[Korean Literature Now] Vol.32 Summer 2016 by LTI Korea Library

VOL.32

SUMMER 2016

VOL. 32 S U M M E R 2 0 1 6

Han Kang The White Book The “Docile Body” and “Organs Without a Body” Ryoo Bo Sun

A Parisian Encounter with Korean Literature Aurélie Julia

Daniel Hahn on Brexit and Literature in Translation BOOK REVIEWS Neil Astley, Steph Cha, Michael David Lukas & more

9 772508 345006

ISSN 2508-3457

REIMAGINED 2016

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FOREWORD

Greetings from the Publisher

ecently, Koreans were greatly encouraged and elated by the news that The Vegetarian had won the prestigious Man Booker International Prize. Thanks to the prominent novelist Han Kang and her outstanding translator Deborah Smith, Korean literature is now receiving its fair share of attention from the international community. A few months ago The Times Literary Supplement carried an article entitled, “A Glittering Korea.” In it, while comparing the two Koreas, Toby Lichtig writes, “But away from the escapee memoirs, famine histories and book-length speculations about the robustness, politically and gastrointestinally, of the youthful Dear Leader, it is the South that has been gaining headway in the more refined literary arts.” It is true that, besides its breathtaking economic growth, cutting-edge technology, and the widespread popularity of its pop culture termed Hallyu or the Korean Wave, South Korea has emerged on the global stage as a country of delightful literary arts and rich cultural heritage. Lichtig also points out that Korean literature in the UK is now rising. “Over the past few years there has been a glut of fiction in translation arriving from South Korea, much of it critically acclaimed and some of it even commercially successful,” he continues. “This is partly thanks to the indefatigable Dalkey Archive, whose Library of Korean Literature, produced in collaboration with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, will—when complete—amount to an impressive twenty-five novels and collections of short stories.” In her article in The New Yorker, Mythili G. Rao, too, agrees that the twenty-five books from Dalkey Archive offer a good starting point for English-speaking readers to learn about Korean literature. Indeed, Dalkey’s Library of Korean Literature series plays a crucial role in making Korean literature conspicuous and easily accessible in the Anglophone market. This year, three major journals came out with special editions on Korean literature: Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International

Writing in the US, Asia Literary Review in the UK, and Le Magazine Littéraire in France. A special issue on Korean literature from Russia’s Inostrannaya Literatura will be forthcoming in November. Recently, Asia Literary Review wrote, “We are proud to have worked in close cooperation with LTI Korea, which receives prominent profiling in The New Yorker article.” Since its inception in 2008, LTI Korea’s quarterly journal in English, _list: Books from Korea, has played a vital role in promoting Korean literature overseas. In fact, the quarterly has been widely praised by international publishers, editors, and literary agents. But despite its popularity, the quarterly has one decisive downside: the title. You can neither Google it nor figure out what _list means. Thus, we have decided to change the title to Korean Literature Now. There will be some substantial changes in content as well. The new issue of KLN features Han Kang and Deborah Smith. Han’s prose in The Vegetarian is poetic and full of heightened sensitivity, while her narrative technique is breathtaking and mesmerizing. At times, the novel is saturated with an atmosphere of sensual desire, while at others it depicts graphic violence in the bleak landscape of modern society. Meanwhile, Deborah Smith’s excellent translation vividly captures the author’s artistic description of the grim environment into which the vegetarian protagonist is thrown among carnivorous predators. Smith beautifully renders Han’s charming prose into impeccable English. Translation is by no means an easy task. It is a painstaking job that requires dedication, writing skills, and verbal dexterity. Besides, without translation, a writer could not be known outside his or her country. Italo Calvino once wrote: “Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.” If so, we should say, “Translators are transnationalists” because they play a key role in bridging two or more nations. I believe the rebranded and reimagined Korean Literature Now will help international editors and publishers to recognize and understand the intellectual and aesthetic significance of Korean literature more comprehensively. I hope KLN will continue to make a distinguished contribution to this effort. Kim Seong-Kon, PhD Publisher, Korean Literature Now President, LTI Korea Professor Emeritus, Seoul National University

PUBLISHER

Kim Seong-Kon

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Ko Young-il

MANAGING DIRECTOR

Park Chanwoo

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Shin Sookyung

EDITORS

ONLINE EDITOR EDITORIAL ASSISTANT ADVISORY BOARD

Agnel Joseph Kim Stoker Yoo Young-seon Lee Jimin Byun Jeeyeon Steven D. Capener Krys Lee Ryoo Bo Sun Bonnie Tilland Yoo Sungho

TRANSLATORS

PHOTOGRAPHER

PRINTED BY

Sophie Bowman Victoria Caudle Meri Joyce Jesse Kirkwood Myeong Hyejong

CONTENTS FEATURED WRITER

HAN KANG 05

A Glimpse of the Artist

Notes on The White Book

Excerpt from The White Book

Baek Jongheon Seo Heun-Kang Son Hongjoo Soluwin Corporation Yoon Eunjung Kim Eunji Adsharp Company

Date of Publication August 5, 2016 All correspondence should be addressed to: Literature Translation Institute of Korea 32, Yeongdong-daero 112-gil (Samseong-dong), Gangnam-gu, Seoul, 06083, Republic of Korea E-mail: koreanlitnow@klti.or.kr / Telephone: +82-2-6919-7714 Fax: +82-2-3448-4247 / koreanliteraturenow.com, ltikorea.org

â&#x201C;&#x2019; Munhakdongne Publishing Group

ABOUT THE COVER IMAGE Sin Sun-mi Born in Ulsan, Korea in 1980 While You Were Sleeping 8, 2008, Painting on Korean paper, 77 x 116 cm This exquisite portrayal of a woman in a hanbok evokes a feeling of the past and offers us a glimpse of traditional Korean painting. And yet, elements of modernity appear unannounced. A curious mix of the traditional and the modern permeates this painting. -Park Young-taek, Kyonggi University

SPECIAL SECTION

The “Docile Body” and “Organs Without a Body”

The Body in Contemporary Korean Literature Curated and introduced by Ryoo Bo Sun

Overview

Excerpts

EXCERPTS

Fiction

Life Unperturbed by Eun Heekyung

To Dream of a Mountain by Park Wansuh

Seven Years of Darkness by Jeong You Jeong

The Wizard Bakery by Gu Byeong-mo

Poetry

Whisper of Splendor by Chong Hyon-jong

Nonfiction

by Korean Cuisine and Dining Production Team, KBS

The Korean Table

ESSAY

FOREWORD

CONTRIBUTING ARTICLE

OVERSEAS REPORT

MUSINGS

Q&A

REVIEWS

The Globalization of Korean Literature and the Status Quo by Deborah Smith

Some Morning-After Translation Thoughts by Daniel Hahn

CONTRIBUTING ARTICLE

Connecting the World Through Words

Korean Literature Now

hen I was a child growing up in the blazing California sun, books for me were a dream, a window into a world that seemed inaccessible to a girl whose family couldn’t afford a basic health insurance plan, much less purchase a plane ticket to foreign lands. But the local library was free, stocked generously with books and cozy reading corners, so I didn’t grow up feeling deprived because the entire world seemed available to me. Charlotte Brontë’s English moors led me to Thomas Hardy’s English countryside. Hardy’s religious preoccupations to Tolstoy’s St. Petersburg. I could travel to Thomas Mann’s Davos, Gabriel García Márquez’s legendary Macondo. But perhaps because Asians were a minority in my suburban neighborhood, I encountered few books by Asian American writers, much less writers residing in Asia and writing in an Asian language. Fast forward to 2016, and the publishing environment has become very different. Though there have always been incredible writers in South Korea, LTI Korea has been instrumental in bringing South Korean literature to the rest of the world. Maybe, even to my childhood town library. Many memorable Korean books have been translated and published overseas in the past decade, but Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and its recognition by the Man Booker International Prize, is symbolically important. The Vegetarian is an astonishing book in its own right. When I first read the book in Korean, I was amazed by its taut sentences, its incredible marriage of plot and form, and the wise, solitary sensibility embedded in the novel. I had experienced this while reading a Korean novel or poem before, but it was one of the few times where such a Korean novel was translated, published, and embraced by an international audience. The book gained momentum with readers and writers in the West who recognized its brilliance and imagination. No one can predict what book will be loved or catch the imagination of its audience, but the timely topic of vegetarianism, the rare perfection of form and content, a dedicated translator who worked hard for the book’s publication, and the support of LTI Korea was instrumental to its success. The introduction of a new, exciting work of literature is the greatest gift to hungry readers, and for readers overseas, The Vegetarian was the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a glimpse into the most hidden recesses of the human heart. But big isn’t necessarily better, no matter The Vegetarian’s impressive sales figures and how many articles spotlight The Vegetarian and its author Han Kang, highly respected by Korean literature critics and local fiction writers long before the prize

brought an enormous amount of attention to the fiercely private with publishers and universities around the world, as well as with writer. Relative to the respect that Han Kang commands, she has the foreign press. Alerting foreign industry players to the trove of been under the public radar for over a decade in South Korea. translated Korean literature has resulted in significant coverage. Great books will always exist, no matter how famous or obscure Twice in the last twelve months, The New Yorker, one of America’s they remain. The Dalkey Archive’s partnership with LTI Korea best magazines, prominently featured LTI Korea’s publication is also an event to equally celebrate. The publisher is deservedly efforts as well as the Dalkey Archive series. Well-known American well-known for publishing noted international and experimental media venues such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, literature. The first of the Library of Korean Literature series and NPR, have also highlighted Korean literature. Respected was published in 2013, then magazines that have recently followed by more additions to published or will be publishing the series published in 2014 special issues spotlighting and 2015. This coming winter, Korean literature include new books to be added to the America’s Mānoa: A Pacific series are as follows: Turbid Journal of International Writing, Rivers by Ch’ae Man-Sik, The World Literature Today, the UK’s Library of Musical Instruments Modern Poetry in Translation, by Kim Junghyuk, Mannequin Russia’s Inostrannaya Literatura, by Ch’oe Yun, Evening Proposal France’s Le Magazine Littéraire, by Pyun Hye Young, and The and the Asia Literary Review. Amusing Life by Song Sokze. Momentum creates momentum, Less noticed but equally but without the years of effort The Library of Korean Literature, published by Dalkey Archive valuable LTI Korea projects by LTI Korea to make Korean Press in collaboration with LTI Korea are the support of Korean literature more available and literature e-books, videos, more visible, I doubt such and audio libraries, as well as the translation and publication of concentrated coverage would have been possible. Korean classics, culminating last March with the first Korean Though I’ve lived in cold climates for a long time, every year work included in the Penguin Classics, The Story of Hong Gildong. I dread winter for the way it imposes its dark solitude. I blame Many professors and students complain about the lack of new that on my childhood growing up in sunny California. The first translations of the Korean classics, and desire to read Korean winter chill unfailingly reminds me of Robert Frost’s poem contemporary literature in a historical context. The Story of Hong “Desert Places,” where “animals are smothered in their lairs” in Gildong, to be followed by other LTI Korea-supported translations the “whiteness of benighted snow.” What helps get me through of Korean modern classics, is a welcome effort to contextualize winter are books, and this year, I’m looking forward to the Korean literature. company of the new additions to the Dalkey Archive series. For Much great art and literature never meet a larger public and in the end literature is not a nation, but the singular voices of are fated to relative obscurity. In the information age and visual writers who found their place in the solitary yet populated world culture that we live in, too much competes for a potential reader’s of books, and helped us become less lonely for it. attention, and the chances of ever being heard, much less read, are slim. Though nearly all writers value privacy and silence, the quiet of creation now collides competitively with the pressure to be seen. Look at me, the writer and the book are supposed to say plaintively, whether you are a debut writer or Salman Rushdie. Notice me. What LTI Korea has also done is help relieve the need by Krys Lee for Korean writers to be noisemakers by taking on some of the Author of How I Became a North Korean burden. LTI Korea has been instrumental in forging relationships

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

OVERSEAS REPORT

A Parisian Encounter with Korean Literature

From the 2016 Paris Book Fair

Korean Literature Now

ednesday, March 16, 5:00 p.m. The 2016 Paris Book Fair opens its doors. Hundreds of people crowd the entrance to what has become an unmissable gathering point for the French literary scene. Started in 1981 in a bid to rescue publishing from a protracted crisis, the fair has been introducing the public to the major players of the literary world for thirty-six years. And while today there is endless grumbling about this important event, nobody wants to miss out. Don’t let this apparent contradiction confuse you, dear readers: France has the largest number of moaners and malcontents on Earth! The French complain about everything at the Book Fair-the location, the lighting, the radiators, the organization, the draughts, the rain—and yet it’s unthinkable that they would miss the festival. The setting is certainly a little drab: an enormous grey hall measuring 55,000m2, surrounded by wide paved areas, with barely a tree to be seen. Inside, the architecture is functional rather than decorative, consisting simply of walls and a roof. This vast hangar is the venue for numerous fairs throughout the year, with themes ranging from agriculture and automobiles to chocolate and the sea. Horses, chickens, cows, boats, and cars all pass through. It is the stage for shows and political meetings alike, and books, too, have found their modest place in the schedule. 5:30 p.m. The queue stretches a long way back on this late winter day. With the November 2015 attacks still a fresh memory, the police are vigilant. Bags are searched, then searched again, and invitations checked: nobody is spared the treatment. We hop from one foot to the other; the French don’t like to wait around. We’ve been given access to the opening ceremony, so why are we being made to wait in the freezing cold? Forty-five minutes later, we gain entry and catch sight, near the middle of the Fair, of the rather attractive Korean literature pavilion. Since 1998, France has granted one country a year the chance to present its own literary culture, with Portugal, Russia, India, Mexico, and various other nations having already received this honor. In 2016, it is Korea that is to enliven the Fair over its four-day duration. Thirty authors, twenty or so editors, and an intense schedule of meetings and signings—the Koreans don’t do things by halves. Paris meets Seoul: talk about a clash of cultures! Just imagine, on one side, 24/7 workers whose motto could be the well-known phrase ‘palli-palli,’ and on the other, officials who won’t even answer the phone after 5:54 p.m. Six or seven years ago, organizing a Korean literature stand at the book fair would have been unthinkable, even the best-stocked

bookshops in the capital had about ten Korean books in their catalogue. In 2016, the situation has changed dramatically; Korea’s excellent policy of supporting translation has enabled the spectacular rise of its literature in France. Bookshops now have dedicated shelves for Korean authors. Saturday, March 19. It’s cold. I shuffle along in the queue with some rather grumpy members of the public. I’m hosting two round tables at the Korean pavilion: the first features Oh Junghee, Han Kang, and Kim Ae-ran; the second Han Kang, Lim Chulwoo, and the French writer Christine Jordis. I was given the theme for the discussions a few weeks prior; the first was “Women’s Voices.” Upon reading the proposal, I had been a little frustrated (in case you’d forgotten, I’m French, so I grumble a lot). No one would have thought to suggest a debate about “men’s voices.” The notion of “women’s literature” suggests to me some kind of sub-literature. I needed to dispel this negative impression as soon as possible, so I asked myself why a theme like that might have been submitted. What did it mean in 2016? In the West, Korean society is often considered to be highly patriarchal, derived from Neo-Confucianism: women are defined first and foremost in relation to the family and their role as mother. Wasn’t it time to shake up these stereotypes? Weren’t women moving out of this internal, domestic space and becoming independent? Weren’t they becoming a more noticeable feature of the literary landscape? These questions came pouring out during the round table. Oh Junghee, Han Kang, and Kim Ae-ran agreed with me; all three disapproved of the label “women’s literature.” They wanted to talk about their Korea, the Korea of yesterday and today, a Korea which is losing its bearings and is witness to an extreme violence between humans. Via their entirely unique styles, these authors acquaint French readers with both Korea’s recent history and the day-today experiences of a changing country. The second theme was “Does the past still have a future?” Golly. Philosophy never has been my strong point… What does the question mean? Is Korea’s past under threat today? Is it a barrier to the future? Is a future possible for Korea without its past? The works of Han Kang (Human Acts) and Lim Chulwoo (The Lighthouse) explore, in their own way, memories, remembrance, and transmission. Han Kang was ten at the time of the bloody repression of student and trade union revolts in Gwangju by the dictatorial regime, which took place in 1980. She explores the tragedy in seven chapters of unbelievable intensity. The audience listens to her evoke spiritual torment and also hope.

From the left, Aurélie Julia, Han Kang, Oh Junghee, Kim Ae-ran, and interpretor Choi Mikyung

People may try to bury the truth, but it will always emerge one day. A seventy-year-old Korean lady speaks from the audience with tears in her eyes: she didn’t know about this historical tragedy that took place in her own country. Lim Chulwoo, sitting to the right of Han Kang, witnessed these dramatic events, but the words get stuck in his throat: he chooses not to talk about them. The book he is presenting at the Book Fair deals with his childhood in a poor, dirty, and harsh country—a Korea that the West is almost entirely unaware existed. He discusses solitude and his own experiences—sometimes joyful, sometimes cruel. We have to love our memories, he concludes, even if they are tinged with ashes and despair. They speak to us; they can act as beacons—or “lighthouses”—for future generations. The audience, moved, is just preparing to leave after a long round of applause when Lim Chulwoo calls out a final piece of advice: “Never forget. Dreamers find their way in the darkness. You have to discover your own dream!”

by Aurélie Julia Editorial Coordinator, Revue des Deux Mondes

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

FEATURED WRITER HAN KANG

HAN KANG Han Kang is a poet, novelist, and professor of creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. She has won the Yi Sang Literary Award, the Today’s Young Artist Award, the Manhae Literature Prize, and the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. Following The Vegetarian and Human Acts, The White Book will be her third book to appear in English.

