korea Literature Translation Institute. Hopefully this move will increase appreciation of Korean literature much the way the Korean Wave garnered loyal support for Korean pop culture. Since 1990, many Vietnamese have become familiar with Korean culture through Korean films. Then a wave of Korean music, called K-pop, followed. Thanks to the cultural similarities between the two countries, Korean films and music have been able to quickly win Vietnamese audience’s hearts. It seems that the stories in films and the melody of the music touches their souls. Books are no exception. Yet Korean books and literature in general, have only been translated and published in Vietnam over the past few years. Books have yet to create a wave as films and music have done. Tre Publishing House, founded in 1981, is one of the top three publishers in Vietnam regarding sales. We publish a variety of books for a wide range of readers. Tre is proud of being the home that nourishes young Vietnamese writers. Every five years, Tre Publishing House presents literature awards for authors who write for children and young people. As a result, there have been many authors who have become successful after winning these contests, such as Nguyen Ngoc Tu (ASEAN Literature 2008 Award), Nguyen Ngoc Thuan (Swedish PETER PAN 2008 Award), and Nguyen Nhat Anh (ASEAN Literature 2010 Award). As a pioneer in the Vietnam publishing industry, Tre Publishing House has been granted the rights to publish many “hot” nonfiction and fiction titles in the world, including the Harry Potter series, the Twilight Saga, and The World Is Flat. Regarding Korean books, we have published work such as My Sister, Mongsil, the short stories of Kim Tongin, and a book on the life of Park Tae-joon. In 2010, Tre Publishing House learned about Kim Youngha’s Quiz Show and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. These two novels drew our attention right away towards the two young writers. Upon reviewing, we fell in love with these two novels because of the stories themselves. The authors wrote about Korea’s young generation: their loves, their lives, their careers, their difficulties, their thoughts,
and many other challenges facing them in the modern world. Both novels vividly depict a portrait of Korean youth. We thought that these were the kinds of books our young readers would be interested in. So with the help of the KLTI, we have introduced the novels to Vietnamese readers. With Quiz Show, Vietnamese readers can understand Korea’s young generation through the main character of Minsu; moreover, readers are attracted by the feeling of nearness to their own lives. The ultimate message our readers receive is that “there is nowhere to hide in the real world”; but Kim Young-ha also communicates to people in their 20s: “Dear friends, you are not lonely.” In The Vegetarian, Han Kang exploits many odd layers of human emotions. The book meets the demand of readers who are searching for something unusual in the story and some strangeness in the characters. To some readers, The Vegetarian can be considered morbid; but to most of our readers, it is a new kind of literature to help them escape from boredom. Tre Publishing House has received lot of positive feedback from our readers, including journalists who write for literary columns. Vietnamese readers, especially younger readers, seem to see themselves and their own issues in the characters from these novels. And more than a few readers have said that they have a keen interest in the books, and thanks to reading them, they became confident and started to develop their own thoughts and views on building their future career as well as their life. It is this pleasure which motivates us to introduce more Korean books in Vietnam in 2011 and into the near future. We aim to publish books on the concerns and choices between love and career, or family, and other tricky issues facing the young generation on their path to the future. Moreover, we pay much attention to novels exploring the subject of global issues together with love, career, and social ties. Learning from a similar culture through books is always the best way to educate our readers. We’d like our readers to know more about Korean people and lifestyles, and subsequently come to understand the real Korea. By Nguyen Thanh Nam
* Tre Publishing House has been a pioneer in the publishing industry in Vietnam for the last 30 years since it was established in 1981. It publishes many kinds of books for a wide range of readers from children to seniors, both by Vietnamese and foreign authors.
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Reviews Fiction
Death Drives the Weary Liver and Gallbladder Kim Soom, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2011, 336p, ISBN 9788932021669
If sentences had ambition (which they certainly do), the prose in Kim Soom's Liver and Gallbladder would be given a perfect score of 10. Rhetorical flourishes are absent in Kim’s writing. Subject, verb, and object are the only elements to be found, and descriptive modifiers such as adjectives and adverbs are almost totally absent. K im Soom’s writing is free from pretension, staying away from beautifying embellishment. In addition, her sentences do not reveal the thoughts and feelings of speakers and other characters. Let’s consider the following examples. “Mom cried, then went to the beauty salon to get her hair done. Her nephews ate some ramen noodles and then shut themselves in each of their rooms. Dad was asleep in the bedroom. I tried to wake him up, but he wouldn’t stir. He was so fast asleep that I wondered if he might be dead... When I arrived at home, my husband was already there. He sat idly on the couch watching television while drinking beer.” (“My Mysterious Neighbors”) Why mom was crying, why dad was fast asleep, the reason for the nephews’ poor nutritional state, and the husband’s ennui are not commented or critiqued upon in the speaker’s narrative. Instead, t he spea ker’s terse a nd dr y descriptions record Kim’s indifference to the scene. This tone shows the speaker’s lack of emotional investment in all things, which is a symptom of depression. Kim Soom’s characters feature detachment that
doesn’t stem from some stoic philosophical outlook or sense of superiority. Rather it comes from an utter lack of interest and libido. They expect nothing from the world, and their utterances are Kim Soom’s. This subdued tone is often accompanied by a universal and philosophical system of logic. The protagonist Gwok-no’s mineral-centric view of the world in “The North Room” is a prime example. A former geology teacher, he is only interested in minerals and ores. His obsession stems from the following: “Compared to the weat her, ea rt hqua kes, or t he ocea n, minerals are relatively concrete and real. Atmospheric phenomena such as clouds, wind, temperature, barometric pressure, snow, and rain are too spontaneous and volatile. Clouds and wind are the motifs of change. They are no more than ‘forms’ that can change at any moment.” If Freud could have read such lines he would have found them to be good illustrations of his theor y regarding thanatos, the death drive. Existence tends toward stability that doesn’t require energy f low. Once a stable living thing dies, it still cannot compare to minerals and ores. Ultimately mankind desires death. Not surprisingly, the protagonists of Kim Soom’s novels are all dying or ill. Cancer, pneumonia, and old age are par for the course, and even 3,000-year-old mummies can become protagonists in her novels. However none of them yearn for
health. Confining themselves to sickbeds or dark rooms, her characters calmly face death’s fast approach without fear or regret over the short time remaining in their lives. As usual they live each day with barely any movement, in subdued tones. Neither mammals nor primates, they practically exist in a mineral-like state. What is the background behind their state? Although it is difficult to presume that the world they enjoy is excessively confined, beyond their death drive they appear to be a part of a “community” of patients. Almost all the characters in Kim Soom’s novels suffer life's vicissitudes due to poverty, and are obsessed over small sums of money, in debt, constantly st r u g g l i ng to ma ke end s meet, a nd without income. Amidst such poverty, her characters have no hope of improving their lot. In such situations, her characters choose to escape into depression and a state of death. Kim Soom’s novels are a depressing photo negative depicting the current state of capitalist Korean society. By Kim Hyoung-joong
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Reviews Fiction
A Map, Unfinished Shadow of Glass Yi Yun-gi, Minumsa Publishing Group 2011, 156p, ISBN 9788937483356
At the end of Shadow of Glass, the author’s note begins: “I think that through the collective unconscious, on a broad scale the history of humanity, and more narrowly, the history of one clan resides within a single person.” “I still have something to say, coming from the depths of my heart. I want to tell it to my friends of the younger generation.” These two quotations show us plainly what we can expect to gain from reading Yi Yun-gi’s novel. As we read, we encounter generalities gleaned from a condensed version of life in the form of maxims. The maxims closely resemble the teachings of any sacred text, but by depicting life in such detailed, concrete terms, they move us as no scripture can. If scriptures are teachings, from this perspective, one can say Yi Yungi’s novel can be considered the aesthetics of reflection. Through reading about life in the novel, we come to examine our own lives. He writes, “A n object must have a shadow to be whole,” so pure transparent glass must have some fine residue on it,
Self-preservation at Any Cost Before and After the Squall Kim Won-woo, Kang Publishing 2011, 435p, ISBN 9788982181597
Kim Won-woo’s novel can be regarded as a novel of criticism. His novel deals with present day civil society from beginning to end. While the novel remains faithful to the rules of realism that depict social conditions and reproduces social mores, the “objective observer” in a passive sense is far removed from the writer and narrator he stands for. He does not hesitate to expose the implicit meaning of a situation and accuse the falsity of certain people. Far from being hesitant, Kim often strays from the plot to give advice or reprimand in his novels. His new novel Before and Af ter the Squall is a compilation of the title work that is as long as a novel, and two medium-length novellas “The World of A Traveler” and “Korean Grave Stonework Seller in China.” In the title work, retired professor Im recalls in his e-mail sent to a colleague, Han, how he “survived his 48 list_ Books from Korea
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trouble with women and the national crisis and corruption at the university” based on thorough self-analysis and self-criticism. Set in 1980, this reminiscence talks about the national crisis and troubles at the university but at its core is the “sexual passion” that he, a married man, shared with an unmarried female colleague. Professor Im recollects his past with a view so critical that it appears to be unrelentingly callous throughout the novel, but at the same time, he continues to maintain the following claim: “But on the other hand, it was undoubtedly at the core of one’s private life so I had the right to fight against and reject all types of interference, sanction and punishment from everyone (…), even parents, siblings or a wife.” It is impressive to see Kim Won-woo, known as the king of negation and scorn who argues that a reasonable person is rare and a proper system is also hard to find, actively advocating one’s private life as the “minimum right to self-protection.” By Choi Jae-bong
like pollen, or feather down, or leaves, to be fully whole. This is because, in any case, “something completely transparent is not of this world.” Extending this line of reasoning, he states, “A map is made by taking the wrong path.” To put it another way, wounds, scars, and disgrace make our lives complete. If according to popular wisdom, we must be free of these things to fully exist, he meditates upon the reverse proposition. He says that wounds and scars are the very things that mean life has been lived. Perhaps while the author was living and writing, he lost his way many times, and each time this left on him a mark or a shadow. In fact, the record of this is precisely what we know as literature. He has left us numerous maps and now he has died. The maps have not been completed for us, the readers, nor will we be able to find the path again using the maps, but rather, using them we can set out on a path and get lost ourselves. I think it is the last time we will see maxims such as these, so they are more precious, more precise and true; these words are Yi Yun-gi’s final legacy to us. By Kang Yu-jung
Spotlight on Fiction
Mouthwatering (an excerpt)
By Kim Ae-ran Translated by H. Jamie Chang
Mouthwatering
There she is, running down the street, shielding her face from the morning light with her hand as small as a maple leaf. She is wearing cotton pants and an orange shirt. On one side, there is a logo that resembles a globe and the inscription, “New Elite Academy 10th Anniversary.” It’s Independence Day, and there aren’t many people out on the streets. There is an uncharacteristic peace around the sandwich stand and the free newspaper stand. A row of half-awake people make a line at the escalator. As children, these people probably did not aspire to be something as grand
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as a historical figure, but they most probably did not ask to be people who work on public holidays. She attaches herself to the end of the row and laments, ‘If only I had been motivated enough to demand an after-school education, I wouldn’t be here doing this.’ Almost instantly, she finds her thoughts embarrassing. She knows all too well that all parents make excuses for their academically challenged students by insisting their children are “not motivated,” instead of admitting that they are simply “not smart.” Her cram school is located in Mokdong. It’s
a corporate cram school with over a thousand students in the seventh grade alone. She’s a Korean Language and Literature teacher for the middle school program. When she first started inter viewing for cram school jobs, she was surprised to discover that she had to name her own salary. One of the cram school interviewers said, “We can give you as much as you want. If you want ten million, we can give you ten million. If you want six, we’ll give you six. The important thing is that you prove yourself worthy of the price you name. So, how much do you want?” She sat on the leather sofa feeling like an insect as she searched for an answer. Too little would make her seem incompetent, and too much would make her sound pompous. There was something strange about this salary system that the cram school director maintained to be “fair,” but she couldn’t figure out what it was. She does know that what she felt at that moment, sitting on that leather sofa, was humiliation. As she presented her sample lecture for the interview, the administrative-level teacher who looked like he’d be worth six million a month slept with his head tossed back, mouth wide open. Their unexpected request to do a sample lecture left her fumbling with no teaching material to work with, but for some strange reason she couldn’t manage to say “I can’t do it” at that moment. She returnd home miserable, despite the fact that she was already being a cop-out by
looking for a cram school job, which is easier and better compensated than the average corporate job. Anyway, she wound up choosing New Elite over the “six-to-ten-million won” cram school. She has the financial competence to pay rent and utilities for a small studio apartment, have health insurance, invest in an accumulative fund, and feed her high-interest savings account. She knows that in order to complete her accumulative fund payments, she must charge like a horse and dance like a bear every day. From time to time, she feels as though a certain part of life has been handed to her as an advance. She feels jealous of people younger than her who silently devoted a year of their lives to study for civil service exams, and returned with stable government jobs. The confidence that employment brings, not having to feel nervous when drinking with other people, and the ability to make monetary contributions at acquaintances’ weddings and funerals all stop her from quitting the cram school job. Every time she toys with the idea of quitting, payday invariably came around like an apologetic lover. The station P.A. announces the arrival of the train. People inch toward the safety line. She takes a deep breath and resolves not to be a sissy. Periods never stopped her from taking the college entrance exam, showing up at her temp job, or going on school trips. She is suddenly reminded of her hubae 1). Her hubae sleeps during the day
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and works at night. Her hubae got the grading gig through her. When she offered the editing job to her hubae, who had spent days searching jobsites on the Internet with a storm cloud over her face, she had jumped for joy. At 1000 won a page, editing would be more profitable than bussing trays. Less than a day later, her hubae had looked up at her with bloodshot, teary eyes, “Older Sister, Korean middle school kids are all idiots.” It’s been three months since they’ve been living together. To this day, she does not know whatever incited her to take her hubae in. If she had to name a reason, she would say it was because she liked her voice. She may have liked the look in her hubae’s eyes as she talked about this and that the first night they spent together. The texture of her hubae’s voice. Her face turns ashen. The train stops with a loud screech. She hops over the gap between the train and the platform and into the air-conditioned car. The door closes. It’s cold. The morning greetings of her co-workers were always related to fashion. When she first started working, she took it seriously when people at the office greeted her with, “You changed your hairdo,” “I like your bag, Miss Park,” “Where’d you get your skirt?” and so on. At first, this made her happy. Shy but proud of herself, she would check herself out in the bathroom mirror. It wasn’t long before she realized that people at the cram school
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talked about fashion obsessively. Fashion was not the topic of small talk, but rather a very important issue to be discussed religiously on a regular basis. She grew weary of her limited wardrobe and other female teachers’ eyes on her. When someone paid her a compliment, she felt strangely indebted. She was often paranoid that everyone was looking at her and rating her outfit as she entered the office every morning. She soon found out that she’d worried about nothing. The teachers welcomed any change because it gave them something to talk about. The first thing she heard today when she entered the office, however, had nothing to do with fashion. The Department Head calls her. During the however many steps it takes to get to his desk, she thinks of all the ways she may have screwed up. Nothing comes to mind. She is meticulous and diligent, and always receives good scores on the quarterly evaluations. The Head asks, You’re in charge of classes SH1 and CK2, right? Yes, she answers, bracing herself. My hubae—I know, he interrupts her. She keeps her mouth shut. She fixed perfectly fine words wrong! She looks at the pile of papers on the Head’s desk. Her hubae’s loopy handwriting is scrawled all over the pages. She must have read it very carefully, for the comments boxes are rather full. She changed “for example” to “for exemple,” and the “because” here turned a perfectly fine sentence into a fragment. The parents
of these children are highly educated people. Do you have any idea how many complaints I received today? Are you sure your hubae is a Korean lit major? She doesn’t know how to respond to that. Should she ask, “How many mistakes did she make?” to verify, should she confirm, “Yes, she really is a Korean lit major,” or attempt damage control, “I’ll redo it myself?” Finding the right response at last, she says, I am sorry. Miss Park. I know we only pay 1000 won per page, but the trust we lose when we make these mistakes is worth a hundred times more than that. He says your hubae can’t have the editing work anymore. She keeps her mouth shut. He asks if he’s been understood. She hesitates. He’s waiting for an answer. She finally says, I am sorry. That means, I got it. She goes back to her seat. The co-workers quickly pretend they weren’t looking. She feels her cramps. She sniff les. As she carefully dabs under her nose, Mr. Ch’oe asks, Miss Park, did you catch a cold? She nods. Who catches a cold in the summer?, Miss Kim chimes in. ‘Who catches a cold in the summer? I do! Do you want to know why? You make me sit in front of the air conditioner the size of a house, that’s why! You know I’m freezing my butt off here, and no one says anything about turning the air conditioner off or even turning it down a little, that’s why!’ She suddenly wants to cry like a child. Once, when she was coughing up her lungs, everyone expressed polite sympathy, but
not one of them volunteered to sub for her. Her hubae irritates her, too. ‘And after I printed out the “Common Grammar and Spelling Errors” for her!’ When she told her hubae to “turn off the light and go to sleep,” her hubae would say, “No, I have to finish” and end up falling asleep like a baby, leaving the light on all night. The Department Head shouts, Let’s go, everyone! She shoots him a quick sideways glance, Your face is a sentence fragment. She asks herself how much she knows about her hubae, other than the fact that she cannot spell “example.” Like the time she could not remember a single word of French after three years of French in high school, her mind draws a blank. Mr. Ch’oe taps her on the shoulder. C’mon. Her hubae was a good storyteller. It had nothing to do with great wit or knowledge. When her hubae told a story, she told it as though she was relating the most important story in the world with the greatest care. Every time she listened to her hubae’s story, she felt something quiver inside her, similar to the way she felt after reading an abominably translated and therefore unreadable yet somehow profound philosophical text. The day she first invited her hubae to her place, all her hubae had brought was a small bag. The only connection between the two was an unbelievably vague and symbolic one—that they went to school together and that they’d met
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before. Like a traveler out of a fairy tale, her hubae asked if she could stay the night. Her hubae’s voice was confident and gentle. She hesitated before agreeing to put her up for the night. She didn’t want people to think of her as a cold seonbae 2), and she didn’t mind entertaining a guest for one night. She laid out the futon for her, turned on the heat for warm water, sent her hubae into the bathroom for a shower, and began to seriously wonder why she had allowed her to stay the night. Perhaps she wanted to be a good person for one night. Perhaps she was pleasantly surprised by such a boldfaced, innocent request after becoming accustomed to encountering favors that were thinly veiled exchanges. The fact that she jumped at the opportunity to put her up for the night suggested that perhaps she was subconsciously wishing that someone would ask her for a favor, even a rude one. When her hubae came out of the bathroom, she started to pummel her silly with questions and offers. “You want something to eat?” “Do you want something comfortable to wear?” “The skin toner and lotion are here, this is the eye cream, and that’s the intensive moisturizer.” “Do you want a big pillow or a little pillow?” When she ran out of things to say, she asked without meaning to, “Would you like a glass of wine?” That night, the two rolled the futon aside and sat facing each other across a folding table. She placed on it a bottle of Chilean wine and two wine
glasses, and said that she didn’t know much about wine, but enjoyed it every once in a while. The two made an awkward toast and each took a sip. Do you want to listen to music? When she started to crawl toward her laptop, her hubae said that it was fine. They exchanged a few words—topics anyone could discuss with anybody without finding themselves in an awkward situation. Frivolous discussion on weather, politics and movies. Her hubae cracked a joke at some point, and they laughed together for the first time. You appeared in my dream last night, Older Sister, said her hubae. She looked puzzled. You know how sometimes people you don’t know very well appear in your dreams and make a significant contribution to the plot? She nodded, I know! It’s really awkward when they appear in an obscene dream. You feel embarrassed and tense around the person when you see them the next day, right? Her hubae smiled. She burst into laughter, I know! She felt relieved in a way. Her hubae continued, In my dream, you and I were standing in the middle of a summer field in some random East Asian country. I have no idea why we were there together since we barely know each other, but we were together anyway. We stood in a spooky field looking up at the foreign night sky. Suddenly, I saw the Big Dipper, which hung unusually close to the horizon. Those were the only stars in the sky. She eagerly waited for her hubae to continue. We
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headed toward the stars and were flabbergasted. The seven lights actually turned out to be seven little lightbulbs on the roof of a brothel. She laughed out loud, You’re a liar! No, said her hubae with a straight face. It’s the truth. she continued, I remember feeling strangely relieved when I found out they were lightbulbs. They talked about a lot of things. She threw her head back and laughed every once in a while, finding things hilarious. She lay down sideways on a cushion, deliciously tipsy. She thought to herself, this is so much better than being stuck in the backseat with a co-worker I don’t like, forced to make small talk all the way to the destination. Perhaps this safe friendship that came with an expiration date made her feel generous. It was possible for anyone to be nice to anyone for one day. One could be as interesting or hospitable as one wanted to for a day. Although she wasn’t expecting it, she felt as though her kindness had been rewarded by her hubae’s good stories. She had a nice voice. They emptied the bottle of wine in no time. Her hubae left her leaning against a cushion with her eyes half-closed, and poked through her bag for something. She seemed to want to show her something. She came back and sat before her and stretched out her palm. There was a small wooden box on her hand. The simple box had a muted sheen from years of wear. Her hubae said quietly, Older Sister, I have a good story for you.