KOREALiterature LITERATURE REVIEW Now 8 8 Korean

A GLIMPSE OF THE ARTIST

Walking Towards the Vanishing Point Cradling a Love of Life I

n the courtyard of an old, humble hanok in northern Seoul that has been lovingly restored, folding chairs are set out in tight rows with loud construction noises coming from the building site next door, where a beautiful building like this one has already been demolished. At the designated time the tiny courtyard fills with people; it’s standing-room only with the entranceway full too. In front of the small but tightly packed crowd sits Han Kang, a unique stillness in the surrounding bustle and noise. When she takes the microphone to begin talking about her artworks on display in this tiny gallery, the levels have to be adjusted so her voice can be heard, even though the builders have agreed to take a break. The hanok is called E’JUHEON and it belongs to a larger gallery called O’NEWWALL. Here, Han Kang’s performance art captured in four videos is on display in an exhibition called “Vanishing Point.” Han’s works take up a single room of the small, squat building. Entering the room it is hard to know where to look. At a glance it is difficult to tell what’s going on, the videos require concentration, and in this way they entice the viewer in. During the talk Han Kang describes how she came up with the ideas for the four performances. They are closely connected to her latest book, The White Book which began life as a list of white things, she explained. “When I go abroad I feel freer somehow and my imagination works more actively. When I was on a plane coming back to Korea from the Paris Book Fair, I saw a mountain range covered in ice on the screen showing what was below us. It made me think of the white newborn gown I had written about, and then the ideas for these video works suddenly came to me.” The four videos all feature items from the list, things which Han thought she would want to give to her older sister, a baby that died in her mother’s arms after just two hours of life, if she had

The original editions of Human Acts (left), The Vegetarian (middle), The White Book (right)

survived and lived in her place. In the first work Han sits on a wooden stool near a window slowly stitching a newborn’s gown, a process which she describes in one of the most moving chapters of The White Book—how her mother realized she was going into early labor, and unable to call for help, boiled water to sterilize scissors, and stitched together a gown for a newborn while going through the pains of labor, to give birth alone. In the second work we see a close-up of a small, white stone being washed repeatedly, although it seems infinitely clean already. The third video features white feathers covering

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

FEATURED WRITER HAN KANG

lines of poetry written on white paper, while the last video shows Han walking, with a length of white string running through her hands and charcoal between her toes, leaving a dark grey line and crushed bits of burnt matter on a length of paper. Describing the white string, Han says it has “a start and an end, like life, like measuring a distance.” Having spent a long intercontinental flight imagining the contents of these artworks Han says that she felt a joyous revelation, “I had imagined all of this without language—the thing that I have lived by.” Indeed most of the questions asked by the audience at the talk revolved around her experiences with language and artwork, and how these two practices differ or relate to one another. Han expressed that for her, the difference was not all that great, “We are all born with bodies; I believe that it is all connected, there are translations between mediums happening all the time, poetry becoming dance, becoming music, I think I had already felt this.” The sense of joy that she felt in the realization that her ideas had been detached from language then is less about the content, the feeling or what they convey, but connected to the constraints of language. She explained, “Language is a very important tool for me, it is something which I love dearly, but it is also an impossibility which causes me pain.” It is interesting to note that Han’s literary works are full of artists, from her debut novel Black Deer to the short story “Mongolian Mark,” with which she won the prestigious Yi Sang Literary Award. These characters and their work as described in her writing come from things seen and things imagined, Han explained, “I love art and I have many vivid dreams, on occasion I have thought ‘I could do it,’ but when I was at school it didn’t seem like I had any talent with art.” It is quite clear from the work in this exhibition, however, that she does have a talent for conceiving of 10

Korean Literature Now

artworks, just as she has a talent for conceiving of stories, and despite differences in medium her works seem to share a deep and profound sensibility. In Han’s writing there is something which transcends language, and this is even clearer when a similar feeling comes across in her artwork without a single word. Her works are greater than the sum of their parts, and perhaps this is why her novels have carried over so well when translated into other languages. About half way through the talk Han Kang suddenly stopped for a moment; her parents had just arrived and were standing near the door. Having made sure that they had each found a seat she explained, “They’ve just arrived back from a trip for their wedding anniversary and happened to be passing through Seoul today. Mum doesn’t know what this book or these artworks are about. I haven’t told my parents. I’m sorry for writing about this without your permission. I’m worried now how they will react.

A GLIMPSE OF THE ARTIST

Photographs by Baek Jongheon

So, let me read to you from the book.” Han then read “Newborn Gown,” the fourth chapter of the first section of The White Book. The atmosphere in the packed courtyard grew heavy; it was clear that Kang’s parents were quite taken aback at what they had just heard, but also deeply moved, to find an experience they had lived through, a fact of life, recounted in this way by the daughter who had followed. Breaking the silence that hung heavy after her reading, Han repeated the words of her mother to the newborn, “Please don’t die, don’t die, live.” With a quiver in her voice she added, “These are words for all of us.” Although not something intended, Han’s works of performance art had a strong sense of the shaman ritual about them. Like the generations of shamans who have presided over the births and deaths, the spiritual lives of ordinary people in Korea for centuries, Han Kang walks unafraid towards the vanishing point, the inevitability of death, possibilities cut

short, alternative universes and moments that will never return. Examining this vanishing point, the blurry uncertainties at the edges of the world each of us inhabits, is something which takes great courage, but for Han Kang it seems inevitable. In her artworks you sense a profound love of life in all its forms, all of the things that surround and elude it. There is a deep sadness in her work also, but somehow it is a sadness which whispers, “Life is fleeting, some lives never get to be, but here we are.” A sadness made of light. by Sophie Bowman Translator

Visit koreanliteraturenow.com to watch highlights from the event.

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

FEATURED WRITER HAN KANG

White Is Not Always Fair W

hite things—things that are pure and clean—which sterilize the parts of life that have been dirtied. That cure wounds. “Something like white ointment applied to a swelling, like gauze laid over a wound.” (p. 10) This book, by reading and writing such white things, will smooth over and bandage the wounded heart. Before reading a book there are times when we have assumptions about what it is going to offer; if your assumptions about The White Book were like the lines above, you would be left with a very different impression after actually reading the work. At first it seems like the kind of simple friendly work that divides the pure and the dirty, the light and the dark, and takes only that which is clean and fair, but in the end The White Book has nothing to do with such a blinkered, selective kind of writing. Life can never be pure, it is always colored in various hues that clash, break and get broken, dye and become dyed. Our hearts and minds get caught up in the crossfire of this color and suffer ever-changing wounds. Life is mottled and untidy; it is a dizzying ballroom of mottled things and is in essence the possibility of getting wounded. Therefore writing which seeks to be truthful about life, as long as it does not get snagged by foolish temptation, does not look towards purity or all that is fair, bright, and without injury, but rather proceeds out onto the dance floor filled with the wounds of mottled things. This is the kind of writing that makes up The White Book. So why is it not ‘dappled’ or ‘variegated’? Why white? Because there is more to white than meets the eye. White is not a color or hue that accompanies yellow or black, red or blue. For the colors from yellow to blue to be possible, there must first be something for those colors to color, something as 12

Korean Literature Now

yet uncolored, a lack or emptiness—something akin to a blank white canvas. In this way the whiteness of a canvas is not equal to other colors like yellow, black, red, or blue. It is a shade on a more fundamental level, and it is the background shade that makes all other colors possible. White is the same as that which makes all other sounds possible, the frame of potential for sound that is silence.1 In this way white is not particularly bright or fair. Rather, it is already the frame of potential for all colors, and somewhere at its root those potentials bubble up towards the visible surface. In this way white itself is mottled. As Han Kang writes in “Fog” and “Candle”: in the thick white fog the ghosts of many colors wander with eyes that can never be seen. As white is life not realized, it can also be the color of death. If we think in this way, death cannot be seen merely as a ceasing of life’s functions or an extinguishing, but rather must be understood as something which is not yet a life realized—a space of potential that could be filled with life, or else a potential which exists transcending life realized. Therefore thinking about whiteness is not “turning away from death to face life,” but rather honing in to focus on “that in life which is not yet part of life, or else that which has already passed beyond life” and thus approaching death. Inside of thinking about whiteness it is more correct to say that life and death in fact overlap. And so a newborn baby, a body that has just died, and the mourners who send their loved one away

See: Kandinsky, Concerning the Spritual in Art, Trans. Kwon Yeong-pil,

Youlhwadang Publishers, 1986, pp. 81-83; Kim Sang-hwan, Philosophy of the Deconstruction Era, Moonji Publications, 1996, pp. 74-85

NOTES ON THE WHITE BOOK

For Her/ Film still Performance : Han Kang 2016 ⓒ Choi Jinhyuk

all wear white clothing—the newborn gown, the shroud, and the mourning dress. Life that has already passed, life, which is as yet approaching, the life that we are now living through—all of it is held within whiteness. Again, thinking about whiteness is the search for the white that always lingers beneath the layers plied onto a painted canvas that cannot be smothered completely, and from that whiteness unearthed new colors can be brought forth. Or else it serves to awaken that which lies dormant beneath a blank canvas, and as a means of checking that this lack of color does not present a simple emptiness, it also serves to make both life and death more abundant. In the end, thinking about whiteness can become an opportunity for us to actually, truly want this life, which we have no option but to accept, and go on living. When we read The White Book, what is it that the work is offering to us? It is precisely this opportunity. by Kwon Heecheol

A Pebble, Salt, Ice / Film still Performance : Han Kang 2016 © Choi Jinhyuk

Literary Critic

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

FEATURED WRITER HAN KANG

The White Book by Han Kang

I In the spring, when I decided to write about white things, the first thing I did was to make a list.

Munhakdongne Publishing Group, 2016 132 pp.

Swaddling bands Newborn gown Salt Snow Ice Moon Rice Waves Yulan White bird ‘Laughing whitely’ Blank paper White dog White hair Shroud With each item I wrote down, a ripple of agitation ran through me. I felt that yes, I needed to write this book, and that the process of writing it would be transformative, would itself transform. Into something like white ointment applied to a swelling, like gauze laid over a wound. Something I needed. But then, a few days later, running my gaze down over that list again, I wondered what meaning might lie in this task, in peering into the heart of these words. If I rake those words across the heart of me, sentences will shiver out, like the strange, sad shriek the bow draws from a metal string. Could I let myself hide between these sentences, veiled with white gauze? This was difficult to answer, so I left the list as it was and put off anything more. I came abroad in August, to this country I’d never visited before, got

Korean Literature Now

a short-term lease on an apartment in its capital, and learned to draw out my days in these strange environs. One night almost two months later, when the season’s chill was just beginning to bite, a migraine set in, viciously familiar, and I washed down some pills with warm water. And realised (quite calmly) that hiding would be impossible. Now and then, the passage of time seems acutely apparent. Physical pain always sharpens the awareness. The migraines that began when I was twelve or thirteen swoop down without warning, bringing agonising stomach cramps that stop daily life in its tracks. Even the smallest task is left suspended as I concentrate on simply enduring the pain, sensing time’s discrete drops as razor-sharp gemstones, grazing my fingertips. One deep breath drawn in, and this new moment of life’s on-going takes shape distinct as a bead of a blood. Even once I have stepped back into the flow, one day melding seamlessly into another, that sensation remains ever there in that spot, waiting, breath held. Each moment is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. With no time for our will to arrest or impel, we lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air. Not because we can claim any particular courage, but because there is no other way. Now, in this moment, I feel that vertiginous thrill course through me. As I step recklessly into time I have not yet lived, into this book I have not yet written. Door This was something that happened a long time ago.

EXCERPT THE WHITE BOOK

Before signing the contract for the lease, I went to look at the flat again. Its metal door had once been white, but that brightness had faded over time. It was a mess when I saw it, paint flaking off in patches to reveal the rust beneath. And if that had been all, I would have remembered it as nothing more than a scruffy old door. But there was also the way its number, 301, had been inscribed. Someone – perhaps another in a long line of temporary occupants – had used some sharp implement, maybe a drill bit, to scratch the number into the door’s surface. I could make out each individual stroke. 3, itself three hand spans high. 0, smaller, yet gone over several times, a fierce scrawl that tugged at your gaze. Finally, 1, a long deep-gouged line, taut with the effort of its making. Along this collection of straight and curved wounds rust had spread like a vestige of violence, like long-dried blood stains, hardened, reddish-black. I hold nothing dear. Not the place I live, not the door I pass through every day, not even, damn it, my life. Those numbers were glaring fiercely at me, clenching their teeth tight shut. That was the flat I wanted that winter, the flat where I’d chosen to spin out my days. As soon as I’d unpacked, I bought a tin of white paint and a good-sized paintbrush. Neither the kitchen nor the bedroom had been re-papered, and their walls were spotted with stains large and small. These dark splotches were especially conspicuous around any electrical switches. Wearing pale grey tracksuit bottoms and an old white sweater, so the splatters wouldn’t show up too badly. Even before I’d started to paint, I had no ambition of achieving a neat, even finish. It would be enough, I reasoned, just to paint over the stains – surely white splotches are better than dirty ones? I swept my brush over the ceiling’s large patches, where the rain must have seeped through at one time, watching grey disappear beneath white. I gave the sink’s grubby interior a wipe with a flannel before painting it that same bright white,

never mind that its pedestal was brown. Finally I stepped out into the corridor to paint the front door. With each swish of the brush over the scar-laced surface, its impurities were erased. Those deep-gouged numbers disappeared, those rusted bloodstains vanished. I went back inside the apartment to take a break and get warm, and when I came back out an hour later I saw the paint had run down. It looked untidy, probably because I was using a brush rather than a roller. After painting an extra layer over the top so the streaks were less visible, I went back inside to wait. Another hour went by before I shuffled out in my slippers to find that snow had begun to scatter down. Outside, the alley had darkened; the street lights were not yet on. Paint tin in one hand, brush in the other, I stood unmoving, a dumb witness to the snowflakes’ slow descent, like hundreds of feathers feathering down.

Sealed / Film still Performance : Han Kang 2016 © Choi Jinhyuk

Translated by Deborah Smith Printed with permission of Portobello Books, London, UK.

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

TRANSLATOR’S ESSAY

The Globalization of Korean Literature and the Status Quo Many translators and publishers were in town last June to attend the Seoul International Book Fair. Deborah Smith, the winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, visited Seoul on the invitation of LTI Korea as part of its Translators in Residence program. Smith attended a press conference organized by LTI Korea for her on the first day of the fair. At the 2016 Forum for the Globalization of Korean Literature held on the last day, she spoke about the success of The Vegetarian and its significance. Below is an abridged excerpt of her presentation.

How to account for the success of The Vegetarian? In the immediate aftermath of the Man Booker International Prize, a lot of the reporting speculated on what had led the judges to single out The Vegetarian. But though the MBI has created excitement on an unprecedented scale, The Vegetarian’s critical and commercial success has been ongoing since its original publication in 2007. Though never (until now) a bestseller, the book received strong critical acclaim when it first appeared, with its middle section taking home the Yi Sang Literary Award, and was already a cult “steady seller” before any of the MBI announcements started having an effect. In addition, by the time the contract for the English translation was signed the book had already been published in countries as far afield as Argentina and Japan, Poland, and Vietnam. This impressive feat was down to the tireless work and connections of Han Kang’s agents, Joseph Lee and Barbara Zitwer, and the book’s favorable reception in these countries was enabled by the skill and dedication of a range of translators as well as the strength of the original work itself. Because of course, the most important reason for The Vegetarian’s unprecedented success is that it is an extraordinarily powerful work of literature. First, there is Han Kang’s style, restrained but never indifferent, perfectly calibrated to describe scenes of extreme violence or sexuality without the least hint of sensationalism. Then there is the form she uses, the varying voices and perspectives which combine to create a subtly shaded triptych of tones and atmospheres, while still providing the 16

Korean Literature Now

reader with a suspenseful plot to pull them through the pages. And there is the portrayal of Yeong-hye herself, a character approached through the obliquely intersecting gazes of those around her, onto whom they project their own repressed fears and desires. And yet, even the most astonishing literary accomplishment is never a guaranteed success. This is all the more so in cases like The Vegetarian’s UK publication—a work of translated fiction, published in a country where translation accounts for no more than four percent of overall publications, written by an author whose work had never been published in English outside South Korea itself. This is not the kind of book that will sell itself; ensuring the best possible chance of success requires intelligent marketing and tireless promotion. In the case of The Vegetarian, this extended from the cover design and marketing copy to a social media campaign and publicity events. One of the most distinctive—and significant—features of these first two was that the author’s nationality, though not effaced, was also not foregrounded. It was simply not an issue. What might this mean for the future? Over the past few years, I’ve heard people involved with South Korea’s publishing and translation scene bemoan the lack of a “Korean Murakami.” For me, this has always begged the question of what would constitute successful globalization, as well as what, exactly, is meant by Korean literature. After all, Murakami

Haruki is not “Japanese literature” any more than Han Kang is “Korean literature.” Fervent Murakami fans are not, by and large, spurred on by this passion to read more Japanese literature— they want to read more Murakami. When a writer succeeds on the international stage they become, for that audience, an international writer. One of the most beautiful things about literature has always been its ability to reveal the flimsiness of those boxes which we all too often put ourselves or others into— not perhaps to transcend borders, but to show that if there is an unintelligibility between countries, it is no more than that which exists between any two individuals. In considering whether there is a certain type of book that will be more or less likely to succeed abroad, these ideas of representativeness or cultural essentialism are definitely unhelpful, but what seems to be replacing them in the source markets, and has always been strong in the target markets, is equally problematic. These days, “universality” crops up with alarming frequency in UK-based discussions on translated fiction—when asked what they look for in a foreign book, editors (particularly at the bigger publishing houses) have become so accustomed to providing this stock response that it’s clear they haven’t really thought about what they mean by “universal themes,” or whether their idea of universality has in fact been shaped by their own particular background. From listening to the examples they cite, you could be forgiven for thinking that to qualify as universal, a book must feature a white male protagonist, preferably a university professor or someone of a similarly elite background, having some kind of mid-life crisis. In addition to the obvious political / representational issues with this view, it also seems to stem from a confusion about the term “universality” itself. Earlier this year, I listened to the Scottish writer A.L. Kennedy give a talk in which she explained that universality is not the opposite of specificity, but in fact proceeds from it, which seemed to me absolutely true. To confuse universality with generality, the absence of the particular— in this context, we might think of the absence of the local— is the kind of thinking that has led the whole notion of “world literature” to be criticized as encouraging homogenization and reinforcing lopsided power structures. There is no doubt that the outsized success of The Vegetarian has vastly expanded the range of Korean books which publishers might be willing to take a chance on. Though there will always be some kinds of books less likely to cross borders (and every country’s literature needs a balance of books that work best

for a domestic audience and those which may in fact be more appreciated abroad), there will be room for a broad spectrum— from those which will introduce aspects of Korea’s rich culture and eventful history to international readers, to those which are not set in Korea and do not feature Korean protagonists. Within a few years, Korean literature (and please, let’s not call it “K-lit”) could become a byword for originality, artistic quality, formal and stylistic diversity. But none of this is guaranteed, and will not happen automatically. The Vegetarian has opened the door, but so did Murakami, yet his success had absolutely no effect on contemporary Japanese literature as a whole, which is still sorely under-represented in English. Here, the crucial advantage which gives Korean literature the edge is its funding organizations— LTI Korea, the Daesan Foundation, ARKO, and others—

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

TRANSLATOR’S ESSAY

long-established, generously endowed, staffed by friendly, dedicated women and men. The role these organizations play is more important now than ever before, if this unprecedented opportunity to introduce Korean literature to the Anglophone world is neither to be missed nor left entirely to market forces, which are concerned neither with the politics of representation nor with presenting the full spectrum of literary talent. Conclusion There’s always a danger, in this kind of discussion, of thinking that what is required is some kind of programmatic action plan—ten steps to Korean Literature’s World Domination!, like those books about how to get ahead in business. Publishing is a business, of course, but those of us with a passion for literature don’t publish in order to make money, we only try and keep our heads above water for the sake of being able to publish. A statesanctioned attempt to increase a nation’s “brand value,” or a homogenizing push for inclusion in some global canon, will be entirely at odds with this ethos. Through the books we make available, there are so many other things we can help make happen: readers will fall in love with individual characters, be 18

Korean Literature Now

impressed by the artistic achievement of certain writers, learn about cultural traditions and contemporary lives. Some will be inspired to study a language and become translators themselves. The continued opening up of Korean literature to the world will be an organic, holistic process, made up largely of people— writers, translators, publishers—doing what they love, aided and supported by funders and other organizations. We’re not selling a product; we’re opening a door. I believe that if we all work together with this common goal in mind, the future of Korean literature will be very bright indeed. by Deborah Smith Literary Translator Founder and Publisher, Tilted Axis Press

SPECIAL SECTION

Overview Ryoo Bo Sun

Fiction by

Cheon Un-yeong, Hwang Jungeun, Kim Un-su, and Kim Young-ha

Poems by Choi Seung-ja, Kim Hyesoon, Kim Sun-Woo, Moon Chung-hee, and Shin Kyeong-nim 20

Korean Literature Now

OVERVIEW

The “Docile Body” and “Organs Without a Body”

THE BODY IN CONTEMPORARY KOREAN LITERATURE For a long time Korean literature has both recreated the violence of the body within the regulation of the symbolic order and dreamed of a different kind of body, one which can go beyond the regulation of bodies.

1. The Vegetarian is receiving worldwide interest with its peculiar story about a woman dreaming of becoming a tree, however this kind of imagination about the human body is not something that the writer Han Kang has created alone. Rather, it is something made by Korean literature in its entirety. The Vegetarian is the outcome of a unique take on a theme repeated throughout the long history of Korean literature. For a long time Korean literature has both recreated the violence of the body within the regulation of the symbolic order and dreamed of a different kind of body, one which can go beyond the regulation of bodies. Interest in the human body, therefore, is one of the various

genealogies that can be traced back within Korean literature. It is fascinating to examine the path of imagination in Korean literature with regards to the human body. Such an endeavor provides an opportunity both to locate the outstanding tree that is The Vegetarian within the forest of Korean literature, and to take in a panoramic view of this diverse and expansive forest. 2. The current symbolic order does not allow for an individual to have their own individual body or for the individuality of each body. Without having to quote Michel Foucault, it should suffice

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to say that in contemporary society bodies that do not fit the a “suicide guide” character in the novel I Have the Right to Destroy norm are constantly being repressed and rejected. It has already Myself and expressed the depression and strong sense of futility been a long time, then, since the fall of the human body in the of modern people, this time focuses on a serial killer who has symbolic order to that of a docile body. Korean literature has lost his memory. Every time he feels embarrassment towards reflected an interest in the docile body for many someone stronger than himself, he coerces this decades, but it is the examination of control over other to the extent that they can no longer put Another tendency the body, or controlled bodies, expressed from up any resistance, and with this behavior he in the imagination becomes a habitual murderer. The act of killing the mid-1990s onward that particularly merits attention. becoming the means through which he finds his of the body in Over the years there have been two main sole meaning for existence. Diary of a Murderer, Korean literature trends in consideration of the human body in through the method of memorization of a serial is the longing Korean literature. One of these is to reproduce killer, which brings the logic of capitalism to its the process of the human subject being reduced extreme, demonstrates in a shocking way just for a completely to a docile body, and examine the way in which how much of a brutal monster the being who different body, these docile bodies exist. For example the poet has been degenerated into a docile body by the Shin Kyeong-nim, who was extremely vocal symbolic order can become. free from in the struggle for political democracy and regulation or unification in Korea that took place from the control. 1970s onwards, in a recent poem titled “Snow,” 3. compares the body to a “dark and stifling prison.” Another tendency in the imagination of the body Choi Seung-ja, who has a strong sense of historical philosophy in Korean literature is the longing for a completely different in which, beneath the weight of the patriarchal order, women body, free from regulation or control. In such works we find have been living as bodies even more systematically regulated— a belief that the human body must not be regulated by the expressed both a strong will to escape from the controlled body symbolic order, and indeed that such regulation is impossible. and the process by which this is denied in “For the Second Time Such works incite the potential of an individualized body to turn in Thirty-Three Years.” Through the frustrated attempt at escape expectations upside down, or else express “organs without a described in this poem Choi hints at how solid the wall of the body” that search for the light of truth in the impulses felt by a symbolic order is which constrains and confines women. single body part. Hwang Jungeun, who depicts the current sadist symbolic The writers leading this trend in Korean literature today tend order with a masochistic cheerfulness, describes in detail in the to be female. This is probably because, unlike most male writers, short story “The Seven Thirty-Two Elephant Train” the physical their bodies are different from the masculine body as emphasized and linguistic violence committed against an individual in order in the patriarchal symbolic order. By actively expressing to restrain a person as a docile body. In “The Third Breast,” Cheon the experiences of their bodies, or—taking it further—the Un-yeong, who often writes about characters that reject the body sensations of a particular part of their bodies, female writers as emphasized by the symbolic order and instead seek after an express a completely new language of the body. For example, individualized beauty of the body, focuses on the cruelty of docile in the poem “Person Crafted Out of Water” Kim Sun-Woo, who bodies. For the narrator in this short story the greatest happiness places high value on the potential for digression inherent in the of his life is being with a woman who has a unique body, but the female body, focuses on female menstruation and hints that as moment she tries to leave him he turns on her, committing a beings who menstruate, women, or “people crafted out of water,” brutal murder. In this story we encounter the terrifying nature have quenched the dry desolation of the world. In “Memories of of the being groomed as a docile body and the way in which it Giving Birth to a Daughter,” Kim Hyesoon, who has relentlessly can transform in the blink of an eye, to enact great cruelty when brought back the history of womankind concealed by patriarchy, faced with an other who stands outside of the symbolic order. In focuses on the agony of childbirth, and in that agony remembers a similar vein, in Diary of a Murderer, Kim Young-ha, who created the maternal line of genealogy which is hidden by the paternal 22

Korean Literature Now

OVERVIEW

bloodline. In a poem titled “Spuds,” Moon Chung-hee, who believes that female beings who cry together with the pain of others are the doors through which humanity will walk into the future, actively praises “a woman the size of a clay pot” who hides a man, who is being chased by a soldier with a gun, in her “skirt,” and credits this female body with bringing about a world filled with laughter. At the same time there are also works which dream of becoming an utterly different kind of body, one that can transgress the symbolic order completely. Works such as Lee Seung-U’s The Private Life of Plants and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which have already been translated into various languages and have come to represent Korean literature, receiving acclaim across the world, fall into this category. The protagonists of these works reject the body which endangers the natural environment to sustain itself, and dream of becoming non-human, or to put it more precisely, becoming plants. Also in Kim Un-su’s Cabinet, which displays a peculiar “mutant showroom” imagination, we meet a “man with a ginkgo tree growing out of his little finger.” Instead of removing the ginkgo tree to protect his body he chooses to become part of the tree in order to let it grow. Through this kind of “ginkgo tree man,” Cabinet rejects the idea of the human body as standing atop the apex of the natural order destroying nature and instead aspires to a body that exists in the living natural ecosystem.

the world does not simply stop at The Vegetarian, but grows and matures into interest in Korean literature in its entirety. by Ryoo Bo Sun Literary Critic Professor of Korean Literature Kunsan National University

4. With the announcement of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian as the 2016 Man Booker International Prize winner it seems as if people all over the world are taking more interest in Korean literature now than ever before. While this attention is welcome, it also feels somewhat belated. The potential of Korean literature is substantial. Serious literary excavation of the catastrophic situation that the human race is faced with is being carried out at least as fiercely in Korean literature as it is anywhere else in the world, with challenging and exciting works being published one after another. The Vegetarian is a good example of this. However Han Kang’s novel is not only a single work of Korean literature, but rather one of many—something that has taken inspiration from numerous other works of Korean literature. This means, therefore, that the history of Korean literature does not begin and end with The Vegetarian. There are many comparable works lined up waiting for the intrepid reader, and so I very much hope that the interest in Korean literature currently sweeping

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

SPECIAL SECTION

Snow

Stick to a tree and become a leaf hang from a branch and become a flower, then seep into the ground as water and soar in midair as wind. I’ll be a bird and fly up to the Big Dipper, to Scorpio, and into air scatter whitely in powdered silver. I will not be sad. Even if my dreams in this world leave nothing on earth but the trace of a tear even if in the end, whatever those dreams were is all forgotten when the time comes. Translated by Sophie Bowman

Korean Literature Now

On the day my body ends its stay on earth I will race out at full speed from the body that held me captive from the dark and stifling prison.

Shin Kyeong-nim is a poet and Endowed Chair Professor at Dongguk University. He has won prestigious awards such as the Manhae Literature Prize, the Daesan Literary Award, and the HoAm Prize for the Arts. The Swedish Institute awarded him the Cikada Prize in 2007. The French edition of Dreams of the Fallen (Le Rêve d’un homme abattu: Choix de poèmes) was published by Éditions Gallimard.

EXCERPTS

For the Second Time in Thirty-Three Years For the second time in thirty-three years I resolve to escape from myself. First I detach my head place it on a shelf. Take off my arms and feet put them on my desk and detach my torso, seat it on a chair. Using only my creaky knees, I steal away furtively and start a desperate run. I run on and on and run some more when I can run no longer when I want to be still, to rest someone walks ahead of me. I run to them seeking pity. Let me rest in your arms awhile, and, if only I could, softly, as air escapes a balloon softly, let me die in those arms. They walk off pretending not to hear. I beg them again for pity and at last, reluctant, as though itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bothersome when they turn to look back at me

Choi Seung-ja has published eight poetry collections. The English edition of Portrait of a Suburbanite: Poems of Choi Seung-ja was published in 2015 as part of the Cornell University East Asia Series. She has translated the works of Paul Auster, David Fontana, Max Picard, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Richard Brautigan, May Sarton, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

There it is...... my own crumpled face. Translated by Sophie Bowman

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The Seven Thirty-Two Elephant Train Passi’s uncle had a gentle voice and face, but he did cruel things when no one was watching. He was a cruel man. Passi barely moved his lips when he uttered those words. Did he beat you? With his fist or a tool? I asked him. Passi rocked his body back and forth. It was a more subtle form of abuse, he said. Verbal abuse that conveyed a physical form. Malicious acts. Unpleasant contact. For instance, when he was talking to you, he would always pull your upper ear. Like this. Passi pulled the top part of his ear with a thumb and an index finger. His muscles tightened, and the right side of his face flattened out subtly. A kid has a thin neck, so when you pull his ear up like this, his head tilts right away. Then you yell into his ear. Again! Again! You, little, bastard, you spilled, your food, again! Pick it up, and eat it, before I rip that thing off! 26

Korean Literature Now

Passi was mimicking someone. My face went cold when I heard that voice. I had never heard Passi speak in such a voice. There was something sticky to the tone. I thought of the time when I had touched a freshly painted wall. I took my palm off the wall, and a thick layer of enamel paint came off with it, like skin. I washed my hands using all kinds of cleansers, but the paint wouldn’t come off completely. I felt as if I were looking at the paint. Passi took his fingers off his ear, and rubbed his flushed ears with his hand. My uncle said ordinary things in the same way. When he did, there was always saliva on his lips, and the lips touched my ear. Over and over. Have your ears ever been bruised? I replied that I didn’t remember. Ears are a little different from other body parts, and aren’t easily bruised. I once tried to bruise my own ear, but it didn’t work. But whenever my uncle touched my ear, it always got bruised.

EXCERPTS

Didn’t his wife say anything? She didn’t say anything. I don’t think she knew. Maybe she was pretending she didn’t know. Anyway, she worked and came home late in the evening. She was nice on the surface, but she wouldn’t let us cross a certain line. And there was something about my uncle’s cruelty that couldn’t be explained to others. What he enjoyed the most was to make us stand in a room. He would make us stand there and pile verbal abuse on us, pull our ears or wave something sharp, like a pencil, before our eyes. For hours on end. He would go get a drink of water or go to the bathroom in between, and always come back to where we were and say awful things to us. We stood there. How do you explain something like that to others? Uncle makes us stand there and hurls abuse at us—like that? Listening to him say those awful things, I felt as if the structure of my body were gradually getting bent out of shape, becoming different. My head turned into an arm, an arm into a leg, an arm into my head, my back into my stomach, and my stomach into my back. I thought with a leg and with a finger. I thought it was strange and painful but I couldn’t tell anyone else about it. There was no way to explain why it felt strange and painful. Maybe I was too young. Passi had his head kicked during his last summer at the house. His uncle’s big toe dug deep into his right eye. After the incident, Passi and his brother were sent to live with their maternal aunt. It took a long time for Passi’s right cornea to heal. He still had his vision, weak though it was, but he developed severe corneal opacity. He said that when he closed his left eye and saw the world through only his right eye, everything seemed to be steaming. Face. Faces. Street. Streets. Tree. Trees. Light. Lights. The world of my right eye grew distant. I lost my sense of depth. Not being able to

see from both sides at the same time means that you lose your sense of balance. You can’t keep your distance from the cruel scenes inside you. Even after I began living with my aunt, I went to see that house several times. I stood at a corner, looking at the house, and pictured cruel things. An intruder attacking my uncle and his wife and slashing them to death. That’s me. That’s me. I thought this hundreds of times. I’ll simulate it perfectly and go in when I’m ready, I’d tell myself. It was like throwing darts. You take a dart in your hand, glare at the target, get a hold of the concentric circles of the target in your mind, and when you’re confident, you throw the dart. I would picture detailed scenes and their order over and over, then return home to my aunt’s, having worn myself out. I waited. For my thoughts to develop naturally so that I’d think that I wanted to kill him, that I had to kill him, that it was all right to kill him. But then he really died. My uncle. On a freeway. He was crushed under a dump truck. My aunt took my brother and me to the funeral. Girin was eleven, but everyone thought that he was a mute. My aunt stood with us before the portrait of my uncle and said we had to forgive him. He had gone wrong because of our grandfather, so it wasn’t entirely his fault, was what she meant. She wept. I could no longer understand what she was saying. I was looking at the dart that had fallen to the floor. Because my uncle had died suddenly, the dart had lost its target and fallen to the floor. For a long, long time, I stared at the hard, red body of the dart, which remained on the floor without disappearing, full of energy. This happened long ago. pp. 72–75 Translated by Jung Yewon

Hwang Jungeun has written three novels and two short story collections. She has won several literary awards such as the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, the Lee Hyo-seok Literary Award, and the Daesan Literary Award. Her novel One Hundred Shadows is set to be published by Tilted Axis this October.

From the short story collection The Seven Thirty-Two Elephant Train, Munhakdongne Publishing Group 2014, 293 pp.

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

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The Third Breast

can see Venus’s third breast if you closely examine her statue at the Louvre. It’s barely a bud without a nipple, but you said that it was clearly visible near the armpit above her right breast. When I didn’t believe you, you brought a book that had the story in

Do you remember how I unwittingly pinched your

Cheon Un-yeong’s books have been published in Chinese, Japanese, French, and Russian. She was invited to the Saint-Louis Literary Festival after the French edition of her book Farewell, Circus! (Adieu le cirque!) was published by Serge Safran Éditeur in 2013. She stayed in Malaga, Spain in 2013 as part of LTI Korea’s writing residency program. She will stay at the Residencia De Estudiantes in Madrid, Spain later this year.

From the short story collection Myoungrang Moonji Publications 2014, 277 pp.

Korean Literature Now

it and showed it to me.

nipple when I first scooped up your breasts? You let

“It’s like a tailbone—the trace now extinct,

out a short shriek and laughed loudly as you wrapped

though it surely existed a long time ago when

your hands around my face.

humans gave birth to more than two babies. I guess

“Men usually touch it with their tongues first. Don’t you think you’re a little strange?” you asked

I haven’t fully evolved. Still, I like this third breast— even Venus had one.”

me, pausing your laughter for a second. For some

You were so proud of your third breast. I glanced

reason, your words made me feel smug. You kept

through the book while listening to you. The book

giggling and left your breasts to me. I felt a tightly

was a sort of general knowledge encyclopedia that

closed door gently open at the sound of your

covered sundry topics in separate sections. Among

laughter. Warm memories, confined behind the

them, I was most interested in the section about

closed door, walked out. I wanted to keep playing

the mysteries of the human body. It was fun to

with your breasts as I had done a long time ago with

read, with the chapters on the human eye, shoulder,

my grandma’s bosom.

and buttocks all carrying interesting photographs.

Your breasts are not that pretty—I mean, at

While glancing through pictures of women with

least not according to generally accepted standards.

their breasts exposed, I stopped at the words “third

You told me the most beautiful breasts were firm,

breast.” As you said, the chapter listed names of

cone-shaped ones, around size 30B, with about

people who had a third breast. It also mentioned

a four-inch difference between upper and under

the story about Venus de Milo. You might’ve read

bust measurements, the nipples facing away from

the following explanation as well: the third breast

each other like two sisters who don’t get along. The

became grounds for accusing women of witchcraft

line connecting the collarbones and nipples should

during the Middle Ages, and witch hunters would

make an equilateral triangle, and the areola should

search every inch of the body for a hidden third

be less than half an inch in circumference. Your

breast. The book also said that people believed

breasts are more bowl-shaped than cone, and they

witches had more than two nipples with which they

are 28A, which is a little small. Your collarbones and

would fed their errand boys. But of course, you’d

nipples do not make an equilateral triangle, you see.

love that, not because it was a trace of the wild but

Nevertheless, you have something else that is not

because it was the mark of a witch.

usually seen on other people—a third breast. That’s

A witch’s errand boy—as soon as I read those

what you called the small bump on the edge of your

words, I thought it would be fine for me to put my

areola.

head on your chest and my mouth on your nipple

I thought you had made up the name, but you

like a child. If what came out of the third breast was

told me it was the official term, and listed names of

witch’s milk, becoming an errand boy didn’t sound

famous women who had more than two breasts. You

too bad. As a witch’s errand boy, I would have to find

mentioned the name of a Roman emperor’s mother

prey or ingredients for magic. In the meantime, I’d

and the name of a woman who was the wife of Henry

probably get to pick up magic.