She nodded. The box stirred her curiosity. I came here because the creditors foreclosed on the place I was staying. They didn’t give me a hint in any way, but I could tell I couldn’t stay there any longer. She braced herself. She was afraid she would be let in on a heavy secret in exchange for an empty act of kindness. When I was little, I used to move around a lot. As you know, I was on a work-study scholarship at school. She hadn’t remembered that her hubae had been on a work-study scholarship, but she hoped that the story she was about to hear was not a dark, troubling one. Wasn’t her studio apartment too cramped a space for her hubae to unload a story like that? I’m not sure where to start, but this isn’t a big deal, so don’t worry. She smiled uneasily. Her hubae continued equably, I once took a trip to the city library with my mom when I was young. I don’t remember exactly, but I think it took us over two hours to get there. She remembered that it wasn’t until she was in middle school that she first saw the inside of a library. Summoning up the memory of the library, her hubae also made the same face she had made years ago at the library. That day, the moment I stepped into this enormous mass of silence holding my mother’s hand, my heart began to race. Her hubae looked at something beyond the reach of sight, the way a blind person does. She looked down at the box. She could not tell what her hubae was trying to say. Mom sat me down at the library rest area,
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and told me to stay put for a while. She said she was going to look up some books. She gave me a pack of gum and told me to chew it if I got bored. She nodded. I peeled a stick of gum as soon as Mom disappeared into the stacks. My mouth kept filling up with sweet saliva from the chewing gum, and I had to stop chewing and swallow the sugary water. I sat in the chair and watched people. I didn’t know exactly what a library was, but I did know I had to be quiet. She nodded. I waited for quite some time, but Mom didn’t return. I was nervous, so I peeled another stick and chewed on it for ten, twenty minutes—until the sweetness wore off. In the end, Mom didn’t return. She felt she was listening to a pretty familiar story, and the familiarity of the plot made her feel a little tired despite her hubae’s misfortune. ‘Don’t mothers usually abandon their children at the market or the train station? What kind of a mother leaves her child at a library?’ I became anxious, so I started to blow bubbles. I blew bubbles, popped them loudly, and practiced being surprised. I was afraid that very soon, the time would come for me to be really surprised. I wandered into the stacks chewing the third stick. Since the library was a quiet place, I figured, maybe Mom has fallen asleep somewhere. I looked for my mom. The shelves all looked the same to me, so I didn’t know where I was going, but precisely because the place seemed like a maze to me, I was convinced I would find her there. I
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put the fourth stick of gum in my mouth because I was beginning to choke up. You can’t say for certain that it’s over until you’ve chewed the entire pack, you know? It makes sense, doesn’t it? Mom would not have left me with a whole pack of gum if she’d planned to come back before I was done chewing them all, would she? She nodded uneasily. What was taking so long? How many books was Mom borrowing? The library was frightfully quiet. I peeled off the fifth stick. The crumpling sound of the gum wrapper was overpowered by the sound of pages turning. I rolled the piece of gum covered in powdered sugar, and popped it in my mouth. Mom wasn’t there. My heart was breaking, but I couldn’t cry out loud. If I had cried at the library, it would have been the loudest cry in the world. She listened intently. In the end, Mom didn’t return. Her hubae looked into her face. This is the last piece of gum. Her hubae pushed the box toward her and carefully opened the lid. Mesmerized, she leaned forward to look inside the box. A f lat piece of ginseng gum lay neatly in there. She felt like her heart had stopped beating. Really? What? asked her hubae. Uh, nothing. Silence hung between the two as they sat face to face, staring at a piece of gum. She looked at the ginseng gum lying gracefully on the velvet lining of the box. The wrapper was soggy and discolored. Despite the ginseng in its content, the gum looked like it would have a very harmful effect on one’s body. What her hubae did next
shocked her. She took the piece of gum and ripped it in half without reservation. Wha, what are you doing? she asked, shocked. This is for you, said her hubae. She turned blue. Like a person trying to dissuade a deserter, she pleaded, Don’t! Her hubae smiled radiantly and said, It’s okay. ‘What’s okay?’ The torn, exposed part of the gum trembled. It’s just gum, said her hubae. Thank you, Older Sister. She was bewildered. Everything seemed like a lie and the truth at the same time. Her hubae’s existence seemed fake to her. Is her hubae pulling her leg? Maybe there’s over a hundred packs of old ginseng gum at her house in a closet of lies? Do they even make ginseng gum these days? The important thing was that, apart from whether it was true, the story moved her. She refused many times before finally giving in and taking the piece of gum. She put it in her receipt drawer on the dresser. It’s a piece of gum, and I can always give it back when she leaves, she thought. Anyway, of all the things that happened that night, there is one thing that she cannot forget to this day: the conclusion of her hubae’s story. It might have been those words that convinced her to live with her. Her hubae resumed in her beautiful voice, Since that day, whenever I think of my mother who disappeared, or when I have to part with people I loved deeply—Uh-huh, she reacted helplessly, the piece of gum imposed on her. When I look back
on all those heartbreaking separations, the people I left, the ones who left me—Uh-huh. Her hubae said with the most infinitely transparent expression on her face, “My mouth waters.” The bus departs. Cold air pours out from dozens of tiny air conditioning vents. It’s cold. I’m depressed. She’s not sure if it’s because of her period, her cold, the company Sports Day on a national holiday, or the Department Head. The combination of the air conditioner and the smell of the bus gives her motion sickness. Looking out the window, she goes over the “vertex dance” sequence in her head. One, two, three, turn. One, two, three, forward. When she practiced the steps in their tiny studio, her hubae doubled over with laughter. Older Sister! What? Her hubae cried, turning white with laughter, You’re terrible! The weather is fine, and a few tired teachers are snoring. The Department Head is seated in the front, sharing energy drinks with the Team Leader. They are determined to validate the existence of the Korean department today, as the general consensus around the cram school is that the Korean department “doesn’t do much” compared to the Math and English departments. Across the aisle from her, the cram school bus drivers are talking amongst themselves. It’ll be another hour before they arrive at the destination. Should I nap? Sniffle. More snot. This is just great.
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The morning after the night her hubae stayed over, she dressed and tiptoed around the house getting ready for work. Her hubae lay sleeping like a dead person. She watched her for a long while before leaving the apartment. There was nothing more insensitive than to wake someone and kick them out. She taught absentmindedly, attended a meeting, and returned home. When she opened the door, she found her hubae sitting daintily next to her bag in the middle of a pristine apartment. She seemed like a parcel, ready to be delivered anywhere. You’d already left. I wanted to say goodbye. St i l l st a nd ing by t he door, she nodded awkwardly. She didn’t know what to do next. So... Do I say goodbye now? Take care, I’ll see you around. Should I ask if she has enough cash to get wherever she’s going? Without meaning to, she blurted, Have a glass off wine before you go. It must have been around that moment that she thought she might try living with her hubae. That night, she emptied a whole bottle of wine, passed out before her hubae could leave, and woke up the next morning with a terrible flu. Her hubae felt her forehead with her cool hand, called in sick for her, and quietly made rice porridge. She peered at her hubae’s busy movements from under the covers. Loopy from the cold medication, she told her hubae to stay until she found a place to settle down. Without a word, her hubae continued
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to cut kimchi. That was three months ago. Her hubae stayed at her place, passing the time cleaning the house into somewhere unrecognizable while she was at work, downloading movies or American TV shows she might enjoy after work and organizing them like folded towels, or putting chrysanthemums in tall glasses. Her hubae also continued to look for work. She collected justifications for living with her hubae. Since her hubae was looking for work, it’d be nice if she could pay half the rent. Her hubae would feel more comfortable that way, and she’d be able to save on rent. Later, when she mentioned her plan in passing, her hubae asked hesitantly, Would it be all right with you? Would it be ‘all right’ with her? What could her hubae have possibly meant by that? The principal’s speech rings through the sky. Would it be all right with her? Wasn’t that her hubae’s way of pretending to be considerate when she was really passing the responsibility off to her? Four canopies stand facing each other in the athletic field. The judges’ tent is in the middle, and the others are all for cheering squads. The expressionless administrators sit under the shade in the judges’ tent. She vows to stop thinking about her hubae. The emcee announces the raffle prizes: a kimchi refrigerator, a bicycle, an MP3 player, and a soccer ball, among others. The field is stirring with excitement. The soundtrack for the National Warm-up Exercises blares through the
speakers. Everyone awkwardly pretends to march. The music is accompanied by the demanding, “One! Two! Three! Four!” and domineering exclamations such as “Hamstrings!” and “Deep Breath!” She’s been hearing the National Warmup Exercise song since kindergarten. The song had a strangely exhilarating, refreshing, and then sobering effect on her. But today, she can’t get over the hilarity of making rowing gestures with her arms to the most dramatic melody in the world as the man in the recording exclaims, “Whole body!” The music ends, and waves of people divide according to color. There are five colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue—for five departments. She is impressed by the size of her company. She thinks, It’s a lot larger than I thought, and cheers. The preliminary soccer games will take place in the large athletic field, while the three-legged race and kickball will be held in the small athletic field. The cheering squads divide into a few groups and settle down. She sits by the soccer field with white inflated tubes in both hands. Male teachers from the Korean and Math departments stand in two rows and bow before the game. The cheering squad on the other side cries, Yay! The Korean department echoes them in response. She keeps sniffling as she claps the plastic tubes together. The whistle blows, and the game begins. Light-footed young men spread out all over the field under the bright summer sky. Win!
Mouthwatering Kim Ae-ran, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2007, 309p, ISBN 9788932018041
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© ⓒ Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd.
About the Author
Kim Ae-ran received the 1st Daesan Collegiate Literary Prize in 2003, the Korea Times Literary Award in 2005, the Critics’ Selection Award in 2007, and the Writer’s Selection Award in 2007. Her debut short story collection Run, Pop, Run! was published in 2005 and her novel Mouthwatering was published in 2007. She is one of Korea’s most critically and commerically successful young writers, and her stories have been praised as a “small but important turning point in Korean literature’s portrayal of poverty.”
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Reviews Fiction
Where Is the Paradise We Dreamed Of ? Good-bye, Atlantis Huh Sukyung, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2011, 267p, ISBN 9788954613842
Huh Sukyung’s Good-bye, Atlantis is the story of a girl who dreams of paradise. Kyeongshil, daughter of a high-ranking civil servant in a wealthy family, is always lonely due to her father’s womanizing and her mother’s disinterest. Moreover, because she is overweight she becomes the target of jokes, and there is no one she can call a true friend. All she has for comfort in her hungry, lonely life are steamed buns from Uncle Mansu, and her diary. Chubby middle school student Kyeongshil becomes “Mimi,” “a name to forget her true self,” during the time she writes in her diary. When there is no one looking after her to show her any kind regard, where can a young girl turn to help her endure life? Kyeongshil turns to writing letters in her diary and telling lies to her friends. She comes to share the same room with her older half-sister Jeong-woo, and at some point they turn to “storytelling.” The friends she makes for the first time in her life, at a reading club, each talk with her about the paradise they dream of so that they too forget about their unfortunate realities for a moment or so.
A Novel of Youth Rewritten Route 7 Revisited Kim Yeon-su, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2010, 207p, ISBN 9788954613743
Kim Yeon-su, who has displayed an almost completely mature writer’s sensibility since I Am a Ghost Writer was published in 2005, has after 13 years rewritten Route 7, his early novel written in 1997. When one says there is a cluster of Kim’s stories that deals with his youth, and to be precise, that the stories are elegiac in their treatment of Korean society circa 1991, it is no exaggeration to say that the novel Route 7 started off the trend. Route 7 is f ixed in our minds as a “process novel” unfolding in fragmented form, or as the story of characters in their mid to late 20s who feel overwhelmed by life, and cannot free themselves of feelings of emptiness and loss. A note scribbled on a Beatles record is at its core: “May 1991, after coming out with Jae-hyeon to the protests at Cheongye Stream, Seo-yeon.” Route 7 has also come to be read as proof of the actual
Kim Yeon-su at that time, 13 years ago, when he was 27. In Route 7 Revisited, what has changed? The characters appear just as they did 13 years prior: the narrator is sick of life; Sehee has been lonely since birth, and Jae-hyeon wanders around, unable to forget Seo-yeon, his first love. The trip along Route 7 is also unaltered, set up as the occasion for Jaehyeon and the narrator to meet. The new ending, in which the first-person narrator and the real writer Kim Yeon-su overlap, is like a gift that fills the reader with warmth. One finds the most symbolic instance of change in the note that Seo-yeon writes on the LP. In the 2010 version, Route 7 Revisited, Seo-yeon leaves Jae-hyeon this message: “To a discovery greater than that of Columbus, May 1991…J&S.” This way, in the rewritten novel, the author attempts by all possible means to erase historical context from the time-space of “1991.” In Route 7 Revisited, rather than impressing us with an understanding of the early 1990s as the time he attended university, Kim highlights the universal pathless-ness of youth.