VIII. I don’t remember exactly who now, though.

pp. 137–139

Among the many names you listed, the only one I recognized was the Venus de Milo. They say you

Translated by Ally Hwang

EXCERPTS

Diary of a Murderer

you think would happen? Wouldn’t the train and the freight pile up at the point where the tracks stop? And it would be chaos wouldn’t it? Sir, this is exactly what’s happening inside your head right now.” *

I killed people regularly for thirty years. I was really

I remember an old lady I met in the poetry

diligent back then. Now the statute of limitations

class. She told me that in the past—she emphasized

has passed for them all and I can even go on about

this part—she had had a lot of love affairs. She

them anywhere. If this was America I could probably

said, I don’t regret it. When you get old, they’re all

publish a memoir. People would attack me. Let them,

memories. Whenever I’m bored I think about each of

if they want. It’s not like I have many days left. If

the men I slept with.

I think about it, I’m a pretty tough one. After all

I’m living just like that old lady. I recall each

those killings, I stopped cold. I felt like, well, like a

of the people that have died at my hands. Now

boatman who’d just sold his boat or a mercenary

that I think about it there was a movie about that.

who’d just retired. I can’t say for sure, but there must

Memories of a Murder. *

have been guys in the Korean War or the Vietnam War who killed more people than me. Do you think

I believe in zombies. There’s no reason why

they’re all losing sleep over it? I don’t think so. Guilt

something you can’t see doesn’t exist. I often watch

is fundamentally a weak emotion. Fear, anger, or

zombie movies. I once kept an axe in my bedroom.

jealousy is much stronger. In the grips of fear or

When Eunhui asked why I kept an axe there, I said

anger, you won’t fall asleep. When I watch a movie

it was because of zombies. Axes work best on dead

or TV show with someone unable to sleep because of

people. *

guilt, I laugh. What are these writers who don’t know a thing about life trying to say?

The worst thing in the world is to be murdered. That’s the one thing that I won’t let happen to me.

The English editions of Kim Young-ha’s I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, Your Republic Is Calling You, and Black Flower were published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who will also publish his latest book in 2017. Kim was a resident writer at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 2003, and a contributing op-ed writer for The New York Times from 2013 to 2014. His books have appeared in more than twelve languages.

...

I hid the syringe in the sewing kit near my head. One of my walls is covered with notes. They are

A lethal dose of pentobarbital sodium. It’s a drug

notes of various colors that stay on the wall when you

used to put cows and pigs to sleep. I’m thinking of

stick them on, and though I don’t know where they

using it on myself when I get to the point where I’m

came from, they’re all over the house. Eunhui might

smearing my shit across the walls. I can’t let it go

have bought them to help me remember. These notes

that far. *

have a special name, but I can’t remember what that is right now. After the north wall was covered with

I’m afraid. Frankly, I’m kind of afraid.

these notes, now the wall facing west is plastered

I’ll read a sutra.

with them, but they’re no good. They’re notes I don’t understand, notes I don’t remember why I stuck

pp. 44–47

there in the first place. Like the one saying “You must tell Eunhui.” What was I supposed to tell her? Each

Translated by Krys Lee

of the notes are like distant stars in the universe to me. Nothing seems to connect them to each other. There, there’s also one that the doctor wrote for me: “Imagine it like a freight car hurtling forward without knowing the rails are cut off ahead. What do

Diary of a Murderer Munhakdongne Publishing Group 2013, 176 pp.

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

SPECIAL SECTION

Person Crafted Out of Water When that time of month comes near my body exudes the scent of the sea From inside a deep well a gyesu tree flows out and a pair of snails that made love flows out and curling its wings that will turn to ash a firebird flows out the feet of all the things which flow out of me are always imbued a little with the salty scent of the sea The musk of mother’s body when her lap was a pillow every night when I could smell only the soft sea brine, why with such unquenchable thirst the acacias on the low mountain waved their skeins of white flowers, why a desert shoal of fish, their green backs sparkling swam toward me like a waterfall across the night sky I think I know now, mother is a person crafted out of water those old stories, how in a year of severe drought on white cotton the red, menstrual smudge vivid on a rag was made into a flag, offered up as a rainmaker, I think I know them now, making rain with the juices scooped from their insides my mother’s mother’s mothers’ stories When that time of month comes near the moon is filled with the scent of the sea Translated by Sophie Bowman

Korean Literature Now

Kim Sun-Woo is a poet, novelist, and essayist. She has won the Hyundae Literary Award and the Cheon Sang-byeong Poetry Award. Her poems were published in the 2015 winter issue of Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing. Her book Falling Asleep under a Peach Blossom (Unter Pfirsichblüten eingeschlafen) has been translated into German.

EXCERPTS

Memories of Giving Birth to a Daughter -in p’ansori narrative

I open a mirror and enter, mother is inside a mirror, sitting. I open a mirror and enter again, grandmother is inside a mirror, sitting. I push aside this grandmother mirror and step over a doorsill, great grandmother is inside a mirror, laughing. I place my head inside great grandmother’s laughing lips, great-great grandmother, younger than me turns around inside a mirror, sitting. I open this mirror and enter, enter, and enter again. All the ancestral mothers are sitting inside a darkening mirror, and these mothers mutter and call in my direction, “Mommy, Mommy.” Their mouths pucker, crying for milk, but my breasts have no milk, and someone keeps pumping wind into my intestines. My stomach grows bigger than a balloon, blows here and there above the sea. It is so wide, wide inside the mirror that I can’t even catch one blade of straw, and sometimes lightning passes through my body. Every time I dive into the sea a row of mothers’ shoes dissolve on the sea’s bottom. A bolt of lightning! Power’s off! A blackout! Suddenly, all the mirrors shatter in front of me, and one mother is vomited out. People in white, wearing gloves collect the bits of mirror and hold up a small mother smeared in blood with eyes still shut— mother of all my mothers— and say, “It’s a ten-fingered princess!”

Kim Hyesoon is a poet and professor of creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. She has written twelve poetry collections, out of which Poor Love Machine; Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream; All the Garbage of the World, Unite!; Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers; and I’m Ok, I’m Pig! have been published in English. Her poetry has been featured and reviewed in The Independent, Guernica, Mānoa, The Margins, World Literature Today, and Po&sie.

Translated by Don Mee Choi Vol. 32 Summer 2016

SPECIAL SECTION

Spuds In a wide, empty potato field sat a woman the size of a clay pot. Hungry from digging potatoes she sat atop the potato pile roasting potatoes to eat alone. From far off a man, like a water deer bounded over. I’m chased, I’m chased, hide me, he said. Potato in hand, hurriedly the woman gestured below. The water deer went inside her skirt. The two became a large clay pot. Gun in hand a soldier ran over. Potato in hand, hurriedly the woman gestured far off. The soldier disappeared to a far off place and the woman still seated wobbled. The mountain tottered. The potato was stuffed into her mouth. The potato field surged with flame. Day by day the woman grew fatter. As big as a manure heap. As big as a house. Finally, she bore potatoes. Bore one after another for a thousand years. Our Earth filled with potatoes. The potatoes, looking alike, thought each other funny and laughed every day. What was the soldier, gun in hand, where did he go? The potatoes wondered sometimes. Translated by Sophie Bowman

Korean Literature Now

Moon Chung-hee is a poet and Endowed Chair Professor at Dongguk University. She has won prestigious awards such as the Sowol Poetry Award, the Chong ChiYong Literature Prize, the Mogwol Literature Prize, and Sweden’s Cikada Prize. She has participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. English editions of her books include Windflower, Woman on the Terrace, and I Must Be the Wind.

EXCERPTS

Ginkgo Tree But after three years, the Ginkgo tree suddenly started to grow with frightening speed, remarkable considering its slow progress in the first three years. The pea-sized tree grew to the size of a chestnut in a mere month, and an orange in two months. On the third month, it was the size of a watermelon. “It’s awesome! It grew so much this month, too. I think the manure really helped. A little smelly, though. Ha ha. Anyway, I’m glad the tree is growing well, but I’d hate to draw attention to myself because of this. What if I end up on TV? What if people crowd me and demand to see my tree? I can’t stand a racket. It can’t be good for the tree, either.” But that was the least of our worries. We were worried about his health. It goes without saying that the only source of nutrients for the tree was

the man’s body, and there was no telling what that meant for him. The roots already run all the way down to his wrist, and he had next to no movement in his left hand. But he was completely oblivious to our worries and driveled on about his plans for the tree. “Maybe I should just let it all out in the open and raise it proudly. It’ll be a little trying, but that’s the only way I can have some semblance of a social life and still keep my tree. By the way, they have Ginkgo tree experts at the Korea Forest Service, no? I have so many questions. How much sunlight does the tree need? I hear Ginkgoes have male and female trees. How does the pollination work? Does the wind take care of everything, or do they need the help of bees and butterflies? ‘Cause I hate bees.

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

SPECIAL SECTION

I’ve heard that some plants only grow on carcasses. But I’ve never heard of trees that grow on organisms that are still alive. What happened there? Why did that Ginkgo tree choose human flesh and veins over the sacred and fertile soil endowed with the blessings of Mother Nature? What an enigma.

The tree is well. I am also well. I think the time has come for the tree to lay roots in the ground. I’ll have to go deeper into the woods. Once the Ginkgo tree goes into the ground, I won’t be able to write anymore. But things will be just fine as they’ve always been. Thank you for planting a life in my body. Don’t worry about a thing. I am happier than I have ever been in any life I have ever lived. I don’t have a Ginkgo tree growing on me, so I don’t know how a monstrous tree that feeds on human blood like a vampire can make anybody happy. But he said he was happy. If he hasn’t died yet, he’ll be living somewhere deep in the Jiri Mountain woods with the Ginkgo. If he lives on, it will be thanks to the tree. He will hang onto the tree, now bigger than he, like a leaf or a fruit, and live on the nutrients the tree draws up from deep within the earth. The Ginkgo tree has been around for 350 million years. They lived through the dinosaur age and survived the ice age. Their average life expectancy is anywhere from a hundred to a thousand years. The Ginkgo tree will raise him now. I sometimes wonder if he has turned into a tree, his body stretched out to become roots, branches, and leaves. I wonder if he’s fluttering in the wind high up on a branch, quietly looking down at our messy, inconsequential lives below.

Butterflies are okay, though.” As time went on, the man shriveled. He kept losing weight until he went from chubby to scrawny. His face was jaundiced, and his entire left arm was paralyzed. His digestive system started to fail him— he couldn’t hold anything down. We implored him to consider the only option he had: to have the tree surgically removed by taking out a part of his finger and digging the roots out of his arm. The way things were going, he was sure to die soon. But he politely declined and put his affairs in order like someone on his way out. “Has he lost his mind?” cried his agitated wife. “It’s not like he’s got a new woman! He’s throwing everything away—his life, his family!—and for what? A Ginkgo tree! Tell him to repot the tree in a pot if he loves it so much.” From her point of view, this whole affair was unconscionable. I agreed. But his closures were irrevocable, quick, and simple. He transferred ownership of the stationery store and the house to his wife, and left. He called us at the bus terminal. “I’m leaving now,” he said. “Thank you for everything.” It was a simple message. He didn’t mention where he was going.

Kim Un-su has written three novels and one short story collection. He won the Munhakdongne Novel Award in 2006. His books have been translated into French, Japanese, and Chinese. He was invited to the Saint-Louis Literary Festival and the French literary festival, “Meeting.”

pp. 40–43 Translated by Jamie Chang

He sometimes wrote us. He was living in a hut on Songni Mountain at one point, and in Taebaek Mountain at another. We couldn’t tell how he was able to feed himself and stay hidden from the rest of the world. His last letter came from Jiri Mountain. 34

Korean Literature Now

From the novel Cabinet Munhakdongne Publishing Group 2006, 391 pp.

Q&A

A Conversation with Ethan Nosowsky of Graywolf Press Ethan Nosowsky, Editorial Director at Graywolf Press, visited Korea in June for the Seoul International Book Fair. Though small in size, Graywolf is widely known for its list of award-winning writers and experimental yet trendsetting works. It is set to publish its first Korean book, The Impossible Fairy Tale by Han Yujoo, in 2017. Nosowsky shares his thoughts about Han’s book, about literature in translation, and about books that interest him.

LTI Korea: What brought you to Seoul? Ethan Nosowsky: Graywolf is an enthusiastic publisher of

translated literature, which occupies a significant portion of our list. And although we have published poetry by two Chinese authors, Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale is the first work of fiction we’ve published from Asia. This is a shortcoming of ours, and we hope to remedy it. After we acquired Ms. Han’s novel, LTI Korea offered Graywolf a generous translation and publication subsidy for The Impossible Fairy Tale and extended an invitation to me to visit publishers and writers in Seoul. I thought it would be ideal to visit during the Book Festival, and I’m so grateful for this opportunity.

Literature Festival in India. As you might imagine, we have no editors on staff who read Korean, so when Kelly submitted a sample translation and a detailed synopsis, we commissioned two experts to report on the book for us. The reports were stellar and the sample translation was intriguing. The voice in the sample pages was extraordinary, and while the story was chilling and disturbing, we thought it was very powerful. I should say that we were initially a little concerned about the metafictional turn that the story takes in the second half. This has in some ways become a well-worn trope in Western literature, but we agreed that Ms. Han had done something very organic and original with it. In the end, we felt this debut novel presented us with an opportunity to collaborate with an author at the beginning of a promising career.

LTI Korea: What made you decide to publish The Impossible

Fairy Tale? EN: Graywolf’s publisher, Fiona McCrae, first heard about the novel from Ms. Han’s agent, Kelly Falconer, at the Jaipur

LTI Korea: Can you share your decision-making process of publishing a book? EN: There are five editors at Graywolf, and when one of us finds

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

Q&A

a manuscript that he or she is interested in acquiring, we share are interesting and I can feel a real intelligence at work behind it with the entire editorial team to solicit feedback and measure them. The fiction we publish at Graywolf is always literary but enthusiasm. This is a fairly informal process, and it doesn’t runs the gamut from fairly conventional psychological realism at all amount to the formal acquisitions meetings that are to pretty far out formal or linguistic experimentation. Mostly common at the bigger houses. We ask ourselves I just don’t want to be bored. I like books that a series of questions: Is the book distinctive teach you how to read them. Books that set and singular? Do we have a vision for how we their own terms and build their own world. Han The fiction would approach the publication? Do we think we Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale did all of that. bring something to the table that another house It’s not like anything else I’ve read. we publish at couldn’t? And finally: Could we live without it? Graywolf is LTI Korea: What do you think is the most Our lists our very full, so we have been setting a essential element for Korean literature or any higher and higher bar for our acquisitions. We’re always literary literature in translation to be widely read in the a small company and we want to feel completely but runs the US? enthusiastic about a book when we decide to gamut from fairly publish it. EN: A distinctive sensibility paired with a conventional LTI Korea: Do you think it is a good time for powerful and original voice would certainly psychological Korean literature to step into the US market? be a sweet spot for publishers like Graywolf. realism to pretty Additionally, we’re less interested in books EN: I don’t think there’s ever been a that mimic or reflect existing trends in our own far out formal better time. First of all, a number of new literature. Obviously it’s necessary that a story or linguistic independent presses in the United States have be “legible” to an American audience in order experimentation. begun publishing international literature to work there, but telling us something that we unapologetically and with renewed vitality. don’t already know has enormous value. Beyond Along with a newly reinvigorated independent that, I don’t think we are all that different in the bookselling community they are finding a end: If you’re telling a human story well, about receptive readership for stories that are not simply reflections what it’s like to be alive in the world—in your world—today, it of the American experience. has the potential to resonate broadly. Translation is never easy. Because editors often can’t LTI Korea: How did you come to know about LTI Korea and read the languages of the books that are submitted, it makes what do you think about the work we do here? them inherently more conservative about taking a chance on something. This can be especially so when there are cultural EN: I believe it was Han Yujoo’s agent who first told us that differences that might not travel very well into a new language. funds might be available that would contribute to the cost But I think that reticence is lessening. of our translation. I can’t tell you how valuable the work As all of you likely know, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which of organizations like LTI Korea is to American and British has just won the Man Booker International Prize, has been met publishers. There are many barriers of entry to foreign markets, with rapturous reviews in both the US and the UK. Its success, even more so with a language that is not widely read in the following the warm reception of other Korean authors such as West. The more that LTI Korea does to erase those barriers— Shin Kyung-sook, are certainly convincing some publishers that with sample translations, dossiers that describe a book and its these books can work. reception in detail, funds to lower publication costs—the easier LTI Korea: What kind of story are you looking for as an editor? it will be for English-language publishers to take a chance on new work. EN: I’ll read just about any kind of story as long as the sentences 36

Korean Literature Now

EXCERPTS Life Unperturbed

Eun Heekyung

Park Wansuh

Chong Hyon-jong

To Dream of a Mountain Whisper of Splendor

Seven Years of Darkness The Wizard Bakery The Korean Table

Jeong You Jeong

Gu Byeong-mo

Korean Cuisine and Dining Production Team, KBS

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

EXCERPTS

Life Unperturbed by Eun Heekyung

Changbi Publishers, 2012, 268 pp. For publication inquiries, please contact us at koreanlitnow@klti.or.kr

Liu’s Narrative On a spring day long ago, Liu’s father saw the most beautiful woman in the world. She was talking on the phone, leaning against the glass of a phone booth. Slight of frame, she was wearing a pale green polka dot dress with a white sweater. She was holding the receiver to her ear with one hand, and her face, fair and transparent, was tilted to one side. She was carrying books and notebooks under her arm. Her long-lashed eyes looked into the distance as if dreaming, and her lips were lustrous as rose petals. Her chin, which looked as if it had been chiseled out of ivory, was lifted slightly, rendering her neckline even more graceful. Her cheeks were flushed peach, and whenever she spoke, her black bob bounced slightly over them. Liu’s father could not take his eyes off the movements of those eyes and cheeks and lips. Listening to the person on the other end, she raised the toe of her brown shoe and tapped the floor lightly with the heel. Her hair spilled over her bent face, revealing the small, round bones at the back of her neck. Suddenly, her movements stopped. The next moment, her expression stiffened—then when she smiled quietly, and when the smile spread out and the phone booth suddenly lit up as if spring sunshine had shone through, a high-voltage shiver 38

Korean Literature Now

shot through his heart. The powerful light which emanated from her reached him in a flash and gripped his feet. This took place at a bus stop in front of a university. Liu’s father, of course, got on the bus after her, regardless of the direction of his home. That was the day Liu’s parents first met. The two were attending the same university. Liu’s mother was a senior and her father was a year behind. That didn’t matter so much. What mattered was that her mother had a boyfriend. Her mother was a romantic who wouldn’t easily have a change of heart. That only added fuel to the fierce flame with which her father was seized. His desire flared up like a forest fire. Immediately he began his persistent efforts to win her heart, armed with all his romantic temperament and reckless action. The entire school was able to witness her father chasing after her mother, and he was always laughing and reeling as if drunk. He was possessed like a sleepwalker, and blind like a sightless man. The results were gratifying. He was accepted not only by Liu’s mother but by her parents as well, and the two became engaged. Liu’s father, however, failed to find a job even a year after her mother had graduated and was hired as a secretary at a foreign-affiliated firm. He couldn’t ask his family for help, either. Liu’s mother made persistent efforts to persuade her parents to let them go study abroad together, and was finally granted permission. Flying for the first time in her life in an airplane several days after the wedding, she looked down through the window at the clouds beneath her feet, and felt that she was at the pinnacle of her life. The two encouraged each other, wishing the other success in their future days as a poor couple studying abroad, and felt intoxicated by the fulfillment of their love. That was when they decided to name their future child Liu. And that was the end of the lyrical epoch allowed to Liu’s parents. Many things changed after that. She asked her mother later on why they had named her Liu. Her mother replied by asking what could be a better name to come up with inside an airplane than one that meant “flow?” She told her about the relationship between the airflow and the force that made an airplane rise. When the airflow above is fast, the wings grow light, and the force below lifts them up. When young Liu had difficulty understanding, her mother said: What flows fast becomes light. If you want to fly, Liu, you have to be fast. If you run with all your strength, you soar all of a sudden. You can go anywhere from that point. But when you stop, you drop right down. Around that time, her mother had already become cynical about life. And always somewhat unequivocal, as far as she remembered.