However, as she hears stories such as those of Misuk, the orphan who wants to be a nun, Yongshik, who wishes for his parents’ sake that his brother would be safely released after being arrested at a demonstration, and Youngmi, who dreams of a world without her physically abusive father, she realizes that her paradise and the paradise her friends so earnestly desire are categorically different. Whereas her friends are bound fast to an unhappy reality, describing worlds only slightly better than what now exists, the “Atlantis” she dreams of is nothing more than an unrealistic romantic fantasy. With this understanding, Kyeongshil comes of age. This is the story of a lonely girl growing up in a small city in the 1970s, and it is also a vivid account of the growing pains Korean society underwent as a country developing under a dictatorship. All of us who have survived a miserable period believing that we will one day reach the paradise we dream of, where are we now? By Cho Yeon-jung
What does it mean for him to revise a story from his youth after he has matured? We should perhaps understand this as an act the author must perform now because in the near future he will no longer remember those days with passion. As Kim offers the sophisticated youth novel Route 7 Revisited to his readers, does it mean he is taking Route 7, the vivid record of his youth, for himself? By Cho Yeon-jung
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Reviews Fiction
Standing on the Precipice of Hell Evening Courtship Pyun Hye-young, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2011, 257p, ISBN 9788932021850
Reading Pyun Hye-young’s work has always challenged readers, beginning with her first short story collection, AOI Garden. The reader is shocked awake by the corpses, muck, and stinking reservoirs with which the stories are filled. These things evoke a horror of the time when nature violates its designated boundary and intrudes on civilization. With the publication of her second stor y collection, Heading for a Breeding Farm, and her first full-length novel, Ashes and Red, Pyun demonstrates a change in literary direction. What comes of this change is the new story collection, Evening Courtship. The abject images that appeared repeatedly in her early work are nowhere to be found here. The hardboiled imagination and the aesthetics of the grotesque no longer seem to interest her. Ironically, however, the stories are all the more terrible and discomfiting. T h e d r y pr o s e s t y l e , f or bi d d i n g a l l sentiment, are a mimetic reflection of sterile modern civilization at the level of form. And the author’s view, which was focused on nature’s overflow, has expanded now to
Notorious Cop Revisited Ginger Cheon Woon-young, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2011, 282p, ISBN 9788936433819
T he nove l i s t C he on Wo on-you n g i s k now n f or w ork s t h a t a r e b a s e d on extensive research. Her novels, which tell stories new to the Korean novel, are also reminiscent of a documentary film. Her stories make a strong impact with material such as a woman who is a tattoo artist and scenes about an abattoir where innocent animals are being slaughtered for human consumption. Ginger is her first full-length novel in six years. It is about a policeman who was notorious for ruthlessly torturing anti-government detainees during the authoritarian era of the 1980s. It goes without saying that the policeman is an act u a l person. W hen democrac y wa s established in Korea, the policeman, who was known for his crimes of torture, no longer had a niche for himself. He was finally captured after about 10 years in 62 list_ Books from Korea
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hiding, and then served a prison term. However, after his release from prison, ironically, he became a protestant minister. The novel does not delve into the most recent events of the policeman’s life. Instead, the book focuses on the time period of his escape and disappearance, when his crimes became known in the late 1980s. In the beginning, he was a young man with a strong sense of justice. But unable to overcome the pressure placed on him in the historical framework of Korea, he turns into a man who fails to recognize that his “acts of conviction” are in fact evil. In contrast to the policeman’s turn to evil, his daughter is a symbol for penance. When her father’s evildoing is revealed to the whole world, his daughter, who has just entered college, drops out and trains to become a hairdresser like her mother. From the perspective of the policeman father, the downfall of his daughter is punishment for his own sins. The conflict of the evil and repentant worlds comes to the forefront when the father goes into hiding in the secret attic
reach the interior of urban civilization. The entire modern world we live in becomes a maze, becomes confusion itself as identity and difference are extinguished. There is nothing to look forward to, nothing that will improve in a nightmarish world governed by the eternal uniformity of space and time. Maybe it would it be insulting Kafka to say that Pyun is the Korean Kaf ka. However, maybe it would also be insulting P y u n to s ay t h a t t he u r b a n K or e a n landscape she portrays is any less dreadful than the allegory of modern civilization found in Kafka’s The Castle. Korean citydwellers are not familiar with life, to the extent that for them, life means rising at the same time, heading off to the same workplace in the same manner, eating the same lunch, finishing the same daily routine at the same time, and retiring to bed at the same hour. Pyun is unrivalled in capturing the hellishness of this uniformity. Of the current young Korean writers, Pyun Hyeyoung is the most intimate with hell. By Kim Hyoung-joong
attached to his daughter’s beauty salon. The novel alternates between the father and the daughter as narrator, and vividly delineates the struggles that are extant in the two worlds. The policeman’s past deeds are all too well known in Korea. Instead of drawing a realistic picture of his actions, the author has made a great effort to depict the psychological development of characters that grow amidst their struggles. By Shin Junebong
Reviews Fiction
The Future Before Us The Big Wolf, Blue Yun I-hyeong, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2011, 330p, ISBN 9788936437176
Recently in Korea there has been a growing interest in a variety of literary genres such as science fiction, mystery, thriller, fantasy, martial arts, and romance. Korean readers have shown great interest in popular fiction, but within these genres themselves, Korean writers have not experimented as diversely as their foreign counterparts. In such a climate, Yun I-hyeong is one of the few writers who have manifested both artistic talent and an experimental literary spirit. In her second novel, called The Big Wolf, Blue, she indulges in a mixed genre of fantasy and science fiction. Yun succeeds in portraying zombies and cyborgs, as well as virtual images created by computer programs, as though they are real. Her characters, freely coming and going from reality to virtual space and past to present, show the imagination of contemporary people on the extreme edge. For the novelist, her imaginative sci-fi is not merely used as a motif for the science of the future, but as a useful device to portray the reality of the present. In The Big Wolf, Blue, for example, Blue, a virtual image created
When the Job Ain’t Enough A Very Ordinary Romance Baek Young-ok, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2011, 288p, ISBN 9788954614306
When Koreans first meet, one of the things that they do most often is exchange business cards. Based on the person’s profession, position, and place of residence one can instantly learn about the other person. Koreans believe that according to the information on a business card, one’s identity is revealed. But is that truly the case? Can one’s identity be expressed solely through a business card or a resume? In A Very Ordinary Romance Baek Young-ok explores the scarred interiority and the tragic sense of identity that is concealed in a business card. Characters that have modern jobs make frequent appearances in this collection of short stories. For example, characters who appear include an employee who is in charge of receipts, the proprietor of a barbecue rib restaurant, a designer of wedding invitation cards, a CEO of a corporation, the head of a publishing company, and a book editor
of an Internet bookstore. They all have respectable jobs; however, they gradually lose their sense of identity when they exploit their jobs in order to express their desires. The author paints the sad portrait of people who, instead of using their talents to express themselves, are becoming enslaved by the robotic system of capitalism and modern professionalization. “A Very Ordinary Romance” is about a woman who works for a magazine as an administrative assistant who believes that it is possible to know all about a particular individual through what kind of receipts that person has. “A Six Million Won Man” is about a successful CEO of a corporation who is the envy of everyone, but finds out that there is nothing he can do by himself once he goes bankrupt. “The Wedding Invitation Cards Murder Case” is about a wedding invitation card designer who is accused of being a serial murderer when he attends too many weddings. “The Family Drama” is about the owner of a restaurant who finds out she has breast cancer, just at the juncture when she leaves her home in
by a computer program, is here to solve conf lict and despair of today’s youth in Korean society: Should we have marched in street protests like them? Have we become like this because we didn’t do that? I had thought that if I liked something with all my heart then I could change the world. I thought fun things would bring us salvation. But how could this be? How embarrassing all this is. Should we keep on living like this and then die?” In a society where it is difficult to work at a job of one’s choice, let alone make a day-to-day living, and youth unemployment everywhere, Yun I-hyeong’s sci-fi is that which, rooted in reality, is desperately needed. Her novel, encompassing both reality and fantasy, and reflecting pure and popular literature, opens a new horizon for Korean novels in the twenty-first century. By Jung Yeo-ul
pursuit of the true meaning in life. “Kang Myo-Hee’s Beauty Salon” is about a woman who dreamt of being a writer herself but ends up working as an editor for other writers instead. All these characters have tried their best for a long time to do a good job in their respective professions, but they fail to live the lives they truly wanted to live. The author invites readers to the barren landscape where people have formulated their identity via a business card. By Jung Yeo-ul
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Reviews Fiction
Murder with a Twist A Night of Seven Years Jeong You-jeong, EunHaeng NaMu Publishing Co. 2011, 524p, ISBN 9788956604992
Jeong You-jeong is a novelist who represents a recent trend in the Korean literary scene. The consensus among novelists, critics, and publishers is that while short stories account for most of Korean literature, writers should publish more full-lengths novels. Consequently, several literary awards, with various amounts of prize money offered, have been established. In some sense, Jeong You-jeong is a fortunate recipient of this new phenomenon. Although she had previously written several full-length novels, her Shoot Me in the Heart, which is about two young men’s escape from a mental institution, garnered the attention of the Korean literary establishment. The book came out in 2009 and won a 100,000,000 won literary prize for a full-length work. It has also been turned into a play, and will be made into a film. The novelist’s sequel is A Night of Seven Years. This book is about how a murderer’s son and his assistant investigate the truth about a grotesque seria l murder c a se that took place in a lakeshore provincial town seven years earlier. The protagonist is a former ba seba ll c atcher who one day murders his wife and allegedly, the
proprietor of an arboretum by the lake; he then goes on to unlock the floodgate of the nearby dam, thereby killing all the local residents. The protagonist’s son, who is labeled the offspring of a psychotic murderer, cannot settle in any one place and goes from one city to another. The reason is that a mysterious person shows up and distributes copies of a weekly magazine that reported his father’s crime, hence revealing his identity. It turns out that the person who exposed the murderer’s son is the proprietor of the arboretum, who was ostensibly thought to have been killed by the former baseball catcher. Before the alleged murder takes place, the arboretum proprietor had harbored a grudge against the protagonist for also killing his daughter; therefore, to take revenge, he pursued the protagonist’s son for seven years. The author tells the story by way of an intricate plot with a final twist that is quite gratifying for the reader. There is already talk of turning this book into a movie. By Shin Junebong
Learning to Breathe Greatest Fish Koo Byung-mo, Jaeum&Moeum Publishing Co. 2011, 210p, ISBN 9788957075425
Driven to the edge as a result of a series of tragic events, a man jumps into a lake with his young son in his arms. The man loses his life, but the child survives. Near the exact moment that would have been his death, the child’s instinct to breathe results in the emergence of gills behind his ears. An old man who lives near the lake rescues the child and then gives him the name Gon. There are no other people in Gon’s life except for the old man and his grandson, Gang-ha. Even though Gangha feels sympathy for Gon, he often hits him and orders him down to the lakebed to pick up all the coins that visitors throw into the lake. Gon grows into a man and rescues a woman named Hae-ryu, who after a misstep, falls into the water. In this novel, Greatest Fish, Koo Byung64 list_ Books from Korea
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mo introduces a character with gills. While her debut juvenile novel, The Wizard Bakery, combined fantasy and realism, in this new novel the author expounds on the poverty, violence, hatred, and imprecations that mark the characters by incorporating them into a character with gills, thereby successfully combining fantasy with the darker side of literature appropriate for adults. The novel begins with the prologue of Hae-ryu, who is drawn to the half-fish half-man that saved her, and alternates between her first-person narration and the third-person point of view of Gon who tells his coming of age story. But the plot takes an abrupt turn when Gangha’s mother, I-nyeong, shows up one day. She has come back as a drug addict, and the only person who treats her nicely is Gon. She gets killed when she is punctured in the neck by a nail as Gon tries to physically prevent her from committing suicide. Gon, who can no longer stay in Gang-ha’s house, leaves. The author seems to suggest that
the only thing that enables us to breathe in a world that is uninhabitable, like being underwater, are the gills, and that we all have our own unique set of gills to cope with life. By Choi Jae-bong
Steady Sellers
A Classic War Novel as Relevant as Ever The Rainy Spell Yun Heung-gil
1
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3
5 4
1. 長雨 Yun Heung-gil, 東京新聞出版局, 1979
3. The Rainy Spell Yun Heung-gil, Jimoondang Pub, 2002
The Rainy Spell And Other Korean Stories Yun Heung-gil, et al. Onyx Press, 1983
4. Die kleine Schamanin Yun Heung-gil, Marino Verlag, 1998
Regnperioden Yun Heung-gil, Bokförlaget Tranan, 1980
5. Lluvias Yun Heung-gil, Ediciones del Ermitaño, 2007
2. La Mousson Yun Heung-gil, Autres Temps, 2004
“The rain that began the day after the harvest of peas continued for days,” begins The Rainy Spell, a novel written by Yun Heung-gil. It ends with the words, “It was a very tedious spell.” In other words, the novel begins and ends with the same rainy spell. The story unfolds through the narration of a young boy, about 10 years of age. The torchlight of the partisans, which the narrator thinks of as a game of fire by adults, disappears as the rainy spell begins, and there are rumors of war. The major conf lict in the novel centers around the relationship between the boy’s maternal and paternal grandmothers, who live together in the same house.