FICTION

Her father’s answer was different. He said that her name came from an operatic aria titled “Don’t Cry, Liu!” Liu is the name of a slave girl who is swept off her feet by a smile she catches from a prince on the one and only beautiful spring day of her life. The prince, in love with an icy princess of a foreign land, is about to plunge into danger to pursue his love. Unable to dissuade him, Liu stabs her own heart with a dagger to save the one she loves. Moved by Liu’s devotion, the princess of the foreign land accepts the prince at last. Liu gifts her life to the man she loves so that he can be with another woman. Why did Liu’s father name his daughter after such a tragically fated slave? Was it because it was easy for him to empathize with the dramatic sentiment of fate? It didn’t matter who was telling the truth, her mother or her father. Perhaps both answers were true in part. Everyone remembers the past with their own revisions. They each have their grounds, and often, even witnesses with their own versions would appear. In any case, the different explanations of her mother and father as to the origin of her name came to Liu as images of two different things. An airplane and an opera. If one was that of grey duralumin wings, attempting to find balance in a vast expanse of air, the other was that of a tearful operatic aria calling for death. If what her mother taught her was the organized logic of the world which scientists and philosophers had sought to reveal, what her father taught her was fascination. And fascination, as was her father’s temperament, was inherently irresponsible and selfish. To a poor couple studying abroad, life in a foreign country was like the first winter with a baby wrapped in a flimsy blanket. After a painful year had passed, Liu’s mother came to the conclusion that it was impossible for two people to study together on the money sent from home. She would be able to finish faster and her grades were better, too, but she chose to have Liu’s father study first. She decided that she herself would earn money. While Liu’s father was at the library, she served food at a Korean restaurant, sold things, and mended clothes. She cut down her own expenses as much as possible, but they were always struggling. Fortunately, she found a good job working as a resident maid in a mansion in the suburbs. Having grown up in a well-to-do family, she was familiar with a refined lifestyle and had no difficulty getting hired. Her weekends would be free. A week later, carrying a bag containing several articles of clothing, her identification, and a wedding picture, she left for the home of some strangers. Thus she became completely isolated from the society she had known, the status she had enjoyed—and from

Liu’s father—and worked hard for extra pay, anticipating the day she would be set free from the home of the fussy old couple. Liu’s father went to pick up her mother every weekend, driving for two hours in the secondhand car whose engine often died. Every time, she had a big bundle ready, containing items discarded by the couple who had an abundance of material things. First he put the bundle in the trunk, then sat her down in the passenger seat. Contrary to her worries, his face took on a healthier glow, thanks to the money and the bundles she brought

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

EXCERPTS

home. Compared to him, she looked more and more tired and raised. But to keep herself from getting hurt, she had to keep anxious. She also developed a habit of studying people’s faces. herself from suspecting what was suspicious. The thought made As time went on, he started to come pick her up once every two her feel as if something precious she’d been holding in her hand weeks. Then once every three weeks, and then once a month, and for a long time had crumbled completely. Quietly staring ahead in the end, a day came when he didn’t come even as she sat rocking in the car whose engine might after a month and a half had passed. die again at any moment, she suddenly raised It was a clear summer day. Liu’s mother a hand and put it on her left chest. She was Because she vividly recalled the intense sunlight and warm offering condolences to a world that had grown had grown up breeze. The owners of the home had gone to visit unfamiliar, and to the loss of love. in a family that some relatives, and inside the mansion, which Even after that, the two lived together for had been cleaned up early in the morning, there neither concealed sixteen years. Liu was sixteen when her father was nothing but chilly silence. Liu’s mother was and mother got divorced. On that summer day nor exaggerated sitting in a chair by the kitchen window, with a when her mother inevitably witnessed that unhappiness, large bundle tied up neatly. She had been sitting her life had become unfamiliar to her, Liu was for four hours in that spot, staring out at the starting her own life in her mother’s womb. Liu learned long tree-lined driveway where you could watch While living together, Liu’s parents were on good about pain and a car coming through for almost two minutes. terms at times, and not on such good terms at solitude early Flowers, arranged by height and color, bloomed others, but they no longer loved each other. They in the well-manicured garden, and the grass in both loved Liu, however. Liu’s childhood wasn’t on. On the other the wide front yard, cut meticulously along the especially happy, but it wasn’t unhappy, either. hand, she also grain, sparkled green. The sunlight was intense You could say that she lived in peace as most that day. The enormous shadow of a Japanese learned that the children do, without wondering whether she was cedar on the lawn looked delicate and fancy, as happy, until she reached an age when children discord between if a black lace tablecloth had been spread out. ask questions about happiness and unhappiness. her parents bore As afternoon came on, the shadow gradually Because she had grown up in a family that changed in color and shape, and swayed gently neither concealed nor exaggerated unhappiness, no connection whenever a breeze shook the branches. Light Liu learned about pain and solitude early on. to her own began to shine obliquely down on the lawn. The On the other hand, she also learned that the unhappiness. splendor of the moment was gradually waning. discord between her parents bore no connection Liu’s mother gazed vacantly at everything for a to her own unhappiness. Through a family life long time. Another thing she saw in the flow of that resembled work life with colleagues you’re time and the lengthening shadow was the decline of her own life. not too fond of, Liu’s parents taught her that there’s no reason Liu’s father showed up the next day at noon, saying that he to band together with other unhappy people because you’re had gotten the car fixed. He looked unfamiliar, probably because unhappy, just as you don’t want to be friends with someone he had a new haircut. Liu’s mother tried not to care whether he cowardly because they’re as cowardly as yourself. Liu had a was telling the truth. Then she realized that the hardest thing happy relationship with both her father and mother. One of the to do was to reject the desire to believe it as the truth, even many things that shocked her when she came to Korea was that though her suspicions had been aroused. It was pride, but more everyone put on an awkward expression when she mentioned than that, it was the determination to preserve her life the way that her parents were divorced. she knew how. She realized vaguely how the foolish optimism Just once, Liu’s mother referred to being a residential maid and deceptive peace with which people tried to guard the very as being a servant. Then she said, Liu, people who love each other framework of their life could drive them into a conservative must be equal. In a relationship where one person is in debt ideology; how unwittingly people play an active role in solidifying to another, you can’t share love, no matter how much of it you this ideology even without trusting it. Her suspicions had been have. When one of you is in debt, love can’t be restored. What if 40

Korean Literature Now

FICTION

the debt is repaid? Liu asked, and her mother smiled. I suppose you can start over when the debt is repaid. Recalling those words later, Liu thought that perhaps her mother had wanted her father to repay the debt. But he didn’t. Fascination wouldn’t be fascination without shamelessness, irrationality, and imbalance. No reckoning was made, of course. What impressed Liu the most about her parents’ story was their first encounter. Her mother, was in love with another man, an office worker, at the time. Spotting a pay phone, she suddenly missed her boyfriend and went into the booth. She felt a little nervous because she had never called him on the phone before. But her face brightened as soon as she heard his voice. It’s me. Her cheeks flushed, and her lips formed a flirtatious smile as she spoke. I just thought I’d call and say hi. Where are you? Her boyfriend asked, and she casually glanced outside the phone booth, but nothing came into her sight. She was in love, and there were only the two of them, she and her boyfriend, in the world. Can I see you today? She asked cautiously, and he said he had to work overtime. There was a momentary pause. She bit her lip, and tapped the floor with her heel without realizing it. And then she heard him say, I love you, over the telephone. She was startled, and then her face broke out into a bright smile, like a flower blossoming, unable to bear the joy that rose from deep within her body and began to fill it entirely. Liu had lived longer with her mother. As planned, her mother became a professor at the foreign university where she had studied, and after retirement, divided her time between her country of residence and Korea, where Liu lived. Liu grew up hearing countless times that she took after her mother, and trusted in her mother with mixed feelings of love and hatred. But often, she searched for her identity in the world of fascination handed down from her father. She was able to make her way through the hatred, contempt, fatigue, and desire that distressed her frequently in her life by entrusting her body to her mother’s flow, but what helped her endure her solitude was the fascination life still held for her. A woman in love glows, at her most beautiful in life. What Liu’s father had seized upon and shivered at was that beauty. Such beauty generally takes the form of an image. That is why so many lyrical tales end in a lovers’ embrace or a wedding, and why such an ending is called a happy ending. The world of narratives, of the life that unfolds thereafter, and of ideology, is a different realm that bears no connection to the world of images. An image is like a momentary beam of light and is complete in itself, so

there’s no need to examine its authenticity. So for Liu’s father, there was neither doubt nor pain. There was no debt for him to pay, either. But what guided the life of Liu’s mother, which belonged to the world of narratives, was a pattern, not an image, and it had to continue like a knitting pattern; so the wound where the cut was made was deep. It required a cost. You could say that Liu’s father, who wasn’t of the world of narratives, was a solitary man. Solitude couldn’t be avoided. On the contrary, Liu’s mother chose the world of narratives, and had to, as a necessity, accept pain. Liu wondered at times: Why does Father think that my name comes from “Don’t Cry, Liu?” In the opera, the prince sings two songs. “Don’t cry, Liu. Leave me to fulfill my love. And take care of my father, who may, tomorrow morning, be all alone in the world” and “Sleepless princess, guess my name. Solve the riddle and let everyone sleep.” At last, the song of the princess resounds. “I know the name now. His name is Love.” Was Liu’s role in this narrative to be responsible for the ideology of the world called Father, and offer her destined love at someone else’s feet, then die bleeding there? Is solitude more fatal than pain? Translated by Jung Yewon

Eun Heekyung has won several literary awards such as the Munhakdongne Novel Award, the Yi Sang Literary Award, and the Dongin Literary Award. The French edition of My Wife’s Boxes (Les Boîtes de ma femme) was published by Zulma. Her works have appeared in German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. She also participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

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To Dream of a Mountain by Park Wansuh

Segyesa Publishing Group, 2012 343 pp. (The first edition of this title was published in 1995 ) For publication inquiries, please contact us at koreanlitnow@klti.or.kr

Sister-in-law changed the dressing for the bullet hole in Brother’s leg in the main room. His calf was skinny but the hole was fresh and deep. The old gauze dressing, a centimeter wide, spiraled out endlessly from the hole, and the new one seemed to go in inch after inch with no end in sight. The suffocating pain of watching probably added to that feeling. It was difficult not to wish the bullet had pierced his heart instead. It was a fiery yet chilling thought. Brother asked what I saw outside. “Nothing. I didn’t see anyone,” I replied. “We’re the only ones left. There are no signs of other people. Seoul is completely empty, but it looks like the North Korean army hasn’t entered yet.” “That can’t be. Why don’t you go out and check?” Brother asked his wife. She wrapped the old dressing that was stained with sticky ointment and blotches of dark blood in a sheet of newspaper and went out. Brother’s anxiety made the waiting seem to last forever. When she returned after making us wait for a long time, she reported something completely nonsensical. “There’s a well right in front of the house. The water looks quite dark and deep.” 42

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“I want to know if you saw any people! Any North or South Korean soldiers?” Brother cried. She shook her head. Unable to stand Brother’s pestering, the three of us, including Mom, rotated in and out to watch the movements of the outside world, but we didn’t see a soul. His anxiety increased by the day. He didn’t even let us cook rice or go out. “D...don’t you see which flag is on the flagpole? A...are you stinking blind?” Brother started to stutter. It was a weak, empty sound, as if he were drawing it from inside, but to me, it sounded like an outcry. What he wanted to find out so anxiously finally became very clear to me. He didn’t want to know if there were other families aside from our own in the city; he wanted to know whose rule we were under. We were sent out in turn to find out if the sky we had over our heads belonged to the Republic of Korea or the Democratic People’s Republic. Other buildings besides the prison had flagpoles, but nothing fluttered on them. The South Korean army retreated after evacuating all the residents and left Seoul empty, but curiously, the North Korean army hadn’t made its entry yet. Was Seoul in a political vacuum, then? A vacuum state of ideology? Brother couldn’t follow the political right or left, lost favor with both, floundered in the cracks, and ended up like this. A world with no ideological pressure should have felt euphoric to him, but he was more afraid of that euphoria than of being accused as a commie. As I watched him turn pale, grow anxious and lose his ability to speak by the minute, I thought that euphoria should swiftly brush past like a hallucination; stretching it on day after day was much too long. The water in the well in front of the house was indeed dark and deep. The cylindrical wall of the well was frosted white, and it seemed pure, even holy. The well’s mouth, which had a rope hanging from it, was a cement pipe that came up to my chest. I was often surprised by the clear reflection of myself in the gloomy surface of the water. Did anyone ever imagine a world in which nobody had to take sides? My image in the well undeniably, unflinchingly reflected that I, too, was fearful. Just because I wasn’t stuttering didn’t mean I wasn’t afraid. Our family couldn’t eat a bite until evening. We were all huddled on our bellies under the blankets because Brother wouldn’t let us light a fire since the smoke would escape from the chimney. Fortunately, there was some used coal and cold rice in the kitchen. Before it got dark, Sister-in-law lit the coal in the brazier and boiled the frozen rice that had swelled like plump

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white lilac blossoms. We could feed my young nephews, but we adults barely quenched our thirst with cloudy rice soup. We didn’t feel hungry and the little ones strangely didn’t fuss either. Brother’s stuttering didn’t get better. He seemed to be aware that it was getting worse. He often just stuttered and didn’t finish his sentence. Listening to that was torture. His wife must have felt worse. She and I meandered outside to avoid Brother and eventually squatted on the kitchen floor. “We’re so lucky. There is a well in front of the house and there’s plenty of firewood, too.” She must have been afraid that she also might start to stutter like Brother; she spoke slowly and clearly, as though she were fingering Braille letters. How could we be so unlucky? I could go crazy thinking about the misfortune that followed us around for two, three days until only our family was left in the city. How could she say we were lucky? But I meekly agreed with her. I could feel the presence of misfortune near us, so I thought we had to appear relaxed and bold in front of that monster. The kitchen ceiling was made into an attic so the floor was deep. When we opened the plank door, stones the size of a cornerstone were stacked into stairs so we could step on them as we came down. Rash-like scabs of mud peered through the scraped spots of cement on the wood stove over which two iron cauldrons and one nickel cauldron hung. The iron cauldrons were permanently fixed, but the nickel cauldron was removable. The bottom of the stove was a coal furnace decked with an iron plate that collected the ashes. Underneath the raised wooden floor at the entrance of the kitchen was a pile of powdered coal that had blackened the kitchen floor, but the lids of the iron cauldrons gleamed as if they had been polished with sesame-seed oil. On the raised floor itself, however, a dining tray with a broken leg, a cement-mended jar, a half-broken sieve, an earthen steamer, a gourd bowl, a tin pail, a box and other things were haphazardly scattered about in neglect. We crouched down as if we were miners trapped at the end of a mineshaft relying on each other with no hope until all these things sunk into darkness. “I gave him some sleeping pills after dinner, so he should be able to sleep,” she said to me when she noticed me trying to make out the noises in the room. There were some painkillers among the medicine that we got from Gupabal Hospital. I think that was what she was referring to. “He should feel better after he gets a good night’s sleep,” I comforted her quite cheerfully. “Where do you think the front is right now?” she asked with a sigh. She, too, must have felt

frustrated that we didn’t know for sure whose rule we were under. I wondered what the front line looked like. It was a place where mortal enemies were stationed with their guns fatally aimed at each other. It would be impossible to cross the invisible line without being riddled with bullets. But Brother did it. If he left as a people’s voluntary soldier and returned to the South Korean army region, he must have crossed the line somewhere at least once. Did he think he was invincible? It was only natural that he came back as a total wreck. The leg wound was only symbolic. There was no way to avoid my love for Brother and when this love overlapped with my cold aversion for the dead, I felt an anxious and repulsive shudder. “Wait. I hear something.” pp. 13-18

… Gyoha was an area where two large rivers met. Big and small brooks that flowed to the river drenched the large, fertile fields of this village. We walked slowly along the melted river. The fact that there wasn’t a single place to run to for cover even if a plane suddenly flew by made us walk even more leisurely. We were amazed and felt like we were in a different world when we saw a woman washing clothes on the riverbank and little children playing and poking something into the mudflats. I didn’t even remember the last time I saw children playing outside. Plus, they seemed like normal children, not starving orphans. I made Sister-in-law rest on a hillock and went down to the mudflat. The children were catching crabs. They were toying with the crabs they had strung on a line after battling numerous bites. I was a glutton for crabs ever since I was little. I would lose my mind at the sight of seasoned female crabs and scarf them down in a second. I also loved the fried male crabs. The flesh of the crabs was delicious but the shells that covered their flesh were all so indiscriminately and hideously ugly. Like a true aficionado, every time I ate crabs, I marveled at the intelligence of the primitives who first discovered the soft flesh inside those ugly shells. From afar, it looked like what the children were playing with were king crabs. But as I got closer, I realized they were neither king nor shore crabs. They were smaller than the king crabs but bigger than the shore crabs. They were much uglier than other kinds of crabs with needle-like hair spiking out from their legs. But in my eyes, they looked delicious. Right now wasn’t the season for king crabs but in the olden days when they