The boy’s maternal uncle, who enters the war as a platoon commander in the South Korean army around the time the rainy spell begins, dies in battle, and it is implied that the boy’s paternal uncle, who becomes a North Korean partisan, dies as well. In light of the fact that the conflict between the two grandmothers begins with the death notice of the boy’s maternal uncle, it can be conjectured that the “rainy spell” refers to the tedious conflict between the two. In this respect, the novel focuses on the theme of maternal love, although it hints at the ideological conflict between the left and the right by dealing with the conf lict between two mothers, one with
a son serving in the South Korean army, and the other with a son who has become a North Korean partisan. This is evident in the fact that the most memorable scenes in the novel include the one in which the boy’s maternal grandmother, who has lost her son, caresses the boy while thinking about her son, and the one in which the boy’s paternal grandmother prepares food for a feast and keeps the lamp burning all night, waiting for her partisan son to come home. The boy’s two grandmothers reconcile with each other on the day that the partisan son was expected to come home; on that day, a big snake appears and the boy’s paternal grandmother loses consciousness due to shock, and the other grandmother leads the snake away, which leads to reconciliation. The reconciliation occurs despite the different ideologies. “You took it upon yourself to do something that I should have done myself. It must have been difficult,” the paternal grandmother says. The reconciliation was possible because the maternal grandmother played the role of mother for the paternal grandmother’s son, or in other words, because the two formed a bond of sympathy in their shared maternal love. Although the major conf lict in The R ainy Spell is bet ween t he boy’s t wo grandmothers, another conf lict exists between the boy and reality. The conflict is depicted through the incident in which the boy gives in to the enticement of a man who says he is a friend of the boy’s uncle, and says he’ll give the boy chocolate if the boy tells him the whereabouts of his uncle. As a result, the boy’s father is taken to the police station, and the boy is shunned by his grandmother. The boy grows up as he experiences a sense of guilt in his conflict with the reality of the times, and comes to rethink his relationship with a reality that betrays him. To the writers of Yun’s generation who experienced the Korean War in their childhood, war is something of a riddle that follows them around without revealing its true identity. The riddle does not pertain only to the author’s generation, but to Korean society as a whole, which has never been free from the division of the nation since the ceasefire in 1953. The conflict and discord caused by the war are as intense as the war itself, and have lasted much longer than the actual war. In light of this, The Rainy Spell is not to be regarded only as a novel about something that took place in the past, but as one that deals with the reality of the division that existed in the 1970s, when the novel was written, and continues to exist today. By Yi Soo-hyung
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Reviews Nonfiction
Is Knowledge an Obstacle to Imagination? Woodcraftsman's Imagination Studio Kim Jin-song, Minhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2011, 316p, ISBN 9788954614368
Kim Jin-song, the carpenter: His wooden creations are not commonplace pieces of furniture like chairs or desks; rather, his workshop is full of seemingly useless objects made of wood that he calls “moving dolls.” All with their own story to tell, they provide the viewer with plenty of food for thought. Kim Jin-song, the writer: It is fair to say t hat K im does not write in a conventional narrative style. What he does is produce seemingly useless pieces of writing that pull the reader into chaos and confusion. His writing pushes boundaries and limitations, forcing the reader to move out of the language of their comfort zone. Kim Jin-song, the eccentric and the iconoclast: Kim’s wooden creations and writings appear useless at first glance. This seeming absence of usefulness, however, is the artist’s challenge to a society ruled by utility and efficiency. That is why he is hailed as a Renaissance man today. “The imaginary is another reality within reality. Trees and f lowers and livings things in nature invite us to imagine, while the machinery and material goods of civilization are imagined entities already realized. We need a new kind of imagination now that they are growing apart, one that transcends the boundaries of natura l, empirica l k nowledge and logical, scientific knowledge. And the only way to connect these parallel worlds
is to look at ourselves afresh from another point of view.” Kim Jin-song asserts that creativity and imagination spring from whetting your powers of observation, approaching a ll sorts of experiences gamely, and increasing your understanding of how things work. He writes that Leonardo da Vinci, a Renaissance man himself, was not born a genius but was merely a keen observer of nature, whether it be water, wind, and air, or birds and animals. Da Vinci gained a deep understanding from his observations and was adept at applying this knowledge. Looking at things through the human eye and heart cannot spark creativity and imagination. Looking at things from the object’s point of view or another person’s point of view, however, can lead to new, unique creations. Kim’s works in the book such as “Nightmare,” “The House of Secrets,” “The Crawly Bug,” and “Mother and Young” are all inspired by this spirit of empathy and looking from the other person’s point of view. “People think that imagining is a difficult, unique skill. What I have felt in my work, however, is that imagination is just another word for empathy,” says Kim. Book learning may make us smarter, but at the same time may conf ine us in a fixed mindset that takes away the possibility of dreaming. In this sense knowledge is the greatest obstacle to
the imagination, and a shell that we must break out of. This book offers an alternative approach to creativity and imagination craved by so many in the 21st century. A startling read that intrigues to the end. By Richard Hong
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Reviews Nonfiction
Navigating the Seas of Thought A Joyful Knowledge Ko Myoung-sub, Sakyejul Publishing Ltd. 2011, 776p, ISBN 9788958285328
Ko Myoung-sub is one of Korea’s most wellknown book reviewers. This book collects 187 reviews the author published in the last four years. Says Ko: “The problems these authors have written about are not only relevant to their particular age but today as well. No book is worth much except as an antique if it does not raise relevant questions today.” The books reviewed in this collection spa n a number of subjects, era s, a nd continents. They range from philosophy, history, and literature of ancient Greece and Rome to politics, sociology, and cultural studies of the East, as well as the latest in intellectual discourse. The collection itself is divided into three sections, named “The Sea of Thought,” “The Sea of the Humanities,” and “The Sea of Culture.” As for why they were named this way, the author says that it is because “reading a book is like crossing a roiling sea of thought. Homer’s ship sailed from the inception of Western culture to cross the sea of knowledge; now that ‘God is dead,’ Nietzsche’s ship is sailing from a new inception through unfamiliar waters
to the sea of cognition.” The title of the book, A Joyful Knowledge, is a tribute to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. The highlight of the book is the section “The Sea of Thought,” which looks at the work of currently acclaimed philosophers and thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek, Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and Michael Sandel. This part will be particularly useful to those interested in how recent Western thought has been received by Korean intellectuals. By Pyo Jeong-hun
Money: Best Servant, Worst Master Humanities of Money Kim Chan-ho, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2011, 271p, ISBN 9788932021843
“ W h a t i s t he mo s t i mp or t a nt f a c t or determining the level of your happiness?” A South Korean firm asked the question twice at a seven year interval. In 2001, health (36 percent) topped the list, followed by family (35 percent), and money (14 percent). In 2008, health remained at the top, but money (32 percent) overtook family (24 percent) to steal the No. 2 slot. In just seven years, people changed their view in favor of happiness brought by money rather than their family members. Even younger people followed the same pattern. In a survey of middle and high school students in 2008, 17.7 percent of respondents said they were willing to engage in corruption if they could earn 1 billion won, even though such a criminal act can lead to an imprisonment of 10 years. Money has come to have a higher value than the human life. The author, who teaches cultural anthropology and education 68 list_ Books from Korea
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at university, says he has written the book in a bid to “help develop a mental antibody against immodesty and extreme violence in the world.” In the first section, money is explored from an economist’s perspective. In the second section, alternatives are sought so that humans can draw back from the money-oriented culture and develop an alternative economic system. The third and final section is devoted to exploring ways that can help humans become masters over money, instead of being its slaves. In a passage depicting the strange power of money, the Seoul Metropolitan Government gave out a small sum of money to volunteers who helped stage a citizen’s festival a few years ago. Volunteers were of course satisfied with the unexpected gift of cash; Seoul Metropolitan officials were equally happy with the positive outcome. But their happiness did not last long. When a Seoul Metropolitan official made a tour of the festival site, he came across some volunteers, who happened to be taking a break. As if they were guilty about failing to do what they were being “paid” to do, the
volunteers hurriedly went back to work, a scene that disheartened and perplexed the supervising official in question. The book, rich in colorful anecdotes and detailed statistical data, is easy to understand and interesting throughout for those interested in the topic of money. By Bae No-pil
Reviews Nonfiction
Dueling Ideologies Make Truce Two Parties, One Vision Presidential Committee on Social Cohesion, et al. Joongang Books, 2011, 279p ISBN 9788927801979
South Korean society was thrown into a frenzy in March 2010 when the ROKS Cheonan, a submarine on guard duty, was sunk. It was not just that dozens of young sailors had lost their lives; it was that the ever-lasting feud between the left and right became yet more pronounced as the investigation of the incident proceeded. One of the greatest challenges Korean society faces today is overcoming the deep mistrust and conflict between conservatives and progressives. Towards this end, the Korean government has laid ground to ha rness this destructive power into a productive one. This book documents their progress so far, namely recording the debates held by the government and national research organizations in 2010. Each chapter replicates the form of the debates that focused on different issues each time, with transcriptions of the panel’s remarks. It is notable that the nation’s leading scholars came to a consensus on a diverse range of issues from ideology to North Korean policy, social welfare, education, and employment, regardless of
their political affiliation. Both sides agreed upon the importance of the KORUS Alliance in Korea’s external and North Korean affairs and the pressing need to improve human rights in North Korea. Regarding social welfare, both progressives and conservatives agreed that a larger welfare budget was inevitable and that both universal and selective policies were needed for the optimal outcome. All in all this book will appeal to those interested in reading about the opinions of both leftand right-wing scholars and the discourse that dominates Korean society today. By Pyo Jeong-hun
Appreciating Architectural Differences Understanding Korean Architecture Through the Lens of Western Architecture Yim Seock-jae, Culturegrapher 2011, 487p, ISBN 9788970595726
Korea’s traditional architecture centers on an asymmetrical structure, a result of the country’s longstanding respect and acceptance of the surrounding elements of nature. Hills, va lleys, and streams are rarely symmetrica l; a structure in sync with nature, therefore, is bound to be asymmetrical. In contrast, Western architectural tradition is built upon strict symmetrical rules and order, which have been highly valued for many generations. This Western approach stems from the view that only humans set order on earth, a key concept applied to Western houses and buildings. This book compares the architectural characteristics of East and West, exploring possible ways to help them complement and coexist with each other. Professor Yim Seock-jae is a respected architecture
theorist. Having conducted research in a wide range of fields, he offers an intriguing comparison of architectural landmarks in the East and West, highlighting similarities and differences in an accessible manner. A look at roofs, eaves, wood, and pillars can disclose some essential architectural differences between East and West. At a time when Korea’s traditional structures a re increa singly threatened by the dominant influx of Western architecture, the book’s attempt to illustrate the beauty and excellence of Korean buildings and houses by comparing them with Western counterparts is highly meaningful. From a building’s components to structura l principles, as well as a guide to appreciating their beauty, the book explains key aspects with the help of various photos so that even ordinary readers can readily understand the differences in architectural tradition between East and West. It is time to ask where we are in terms of an architectural environment. This book is a helpful guide for answering important questions as it aims to balance the strengths of East and
West, tradition and modernity, in hopes of generating a new alternative. By Richard Hong
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Reviews Nonfiction
Understanding Landscape Painting Paintings, Drunk on Poetry Kho Youen-hee, Artbooks Publishing Corp. 2011, 355p, ISBN 9788961960755
Just as a working knowledge of Christianity is necessary to appreciate Christian art, understanding old Korean paintings requires a knowledge of classic Chinese poetry. This is crucial because many paintings take their titles from poetry. The literati of the Joseon era were used to considering poetry, prose, and art as a whole. Although professional artists existed, many of the era’s greatest scholars such as Kang Sehwang and Kim Jeong-hui enjoyed painting as a pastime as well. These scholars might have been inspired by a branch of plum blossoms to write a poem, which would then serve as the inspiration for a painting. Their poems were often set in the cultural context of poetry or classic works of philosophy and history from the Tang and Song dynasties. To the educated scholars of the Joseon era well-read in the Chinese classics, nothing could have been more natural than naming their paintings after quotes from Chinese literature. However, what was once given k nowledge is now an obstacle for the modern viewer. Paintings, Drunk on Poetry is a guide
to appreciating old Korean paintings. The author, Kho Youen-hee, earned a doctorate in Korean literature before going on to study art history. This work draws upon the full range of the author’s knowledge in an attempt to decode the classical works of literature that are often the context for old paintings. Kho looks at the poetry included in the painting, the historical context in which the work of art was appreciated, and finally at the painting itself. The paintings and poetry of such Joseon artists as Choi Buk, Kang Sehwang, Yi Inmun, Jeong Seon, Ahn Gyeon, and Kim Hong-do are visited in this context. Once the context is established it is much easier to appreciate the paintings. This book helps the reader to understand the scholarly spirit behind such works as Choi Buk’s “Gongsanmuindo” (“No One in the Empt y Mounta ins”) a nd K a ng Sehwang’s “Suseokyuhwa” (“Flower Hidden in the Spare Rocks”). By Han Mihwa
Women Heal Through Art Woman & Art Therapy Kim Sun-hyun, Jinsun Publishing Co., Ltd. 2011, 123p, ISBN 9788972216902
Hidden within the expression of oneself is the power to heal, and from that we can see why one might say that it is impossible for a writer not to write, or a painter not to paint. In recent years, therapies that incorporate creative activity are being incorporated more and more into traditional therapy methods. Especially for young people unfamiliar with the terminology and expressions used in the medical field, art therapy is common. K im Sun-hyun, author of Children & Art Therapy, opens up the world of art therapy to women. A s opposed to previous generations of women that looked vicariously for satisfaction through their husbands and children, today’s women are finding their own satisfaction important. Still, reality poses challenges to this. Caught bet ween familial obligations and selfrealization, women often find themselves conf licted. At times, in order to escape 70 list_ Books from Korea
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this dilemma, women will either opt out of marriage or choose not to have children. From her extensive clinical experience in universities and hospitals the author came to realize the efficacy of art therapy not just for children, but for women, as well. It is difficult for women to verbally express issues of concern, but through painting, sculpture, and other decorative arts, they can better understand themselves and heal their wounds. Woman & Art Therapy outlines art t her apy te c h n ique s t h at re a der s c a n undertake on their own, without the aid of specialists. Divided into beginning, intermediate, and advanced stages, the book suggests what kind of paintings one might try to paint, and introduces to the reader various examples of real-life therapies people have undertaken. Following the changing lifestyles and concerns of women in their 20s and 30s, 40s and 50s, the book incorporates examples of art therapy for women who suffer from female ailments such as osteoporosis or uterine fibroids. This is a book that helps women express
themselves and turn a new leaf of happiness. By Han Mihwa
Reviews Nonfiction
Korean Flora Explained Plants Are the People Ko Joo-hwan, Geulhangari 2011, 416p, ISBN 9788993905564
Though they often appeared in the lives and histories of the Koreans of the past, 55 types of plants and trees unfamiliar to today’s younger generation are the focus of this book. The author himself is a successful businessman in the city who hails from a small mountain village; still, every weekend he travels back to the simple home his parents left him, where he cares for the adjoining garden. His hometown, Seonghwang-ri, receives high marks for its forestland, even in Korea, a country whose terrain is two-thirds mountainous. His popular blog, which documents his weekend life tending to the garden, boasts 100,000 visitors. In this book, through descriptions of his younger years with his parents and their generation around him, and at times, his own experiences, the author revives various items of common practice and folk wisdom regarding plants and trees with a novel writing style and illustrations. In addition to factual information such as the Latin name and genus, the author includes practical nutritional and medicinal uses.
T he b o ok i s f u l l of h a rd-to -f i nd information regarding questions such as why it is essential to use white ash for a cow’s nose ring, or why the police guards at government buildings always carried clubs made of birch, and why telephone poles were always made of larch. The common thread throughout the book may be plants and trees, but beyond this the book also deals with Eastern and Western classicism and literary works. Ko foments the reader’s interest and understanding by incorporating the poetry of Rimbaud and Yeats, classical Chinese poetry, The Analects by Confucius, and Korean history. Ko describes himself as “a grassroots ma n ca lling for t he need to seek out the various buzzwords of happiness like communication and harmony between nature and our surroundings.” After closing this book, the reader will take another look at the plants and trees once carelessly overlooked. By Pyo Jeong-hun
Searching for Peace in an Era of Conflict International Conflicts Kim Jae-myung, Mizibooks 2011, 580p, ISBN 9788994142135
The author of this book, Professor Kim Jaemyung of Sungkonghoe University, is one of Korea’s experts on international conflict. Over the past 15 years he has covered inperson issues in 15 points of conflict around the globe including the Balkans, the Middle East, and West Africa. According to Kim, the 21st century will be no more than an extension of the war and violence of the 20th century. As noted by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the beginning of the 21st century has seen the onset of no fewer than 15 incidents of war per year that will each see over 1,000 casualties. Kim states that war arises when the wicked passion that looms in some corner of the human spirit is called forth by political leaders in the name of nationalism or ethnocentrism. Consequently,
K i m s u g g e s t s t h a t w e n ot a l l o w t he rationalizations of war made by political leaders to run rampant, and instead, that those interested in peace must band together and resist. The author’s hatred of “dirty wars”— c a rried out for politic a l or economic benef it—is a natura l extension of his sympathy for those few who become the victims conf lict. Kim also criticizes U.S. imperialism, stating that, in effect, “terror” is but a buzzword of political ideology used by nations that hold power, and asserts that from the viewpoint of the opposition, the struggle for national independence is a struggle for freedom. Ultimately, the author’s interest lies in t he e stablish ment of peace on t he Korean peninsula, where 1.7 million of the world’s 21 million soldiers stand in confrontation. The possibilit y of such peace does not depend on Korea’s four powerful international neighbors, which do not necessarily truly wish for peace on
the Korean peninsula, but rather on frank dialogue and cooperation between the two Koreas, two countries that share the same language and culture. By Pyo Jeong-hun
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Reviews Nonfiction
Aspire to Lead a Life of Service Dream About How to Live Rather Than What to Become Kim Won-seak, Myungjin Publications Inc. 2011, 303p, ISBN 9788976776457
This book is the 12th installment of a youth role model series, featuring the late Cardinal Stephen Kim Sou-hwan (19922009). Cardinal Kim was the undisputed spiritual leader for Koreans for decades who sought truth and justice in his lifetime, going beyond conflicts between religions, denominations, and generations. In 1969, K i m bec a me t he c ou nt r y’s f i rst- e ver cardinal. Age 47 at the time, he was also the youngest cardinal in the world. In the next 40 years, Kim delivered messages of love to people struggling with poverty and alienation as well as devoted himself to nurturing Korea’s democracy and protecting human rights. At every corner of Korea’s troubled modern history stood Kim with his trademark gentle smile, offering a glimmer of hope to Koreans grappling with obstacles and challenges. Kim was a true leader who had courage, a balanced mind, and respect for others. He always put himself in a lower position, spending his life to serve and help people in need. That is why he was fondly dubbed “a fool,” and he was willing to remain a
What Art Means to Artists I, Artist Kwon Keun-young, Semicolon 2011, 336p, ISBN 9788983712844
In the mid-2000s, Korean investors started looking to art instead of real estate or stocks. Their interest, however, was still limited to Park Soo-keun and a handful of hyperrealist painters. Modern art was and is considered too difficult to be enjoyed by many. I, Artist bring s toget her t he ne x t generation of Korean artists in their 30s and 40s in a collection of interviews depicting their artistic struggle. A team of 50 experts encompassing curators, art critics, and professors picked the 10 artists interviewed in the book: Kim Joo-hyun, Noh Suntag, Debbie Han, Park Byoung-choon, Park Yoon-young, Park Hyun-su, Suh Do-ho, Yang Hae-gue, Lee Bul, and Jung Yeon-doo. The author interviews the artists on their work in a variet y of media from installation to photography to Korean painting, and what it means to them. It 72 list_ Books from Korea
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is a joy to read about this diverse group of artists and their widely varying ways of thinking, painting, philosophizing, and creating. Park Byoung-choon likes to add a little whimsy to the traditionally solemn genre of Korean painting. Scarlet paragliders flit around black and white ink paintings, while a couple gets it on in the bushes. Suh Do-ho, the installation artist, grew up in a house modeled after the Yeong yeongda ng Residence of Cha ngdeok Palace. Suh believes that place is crucial to understanding a person and features his childhood home in such works as “Fallen Star 1/5.” Ernst Gombrich, author of The Story of Art, once said that “there is no such thing as art, there are only artists.” This book hints at the possibilities these 10 artists are creating in modern art. By Han Mihwa
fool as long as he was able to help other people. Many are worried about what they should become, but Kim’s concern was focused on how to lead a life. Kim, in other words, demonstrated what a true leader could do: set an example through one’s own life devoted to other people. Kim’s last message shortly before his death—“Thank you. Please love each other.”—shall be remembered among many Koreans for years to come. T he role model series is a imed at portraying notable people in a way that inspires and encourages young Koreans who will shape the future of the country. The personalities already introduced in the series include U.N. Secretary General Ban Kimoon, U.S. President Barack Obama, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and Samsung Group founder Lee Byung-chull. By Richard Hong
Writer's Note
© Paik Dahuim
Dreaming the Language of Literature and Womanhood
Where? The Arab Emirates, they said. If it wasn’t the UAE, I would not have said yes and agreed to go so readily. Didn’t they tell me I would be going to Abu Dhabi? And to Dubai? The country where I had long dreamed of visiting on my own but had all but given up, as I thought I would never be able to go by myself. Whistling in excitement, I went through a couple of summer outfits but ended up putting them back in the closet. What I am trying to say is that I could not fathom how different. I mean, before I could confirm the cultural differences, I realized that I was so ignorant of this country and its Arabic culture. I read a few books that seemed to specialize in the subject and called a few people whom I believed to be experts. I was told, Let’s talk after you get back, so I said fine. I boarded a flight on Etihad Airways, the second national airline of the UAE. The first official function took place at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. Because South Korea participated this year as the Market Focus country, we had a booth at the entrance of the fair. It was modest in size; not just our booth but those of all the other countries in attendance as well. I wonder if this was the reason the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair was not well known worldwide. The other authors Kim Joo-young and Yi Mun-yol, and KLTI folks including the president Kim Joo-youn, who had been on my flight, were slowly becoming my family, as we looked around the booths, chatted, and took pictures together. Our shared communal fate as this odd family unit proved itself to be useful with our flexible teamwork during the “conversations with authors” segment of the fair. For instance, if my poems brought to mind the image of a trouble-making daughter, the
novels of the two senior authors on the panel could be likened to that of the father straightening out the situation. It w a s t h rou g h t he aud ienc e’s re sp on s e s t h at I realized the sincere concerns expressed by my friends and acquaintances—urging me to bring only my least provocative work—had been unfounded. When I laughed, they also laughed, and when I became serious, they also wore grave expressions. Why would it matter whether I wore a tank top and a mini skirt, while they wore black burkas from head to toe? I was able to reaffirm that we were all aboard the same ship under the common language of literature, poetry, and womanhood. After traveling to Dubai, which is also in the UAE but quite different from Abu Dhabi, we attended another set of functions at Zayed University. A group of young Arab women ranging from their late teens to early twenties—who, like Korean university students their age, enjoyed getting dressed up and chatting with their friends, often bursting into laughter over nothing—were gathered before us. As I stood in front of them, I tried to imagine how we looked to them. When we asked what they knew about Korea, they immediately responded with names of Korean boy bands like TVXQ (Dong Bang Sin Gi), 2PM, and Beast. Wow, this must be the Korean Wave! But they did not have the slightest knowledge of Korean literature. This was not at all surprising. In fact, Korean literature nowadays is widely neglected by even Korean students, who hardly know anything about it and don’t even try to learn more. Although the discussion involved expressing difficult views that link the Korean War and national division, the history and the present including politics and literature, the local students stayed until the very end and paid close attention. The reason they seemed so beautiful was not just their youth. Middle East meets Far East. During the cultural festivities in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, I was fortunate enough to make a new friend: an art histor y major at Zayed University named Bakha. Memorable for her black plastic frames and braces, she handed me a picture of a tiger from a Korean folk tale which she proudly told me she had drawn herself. Thus began our friendship, which has continued to blossom through emails; regardless of our respective origins, what’s certain is that we both love bulgogi, that we might find ourselves at a Korean barbecue joint in Apgujeong grilling meat together come next year, and that literature can bring people together. Perhaps this has always been the reason I participate in literature. By Kim Min-jeong
* Kim Min-jeong is a poet. She made her debut winning the Munye Joongang New Writer’s Award in 1999. She has published such collections of poetry as Flying Miss Hedgehog and For the First Time, She Felt It.