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were in season, the royal family ate crabs from this region of Paju. I approached the children and asked what kind of crabs they were. They said they were mud crabs. “Can you eat them?” “Who would eat a crab like this?” “Then why did you catch them?” “So we can play with them. There are tons of them here.” “Do you die if you eat them?” “Why would you die? You don’t eat them because they’re not very tasty.” Of course they would turn up their noses to inferior crabs. After all, this was the home of crabs for kings. Surprisingly, the children didn’t seem even a bit suspicious of new refugees like us. There was quite a large village nearby. There were people walking on the road and working in the fields. It felt like a dream to see a village functioning normally like this. It didn’t look like there were vacant houses but we didn’t want to go anywhere else. One way or another, we wanted to latch closely onto a place with a lot of people. Not only were we envious of the prosperous atmosphere, we could also sense a secret bustling of freedom that was a bit ahead of its time. But on the hill that overlooked this village a North Korean flag flapped in full, ostentatious display. There was also a square, two-story building with a large front yard that looked like an elementary school or a town hall. I had never seen a North Korean flag waving so boldly anywhere in Seoul or Gureongjae, but I didn’t believe for a second that there might be an authority figure in there. The audacious waving of the flag only looked shamelessly deceptive; I didn’t feel at all threatened by it. Except for the flag, there were no other signs of North Korean control—no soldiers, no signs for the National People’s Congress office or the youth league. I think Sister-inlaw liked this village, too. But we were hopelessly trapped in a quagmire where we longed for people and feared them at the same time. We made it a point to decide whether we were going to act as leftists or rightists before we mingled with anyone. We felt nervous otherwise. We were going around peeking in people’s homes when our eyes met a landlady who was hanging laundry in the yard. She was wearing a bright wrapped skirt and a traditional blouse. “Hello, can I help you?” she asked in a familiar Gaeseong dialect. “Hi, we are refugees.” “We are refugees, too. Where are you from? We are from 44

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Songdo. We were on our way to another town but we fell behind the group so we decided to stay here.” “We are from Gaeseong. We fell behind too and got stuck in Tanhyeon-myeon this whole time. They told us that there might be a battle in the mountains and sent us here. Do you have an empty room we can use?” I chattered away and cut Sister-in-law off as though it was my turn to lead. “Oh, I am glad you came! We have lots of empty rooms. What are you waiting for? You can just grab any room, and it’s yours! You don’t have to worry about saving face. Look what kind of world we are living in!” said the woman as she led us to an empty room. It seemed like there were plenty of empty rooms but I didn’t think there were many empty houses. The men had fled and only the women remained behind in the house we chose. She said we were the first refugees in this household because there were many vacant houses around. There was no need for people to stay in a house with an owner. As I had guessed by the Gaeseong dialect, the refugees here were of a different type than we were. I didn’t think it was necessary to tell them we were refugees who defected from our escape to the north. The best thing was to let them know that we were no different from them. It was such a shame that our differences could easily become a reason for hostility. Since it wouldn’t be too long until the world changed again, we decided to make sure everything was well planned and under control. I acted like a refugee from Gaeseong just like I had blunderingly told the woman earlier. We were originally from Gaeseong so that wasn’t difficult. How nice it would have been if all refugees were considered equals. Being a refugee was already an exhausting task but since refugees fleeing north and south had opposite ideologies, it could cause problems. But we were the only ones who were actually anxious about keeping things straight. What the other women in the house really wanted to know was what we had in our bundles. As far as I could tell, they had grown used to exchanging grains for clothes and fabric with other refugees. One young woman prepared her wedding gifts this way without so much as lifting her finger. When they found out that we had more grain than fabric, they looked at us with confused eyes and asked us why we were carrying such a heavy load. This was such a different world. In the evening, the village maidens gathered in the main room around a lamp to work on their embroidery. This looked like a whole new world from the perspective of a runaway who had been chased by war

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and fear of hunger. The maidens embroidering pillowcases and garment covers as their future weddings gifts in a village with no prospective grooms seemed unreal and otherworldly indeed. The next day, I borrowed a feedbag from the landlady and headed out to the riverbank. The bank was more like a mudflat probably because the mouth of the river wasn’t too far away. There was plenty of water but it was still like a lake and it was hard to tell which way it was flowing. When I took my shoes off and went into the mudflat, my body felt numb with the cold. But the warmth of the spring air made it bearable and it even reminded me of that famous line from a poem, “The water of spring filled every pond.” Then I started to catch crabs just like the way the children taught me when we first entered the village. The feedbag wasn’t sufficient to hold the crabs, and some escaped, poking me all over as I carried them home. When I put a little bit of soy sauce and stir-fried them in the thick iron cauldron, there was no better dish in the world. I didn’t even remember the last time I tasted fresh meat. The traces of my battle with these crabs left all over my body whet my appetite even more. Sister-in-law and I ferociously conquered the rough hard shells like starving demons and devoured the inner flesh until our stomachs were stuffed. I would remember this as the

most unforgettably delicious, yet the most pitiful meal I’d have for decades to come. pp. 105-110 Translated by Hannah Kim

Park Wansuh (1931~2011), one of Korea’s most revered writers, debuted at the age of forty, and in a career that spanned almost forty years wrote over one hundred novels and short stories. She won prestigious awards, including the Geumgwan (Gold Crown) Medal, the highest Order of Cultural Merit in Korea. Her books, including The Naked Tree, My Very Last Possession and Other Stories, and Lonesome You, have been translated into more than twelve languages.

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Whisper of Splendor Ten poems by Chong Hyon-jong

Time Blossoming 1

Moonji Publications, 2008, 104 pp. For publication inquiries, please contact us at koreanlitnow@klti.or.kr

Korean Literature Now

Behold the waves of Time It’s morning Already tomorrow morning Sailing on this very night to meet another day my waves are blue, oh so blue their undulation tinges the light of every day; oh the heart, where dawn rises

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Poetry Came Surging and Surging Poetry came surging and surging while I slept; the world is but a window or an egg called earth whose beak is now cracking it open or time is a perpetual pulse of ethereal daylight, poetry as such surging over anyhow the universe with some blue ether the light for which nothing is impervious infinity smiling, formed by that light— the infinity right in my eyes the infinity suffusing my whole body poetry as such still surging over anyhow yet I chose to sleep on instead of arising to set it down… (it may well be that I no longer think it’ll be lost unless put down that the egg will hatch just the same in the bosom of slumber)

O My Hearts This day is so fair dusk is in its own hue sky in its own hue clouds in their own hue and these are the cumulus clouds that I used to see as a child O my heartstwilight-heart sky-heart cloud-heart O heart of its own hue Vol. 32 Summer 2016

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Some Solitude Suffering a brief lonely spell wild flowers you gathered and twined into a bracelet. Boundless was the time spent in silence the round thing, inside and out, full of solitude. You wore it on your wrist or left it on the table and I, in your absence, look upon the floral bracelet lying there. Upon it converges the universe and loneliness pervades without end. In that air I too at once am kindred with solitude— together with the hand that brought it.

A Day A day is ten thousand years a moment veritably an eon. Where does the day end? It never ends. Somewhere the sun rises somewhere it sinks. (Just as love rises then sinks) Heat knows no end. Nor do ashes. The wind’s chest is limitless and so are the river’s sighs. The sky with all its folds the heart with all its chambers, so goes laughter endless as are tears. No way to contain the body heat of the whole of creation infinity unfolds, channels its course full to the brim. The sky with all its folds the heart with all its chambers, a day never ends. 48

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Ode to a Cricket

A Visitor

It is all very well Autumn came but O cricket you’re making a sound underneath my desk, though not quite like a stone step, so intent on and on without a break pouring into my ear your clear music your pure sound O cricket you’re letting flow from my ears a spring that never dries out and the clearest in the world your sound vibrating from the wings on a tiny, 17-millimeter body arousing me from my summer-long sloth and the mind prone to be slothful is a Word which, let us say, the sacred texts of all those so-called religions put together could never be anywhere near; O better singer intent, purposefully intent, pouring your word into my ear until I grasp (in truth, I did upon hearing) and turning my heart into a wellspring of the world’s clearest spring-water O you a better singer

To have a visitor is indeed a matter of gravity. For he brings with him his past present plus his future. Brings with him his whole life. Brings with him his heart vulnerable as can be as may have been cut asunder—a heart whose written account a wind may be able to read; should my heart imitate such wind this visit after all will be a hearty welcome.

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Tang of Energy

O the Dazzle of the Diamond

This morning I’m having a green apple, an early crop, and so rapt over its green fresh flavor my heart at once dances. Energy unbounded in the freshness the tongue savors. The tang of vitality now in my mouth after all the flowing and winding through the labyrinth of those dynamic resources stored in Nature. The heart dances to the wavelength of light O freshness.

- Istanbul Poems Topkapi Palace Museum’s Treasury Section The very moment you stand before the 86-carat diamond, a lightning of lights! All gemstones are virtual suns yet this enormous diamond is literally the sun itself! To let your eyes fixate such luminescence is dangerous, for you will be blind or lose your mind. O the stone so dazzling, you just gasp, not a word, and certainly no creed but a virtual light O the dazzle of the diamond.

Korean Literature Now

POETRY

Whisper of Splendor The splendor of the movement of Time as the day draws to an end in the gloaming nothing wanting so are solitude or seeds one separate universe each (which is splendor of all splendors) could poetry, I wonder, join in that movement. Whatever sweeps over you when you secretly weep for the loneliness of the ailing could that be perhaps poetry. (O splendor of loneliness and tears) Underneath this ground still tracked with all the past shadows of footprints could poetry lay her breast somewhere there. (Splendor of shadows and breast!) The sky’s windy edge still suffused with all the past breaths could poetry breathe somewhere there. (O splendor of breaths and winds)

Chong Hyon-jong worked as a reporter for seven years and subsequently taught at Yonsei Unversity as a professor of Korean Literature. He has received the Pablo Neruda Medal and the Eungwan (Silver Crown) Medal, which is the second highest Order of Cultural Merit in Korea. He has translated the works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda, and Federico García Lorca into Korean.

Translated by Cho Young-Shil

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Seven Years of Darkness by Jeong You Jeong

EunHaeng NaMu Publishing Co. 2011, 523 pp. For publication inquiries, please contact Joseph Lee KL Management: josephlee705@gmail.com

The new manager didn’t show up even after Seung-hwan finished making the depth gauge. He calmed his nerves with beer he bought at the rest area. Only after he downed two cans did he realize what he’d drunk could kill him. He waited until nine, doing push-ups, trying to clear the alcohol from his system. He had to go to the lake that night. He had to enter the lake without the people from the lowlands and the company housing finding out, and seek Atlantis between today and tomorrow, when he was alone and off duty, to complete his mission of taking detailed pictures of the scene below. Once he was on the other side of the fence, Seung-hwan turned on his headlamp. He made it as bright as he could but he still couldn’t see very well. The fog was too heavy. It was the peculiar fog of the lake that came at you like a snowstorm. It began to rain. He had to turn off the lamp when the path ended, as there was a CCTV camera under the first entrance to the lake. Darkness descended. He arrived at the dock ten minutes after he began walking by feeling the fence around the lake. The dock was the one point of entry to the lake that was guarded by a steel door. The door was about as tall as the fence and there was an air gap of about thirty centimeters between the ground and the door. A thick chain was 52

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coiled around the handle and fastened by a padlock. He turned on the lamp at the lowest setting. He needed light to unlock the padlock. Once inside, he slung the chain and the padlock on the inside and locked it, to ward off anyone who might possibly disrupt him. The concrete ramp down to the docks was about twenty meters long. On either side were the banks of the lake, tangled with branches and vines. The floating bridge was at the end of the ramp; tied to it was a boat by the name Joseong, a barge used for regular cleanings by the trash service company for the dam. Seung-hwan put his backpack down in front of the Joseong’s cabin. He took out the fishing line, tied it to the pier, and prepared to enter the water. When he tugged on the pin strap and slid the breathing apparatus in his mouth, his watch said 9:30. He entered feet first. He turned his lamp as bright as he could and descended, carefully unraveling the fishing line so it wouldn’t get tangled. When he passed the first thermocline, he spotted the yellow center dividing line of the two-lane road. A long time ago, when cars, people, and cultivators used the road, this place was called Ssangryeong Peak. The undercurrent was fairly strong but visibility wasn’t bad, considering he was underwater. He wasn’t sure but he could tell there was a long valley beneath the road. Seung-hwan wrapped the fishing line loosely around a tree so the current wouldn’t wash it away and continued his descent. He slid along the undercurrent as though he were skiing downhill. Seung-hwan stopped descending when the water became cold enough to give him a headache. His feet were on the bottom of the valley. It was dark and quiet. The objects were colorless and only the concrete road reflected by his underwater lamp glistened in silver. On the other side of the darkness, the phantom of the vanished old village flickered. He felt conflicted: afraid, excited, and overwhelmed. He swam into the darkness along the road. Welcome to Seryeong Village, the sign engraved on a rock at the entrance of the village greeted him. A bus stop was next to it. He looped the fishing line around the rusted sign. He wrapped it around the bus stop; its glass was gone and only the frame was standing. He wound it around a large tree trunk. Aquatic plants had grown thick on the ruins of a rice mill; fish swam through its walls. A telephone pole lay in the street and the red rusted body of a cultivator was stuck in the link canal. He wound the fishing line around them all and went into the village. A rock wall had crumbled, a shingle dangled on one end, a wall’s steel beam skeleton lay exposed, a doorframe was broken, roof tiles were

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scattered about, fallen trees were rotting away, a stroller was stopped at the nameplate of that one house. He recalled a man missing a wheel, and a well was covered with a steel lid. Was this and a frighteningly pretty girl. what the world would look like after humans went extinct? His It had happened the first weekend night after he moved to Atlantis was desolate but beautiful, melancholic but charming. Seryeong Lake. The manager had gone home to Seoul for a visit With this single encounter, he’d become and Seung-hwan was alone at the house. Around bewitched and given over his entire soul. midnight, at the moment he started to nod off, Seung-hwan flitted around like a fish among Seung-hwan heard a sharp scream. His eyes flew It had happened the roads and bridges and stone walls. He open but everything was quiet. He closed his the first weekend watched an elderly couple enjoying a relaxed eyes again, thinking he’d heard it in his dream. night after evening meal in a lot where only the walls A moment later, he heard a quiet weeping and remained. He sat at the bus stop bench and woke up fully. It was faint but he could tell where he moved to listened to people talking as they waited for the it was coming from—outside his window. He Seryeong Lake. bus. He heard the story of how a young mother picked up his underwater lamp and opened the The manager met her husband as she pushed a stroller. Pieces window. Outside there was a cypress tree whose of his imagination were stored one by one in his trunk was divided in two with each half curved had gone home camera. He felt he could put the pieces together across the other. A girl was hiding in its shadow. to Seoul for a and create an amazing story. He felt he could His light revealed the girl in her underwear, her visit and Seungwrite it really well. arms crossed in front of her chest. She crouched Time underwater flowed as capriciously as into a ball and cried, “Don’t look, don’t look!” her hwan was alone the current. Sometimes it was as slow as a threevoice dripping with a deep shame. at the house. year-old’s tricycle and other times it sped by like Seung-hwan decided to listen to her. He the motorcycles of a biker gang. Atlantis’ time Around midnight, didn’t know what was going on but he thought it was like the hand of a magician. In the brief would be better to pretend not to have noticed. at the moment moment he waved his hand once, an entire hour If she hadn’t fainted right then, he wouldn’t he started to nod vanished into his sleeve. Seung-hwan’s body heat have changed his mind and climbed out of his fell dangerously low and he had little feeling left window. She looked as though she had met a off, Seung-hwan in his skin. His vision shook, and not because of mugger in the woods. Her nose was swollen and heard a sharp the current. The village scene, which should have phlegm rattled in her throat each time she drew scream. looked washed out, became overlaid with vivid in a breath. Her body was covered in whip marks. colors. He was feeling ecstatic, to the degree that Her skin had broken in some places. He wrapped it was getting dangerous—warning signs that he her in a blanket and ran to the main entrance, was starting to feel nitrogen narcosis. carrying her in his arms. He’d remembered there was a clinic in This is the last one, he told himself, as he pointed his camera the commercial area. Figuring out whose kid she was and who’d at the nameplate hanging on a house. That house stood at the beaten her up was a secondary concern. highest point of the village. He pressed the button and the flash The doctor was present even though it was a weekend night. popped over the dark letters of the nameplate. The nameplate The young doctor, whose head was buzzed like that of a soldier, disappeared under the flash and the letters floated up like they took an X-ray and told him that her nose was broken. He asked were embossed. Oh Yeong-je. Seung-hwan something he couldn’t answer. “What happened?” 10:45, 120-bar remaining. Seung-hwan hurried out of “I don’t know. She was in front of my bedroom window and the village. He started to take the air out of the buoyancy just fainted.” compensator and ascend. He didn’t have time to take the same The policeman who arrived after Seung-hwan’s call knew the route out so he ascended directly above the house. He looked girl. The daughter of the owner of the arboretum, her name was down at the village as he ascended at nine meters per minute. Se-ryeong and she was twelve years old. He also knew how to Everything was starting to return to black and white. His mind reach her father; he took out his cell and made a call. Soon, a man

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wearing a navy suit and shiny shoes appeared. “You must not be coming from home,” the policeman observed. “I got your call on my way home,” the man said, not bothering to glance at his daughter. He stood as though he meant to block the door and looked at Seung-hwan. His dark pupils were wide open. It was as though his eyes were all pupils, no whites. “Who are you?” Seung-hwan coughed. “I live in 102.” “Since when? I’ve never seen you.” Seung-hwan could feel his breath getting shallow, which was what happened when he became nervous. It was because he’d glimpsed something unpleasant in the man’s eyes, something people usually called a challenge. “It’s been a couple of days,” he said slowly, to regulate his breathing. “I didn’t know she’s your daughter.” “Tell me why you brought my daughter here.” “I want to ask you something too. Why did your daughter faint outside my window?” The man addressed the doctor. “Is there evidence of assault?” The doctor repeated what he’d told Seung-hwan. “Her nose is broken. There are abrasions that look like whip marks…” “Is that all you can see? What I see is my daughter lying naked in the clinic, and this man who supposedly brought her here in the middle of the night.” Seung-hwan stared at the man. His words felt like a punch. The doctor clacked the chart closed, displeasure spreading across his round face. “So doctor,” the man continued unpleasantly. “Are you saying you don’t see the police who’s here because of a report?” The policeman was looking down at the girl. Se-ryeong was now awake, glancing sideways at her father. The man realized that she was listening. “What did this man do to you?” he asked, pointing at Seung-hwan. “Did he hit you? Did he touch you?” Seung-hwan drew in a breath. Se-ryeong whispered, “No.” The policeman took over. “So how did you get hurt?” Se-ryeong’s gaze scanned over the policeman and the doctor and paused at Seung-hwan before returning to the policeman. She seemed to be trying her best not to meet her dad’s gaze. Her large cat-like eyes glistened with moisture. It looked like tears but it wasn’t. Seung-hwan would bet an entire month’s worth of his salary that it was fear. “Mr. An Seung-hwan, did you say? Please step outside for a 54

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moment,” the policeman said. Seung-hwan couldn’t do that. Step out? The girl had his life dangling between her small teeth. “You too, Director Oh.” The man didn’t move, his gaze fixed on his daughter. “Didn’t you hear me?” the policeman pressed. The man and Seung-hwan glanced at each other before turning toward the door at the same time. “Don’t go far. I’ll just be a minute,” the policeman said. The man sat in a chair outside the doors. He leaned on the armrest, threw his head back, and looked down over his cheekbones at Seung-hwan without expression. His black, dilated pupils, his tense, coiled shoulders—the man looked like a wild animal about to pounce. Seung-hwan sat down across from him. He tried his best to look calm. He tried to relax and maintain a poker face. It was hard. All rational thought flew out of his head. Rage, humiliation, and nervousness filled its spot. His breathing became rougher and rougher. He craved a cigarette but couldn’t leave because he couldn’t tell what these people would do in his absence. There was no sound coming from the examination room. Twenty minutes slogged by as though they were twenty hours. Seung-hwan was about to pass out by the time the policeman came out. “She says she was playing tag with a cat she met in the forest and crashed into a tree,” the policeman reported, standing between the two men. “So she tried to go home but she got confused with the house next door because it was dark. She felt dizzy because her nose was bleeding and she fainted. She wanted me to tell her dad that she’s grateful to the next-door neighbor who brought her to the clinic even though he doesn’t know her, and that he never hit or touched her.” Seung-hwan stood up. Rage was coursing down his throat like hot water. “So you’re saying that a twelve-year-old girl was playing tag with a cat? In the middle of the night? In her underwear? You actually believe that?” “What did she say the cat’s name was?” the policeman muttered to himself. “Anyway, she said it was his favorite game.” “How did she explain the lash marks on her body? Her shoulder is all cut up.” “She said the cat scratched her. I guess they played pretty rough. Anyway, the doctor says he can’t determine whether there was sexual assault, and according to the X-rays her nose is definitely broken.” The girl’s father stood up. “So are you saying that we need to

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go to a gynecologist to determine that?” “If it were me, I’d take her to an ear nose and throat doctor first. The doctor says that pretty nose is broken. It’s not too late to pursue an official investigation after that.” The girl’s father went inside and carried her out wrapped in a blanket. He didn’t say anything. He looked at Seung-hwan as though he were pummeling him with his gaze and left. The policeman grabbed Seung-hwan’s elbow. “Come with me to the station.” Seung-hwan shook him off. This was unfair treatment. He didn’t know anything about the law, but he knew enough that bringing an injured child to a clinic wasn’t something that required a visit to the police station. And the child had stated his innocence. “Come with me. Since you reported this, you should file an official report.” The policeman strode out of the clinic. Seunghwan followed him to the station and wrote down the events of the night. He suppressed his urge to throw the pen; his fingers cramped. His head was whirring busily as he tried to understand the puzzling words and actions of the girl, her socalled father, and the policeman. Why was she lying? Why was her father trying to make him out to be the criminal? Why was the policeman uninterested in getting the person who abused her? The actions of the three shared a silent premise that he and the doctor weren’t privy to. They knew who the perpetrator of the violence was. The girl’s father hadn’t gotten the call on his way home, and the policeman seemed to know this. Seung-hwan mulled over the situation in his head. For some reason, Se-ryeong was beaten in the nude by her father. She ran away but she was unable to do anything. She was too scared to go into the forest, and she couldn’t go to the main road because she was naked, so she hid under the tree near her neighbor’s window. Her father looked around for her. At that moment, the nosy neighbor butted in. The father watched as the neighbor brought his daughter into the house and then took off running toward the clinic. A little later, he received a call from the police. The policeman knew that the girl was beaten on a regular basis and that the neighbor was caught in a dicey situation. But he still pretended not to know and defused the situation. To Seung-hwan, the truth was simple. The girl’s father used him as a smokescreen to hide the assault on his daughter. But that didn’t make any sense. Korea wasn’t the kind of society where they sent the parents to prison because they hit their child. The parents’ reputation might suffer a little, but that was

about all. The dad’s defense went overboard compared to the penalty. It was as though he’d swung a chain saw to remove some cobwebs. It was as overreaching as it was risky, since he could be liable of making a false accusation. Why would he do that? Park, who was well informed on the history of the area, gave him a clue. The man was in the middle of divorce proceedings and a custody battle was brewing. Oh wasn’t a “director” due to his status as the owner of the arboretum. He was a dentist by trade and he had a medical building in S city that housed eleven private practices, including his own dental practice. Not only that, he was the only son of a large landowner who lorded over the entire Seryeong River area, amounting to 100 li before the dam was built, and he owned the Seryeong fields on which the people of the lowlands depended for their livelihoods. Seung-hwan could understand the policeman’s attitude. Director Oh versus a dam security guard; a native versus an outsider. In both power and fame, there was a marked difference. He could read Director Oh’s message, too: Stay out of my family life. Even as August came to a close, no investigation was initiated at the police headquarters. Seung-hwan heard Se-ryeong’s screams a few more times. He also heard her desperately cry, “Dad!” through her open window. On that house, on the nameplate of 101, was that name. Oh Yeong-je. Translated by Chi-Young Kim

Jeong You Jeong’s Seven Years of Darkness sold more than 400,000 copies in Korea alone, and its German edition was ranked eight on the “Best Crime Fic tion of December 2015” list by the German weekly Zeit. Rights to her books have been sold in Germany, France, China, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Visit koreanliteraturenow.com to watch a trailer of this book.

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

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The Wizard Bakery by Gu Byeong-mo

Changbi Publishers, 2009, 252 pp. For publication inquiries, please contact us at koreanlitnow@klti.or.kr

Provided he kept his mouth shut, people saw a man of intellect, an artisan or an expert, unpretentious yet with a certain mystery. They saw his silly paper hat and the ponytail peeking out beneath it, his face the color of finely sifted baking powder, his meticulous, graceful, efficient gestures. A baker with talent enough to keep his shop running on word-of-mouth alone without joining a franchise. I’d always seen him that way until one day, I pointed a pair of tongs at a piece of pastry that sort of resembled a streuseltopped bun but with some questionable modifications, and asked what was in it. “Oats, rye and—” the girl behind the counter started to explain, when a voice interrupted her. “Liver. Dried.” I looked up and saw the baker standing in the kitchen doorway, just beyond the girl’s stiffening shoulders. “Finely ground liver of a newborn baby. Three parts liver, seven parts wheat flour.” The tongs slipped out of my hand. Clank! The metal scraped the floor. I didn’t really believe he had put liver, dried or raw, in the bun. And if it did contain liver, it would have to be from a pig, and not a newborn. (Refrain from imagining that unsettling taste.) But why was he joking about ingredients? It would only 56

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be a matter of time before the rumor would spread that the neighborhood baker was a little cuckoo. The Apartment Complex Women’s Association, with all their concern about falling real estate values, might even join forces to drive him out. The girl swatted him on the stomach with the back of her hand and told him to stop kidding around. Of course, he was kidding. As I sighed and bent down to pick up the tongs, I spotted wafer cookies on the next shelf. He saw what I was looking at. “Titi bird shit,” he said. “Spread ever so thinly between two wafers. Glazed with a syrup made from marinated raven eyeballs. They strike a delicate balance between sweet, bitter, and sour, rather like Ethiopian coffee…” “Are you trying to drive all of our customers away?” The girl jabbed him in the side. Why was he teasing me with such lame jokes? Just to see how far he would go, I pointed at something that looked like jelly candies. “Pack of three cat tongues. Persian, Siamese, Abyssinian.” I slammed the tongs on the countertop with a loud clank. The girl took them in the back to wash them, while the baker adjusted his hat and laughed. “I’m not joking. I am telling you the truth because a kid like you would understand.” Who are you calling a kid? I looked around the bakery. The pink and yellow-checkered wallpaper looked cozy. Hanging crookedly on the wall was one of those crudely designed calendars, the kind they hand out for free at banks or churches every year. The display case, where the pastry lay in straight rows and columns, was so clean there wasn’t a single handprint in sight, and the handle gleamed gold under the overhead lamps. But overall, there was nothing fancy about the place, and in fact, it was closer to run down. Nevertheless, there were no cracks in the walls, and no streams of unidentifiable liquid trickling down the walls and stinking up the place or giving it a creepy air. It was more or less sanitary. Just your average clean and humble neighborhood bakery. The baker looked normal, too. No matter how hard I looked, there was nothing creepy about him at all, despite the things he’d said. Stuttering, I asked him if there was anything he could recommend for a normal person to eat, and grabbed a bag of plain rolls, no sausages or cheese or anything else in it, and set it on the counter. Surely there was nothing in them besides the basic ingredients, like flour, eggs, and milk. I tried to act casual,

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but whether he had been joking or not, it wasn’t easy after hearing him recite those atrocious ingredients. But then, as he passed the girl on his way into the kitchen, the baker offered, unsolicited, “Instead of flour, I collected Rapunzel’s dandruff…” I lifted my hand, stopping him before the girl could interject, and put 2,500 won in change on the counter. Assessment complete: the baker is nuts. I opened the door and stepped outside. Suddenly, I felt as though the dingy neighborhood bakery was in the middle of a dark forest, the kind of forest that appeared in fairytales: “Once upon a time, there was wizard who lived in a deep, dark forest, and he made different pastries every single day. Each time a breeze passed through the forest, the leaves would rustle, carrying the scent of those pastries out, out, out, to the edge of the woods.” The moment I got home, I would have to tell someone about the place and ask if someone shouldn’t do something about the crazy man in the bakery located on the first floor of the third

building from the bus stop, you know, if only for the sake of the neighborhood children… But who on earth would I tell? Returning home and opening the front door, I would confirm that no one was there to listen to me. Wasn’t that why I bought the rolls on my way home in the first place? So I could take a mouthful of bread and a sip of milk, chew on the sentiments of a day that was neither too dry nor too soggy, then store them in an airtight container and pack them away somewhere deep inside? pp. 9–13

… They are coming after me. The spiral cleats on the bottoms of my sneakers claw at the ground, rapidly, savagely. The smell of rubber burning from the friction hits me in the face. The shrieks, the cries, and the fury

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that cling so tenaciously to the cleats are kicked off in the wind. As I race down the street, I realize I have nowhere to go. I could spend the night at an Internet cafe or something, but it all happened so quickly that I ran out without grabbing anything. The cellphone I almost never use (since I don’t speak) is still in the bag next to my desk. Not that having the phone on me would make any difference now. Do I have any “friends” I can call? Who would have the patience to invite me in with open arms in spite of my stutter? There’s my maternal aunt and grandmother, but I haven’t heard from them in six years. I don’t know if they are alive or dead, let alone where they live. How much longer and farther can I run? I am about to run out of ideas when I see the bakery. I gasp for air. I spot the baker past the anonymous handprints stamped on the display window. I have become a regular at the bakery for reasons beyond my control, but if it wasn’t for my speech impediment, I would ask him: Why is your bakery open twenty-four hours? Does anyone ever come looking for bread this late at night? He does seem busy all the time, but he can’t be immune to the stir of emotions, between the hours. Isn’t he lonely working there day after day, all by himself? More importantly, when does he sleep? But thanks to his twenty-four-hour bakery, I now have a place to seek refuge. I push the door open. The store is warm from the heat of the freshly baked goods. He looks at me with his bright, brown eyes. He doesn’t have his hat on. He’s wearing his regular clothes, not his usual white baker’s uniform. Is the bakery closed for the day? Hurried and desperate, the words rush out all at once. “Hide me,” I say without a hint of a stutter. They will never suspect I’ve hidden in a bakery just a few hundred meters from the apartment complex instead of running as far as I can. He doesn’t ask questions, or speak, or nod. He simply opens the door to the kitchen where the sweet smell of chocolate still hangs in the air. He says nothing, but his broad shoulders usher me in. The kitchen is identical to any other that I have ever glimpsed from across the counter at other bakeries. There are two enormous ovens. He opens the door to the slightly larger oven, pulls out the racks, and looks at me. In there? All of a sudden, I am reminded of the scene where the evil witch falls into the oven 58

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and is burned alive—the witch who bided her time fattening Hansel up, but fell headfirst into the woodstove thanks to Gretel’s cunning. I am momentarily confused as to who should be pushing whom into the oven. But there is no time for musings. I put one foot into the stillwarm oven. Why isn’t he telling me to take my shoes off first, if this oven is for baking? As he gestures with his chin to get in, I say, “O-o-o-kay, b-b-but d-d-don’t t-t-turn the o-o-oven on.” pp. 18–21

… And so the tables turned and turned again. Muhee consistently identified the English teacher as the offender three or four times in a row, but by the time the prosecutor repeated his question for the seventh time, her behavior became erratic as she began to claim she couldn’t remember, refused to pay attention, or burst into tears, and so put Mrs. Bae in an awkward position. “Look. The current legal system in Korea requires physical evidence to prosecute someone. It’s realistically difficult to take a child’s testimony as evidence. They say that the very first testimony made in a calm environment in the presence of a psychiatrist and a child psychologist should count as evidence, but that works only in theory. They should try applying that in the field themselves. That’s right. You’re a teacher, aren’t you? So you know how often children lie without knowing what they’re doing. They don’t mean any harm, do they? Children are like ostriches with their heads in the sand…75 percent of all child sex offenders are someone the child knows. Of the 75 percent, 38 are someone from the neighborhood, 19 are relatives, 17 are from educational institutions… So stop picking on one person and cast the net wide.” And then, one night, when the gloom and disquiet of the household had reached its height following these events, it happened. Father had been good about getting home from work on time of late, but it did nothing to alleviate the sinister atmosphere in the house. On top of that, the English teacher had a change of heart when Muhee changed her testimony, and he pressed charges against the lot of them for defamation. Mrs. Bae was served a subpoena from the prosecutor’s office. That night, Mrs. Bae

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grabbed Muhee by the hair and swung her about, whipping her with a wire coat hanger as Muhee begged for her life. “Say it! Say it! Who did it? If it wasn’t that bastard, who was it? You bitch, you made me look like an idiot by going after the wrong person and now I look like an ass! You don’t deserve to live, you bitch! Which asshole was it? Tell the truth!” She was pummeling her in my presence as if she wanted me to play audience. I felt no enmity toward Muhee, but I didn’t feel chivalrous enough to save her either, so I didn’t try to stop Mrs. Bae. I had learned from experience that if I butted in, she would shove me aside with some minor insult and hit Muhee even harder. And then it happened. I stood there, my mind drawing a blank as I tried to understand the meaning of Muhee’s arm rising slowly to a ninety degree angle, her finger pointing at my face. Mrs. Bae’s dry palm flew at me in slow motion and scratched my cheekbone. The back of my head hit the wall as she seized me by the collar and shoved me up against it. Only then did I understand what was happening to me. I heard a vein pop at impact, sending a tingling, warm sensation through my head. It’s not true! No! Why would I? I have no way of knowing if these cries and protestations actually burst out of me. The shower of punches and slaps that followed immediately obscured my senses and perception. I wasn’t small or weak. I now reached Father’s shoulder, had the strength to stand up against her blows, and could have returned the attack and then some, but I didn’t. Father was watching. I couldn’t do that to Father’s wife. I wasn’t intending to lessen the impact of her fists, but I wound up kneeling with my face to the floor. Her slippered foot came down over my neck and my back. Feeling a warm stream of liquid flowing from the corner of my mouth down to the chin, I raised my head to look at Father. The look on his face suggested that he didn’t really believe Muhee’s accusation, but didn’t have sense or sympathy enough to protect me. Overall, his expression was full of ambivalence. You know it wasn’t me, right? You believe I wouldn’t do such a thing, right? I don’t know if these thoughts turned into words and made their way out of my body, or if they just echoed in my head. What’s clear, however, is that the flushed Mrs. Bae finally stopped kicking to rush past Father and pick up the phone. “Hello? Police? I would like to report an underage criminal.” At that moment, something snapped inside me. It was no

time for lofty beliefs that I would be released soon even if I were arrested because the accusation was untrue and there was no evidence. Father didn’t stop Mrs. Bae from picking up the phone, so how could I expect an idyllic fairytale ending of forgiveness and reconciliation in this house? Hope for the restoration of everyday peace? We were caught in a storm, and I was the prisoner of war or foreigner they were throwing overboard to reduce the weight of the vessel. The moment this occurred to me, I pushed Mrs. Bae, who was off the phone and strangling me again. Mrs. Bae fell over and knocked Father over as well. Leaving the two to struggle like a pair of overturned turtles, I opened the front door. Before I dashed out of there, I briefly made eye contact with Muhee who was standing by the bedroom door, her nose still bleeding. I didn’t have time to dawdle, but I was able to give her a slight nod to say, It’s not your fault. I didn’t have to ask to know that she had to point at someone to save herself, and that someone just happened to be me. She simply thought that burying her head in the sand would make her invisible, too. I heard Mrs. Bae screaming behind me, “Stop him!” and Father shuffling to pick himself up. They’re coming after me. pp. 51–55 Translated by Jamie Chang

The French editions of Gu Byeong-mo’s Greatest Fish (Fils de l’eau) and The Wizard Bakery (Les Petits Pains de la pleine lune) were published by Philippe Picquier. The Wizard Bakery was also published in Taiwan and Mexico, and became a bestseller in Mexico. Gu has won the Changbi Prize for Young Adult Fiction, the Today’s Writer Award, and the Hwang Sun-Won Rising Writer Award.

Visit koreanliteraturenow.com to watch a trailer of this book.