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Reviews Children's Books
Take a Peak Inside Your Neighbors’ Apartment Last Evening Baek Heena, StoryBowl 2011, 14p, ISBN 9788996478218
The content and structure of this book is very different from any other storybook. The body of the book starts on the cover. Next to the large title Last Evening smaller letters spell out, “It is six on the dot. The zebra was getting ready to go skating.” In this way, the title and the main text interconnect and the title becomes part of the main text. Secondly, dolls, instead of illustrations, represent the main characters. Opening the book feels like stepping into a doll’s house. Thirdly, the unique composition of the pictures differentiates Baek ’s work from others in her f ield. Instead of having to turn each page of the book, the illustrations in this book connect to one another like that of a folding screen. Through this method, Baek is able to depict the simultaneous action of the characters both inside and outside of their apartment building. The effect reinforces how their lives are intertwined. The story told does not have a beginning, middle, and end. The book is about a number of people living in the same apartment building, each leading their own lives. These various snapshots of their lives create episodes and these episodes come together to form the whole picture book. Lastly, there are a variety of characters that appear in the book. The copyright page lists some of the names of these characters, introducing 11 of them. The characteristics of these characters are different from the average storybook as
well. The plot of most storybooks develops with the action of the main characters, but this is not the case with Baek. The first episode begins with Mr. and Mrs. Dog. They love to sing while playing the piano. The couple becomes angry when they cannot find their socks. The ruckus they make wakes up the baby rabbits and they make even more noise than the dogs. Just in time, Mrs. Mouse is passing by and she picks up the lost sock on the street to hang on her doorknob as a Christmas ornament. Mr. and Mrs. Dog discover the sock hanging on the doorknob, recover their peace, and sing joyfully. Then the baby rabbits fall fast asleep. The second episode tells the story of Mrs. Lamb who drops her keys when the angry Mr. and Mrs. Dog surprise her. Mr. Zebra, who is passing by, helps Mrs. Lamb find her keys and also discovers other objects hidden inside the folds of her wool. In the third episode, the goat invites the hungry fox for dinner. Fox eagerly comes to dinner and is disappointed when vegetable soup is the only item served. Fox is happy again when the cake the goat ordered arrives. The fourth episode is about a black cat. Mr. Rabbit accidentally runs into the black cat on the street but merely passes him by. On her way to purchase Christmas ornaments, Mrs. Mouse comes across the cat and immediately runs back home. In connecting the illustrations of the
book to look like a folding screen and f urthermore connecting the sepa rate episodes of the story, Baek emphasizes the interconnectedness of the daily lives of the characters living in the same apartment building. If The Moon Sorbet—a picture book that Nanny Duck reads to the Baby Rabbits—exemplifies the interconnectivity of t he apa rtment, t he moon a nd t he cosmos on a hot summer night, then Last Evening demonstrates this connectivity on a cold winter day. Baek Heena has ignited curiosity among her fans by expressing the desire to publish a series of stories with the characters in Last Evening as the main characters of each book. “There is no place like home,” is the main theme that Baek wants to portray through Last Evening. The individual homes form the apartment building, the apartment buildings form the earth as our home, and the universe consists of these homes. By Eom Hye-suk
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Reviews Children's Books
Righting the Wrongs The Stories Shouldn’t Be True Gang Gyeong-su, Sigongjunior 2011, 36p, ISBN 9788952760661
The Stories Shouldn’t Be True is a good example of typical nonfiction in a sense that nonfiction delivers fact, knowledge, and embedded values or attitudes through writing and pictures. In particular, the title The Stories Shouldn’t Be True delicately suggests the message that the book wishes to deliver. This book exposes the current state of children’s rights, that need to be protected and respected without question, which are neglected and alienated. The book begins wit h Sori, a mischievous Korean boy who wants to become an artist. The story of Hassan who has to dig and send up coal from a mine everyday is next. Then the lives of Panier who works up to 14 hours at a carpet factory in India, a Ugandan boy Kijambu who is dying of malaria, and Elena who has been living alone in a manhole for the past three years in Romania. Sori cannot believe the stories of René who sits on the building that has been destroyed by an earthquake and continues to wait for her parents, and Kalami who was taken away as a boy solider at the age of
nine and still suffers from the memories of war even after returning home. But Hassan, Panier, Kijambu, Elena, René, and Kalami cry out with all their hearts. Though their stories may sound unbelievable, they are their true life stories. The Stories Shouldn’t Be True informs us with a soundless cry of a reality where unbelievable things are happening around us and what we have to do in order to resolve such issues. I applaud the publication of this book, which is the fruit of author Gang Gyeong-su’s hope and efforts to make the world a happier place by making small changes from the bottom up. By Shin Hye-eun
Girl Meets Future Self Fantastic Girl Kim Hye-jung, BIR Publishing Co., Ltd. 2011, 275p, ISBN 9788949123042
Would my current life change if I knew my future? Knowing the future is fascinating yet scary because we can’t be sure that our uncertain future will be a good one. What should I do when I suddenly find myself face to face with my gloomy future? This is a fantasy where 17-year-old O Yeseul who wants to be a fashion model meets her 27-year-old self. On atrip to Miami, 17-year-old Yeseul has a slight concussion in the airplane washroom and is, amazingly, transported to her home 10 years in the future where she becomes friends with her future self. Contrary to her belief that she will be a successful model, her future 27-year-old self is an ordinary person studying for the civil service exam. The younger Yeseul is confused to face the unbelievable changes her future self has gone through and how dull her life has become. Rather than despair, however, she 76 list_ Books from Korea
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tries to encourage the future Yeseul and give her confidence. But despite such efforts, the 27-year-old Yeseul is very timid without much courage left to try anything because she has experienced too many failures. The future “I” is in fact afraid of the “I” from the past and refuses to change. This story deals cheerfully with the situation of a life a teenage girl can dream about but also reveals the bitter truth that life does not always happen as you want it to. The 17-year-old girl, who thought she could soar to the top if only she realized her dream of becoming a model, later does become one, but is put under unimaginable pressure, suffers from anorexia, and finally gives up her job as a model. But the charm of this book is not just in the “confirmation of the future.” 27-year-old Yeseul revives the dream that she has given up on after meeting her younger self. The meeting between the 17-year-old and the 27-year-old brings about the “change and maturity of the future.” Aut hor K im Hye-jung made a spectacular debut by winning the First Blue
Fiction Award in 2007. She has a rhythmical and keen sensibility that explores various affairs of the world. This stylish story of one yet two Yeseuls with a 10-year gap between them is currently gaining strong interest from teenage girls, and is the third book by the author. By Kim Ji-eun
Reviews Children's Books
Leaving the Shell of the Boy Behind Thanks to That Boy Lee Gyeong-hye, Baram Books 2011, 204p, ISBN 9788994475158
In 1915, Franz Kafka talked about the shock of “the day I transformed into an insect” in The Metamorphosis. In 2011, Lee Gyeonghye talks about “the day the insect became me” in Thanks to that Boy. Why is she talking about this exact opposite experience from Kafka after almost 100 years since the publication of The Metamorphosis? Jang Yangho, a high school student studying for the university entrance exam, gets kicked out of his own home when a fake Yangho who looks exactly like him claims to be the real Yangho. It turns out that the pretender is a metamorphosis of a cockroach that has been living in the corner of Yangho’s room. Seeing that the “cockroach Yangho” carries on with life much better than he does himself, the real Yangho begins to develop a strange camaraderie with the cockroach Yangho, becoming his friend. Unlike Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis who feels shame that he has become an insect, Yangho leaves his false life with the cockroach and sets off to find his true life. It is a thrilling paradox that shows how his current life has been
nothing but an empty shell. Yangho forms a rock band with the friends who have lost their way in life and rediscovers the drumming sound of his heart. If Lee Gyeong-hye walked deep into the heart of young people’s lives in her previous work I Died One Day, then she plunges herself into their lives in this story. Though the characters are cheeky, they know how to console one another’s pain and they don’t hesitate to acknowledge rock bottom. A song by the band Moonlight Fairy that appears in the book tells us that we are “lucky” when we know how to struggle through difficult times. The understanding of rea lit y and failure are not directly proportional. Instead, they create and give back amazing energy. This is a collection of short stories that is full of sensibility and that shows the present condition of youth literature in Korea. By Kim Ji-eun
The Girl Who Wants to Eat Everything I Wanna Be a Picky Eater Too Yoo Eunsil; Illustrator: Seol Eunyoung Sakyejul Publishing Ltd. 2011, 56p, ISBN 9788958285366
Sakyejul’s Smiling Elephant series is made especially for children from ages six to seven who are moving on from picture books to books with more vocabulary. The books are not too long and can hold the attention of children who are moving on from pictures to words. Its rhythmic language, and the familiar every day experiences the elephant portrays through words and illustrations have earned the series a popular reputation in Korea. Yoo’s work Everything Is Fine with Lee Yoojung was selected for the 2010 IBBY honor list and her book Flags of All Nations Boy was awarded the 28th Korean children’s literature award. It goes without saying that Yoo’s work represents some of the best children’s literature in Korea. Yoo employs
the literary device of irony well even while approaching children and the world with a warm heart. Young children seem to categorize the world into what is edible and what is not as they are particularly obsessed with food. (Think of infants who try to eat anything new they encounter.) Yoo’s new book is a series of short stories titled “It’s Difficult to Always Eat What I Want to Eat,” “A Delicious School Lunch,” and “Herbal Medicine.” A ll of these stories tell the story of the main character Jungah’s keen appetite. Jungah eats balanced meals, but her older brother only eats what he wants to eat. The mother gives delicious treats to only Jungah’s brother in order to have him eat better meals. To win treats, Jungah tries to be a picky eater like her brother but finds the task difficult. She ends up bursting into tears. Jungah also becomes envious of her brother’s herbal medicine. Jungah’s mother is understanding of Jungah’s voracious
appetite and instead of reproach extends wit and understanding. The writer’s warm appreciation for children will bring delight to young readers. By Yu Youngjin
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Reviews Children's Books
Play Time Is Better than Making Money What? Make a Living? Park Hyo-mi; Illustrator: Lee Kyoung-suk Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2011, 213p, ISBN 9788936442613
This is the work of Park Hyo-mi who is known and loved in Korea for Diary Library and Balloon Mirror. In the past, Park has drawn on inventive writing methods in order to describe the hopes of children, but this work relies on realism in guiding readers to a small village next to the sea in the early 1980s. The main character Gahee is the oldest daughter of a farmer who is neither rich nor poor. To save heating expenses Gahee’s picky sister, Nahee, comes to Gahee’s room and scolds her. Gahee wants to continue to use her own room so she begins to think of ways to make money to pay for the heating bill. She notes that during the winter when the family field is frozen the neighborhood boys come and play in the field. She decides to charge them an entrance fee. When the boys pay her with glass marbles instead of cash Gahee is further consumed with the desire to make money. Gahee dreams of becoming a
millionaire and while playing with the boys she finds various ways to take more glass marbles from them. She becomes obsessed with collecting marbles in hopes that she will be able to sell them later for cash. But eventually her greed leads her to lose all of the marbles she owns and end up stealing money from her mother. Ga hee’s greed grows a nd lead s to a n u n forget t able episode t hat ma ke s her realize that the richest man in town has been deceiving the entire village by trying to fulfill his selfish desires. Gahee is disappointed by him and renounces her dream of becoming a millionaire. Instead she becomes deeply involved in the world of child’s play. T h is book w i l l not on ly help t he understanding of farm villages in the 80s but will also educate children with healthy concepts of money.
Delivering Messages of Sympathy Olga’s Letters Song Mari; Illustrator: Moon Jihoo Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2011, 149p, ISBN 9788936442620
A collection of seven short stories, Olga’s Letters, gives an impression of having a simple, modest yet carefully laid out meal where every dish is perfect in harmony. The stories of a Mongolian girl Olga who writes to her father who has gone far away to Korea to earn money, and a Paraguayan boy Marco who misses his mother who has remarried a Korean, talk about the longing that transcends national boundaries and with which all children can sympathize. In many cases, nationality, language, and race divide people. Examined more closely, however, people’s lives are quite similar wherever they are and whoever they are. We miss the family members who are far away and we care for those who appear to be fragile. Therefore, understanding others’ emotions or feelings is as important as ack nowledging the dif ferences. 78 list_ Books from Korea
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Considering that Korea is the last divided country in the world, seeing North and South Korean boys kicking a ball together and opening their hearts to each other at a youth football match is very meaningful. The stories of Handeul who is confused a f t e r b e i n g t old a b out h i s mot he r ’s remarriage and Junho who struggles with everyday life after losing his mother to a tidal wave carefully portray the pains the main characters go through. Being able to feel another’s pain or sadness should be at the very basis of sympathy. Delicately c ompre s s e d s tor ie s s o ot he t he m a i n characters’ hearts. On the other hand, the story of an elderly lady who finally obtains her driver’s license after failing hundreds of times has an earnestness that touches the heart despite its humorous tone. A rapid pace and simple yet clear sentences bring the beauty of short stories to life, and the message of sympathy comprised in all seven stories will move readers’ hearts. By Kim Min-ryoung
By Yu Youngjin
Steady Sellers
Telling Animal Tales The Barnyard Duck that Flew Away to the Sky Lee Sang-kwon, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 1997, 206p, ISBN 9788936441616
We all come into contact or become friends with animals in our childhood. The animals range from big ones such as cows and pigs, to small ones such as parrots and frogs. Author Lee Sang-kwon, virtually the only children’s book writer in Korea specializing in books on ecology, was born and raised in a rural village. He grew up seeing and hearing fantastic stories about quite a variety of animals. He even came into contact with animals that can scarcely be seen today, even in zoos, such as weasels and wildcats. Even now, Lee vividly remembers the stories he heard more than three decades ago. Several years ago, he set to paper his experiences in a suspenseful, realistic style, giving rise to The Barnyard Duck that Flew
Away to the Sky, a collection of ecological stories. In the six stories that deal with six different animals, Lee does not simply describe what the animals are like. He reveals how the animals came into contact with humans in a rural village 30 years ago, and displays the conf licts and incidents that ensued. For instance, the story “The Water Spirit of the Nasan River” unfolds at first with a tale about a spooky water spirit, even though the story itself is really about a weasel. The story is based on something that happened when the author was young. A number of people drowned in the Nasan River in his hometown. Around that time, more and more people began to testify that
they had seen a “water spirit” in the river. The author, a little boy at the time and full of curiosity, stepped forward to discover the identity of the water spirit. After a long stakeout, he finally learned that the water spirit was really a weasel. People had mistaken the weasel, which swam in the distance with its head bobbing in and out of the water, then disappeared, for a water spirit. The story doesn’t end there, however. After the true identity of the water spirit is revealed, people become desperate to catch the weasel. The conflict between the adults who seek to catch the weasel in order to use its gall bladder to treat illnesses, and the young protagonist who tries to protect the weasel, is intriguing. As the story unfolds, the author shares tidbits of information on weasels, such as the fact that weasels were once called “freshwater seals” or “freshwater weasels,” that weasels are great hunters of freshwater clams, and that they live among rocks on the shore. Young readers come to learn many things as they read the stories about six animals that are pursued or abused by humans. They learn about how weasels or squirrels live out in the wild, what kind of animals lived in Korea long ago, how people in days of old treated wild animals, how humans and animals must live together, and how to protect animals. Therein lay the reason why critics call this book “The Wild Animals I Have Known of Korea.” In the preface, the author tells young readers that animals are friends to humans, saying, “I believe animals can feel just as humans do. They cry when they’re sad, and laugh when they’re happy.” Perhaps for that reason, the animals in the stories are true to life. I wonder where the squirrel raised by the cat, and the barnyard duck that flew away to the sky, have gone. By Oh Yunhyun
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Meet the Publishers
Introducing The Multifaceted World of
Jaeum&Moeum Publishing Co.
Jaeum&Moeum Publishing Co. is widely considered an enfant terrible in the Korean literary publishing industry. Despite being a newcomer to literary publishing the company has already had a steady stream of hits and is collaborating with respected publishing houses in China and Japan as well, injecting new life into the market. It is challenging the status quo of established houses like Changbi, Munhakdongne, and Moonji Publishing that dominate literary publishing, by snapping up the latest work of promising young authors. Jaeum&Moeum Publishing Co. was established in 1997. In the beginning it focused on fantasy. Although the genre was considered second-rate and of solely commercial value at the time, the company thought it would appeal to the younger generation that had grown up with computers, playing computer games. They were ahead of their time, however, as they found that fantasy did not sell as well as expected, nor was it easy to find new material. Their next move proved to be a sounder choice: educational books, always a popular genre in Korea where parents are highly dedicated to their children’s education. One of the company’s biggest hits was The Science Stories Told by Scientists, a series targeted at students from elementary to high school level that was eventually expanded to 100 volumes and sold 7 million copies.
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1 3
1. Fiction World Chinese literary magazine 2. 流苏树 Park Bumshin, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing Group, 2010 3. Business Park Bumshin, Jaeum&Moeum Publishing Co. 2010, 248p, ISBN 9788957075364
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1. A Ha Sung-ran 2010, 284p, ISBN 9788957075173 3 2 1
2. Sohyeon Kim In-suk 2010, 340p, ISBN 9788957074848 3. Seven Cat Eyes Choi Jae-hoon 2011, 378p, ISBN 9788957075418 4. The Doctor of Oz, awarded the inaugural Jaeum&Moeum Literary Award An Bo-yun 2009, 272p, ISBN 9788957074701 5. Perspective at Noon Lee Seung-U 2009, 159p, ISBN 9788957074695
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Quarterly Literary Magazine
Jaeum&Moeum
In 2008 the company founded the literary magazine Jaeum&Moeum on its second foray into the literary market. This time it went for mainstream literature rather than fantasy. From the publisher’s point of view, literary magazines and journals are one of the best ways to attract critically and popularly acclaimed talent. Writers are also partial to magazines as they pay on a regular basis. “It was very complicated trying to publish literature without a magazine of our own,” recalls Jaeum&Moeum’s CEO, Kang Byung-cheol. “I decided that we should have our own magazine the next time we tried to break into the literary market.” In other words, the magazine is critical as a source of new material and a forum for networking with authors. Jaeum&Moeum, the magazine, usually publishes novels. Novels are serialized quarterly and then published in book form. This d ist i ng u ishe s t he ma g a zi ne from other publications that focus primarily on poetr y, short fiction, and criticism. S o f a r t h e m a g a z i n e ’s direction is working. Novels t hat t he compa ny ha s published in book form after serialization in their ma ga zine include K im In-suk’s historical novel, Sohyeon, inspired by the Crown Prince Sohyeon who was taken hostage by the Qing Dynasty during their invasion of the Joseon kingdom and died shortly
after returning to Korea, Ha Sung-ran’s A, based on a true story involving the mass suicide of a cult, Koo Byung-mo’s Greatest Fish, an unusua l novel about humans who breath through gills, Choi Jae-hoon’s Seven Cat Eyes, a scathing social critique also noted for its memorable style, and Perspective at Noon by Lee Seung-U, whose previous work was received favorably in France. L a st ye a r Jaeum&Moe um a nd t he Chinese literary magazine Fiction World ran simultaneous issues serializing novels by Korean and Chinese authors, namely Business by Park Bumshin, one of Korea’s best-known male writers, and The Times on the Road by the Shanxi novelist Jiang Yun. Both were published in book form in China and Korea this year. Nothing like this has ever happened in Korean literary publishing before. Business tells the story of a mother who resorts to prostitution to pay for her son’s private tutoring so that he may go to a top university. The novel is doing well in China as well as Korea. CEO Kang’s dedication to literar y publishing is unwavering. Mr. Kang says, “I think that no other books influence people as much as literature and the humanities. They are most publishers’ dream, actually.” The way he sees it, the value of literature is incalculable. By all means Jaeum&Moeum is certainly adding to the diversity of the Korean literary landscape. By Shin Junebong
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New Books
Recommended by Publishers Korean editors have handpicked their favorite titles among the collections from their own publishing houses. The following list contains hidden gems in Korea’s publishing industry. For further information, please contact the agents directly.
Copyright © Lee Hyungjin, Seventh Birthday, Sigongjunior
Fiction
Island Table
Nowhereman
Trunker
The Cat that Plays Cards
Park Keom-san, Minumsa Publishing Group 2011, 332p, ISBN 9788937483530
Yum Seoung-suk Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2011, 311p, ISBN 9788932021867
Koh Eun-gyu, Edition PPUL 2010, 260p, ISBN 9788901115245
Lee Hwa-kyung, Edition PPUL 2011, 248p, ISBN 9788901117409
“Let’s erase love, erase wounds, and crawl into the trunk!” Trunkers— people who sleep in car trunks! The most eccentric, bizarre people since homo sapiens! What do Ondu, an eccentric and oversensitive girl, and Reum, a corny but romantic guy, do every night inside the trunks of cars? You’ll think about the place trunkers have in society, and you won’t be able to put it down for a single moment as you get a peek into their private lives.
The book is a collection of nine short stories about love and goodbyes, and the human emotions of joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure. The title piece, portrays in a lighthearted and fond way the story of a girl who suffers from low self-esteem because she can’t memorize “the silent tribute for the patriots and fallen heroes who gave up their lives for the country,” and her grandfather who teaches her life lessons with a single card.
Copyright Agent: Claire Yang shy07@wjbooks.co.kr 82-2-3670-1168 www.wjthinkbig.com
Copyright Agent: Claire Yang shy07@wjbooks.co.kr 82-2-3670-1168 www.wjthinkbig.com
Regina, a girl who can’t see, Seki, a boy who can’t speak, Agnes, a girl who won’t face reality, and Minwu, a boy who doesn’t say what he knows, talk of their desire for one another, amid destinies that cross. Dealing openly with taboo subjects such as broken homes, people with disabilities, and sex with a minor, the book reveals the relationship between physical and mental challenges and human desire. Copyright Agent: Michelle Nam michellenam@minumsa.com 82-2-515-2000 (Ext.206) www.minumsa.com
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Yum Seoung-suk’s short story collection calls attention to the fact that there are countless people in the world who think that they are no longer of any worth, and that there is no meaning in existence, due to despair, failure, loss, and degradation. Copyright Agent: Lee Keun-hye leciel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 www.moonji.com
Seven Cat Eyes
A
The Ants on a Sandy Plain
Cold, Slippery Sorrow
Choi Jae-Hoon, Jaeum&Moeum Publishing Co. 2011, 384p, ISBN 9788957075418
Ha Sung-ran, Jaeum&Moeum Publishing Co. 2010, 284p, ISBN 9788957075173
O Song-i, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2010, 197p, ISBN 9788954613040
Seven Cat Eyes is a novel, in the form of a mystery novel, about writing novels. This is exquisitely put together as four puzzle pieces. Garnering such praise as “a suspenseful narrative,” “complete control over the plot and the story,” and “musical variations on a single subject,” the book was a finalist for the Dongin Literary Award, one of the most prestigious literary awards in Korea.
A full-length novel by award-winning author, Ha Sung-ran, the book depicts the process through which the truth about a mysterious case of mass suicide at a cement factory, based on the “Odaeyang Incident,” is revealed one by one. The process of delving into a maze of secrets between the past and present can seem somewhat complicated, but the author maintains the pace and tension with a solid plot.
The winner of the 2nd Munhakdongne Young Adult Novel Award. There’s a sandy plain, a wasteland where nothing can survive. There, miraculously, Boy and C live. Why do the people, who were once neighbors and family, have to chase and catch and trample each other?
Ryu Gyeong-hui EunHaeng NaMu Publishing Co. 2010, 260p, ISBN 9788956603704
Copyright Agent: Park So-yi munhak@jamobook.com 82-2-324-2349 www.jamo21.net
Copyright Agent: Cho Chanhee jamoglobal@jamobook.com 82-2-324-2347 www.jamo21.net
Juliet Club
The Most Beautiful Farewell
Pit-a-Pat Love Story
Cat Cat Cat
Park Sun-hee, BIR Publishing Co., Ltd. 2010, 305p, ISBN 9788949123004
Noh Heekyoung, Booklogcompany 2010, 328p, ISBN 9788994197098
editorial department, Booklogcompany 2011, 272p, ISBN 9788994197173
Kim Seo-ryung, et al., Hyundae Munhak 2010, 348p, ISBN 9788972754589
Yum, the 17-year old protagonist of Juliet Club, takes part in a “contractual relationship” with her private tutor, and practices kissing in advance out of curiosity. Jueun chases after teen stars, and Toran has a crush on a classmate. Yeondu worries about her relationship with her boyfriend. The four teenagers meet at Yum’s rooftop house and share their stories in this coming of age novel.
Noh Heekyoung, a TV drama writer with the most solid fan base in Korea, wrote this novel for her mother. The narrator talks of her mother, facing death in her 50s, and her motherin-law, who suffers from dementia and who was hard on her daughterin-law, while at the same time being affectionate like a mother. The book has captured the heartache of those who must say farewell to their mothers.
“Marry Me, Mary!” a TV drama that became the talk of the town even before it aired, with its casting of Jang Geunseok, the next generation Korean star, has now been reborn as a book of essays and photographs depicting the love story of the two protagonists. “The book contains cute little stories such as “Contract Marriage” and “Double Marriage with Two Guys,” as well as 320 photographs that vividly capture the drama episodes.
This book, issued in commemoration of the 55th anniversary of Hyundae Munhak, is a collection of short stories by 11 young writers centering around one theme. The theme is “cats”—cats with voices that seem to accuse the city of being melancholy, and mysterious eyes that seem to see right through you. The unique, enchanting stories have a strange, dreamlike feel to them.
Copyright Agent: Tae Yoon-mi blc2009@naver.com 82-2-738-0214 cafe.naver.com/blc2009
Copyright Agent: Tae Yoon-mi blc2009@naver.com 82-2-738-0214 cafe.naver.com/blc2009
Copyright Agent: Lee Young-mi ymlee@bir.co.kr 82-2-515-2000 (Ext.311) www.bir.co.kr
Copyright Agent: Kim Mijeong mijeong@munhak.com 82-31-955-2662 www.munhak.com
Selected by the Arts Council Korea as the winner of its creative writing fund, Cold, Slippery Sorrow is a novel about the private inner world of people living in modern society, with a lack of communication, praised by judges as “a masterpiece with deep insight into the human heart.” Copyright Agent: Oh Ga-jin ehbook@chol.com 82-2-3143-0651 www.ehbook.co.kr
Copyright Agent: Choi Hae-kyoung nina8277@naver.com 82-2-2017-0295 www.hdmh.co.kr
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Fiction
Poetry
Peak
Paper
Lee Kiho, et al., Hyundae Munhak 2008, 316p, ISBN 9788972754213
Shin Dal-ja, Minumsa Publishing Group 2011, 124p, ISBN 9788937407918
Peak is a collection of short stories by 10 young writers who will lead the Korean literary world in the future. The word “peak” indicates the finest state of a phenomenon, object, or person; the collection is full of stories about life and death, love and farewell, and sorrow and humor that span space and time.
Shin Dal-ja, a major woman poet in the Korean literary world, has issued a poetry collection on the theme of “paper.” The poems, singing of paper from the perspective of nature, are permeated with regret on the destruction of the natural environment, and sorrow about vanishing sensitivity.
Copyright Agent: Choi Hae-kyoung nina8277@naver.com 82-2-2017-0295 www.hdmh.co.kr
Copyright Agent: Michelle Nam michellenam@minumsa.com 82-2-515-2000 (Ext.206) www.minumsa.com
Minority Opinions on Earless Rabbits Kim Sungdae, Minumsa Publishing Group 2010, 140p, ISBN 9788937407871
Kim Sungdae, who received the Changbi New Writer Award, garnered attention as a promising writer of lyric poetry. After a period of silence, he created a world of poetry completely different from before. Let us perk up our ears to the “minority opinions” he carefully presents, for the many “earless rabbits” of today. Copyright Agent: Michelle Nam michellenam@minumsa.com 82-2-515-2000 (Ext. 206) www.minumsa.com
Your First Kim Hye-soon, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2008, 176p, ISBN 9788932018492
Kim Hye-soon has been important to Korean poetry since the 1980s. In particular, “Sand Woman,” one of the poems in this collection that reflects on the lives of women through the mummy of a woman, has been awarded the 6th Midang Literary Award, making her the first woman ever to receive the award. Copyright Agent: Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com
Nonfiction
Kirtimukha
The Answer Lies Without
Haam Seong-ho Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2011, 160p, ISBN 9788932021904
Lee Sang-hyup, Sam&Parkers 2011, 344p, ISBN 9788965700111
Poets, wandering around in boundless time, dream of a language that neither dies nor disappears. Kirtimukha, a book of mythology and music, is an enchanting record about the beyond written in this immortal language. The trajectory of the poems, which starts out from the beginning with light and darkness and goes past childhood to reach the present, never ends. Copyright Agent: Yoo Hee-kyoung morte@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 110) www.moonji.com
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This book presents the optimal framework for enhancing the ability to solve problems and enable critical thinking. The framework consists of 13 thinking tools that are presented through processes of deduction undertaken by detectives such as Holmes, Dupin, and Miss Marple. Copyright Agent: Jeannie Hwang jeannie_hwang@smpk.co.kr 82-2-3140-4671 www.smpk.co.kr
Studying Is a Courtesy to My Life Patrick G. Lee, Sam&Parkers 2011, 272p, ISBN 9788965700067
This is an autobiographical essay by Patrick G. Lee, who was selected as a top high school student in the U.S. Lee is a second-generation Korean American student currently attending Yale. He talks not about how to become number one, but about his philosophy on studying based on serious reflection. Copyright Agent: Sherry Choi sherry@smpk.co.kr 82-2-3140-4650 www.smpk.co.kr
Children & Art Therapy Kim Sun-hyun, Jinsun Publishing Co., Ltd. 2009, 160p, ISBN 9788972216025
This book helps readers understand the thoughts and feelings of children expressed through pictures, and leads mothers and children to communicate through art. Author Kim Sun-hyun studied clinical art therapy in Korea, Germany, and the U.S. This book is based on her clinical experience with children and mothers who used art therapy techniques in real life. Copyright Agent: Choi Ji-sun jinsunbooks@naver.com 82-2-720-5990 www.jinsun.co.kr
Steve Jobs iMind Kim Bum-jin I-Sang Media Publishing Company 2010, 190p, ISBN 9788994478067
This book goes in search of the essence of greatness shown by Steve Jobs. In his youth, Jobs became fascinated by hippie culture and Zen philosophy. The author theorizes that Jobs’s insight and creative ideas have their roots in Eastern learning and experience. Like great Buddhist monks, Jobs practiced the Zen spirit, which can be characterized by unconventionality, simplicity, and immediacy. Copyright Agent: Kim Hun-tae sawberry@gmail.com 82-2-913-8888
The Climate and Culture of Korea Lee Seungho, Purengil Co., Ltd. 2009, 296p, ISBN 9788962911060
This book provides readers with a perspective through which they can understand the culture and landscape of Korea in terms of climate. The author, the most active climatologist in Korea, explains the characteristics of climate and the effect Korea’s climate has on the lives of its people. Copyright Agent: Park Mi-ye pur902@kornet.net 82-2-523-2907 www.purungil.com
Pop Music in a Pocket
The Music Notation of Thought
Yoon Ho-jun, Baram Books 2011, 232p, ISBN 9788994475141
Choe Jeong-U, Jaeum&Moeum Publishing Co. 2011, 529p, ISBN 9788957075494
This book is packed with information, as well as fascinating anecdotes, on popular music. It is especially remarkable, however, for its explanation of the relationship between teenagers and pop music. This is a guide for grownups who wish to understand teenagers better, and also a job guide which talks about how the author came to be a music critic.
This is a collection of critical essays that reflect on the modern era as well as the eras that follow, by juxtaposing and compounding post-modern theories and works that have shaped today’s thinking. The author, a critic and composer, seeks new ways of thinking and writing by “grafting” together various discourses in the arts and humanities.
Copyright Agent: Nam Kyung-mee windchild04@hanmail.net 82-2-3142-0495 cafe.daum.net/barampub
Copyright Agent: Cho Chanhee jamoglobal@jamobook.com 82-2-324-2347 www.jamo21.net
Graphic Novels
Women's Image Tuning
iWAR
Slow Growing
A Lady Detective
Hwang Jung-sun, Golden Owl, Inc. 2010, 328p, ISBN 9788960302624
Son Young-dong, Golden Owl, Inc. 2010, 344p, ISBN 9788960302495
A complete guidebook for businesswomen in their 20s and 30s on how to achieve a successful business style. The author, an image consultant who has given lectures at countless businesses and universities, suggests key style rules on fashion, beauty, and business makeup for working women.
Cyberspace has been established as an essential space and infrastructure in society. There are, however, many adverse effects to this phenomenon. Since the Morris worm incident, a cyber attack in the early days of cyberspace which raised the alarm on Internet security, cyber crime has continued to proliferate. The book reveals what must be done by nations, businesses, and individuals in order to prepare for cyber warfare.
Kang Se-hyoung Gimm-Young Publishers, Inc. 2010, 355p, ISBN 9788934940067
Jeon Hey-jin; Illustrator: Lee Ki-ha Daewon C.I., Inc. 2011, 200p, ISBN 9788925276458
This is a book of essays by Kang Sehyoung, a radio scriptwriter. The essays convey joy, excitement, and comfort to youth who have been disheartened by disappointments, wounds, and failures. The book is full of sentiments about things found in ordinary everyday life, memories about times past, and beautiful scenes of life.
The story takes place in England in the early 1830s, when affluence is at its height. Lady Lizzie, a rising star in the world of mystery novels with an established fan base, uses her fine senses not only to write novels but to solve murders and other peculiar cases.
Copyright Agent: Lee Soo-min sublime@goldenowl.co.kr 82-2-338-9151 www.goldenowl.co.kr
Copyright Agent: Cho Yeon-kon nahappydream@goldenowl.co.kr 82-2-338-9151 www.goldenowl.co.kr
Copyright Agent: Lee Youjeong bookmaker@gimmyoung.com 82-2-3668-3203 www.gimmyoung.com
Copyright Agent: Oh Sunjoo sunjoo@dwci.co.kr 82-2-2071-2141 www.dwci.co.kr
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Graphic Novels
Children's Books
Space China Dress
Rainbow
The Secret of the Bonbons
My Friend, I Have to Go Alone
Choi Bong-su; Illustrator: Won Hyun-jae Haksan Publishing Co., Ltd. 2010, 180p, ISBN 9788925858784
Kim Jingi; Illustrator: Kim Jaehong Prooni Books, Inc. 2007, 32p, ISBN 9788957981214
Jung Eunsuk, Prooni Books, Inc. 2008, 184p, ISBN 9788957981603
Jo Wonhee, NURIMBO 2011, 32p, ISBN 9788958761170
Liang, the best student at “Planet Shaolin,” where universal martial arts originated, and Mei, an ordinary girl whose parents run a dumpling restaurant, get into a quarrel. Bearing a grudge, Liang plans to take Mei as a student and bring her down at the annual universal martial arts competition.
How would a blind mother and her child talk about a rainbow? Mom has lost her sight but always tells the best stories. The stories transport her daughter to worlds beyond this one. A mom’s stories and her daughter’s imagination paint brilliant rainbows against the grey monotony of reality.
In this detective story written from a child’s point of view, two fearless detectives solve a case with impeccable judgment. The slightly heavy subject matter of a kidnapping and robbery is diffused by reassuringly familiar, kindhearted characters. The plot combines humor with suspense to the end.
As a dog draws its last breath, a fragrant blossom opens deep in the forest. The forest is a magical place where dogs go to stay for the last time. A black dog, the keeper of the forest, plays a beautiful song on his pipe to soothe dogs on their last journey. This is a comforting book for anyone who has ever lost a pet.
Copyright Agent: Park Jin-a joshua@haksanpub.co.kr 82-2-828-8805 www.haksanpub.co.kr
My Grandpa’s Last Year Oh Okju; Illustrator: Horang NURIMBO 2011, 32p, ISBN 9788958761198
Grandpa has his first stroke when the protagonist’s baby brother is born. Her brother grows day by day, but Grandpa speaks less and less and is only able to eat mushy foods like a baby. The five-year-old protagonist comes to think of him as Big Baby and her brother as Little Baby. One winter’s evening Grandpa passes away; the next morning, her brother takes his first step. Copyright Agent: Park Misuk nurimbo_pub@naver.com 82-31-955-7391 www.nurimbo.co.kr
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Copyright Agent: Hwang Hyejin editor@prooni.com 82-2-581-0334 www.prooni.com
Where Does Ice Cream Come From? Jeon Hye-eun; Illustrator: Yoo Kyung-hwa Woongjin ThinkBig Co., Ltd. 2011, 36p, ISBN 9788901119359
This educational book teaches how everyday things are made. Readers learn such basic economic concepts as production and distribution. Following the journey of where a bowl of ice cream comes from, readers learn how the glass bowl, ice cream, and strawberries finally reach Jeong-han, the protagonist. Copyright Agent: Clarie Yang shy07@wjbooks.co.kr 82-2-3670-1168 www.wjthinkbig.com
Copyright Agent: Hwang Hyejin editor@prooni.com 82-2-581-0334 www.prooni.com
Copyright Agent: Park Misuk nurimbo_pub@naver.com 82-31-955-7391 www.nurimbo.co.kr
I Like Myself
Mommy Teaches Art
Yoon Yeo-rim; Illustrator: Bae Hyun-ju Woongjin ThinkBig Co., Ltd. 2011, 32p, ISBN 9788901118307
Kim Hong-dae; Jeon Young-sun Jinsun Publishing Co., Ltd. 2011, 122p, ISBN 9788972216964
Have your precious children say ‘I like myself!’ every day. I Like Myself is a picture book that boosts children’s selfconfidence and fosters an optimistic outlook on the world.
Mommy Teaches Art shows children how to draw their favorite subjects and themes, accompanied by examples done by their peers in real life. Written by two art teachers with plenty of experience preparing lesson materials and teaching young children how to draw, this book is a treasure for parents teaching their children art at home.
Copyright Agent: Clarie Yang shy07@wjbooks.co.kr 82-2-3670-1168 www.wjthinkbig.com
Copyright Agent: Cha Seul-a jinsunbooks@naver.com 82-2-720-5990 www.jinsun.co.kr
Nanji Island Has Been Revived!
The Wonderful Korean Heating System: Ondol
Lee Myeong-hee; Illustrator: Park Jae-chol Marubol Publications, 2007, 40p ISBN 9788956630922
Choi Junshik; Illustrator: Koh Jeongsoon Marubol Publications, 2010, 40p ISBN 9788956633350
Once a neglected, polluted dump, Nanji Island was restored to the ecological park it is today in a painstaking process that exemplifies the importance of protecting the environment. This book tells the story of that recovery and instills the values of conservation in children.
Ondol is the traditional Korean heating system that heats houses by stoking fires under the floor. This illustrated book offers an easy introduction to the history and workings of ondol, a healthy, energy-efficient way of heating.
Copyright Agent: Lee So-dam sodam@marubol.co.kr 82-2-790-4150 (Ext. 507)
Flowers for Lunch Kim Hye-yeon; Illustrator: Bae Hyun-jung Baram Books 2009, 195p, ISBN 9788990878786
Flowers for Lunch is a collection of eight simple, heartwarming stories written for lower grades. The quality of the writing and storytelling will appeal to children who appreciate a good story. Copyright Agent: Nam Kyung-mee windchild04@hanmail.net 82-2-3142-0495 cafe.daum.net/barampub
Jacheongbi, Jacheongbi
Sammy and Purry
Hyun Kil-un; Illustrator: Kim Chun-jung Gesunamu Publishing House 2005, 190p ISBN 9788989654254
Lee Gyeong-hwa; Illustrator: Kim Hye-jin Baram Books 2011, 144p, ISBN 9788994475165
Fourteen-year-old Jacheongbi starts her adventures when she leaves home in search of Cheonsaedong, a prince from heaven. She learns that living selflessly is the key to happiness and peace. Jacheongbi is a feminist protagonist who breaks the constraints imposed upon her gender and fights for her own dreams and love, bringing peace and reconciliation to the world.
Sammy is picked on at school and is the worry of her parents at home. Then one day something amazing happens. She meets a tiny fairy with wings! Sammy and Purry is the simple yet satisfying tale of how timid Sammy changes dramatically with the help of a fairy that grants her wishes. This is an imaginative and moral story suitable for lower grades.
Copyright Agent: Kim Ji-ae gesunamu21@hanmail.net 82-2-566-6288 www.gesunamu.co.kr
Copyright Agent: Nam Kyung-mee windchild04@hanmail.net 82-2-3142-0495 cafe.daum.net/barampub
Joon-bum Is New
PPYONG-GA-MAN
Lee Hearan, Borim Press 2011, 38p, ISBN 9788943308629
Yun Jeehoe, Borim Press 2010, 48p, ISBN 9788943308186
This is the story of how Jin-woo learns to love reading when he tries to win the prize for “Reader of the Month” by faking the results. Jin-woo’s story is sure to please even children who dislike books and introduce them to the joy of reading.
Another book by the author about the lives of hardworking neighbors; this time she focuses on the everyday lives of children. The uncontrived, honest illustrations, the shaky lettering imitating that of a child’s, and the spots of coloring adding warmth to the grey tone of the drawings play an effective part in the storytelling.
“I’ve never seen such a great robot in all my five years!” PPYONG-GA-MAN is a story that any child with a favorite toy can relate to. The story draws the reader in with its clear message, effective pacing, and bold colors. This book combines attractive illustrations with a humorous story.
Copyright Agent: Jung Ae-young iandbook@naver.com 82-2-2248-1555 www.iandbook.co.kr
Copyright Agent: Park Jihye jhpark@borimpress.com 82-31-955-3456 (Ext. 147) www.borimpress.com
Copyright Agent: Lee So-dam sodam@marubol.co.kr 82-2-790-4150 (Ext. 507)
The Fake Reader of the Month Kim Hyeontae; Illustrator: Bae Jongsuk IANDBOOK, 2011, 108p ISBN 9788992830782
Copyright Agent: Park Jihye jhpark@bormpress.com 82-31-955-3456 (Ext. 147) www.borimpress.com
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87
Children's Books
Dreambot 1
Kim Koo
Mrs. Elephant’s Sunny Library
Seventh Birthday
Yi Hyeon; Illustrator: Kim Sook-kyeong Hankyoreh Publishing Co. 2011, 124p, ISBN 9788984314610
Young Baekbeom; Illustrator: Bak Si Baek Hankyoreh Publishing Co. 2009, 160p, ISBN 9788984313675
Kim Hye-yeon; Illustrator: Choi Hyun-mook BIR Publishing Co., Ltd. 2011, 175p, ISBN 9788949121307
Lee Hyungjin, Sigongjunior 2011, 40p, ISBN 9788952761460
It is the year 2045. Dream Robot Industries is nearly bankrupt from building robots that are too innovative when it decides to open a custom robot rental shop. Their first customer wants a memory aid robot. More customers come with orders for a robot that will make decisions, earn money, and more. The robots get into all sorts of unexpected trouble and hilarity ensues.
Kim Koo was the sixth president of the provisional government of the Republic of Korea. He is one of the most respected politicians and thinkers of all time in Korea, and also an author who kept a journal that has proven invaluable to understanding his era.This book introduces children to Kim Koo the activist and human being who rose above hardship.
This book is a collection of stories about a small town library that sets the stage for five protagonists and their stories. There’s a stuttering mom, a five-year-old Jinju who wants to collect sunlight, a girl who needs a room of her own outside her noisy house, a librarian in love, and a boy whose math score is 15 out of 100 but dreams of becoming a soccer player.
This book depicts the life of a cicada at its peak. It follows how the cicada waits years for a few days of life. The bold, highly saturated colors are evocative of the heat and humidity of a summer forest, painted on transparent film with a dreamy quality that suggests shimmering heat. The illustrations that show the cicada’s journey mirror its psychological journey as well.
Copyright Agent: Yeom Mihee salt23@hanbibook.co.kr 82-2-6383-1606 www.hanibook.co.kr
Copyright Agent: Yeom Mihee salt23@hanbibook.co.kr 82-2-6383-1606 www.hanibook.co.kr
Copyright Agent: Song Jungha ha@minumsa.com 82-2-515-2000 (Ext. 207) www.bir.co.kr
Copyright Agent: Amélie Choi amelie@sigongsa.com 82-2-2046-2855 www.sigongjunior.com
Hyeon-ho Hit Me!
Nine-Year-Old Teacher
Book Monsters
Hospital
Roh Kyung-sil; Illustrator: Nam Ju-hyun Sigongjunior 2011, 64p, ISBN 9788952760760
Seo Ji-weon; Illustrator: Park Yon-oak YeaRimDang Publishing Co., LTD. 2011, 112p, ISBN 9788930268516
Seo Ji-weon; Illustrator: Park Yon-oak YeaRimDang Publishing Co., LTD. 2011, 104p, ISBN 9788930268523
Chaekbo; Illustrator: Lim Un-gyu Ahyun Publishing House 2010, 36p, ISBN 9788958781301
This book is written for all brothers and sisters. First-grade Hyeon-ho and five-year-old Hee-jin are a brother and sister who fight every day. The book follows both sides of the argument as they squabble, and also shows how deeply they care for each other in moments of crisis.
Buwang hates studying. His name is Gong Buwang (which sounds the same as “Study King”) but he hates to study. He always gets a 0 or a 10 out of 100. Actually Buwang would love to be good at schoolwork, but he can never concentrate at his desk and is afraid that he will end up no good anyway. Then a new teacher shows up and Buwang is transformed.
Boram hates reading more than anything in the world. To Boram, books are like monsters. He has nightmares where they threaten to eat him up if he doesn’t read them. To make matters worse, the school is having a reading marathon. There appears to be no way out this time. Then his teacher shows him how to enjoy reading. Will he ever grow to love books?
The hospital is a scary place; however, it is also a very important place. This is a clearly written account of why people go to the hospital, what a hospital does, who works at a hospital, how people are cured, and what different kinds of hospitals exist.
Copyright Agent: Amélie Choi amelie@sigongsa.com 82-2-2046-2855 www.sigongjunior.com
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Vol.12 Summer 2011
Copyright Agent: Kim Boa kimba@yearim.co.kr 82-2-3404-8459 www.yearim.co.kr
Copyright Agent: Kim Boa kimba@yearim.co.kr 82-2-3404-8459 www.yearim.co.kr
Copyright Agent: Jeon Jeong-sook jeonjjs@naver.com 82-31-949-5771 www.ahyunbooks.co.kr
Children of the Bear Ryu Hwaseon; Illustrator: Lee Yoon-hee Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2010, 220p, ISBN 9788954613668
Winner of the 10th Munhakdongne Children’s Book Award, this book is based on the myth of Dangun. Set in the Bronze Age, the story shows how humans worshipped nature and how three tribes with different religions and cultures clashed, asking the weighty question of how differences may coexist. Copyright Agent: Choi Youn-mi youn@munhak.com 82-2-3144-3240 www.munhak.com
The Suffering of Two Generations
The Crocodile Skin Bag Returns to the Jungle
Ha Kunchan; Illustrator: Oh Seungmin I-seum, 2010, 40p, ISBN 9788937845925
Kim Jin-kyung; Illustrator: Yoon Bong-sun Gilbut Children Publishing 2011, 36p, ISBN 9788955821574
A classic story rewritten for children that neatly ties together the suffering of the Korean nation during Japanese occupation and the Korean War through the struggles of a father and son. Copyright Agent: Heo Jeeyoun green@i-seum.com 82-2-3475-3948 www.i-seum.com
This is a new book by Kim Jin-kyung, the author of the well-known Cat School series. The story tells how a crocodile skin bag in a department store meets Grandpa Crocodile and returns to the jungle.
Daddy and Me You Moon-jo; Illustrator: Rew Seung-ha Gilbut Children Publishing 2011, 24p, ISBN 9788955821406
Introducing a host of animals that play father-baby games like wrestling and running, the story shows how much fun fathers and babies have playing together. The vibrant, bold illustrations complement the lively, spirited play of the animals.
Copyright Agent: Kim You-jung youjung@dreamwiz.com 82-31-955-3262 www.gilbutkid.co.kr
Copyright Agent: Kim You-jung youjung@dreamwiz.com 82-31-955-3262 www.gilbutkid.co.kr
100 Scenes: History of Science
Like a Bird in the Spring
Walking with My Son
Mom Is My Dear Friend
Lee Miyoung; Illustrator: Han Eunok Silcheonmunhak Co., Ltd. 2010, 184p, ISBN 9788939206403
Lee Soonwon; Illustrator: Han Sooim Silcheonmunhak Co., Ltd. 2011, 240p, ISBN 9788939206502
Lee Vin, Haksan Publishing Co., Ltd. 2003, 188p, ISBN 9788952950819
The author wanted to write about what it means to live apart from loved ones in a simple, accessible way. The protagonist Misun learns about loneliness from an early age living apart from her parents. Her adventures with fatherless Yujin, the grandmother who lost her son, and the orphan beggar Dalgeun all celebrate the affirmation of life and friendship in the face of sadness.
The narrator is a novelist and the father of two sons who originally comes from a rural village. He is worried about his latest novel because it touches upon an old family secret that may hurt his parents. With Parent’s Day coming up and his father suggesting a visit to go over the family annals, the narrator decides to walk over to the hills of his hometown with his eldest son Sangwoo.
Copyright Agent: Kim Hyesun silcheon@hanmail.net 82-2-322-2161 www.silcheon.com
Copyright Agent: Kim Hyesun silcheon@hanmail.net 82-2-322-2161 www.silcheon.com
Set in the 1970s and 80s, this series features the school life of harumscarum Jadu. Supporting characters include thrifty Mom, the real ruler of the nest, Dad, fond of his beer, younger sister Mimi who wants to become Miss Korea, and the infuriating but adorable baby. The life of this family of five lends an air of nostalgia and a taste of a simple but happy family life. Copyright Agent: Park Jin-a joshua@haksanpub.co.kr 82-2-828-8805 www.haksanpub.co.kr
Kim Tae-kwan, et al. Illustrator: Moon Pyung-yoon Daewon C.I. Inc., 2011, 204p ISBN 9788925276540
This comic book shows 100 scenes of science that have greatly improved human life. From the discovery of fire to the advent of smart phones, the book covers a substantial part of the science curriculum in the lower grades, not to mention all sorts of useful information that makes this a handy guide for all children. Copyright Agent: Oh Sunjoo sunjoo@dwci.co.kr 82-2-2071-2141 www.dwci.co.kr
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Vol.12 Summer 2011
89
INDEX Title Original Title Publishers Copyright Agent E-mail Phone Homepage
22p
33p
The Seven Thirty-two Elephant Train (Ilgopsi Samsibibun Kokkiriyeolcha) Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. Kim Mijeong mijeong@munhak.com 82-31-955-2662 www.munhak.com
Who Killed Kurt Cobain? (Nuga Keoteukobeineul Jugyeonneunga?) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com
Legends of the World's Heroes (Jiguyeongungjeonseol) Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. Kim Mijeong mijeong@munhak.com 82-31-955-2662 www.munhak.com
18p
Penguin News Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com
38p
Pig on the Grass (Pulbat Wiui Dwaeji) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com
14p Romantic Love & Society (Nangmanjeok Saranggwa Sahoe) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext.122) www.moonji.com
15p Run, Pop, Run! (Dallyeora Abi) Changbi Publishers, Inc. Lee Soonhwa copyright@changbi.com 82-31-955-3369 www.changbi.com/english
Straight Out (Sumgimeopsi Namgimeopsi) Jaeum&Moeum Publishing Co. Cho Chanhee jamoblobal@jamobook.com 82-2-324-2347 www.jamo21.net AOI Garden (AOI gadeun) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com Heading for a Breeding Farm (Sayukjang Jjogeuro) Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. Kim Mijeong mijeong@munhak.com 82-31-955-2662 www.munhak.com
Mouthwatering (Chimi Goinda) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com
The Library of Instruments (Akgideurui Doseogwan) Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. Kim Mijeong mijeong@munhak.com 82-31-955-2662 www.munhak.com
27p Evening Courtship (Jeonyeogui Guae) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com AOI Garden (AOI gadeun) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com
27, 29p 19p Table for One Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com
16p Wolves (Neukdae) Changbi Publishers, Inc. Lee Soonhwa copyright@changbi.com 82-31-955-3369 www.changbi.com/english I’m a Ghostwriter (Naneun Yuryeongjakgaimnida) Changbi Publishers, Inc. Lee Soonhwa copyright@changbi.com 82-31-955-3369 www.changbi.com/english Song of the Night (Bameun Noraehanda) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com Whoever You Are, No Matter How Lonely (Nega Nugudeun Eolmana Oeropdeun) Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. Kim Mijeong mijeong@munhak.com 82-31-955-2662 www.munhak.com
17p One Hundred Shadows (Baegui Geurimja) Minumsa Publishing Group Michelle Nam michellenam@minumsa.com 82-2-515-2000 (Ext. 206) www.minumsa.com
90 list_ Books from Korea
17p
To the Moon Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com
21p What Happened to the Guy Stuck in the Elevator? (Ellibeiteoe Kkin Geu Namjaneun Eotteoke Doeeonna?) Global Literary Management Kent D. Wolf 1-212-929-3161 kent@globallit.com I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (Naneun Nareul Pagoehal Gwolliga Itda) Global Literary Management Kent D. Wolf 1-212-929-3161 kent@globallit.com Double Changbi Publishers, Inc. Lee Soonhwa copyright@changbi.com 82-31-955-3369 www.changbi.com/english
22p Is Leslie Cheung Really Dead? (Janggugyeongi Jugeotdago?) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com
Vol.12 Summer 2011
Snowy Road (Nungil) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com Sopyonje (Seopyeonje) Yolimwon Publishing Group Lee Sung-geun norway@yolimwon.com 82-2-3144-3700 www.yolimwom.com This Paradise of Yours (Dangsindeurui Cheonguk) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com Magnolia Park (Mongnyeongongwon) Munidang Jung Sara munidang88@naver.com 82-2-927-4990 www.munidang.com
Ashes and Red (Jaewa Ppalgang) KL Management Joseph Lee josephlee705@gmail.com 82-10-6239-9154
The Mung Bean General, Vols. 1-12 (Nokdujanggun) Window of Times Lee Jeongnam sidaebooks@daum.net 82-2-335-6125
31p
Port (Pogu) Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. Kim Mijeong mijeong@munhak.com 82-31- 955- 2662 www.munhak.com
Double Changbi Publishers, Inc. Lee Soonhwa copyright@changbi.com 82-31-955-3369 www.changbi.com/english Ping-pong Changbi Publishers, Inc. Lee Soonhwa copyright@changbi.com 82-31-955-3369 www.changbi.com/english
31, 35p Pavane for a Dead Princess (Jugeun Wangnyeoreul Wihan Pabanneu) Wisdomhouse Publishing Co., Ltd. Kwon Minkyung ohappyday@wisdomhouse.co.kr 82-31-936-4199 www.wisdomhouse.co.kr
33p Sammi Superstars’ Last Fan Club (Sammisyupeoseutajeuui Majimak Paenkeulleop) Hankyoreh Publishing Co. Kim Yun-jeong simple@hanibook.co.kr 82-2-6383-1608 www.hanibook.co.kr Castella Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. Kim Mijeong mijeong@munhak.com 82-31-955-2662 www.munhak.com
40p There, a Petal Silently Falls (Jeogi Sorieopsi Han Jeom Kkochipi Jigo) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com
41p The Vegetarian (Chaesikjuuija) KL Management Joseph Lee josephlee705@gmail.com 82-10-6239-9154 Needle (Baneul) Changbi Publishers, Inc. Lee Soonhwa copyright@changbi.com 82-31-955-3369 www.changbi.com/english Rina Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. Kim Mijeong mijeong@munhak.com 82-31-955-2662 www.munhak.com
42p
61p
68p
76p
My Sweet Seoul (Dalkomhan Naui Dosi) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com
Good-bye, Atlantis (Ateullantiseuya, Jal Ga) Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. Choi Youn-mi youn@munhak.com 82-2-3144-3240 www.munhak.com
Humanities of Money (Donui Inmunhak) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com
The Stories Shouldn't Be True (Geojinmal Gachin Iyagi) Sigongjunior Amélie Choi amelie@sigongsa.com 82-2-2046-2855 www.sigongjunior.com
Girl Friends (Geolpeurenjeu) Minumsa Publishing Group Michelle Nam michellenam@minumsa.com 82-2-515-2000 (Ext. 206) www.minumsa.com
Route 7 Revisited (7Beongukdo Revisited) Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. Kim Mijeong mijeong@munhak.com 82-31-955-2662 www.munhak.com
69p
Fantastic Girl BIR Publishing Co., Ltd. Song Jungha ha@minumsa.com 82-2-515-2000 (Ext.207) www.bir.co.kr.
Romantic Love & Society (Nangmanjeok Saranggwa Sahoe) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com
62p
43p
Evening Courtship (Jeonyeogui Guae) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com
The Eighth Room (Yeodeolbeonjjae Bang) Minumsa Publishing Group Michelle Nam michellenam@minumsa.com 82-2-515-2000 (Ext. 206) www.minumsa.com
Ginger (Saenggang) Changbi Publishers, Inc. Lee Soonhwa copyright@changbi.com 82-31-955-3369 www.changbi.com/english
The Boy Who Laid Down on the Gallery Floor (Puri Numneunda) Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. Kim Mijeong mijeong@munhak.com 82-31-955-2662 www.munhak.com
63p
44p Quiz Show Global Literary Management Kent D. Wolf 1-212-929-3161 kent@globallit.com The Vegetarian (Chaesikjuuija) KL Management Joseph Lee josephlee705@gmail.com 82-10-6239-9154
46p Liver and Gallbladder (Gangwa Sseulgae) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com
48p Shadow of Glass (Yuri Geurimja) Minumsa Publishing Group Michelle Nam michellenam@minumsa.com 82-2-515-2000 (Ext. 206) www.minumsa.com Before and After the Squall (Dolpung Jeonhu) Kang Publishing Kim Jeong-hyun gangpub@daum.net 82-2-325-9566
59p Mouthwatering (Chimi Goinda) Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. Kim Phil-gyun feel@moonji.com 82-2-338-7224 (Ext. 122) www.moonji.com
The Big Wolf, Blue (Keun Neukdae Parang) Changbi Publishers, Inc. Lee Soonhwa copyright@changbi.com 82-31-955-3369 www.changbi.com/english A Very Ordinary Romance (Aju Botongui Yeonae) Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. Kim Mijeong mijeong@munhak.com 82-31-955-2662 www.munhak.com
64p A Night of Seven Years (7Nyeonui Bam) EunHaeng NaMu Publishing Co. Oh Ga-jin ehbook@chol.com 82-2-3143-0651 www.ehbook.co.kr Greatest Fish (Agami) Jaeum&Moeum Publishing Co. Cho Chanhee jamoglobal@jamobook.com 82-2-324-2347 www.jamo21.net
66p Woodcraftsman’s Imagination Studio (Sangsangmokgongso) Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. Kim Mijeong mijeong@munhak.com 82-31-955-2662 www.munhak.com
68p A Joyful Knowledge (Jeulgeoun Jisik) Sakyejul Publishing Ltd. Jo Geon-hyeong ghyeong@sakyejul.co.kr 82-31-955-8564 www.sakyejul.co.kr
Two Parties, One Vision (Du Gaeui Siseon Hanaui Gonggam) JoongAng Books Rachel Ahn rachel_ahn@joongang.co.kr 82-2-2000-6024 www.joongangbooks.co.kr Understanding Korean Architecture Through the Lens of Western Architecture (Uri Geonchuk Seoyang Geonchuk Hamkke Ikgi) Culturegrapher Park Hyunju jade@ag.co.kr 82-2-745-0631 www.ag.co.kr
70p Paintings, Drunk on Poetry (Geurim Munhage Chwihada) Artbooks Publishing Corp. Son Hee-gyoung editorialcat@gmail.com 82-31-955-7974 www.artinlife.co.kr Woman & Art Therapy (Haengbokhan Yeoseongeul Wihan Misulchiryo Swipge Hagi) Jinsun Publishing Co., Ltd. Choi Ji-sun Jinsunbooks@naver.com 82-2-720-5990 www.jinsun.co.kr
71p Plants Are the People (Namuga Minjungida) Geulhangari Kang Seong-min bookpot@hanmail.net 82-31-955-8898 cafe.naver.com/bookpot International Conflicts (Oneurui Segye Bunjaeng) Mizibooks Yi Ji-yeul mizibooks@naver.com 82-70-7533-1848
72p Dream About How to Live Rather than What to Become (Mueosi Doelkkaboda Eotteoke Salkkareul Kkumkkwora) Myungjin Publications Inc. Choi Ko-eun koeun123@gmail.com 82-2-326-0026 (Ext. 112) www.myungjinbooks.com
77p Thanks to that Boy (Geu Nyeoseok Deokbune) Baram Books Nam Kyung-mee windchild04@hanmail.net 82-2-3142-0495 cafe.daum.net/barampub I Wanna Be a Picky Eater Too (Nado Pyeonsikhal Geoya) Sakyejul Publishing Ltd. Kim Taehee kth@sakyejul.co.kr 82-31-955-8600 www.sakyejul.co.kr
78p What? Make a Living? (Ome, Don Beoljago?) Changbi Publishers, Inc. Lee Soonhwa copyright@changbi.com 82-31-955-3369 www.changbi.com/english Olga’s Letter (Olgaui Pyeonji) Changbi Publishers, Inc. Lee Soonhwa copyright@changbi.com 82-31-955-3369 www.changbi.com/english
79p The Barnyard Duck that Flew Away to the Sky (Haneullo Naragan Jibori) Changbi Publishers, Inc. Lee Soonhwa copyright@changbi.com 82-31-955-3369 www.changbi.com/english
80p Business Jaeum&Moeum Publishing Co. Cho Chanhee jamoglobal@jamobook.com 82-2-324-2347 www.jamo21.net
I, Artist (Naneun Yesulgada) Semicolon Song Jungha ha@minumsa.com 82-2-515-2000 (Ext. 206) www.semicolon.co.kr
75p Last Evening (Eoje Jeonyeok) StoryBowl Baek Heena storybowl@yahoo.co.kr 82-70-7788-5664 www.storybowl.com
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91
Afterword
Korea’s Rich Illustrative Tradition Innovates and Delights Since 1999, I have uninterruptedly been chair of the committee for the Bologna Ragazzi Award, before that it used to change presidents every year. Thanks to this assignment I have been able to see published books from various countries and take into account numerous publishing houses. My attention has been particularly drawn, year after year, to the books coming from Korea, for many reasons that I will try to summarize here. I first noticed the special attention that Korean publishers devote to children's literature and how they take specific care according to varying age levels. I am an educator, and I have been teaching for 52 years, so I can recognize the different ways of taking into account a book aimed at a very young child and how, for example, you make it different from a volume that will appeal to a pre-teen. It seems to me that Korea has a great publishing industry: it is richly fascinating and capable of offering such a diversity that is the real basis of authentic “children’s literature.” Another important element catches my attention and makes me interested in Korean children’s literature: it is the “dual nature” of its publishing industry which really looks in two directions. As a matter of fact, in recent years Korea has shown itself to have a publishing and illustration tradition which does not resemble that of any other culture. It is based on an independent search of shapes, styles, and visual forms. Such peculiarities become evident in fairytales, in the use of the folk iconographic traditions, and especially in fantasy genre illustrations. I am talking about images, shapes, and use of space that every great graphic culture places as basic. Gutenberg and Bodoni’s legacy are always present as a stylistic footmark of German and Italian children’s books production, but also Korea has a long ancestry of its own unmistakable style. It is this style which guides and legitimates the folk culture and at the same time helps to distinguish it and to recognize the creative power of a country in different periods of its history. However, besides this deep sense of its own roots, there is a strong innovative desire which leads to research, to the consideration given to the most recent stylistic variations, to the authors that, globally, became the genre’s undisputed protagonists. With this double nature, Korea really looks at the past and the present with the same intact dedication; in this way it can gain its own uniqueness in which its deep roots surge to improve and test. One final thought: in recent days, in the movie theaters of my city, the Korean film “Poetry” is experiencing great success. This movie, awarded at the Cannes Film Festival, is so intense, refined, moving, and clear, and it made me reflect, once again, on the great visual culture that exists in Korea. By Antonio Faeti
* Antonio Faeti has been the president of the Bologna Ragazzi Award since 1999. He became the first university chair in Italy for the History of Children’s Literature in the Department of Educational Sciences at the University of Bologna. He presently teaches a course in the Pedagogy of Reading supported by Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna.
Copyright © Horang, My Grandpa’s Last Year, NURIMBO
92 list_ Books from Korea
Vol.12 Summer 2011
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Vol.12 Summer 2011
Vol.12 Summer 2011
Special Section
The New Imagination Trends in Modern Korean Fiction Interviews
Novelist Pyun Hye-young Novelist Park Min-gyu The Place
Jangheung: Where Writers Bloom
ISSN 2005-2790