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

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The Korean Table by Korean Cuisine and Dining Production Team, KBS

Seedpaper, 2011, 344 pp. For publication inquiries, please contact us at koreanlitnow@klti.or.kr

Buddhist Temple Cuisine: A table set with nature and eaten with the soul We have changed many things in keeping with the times. As we aspire to an increasingly fast-paced and convenient way of life, including one-minute rice and three-minute soups, it is probably no wonder that our diet and recipes should change as well. But there is a place where we can fully appreciate the flavor and allure of the traditional Korean table and its respect for the natural rhythm of time. It is the Buddhist temple. In Buddhist cuisine, every step entails patience and tolerance for painstaking work, with no shortcuts. A diet based solely on local, seasonal vegetables is sure to be healthy. Below we immerse ourselves in the beautiful flavors and charm of Buddhist temple cuisine. The roots At Jogyesa Temple, on the Buddha’s birthday, all gathered pray with earnest fervor when the ceremony begins in a solemn ambience. The temple treats the visitors to a meal as a sign of gratitude, sharing a flavor profile that has long been maintained as a Korean tradition in isolated sanctuaries. The reason for the appeal of Buddhist temple cuisine is its taste, which resembles the original Korean table. 60

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The beginning of temple cuisine dates back to the introduction of Buddhism in the Three Kingdoms era. With the exposure to Buddhist culture, religious precepts that forbade killing of animals and carnivorous diets had an impact on eating habits. In the subsequent eras of Unified Silla and the Goryeo dynasty, Buddhism was designated as the state religion, giving rise to the development of a vegetarian diet in due course. Buddhism spread among the upper class under royal patronage and took on an aristocratic and patriotic bent. The cuisine was also influenced by that trend. According to Buddhist dictates that prohibited killing, animal products were ruled out, and a wide range of dishes using vegetables were created instead. Moreover, the popularity of the Buddhist ritual of oblatory tea prompted a tea-drinking boom, and pan-fried or deep-fried confectionary made from kneaded rice or wheat dough with honey, oil, and wine caught on as an accompaniment to tea. Buddhism started to decline during the Joseon dynasty. Crackdowns began in earnest when the State Council reported on the corrupt practices of Buddhist clergy and advised that their land and slaves be confiscated; those recommendations were acted upon by King Taejong. In the end, the larger temples moved deeper into the mountains, and as they did, monks ate more and more of the wild greens that they found there. Monks who had been unfamiliar with wild flora garnered valuable knowledge from the diet of animals, and used these plants both as cooking and medicinal ingredients. Praying for the salvation of hungry ghosts In the sanctum at three in the morning, when the sound of the officiating monk’s wooden bell awakens all that was asleep, the remote temple begins its day with a solemn predawn service that exudes unwavering piety and faith. After the service, the kitchen prepares breakfast. The crew has to cook a meal for about two hundred people. But the reason they do not look at all frenzied is because each step—steaming the rice, making the soup, and slicing the kimchi—is part of temple discipline. As a result, the preparation of breakfast is impeccably pious. Instead of using the Five Spices—garlic, scallions, Korean wild chives, garlic chives, and Japanese jacinth—the disciples season the dishes with their souls. In Buddhism, meals are referred to as pujana. Eaters are to realize that they are partaking of food offered respectfully to the Buddha and not to lose sight of that privilege. Monks dressed in robes and long jackets sit up straight behind alms bowls. Pujana

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begins by laying out the bowls carefully. These bowls are used by Buddhists to portion out food, with each serving to include rice, soup, side dishes, and water for rinsing the bowls at the conclusion of the meal. The meal does not begin as soon as the bowls have been laid out: when everyone has unstacked their bowls and the presiding monk shakes his bamboo broom once, those gathered put their hands together in unison and recite ten prayers. These invocations praise the immeasurable good deeds of the Triple Gem—the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha—and are reminders of their grace. Only after practitioners have recited the prayers with a grateful heart do they take into their bowls the exact amount of food that they will consume. With the food in front of them, they chant hymns, thinking of the Five Meditations, which embody the Buddhist attitude toward food. Plainly put, they thank nature and those who have toiled to grow each grain of rice, ponder whether they are virtuous enough for such food, drive away greedy thoughts from their minds, and finally resolve to eat this food with gratitude, like medicine that will enable them to devote themselves to their training. The act of eating is not simply to sate their hunger but rather to feed the pretas, the invisible ghosts or starved masses. After finishing their meal, practitioners rinse their spoons, chopsticks, and bowls, and pour the remaining water into the wastewater bucket. Any remaining food residue must be swallowed and only clean water poured out. Before carrying the bucket outside, the Buddhist scripture on the ceiling is reflected in the water—this is a gesture expressing a wish for the salvation of hungry ghosts. After the hour-long pujana, the monks remain sitting with the bowls in front of them as they did at the start of the meal. It is impressive and breathtaking to behold the supplicants cleaning out their bowls reverently and ending the meal by rinsing the bowls and drinking the water in silence. Pujana is the very reason that a definition of temple cuisine as one that excludes meat or the Five Spices seems to fall short. Unmunsa Temple: “no labor, no food” Unmunsa is nestled like the heart of a lotus blossom among the petals of Hogeosan, Gajisan, and Biseulsan Mountains. This temple, founded under King Jinheung of Silla (reigned 540–576), is also a Buddhist college where some two hundred nuns study. It is also famous for its strict adherence to the rule: “No labor, no food.” So the students perform ullyeok on a daily basis during

Lotus lanterns

Even wild flowers can become an ingredient in temple cuisine

those hours that they do not devote to their studies. Ullyeok refers to collective physical labor performed by all; for example, picking wild vegetables is a form of ullyeok. Its alternative spelling, with the Chinese characters for “cloud” (雲) and “labor” (力), highlights the collective effort of people huddled like clouds. The nuns harvest the many gifts of nature from around the temple through this activity. Harvesting and washing mugwort Because the community of Unmunsa performs ullyeok so often, three meals a day is not enough. The nuns need snacks. Spring Japanese mugwort, which is rich in minerals, is medicine. The students harvest mugwort when it is in season, boil it, and store it in the freezer. This ensures a year-round supply of fragrant mugwort. The harvested mugwort is washed carefully and rinsed in running water so as not to harm any living thing that might be hiding in it. This is a very different mindset from that of secular folk who wash vegetables in running water out of fear of pesticides. The cauldron where they have blanched the mugwort cannot be lifted up and drained, so cold water is poured

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EXCERPTS

in as the hot water is scooped out. Buddhists consider throwing out hot water as an act of killing, since the scalding water may traumatize germs and microbes. They only dispose of hot water after added cold water has cooled it enough that it would not damage anything living. Temple cuisine and pickling Temple cuisine is true to the fundamentals of nature. Time changes many things, but it has not altered the basics of temple cuisine, which gathers its ingredients in the garden of nature. There the cooks can find a veritable cornucopia of wild plants, including the young shoots of prickly castor oil trees that alleviate the symptoms of stroke and diabetes, the rootstalks of 62

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bonnet bellflowers and balloon flowers, Fischer’s leopard plant, cham-namul, and scented Solomon’s seal. Most Koreans believe that scented Solomon’s seal is only good for tea, but its leaves can also be pickled. Pickled side dishes are an important fixture on the Korean table, and temple cuisine boasts a particularly vast inventory of them. Vegetarianism developed with the introduction of Buddhism, and fermented foods such as soybean paste, soy sauce, and gochujang were conceived as a way to better enjoy vegetable dishes that are less appealing than meat or seafood dishes. In the same vein, monks also prepare kimchi and other pickled side dishes. Congregants exposed to these creations adopted them for their table, and reinvented side dishes, kimchi, and fermented foods. Pickling,

NONFICTION

which evolved in step with fermented foods, is just as laborintensive as other preserved preparations. Gochujang-based side dishes must use cultivated vegetables and wild greens that have been drained thoroughly to prevent the juice or the vegetables from spoiling. When making soy sauce pickles, the base is brewed from mushrooms, kelp, chili peppers, and ginger, and then chilled. Traditional Korean soy sauce is added to create a suitably salty, refreshing, and rounded taste. It is far from easy for monks, who should concentrate on their discipline, to forage ingredients for every meal. So the main reason for the development of pickling in temple cuisine has to do with the fact that wild plants that abound in forests or plains in spring or late spring were pickled using homemade fermented preparations so that the clergy could devote themselves to their training without worrying about provisions all year. Pickled dishes taste better the longer they age, and as the product of a slow, earthy, and challenging process, they flaunt a flavor that calls to mind the poise of an enlightened monk. Dawn at Seonamsa Temple The mountain temple begins its day as the sound of the large bell shatters the calm. The ascetics who have embarked on their training to become monks begin their days in the kitchen. Most of their duties involve kitchen work. There is a precise division of labor: some make dainty side dishes, some prepare soup, some cook rice, and so on. These job descriptions are intended to encourage focused training that dedicates all thoughts to one task. Once the meal is ready, trainees carry the food to the main hall in unison. The monks take over from there. The trainees put out the fire in the kitchen and observe the monks with anticipation. Seonamsa Temple, located at the foot of Jog yesan Mountain, has a thousand-year history. It is famous for its strict disciplining of novices, and this means that it remains true to its roots. Novices are prospective monks, charged with day-today housekeeping in the temple. One of their duties is to tend the vegetable garden. Tilling the soil and growing vegetables themselves, thereby learning the value of ingredients, is part of their training. When the plots yield nothing, they cook what they find in the forests and fields. The recipes are passed on from one trainee to the next, who learn the seasonal ingredients and recipes, as well as the properties of each ingredient. For instance, part of the cumulative knowledge is a recipe for coriander salad, which clears the head on a languorous spring day. This process

Pickling helps monks with their training

A modest portion of food is put into each bowl

safeguards temple cuisine and provides training for the novices. It is analogous to making kimchi from young summer radish leaves, which release moisture and dispense with the need to add extra water. If you seek to be free of all torment, learn to be satisfied. Those who know how to be content are always rich, merry, and at peace. Such a person is at ease and joyous in his heart even if he should sleep on bare ground. But those who do not know how to be content are unhappy even if they should find themselves in heaven. Those who do not know contentment may be rich on the outside but are in fact poor, and those who know contentment may appear poor but are in fact rich. Testament Sutra Translated by Ji-yung Kim

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

MUSINGS

Some Morning-After Translation Thoughts T

his is not the column I was intending to write. Over the last few days I’ve jotted down some notes for this piece and it was going to be all about promoting literature in translation here in the UK (the challenges and benefits), about increasing market share, perhaps mentioning some recent particular successes, and so on. I was going to comment on the impressive international performance of Korean literature in the past couple of years and speculate on some of the causes, maybe consider some of the lessons. But it’s seven in the morning, and I was up most of the night watching the television coverage of our European Union referendum, and as the results come in it’s becoming terrifyingly clear that our voters have made what I believe is a profoundly irresponsible choice, and so, well, it turns out there are more important things that need talking about. The referendum asked us a simple question: Do we remain a member of the European Union or do we leave? But behind that question, it was really about many different things. Depending on whom you ask, the votes were cast over immigration, democratic rights, disenfranchisement, anti-establishment anger, racism, isolationism, nationalism, patriotism, a massive collapse of trust, austerity, control. Now, you don’t need to know what I personally think it was about, that doesn’t matter here; I’ll just say I was firmly, vehemently in the “Remain” camp, though I do understand the discontent that led many to vote the other way. I think the “Leave” voters made a calamitously wrong choice, but yes, I understand. Judging by my Facebook timeline and my Twitter feed, however, one would have guessed “Remain” would win by a landslide. Quite possibly even the full unanimous 100%. In one sense that’s not surprising: my friends tend to be educated, internationalist, financially comfortable, and metropolitan, 64

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people who feel relatively more enfranchised than the average and who have suffered less than most from the sharpest edges of the status quo, so they largely fit the demographics that have tended to vote that way. But there’s something more than that: my friends are translators, writers, publishers, people who promote literature and diversity and free speech. And even those who aren’t, well, they’re all readers. So what? In the column that I’m not writing for you, I would have talked about how great it is that Korean literature is becoming a presence in the UK market, and what we can learn from how that has come to be so. I would have included praise for the fine support of LTI Korea, of course, who have been instrumental in making it happen; I would have talked about the individual translators whose advocacy work (and translation work, of course) has allowed the opening-up of this new market to Korean writers using an influence that really can’t be overestimated; and I would probably also have said something about the UK market generally and its long-standing resistance to translation which seems to be dissipating, at last, as we publish more books in translation than ever, attract more attention, sell more copies. These things are important, and I do talk about them all the time. But watching my friends respond to today’s catastrophic news reminds me that we too often take for granted why translating literature is important. We talk about what’s being published and what’s being read, and assume we all agree it’s a good thing when a book crosses a language and a border, but we don’t talk about why. Is it really so obvious? To everyone? I’ve only spent four days in Korea in my whole life, and those four days were for a conference so I barely escaped my hotel. Korea is the other side of the world for me, a culture that should seem as entirely unintelligible as its strange and beautiful language.

And yet. In the last couple of years I’ve come to know the work of half a dozen Korean novelists (three years ago I couldn’t have named one); and in so doing, I’ve imaginatively inhabited dozens of varied Korean lives. Again and again I’ve discovered how different each of these people is from me, and I’ve been able to engage with them at all because of the ways in which we are also fundamentally the same. Reading fiction requires imagination, and imagination is what enables empathy. And empathy is… well, any attempt at empathy was in short supply in yesterday’s referendum. Empathy makes racism more difficult, it makes mean-spirited negligence more difficult, it makes selfishness more difficult. Empathy insists upon compassion. Recent studies have shown that reading fiction strengthens empathy, theory of mind; and I’d contend that we should want a vast diversity of books traveling the world because the more pluralism you find in the fiction available, the wider the horizons, the more profoundly effective that empathy work-out can hope to be. (Yesterday’s referendum was no great celebration of pluralism, either.) Making it possible for my readers to read your writers and vice versa—that possessive “my” and “your” is sadly revealing, too— isn’t just important because of the exporting of cultural products is a potentially valuable commercial activity; and it isn’t even just important for reasons of soft power. Translating books from there and bringing them here, those are also positive, optimistic, generous things to do. Yesterday’s referendum decision had been contested fearfully, negatively, ungenerously. There was much discussion about the country’s net contribution to the EU: How do we make sure we get out more than we put in? How do we make “them” bear more costs so we need only bear fewer costs ourselves? In three months of campaigning I heard not one person making the altruistic case for contributing, for its own sake and not for a greater net return. Arguing that when others need our help, we should help them, because doing good is better than not doing good. And no, I’m not hopelessly naïve, and of course I didn’t truly expect anyone to make this argument in a political campaign, but still, empathy… We— both politicians and electorate— could do with more empathy than was on display in the language of the last few months. Those of us who translate and write, and who encourage and support translation, those of us who teach others to translate and write and read, those of us who campaign for reading and those of

us who just read—we are all in the empathy business. And just look at the world around us! Getting people to broaden their imaginative horizons has never been more important. If you, who are reading this, are someone who does one of those things, thank you. If they’re anything like me, I suspect most English readers will read translated Korean fiction in the same way as their own, every bit as demandingly, without making allowances. That is, they expect to be seduced by a voice, turned on by a character, excited by a plot, they expect to be surprised into surrendering to the rhythm and muscle and taste of the (translated) language and lose themselves pleasurably in it. (These are all reasons why the recent Korean Man Booker International Prize winner is such a good standard-bearer as literary translations go.) And retailers promote translated fiction accordingly. They don’t try to tell readers foreign books are “good for you,” that they’re healthy, that they’ll encourage you to understand people unlike you and discover the ways they are like you, too, that they’ll improve your powers of empathy, your curiosity… We don’t say those things because they’d be a terrible marketing strategy, but they are nonetheless true. It’s worth occasionally reminding ourselves of the power we have, all of us whose job is to seduce readers into thinking themselves into other people. As a translator I have made it possible for hundreds of thousands of English readers to spend some time in the heads of men, women, and children (and indeed some animals) in Angola or Spain, in the present or hundreds of years in the past or even the future, in Quebec and Brazil, in Guatemala and France, in Portugal, Spain, and Argentina. That experience we’re enabling in our readers is slowly, positively, transformative. Maybe what we’ve been doing isn’t enough to win a referendum, but it’s not nothing. We just need to keep doing it. The event programmer at London’s biggest bookshop has invited those of us who work with European literature to gather in the shop this afternoon for a post-referendum drink. A sort of wake, if you like. It’s a thoughtful idea, to give us all an opportunity to be together to feel sad at the loss for a moment, for sure, but also crucially to remind each other why we do what we do, and why it’s needed more than ever. And then, when we’ve revived and remembered the power of that essential “why”— the empathy-building, the horizon-broadening—we will ready ourselves to get back to work. by Daniel Hahn Writer, Editor, and Translator

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

REVIEWS A Cloud Drifting over California

A Contrived World Jung Young Moon Translated by Jeffrey Karvonen and Mah Eunji Dalkey Archive Press, 2016, 206 pp.

“I might title this novel Drifting Clouds,” Jung Young Moon writes in the final paragraph of his new book (which is actually called A Contrived World), “because this novel, which is a confused play on thoughts and words, has no point at all, like drifting clouds.” (p. 195) It’s true that not much happens in A Contrived World, at least not in terms of plot. The obsessive and somewhat aimless narrator visits California, gets drunk on tequila in the desert, talks to a few homeless people in Golden Gate Park, tries on some hats in Honolulu, then returns home to Seoul. “This entire novel,” the narrator 66

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explains, “is a lengthy expression of my indescribable, intense boredom.” (p. 191) And yet, there is a point. One comes away from A Contrived World with an unforgettable impression of the narrator’s personality and voice. He is a neurotic, narcissistic, crude, and mirthless young man, but nevertheless one is reluctant to leave him behind when the novel is over. Aside from a brief trip to Hawaii, A Contrived World takes place entirely in California. In the opening chapters of the book the narrator is visiting his exgirlfriend and her current boyfriend in Los Angeles. The remainder of the novel takes place primarily in San Francisco, where the narrator is living while on a fellowship, it seems, at UC Berkeley. The narrator has a very strong understanding of the state’s history and culture, and his descriptions of place are unconventional, but always apt. Take, for example, this description of the desert south east of Los Angeles: “We drove for a long time through a bleak landscape that barely changed, and so the place where we ended up seemed as though it only existed on a map.” (p. 5) His carefully observed depictions of San Francisco’s underbelly reveal a curiosity and genuine affection for the city, which he describes as being overrun with “deranged people,” “hobos,” and “drifters.” In one section, the narrator describes being harassed by a group of young vagrants in the park: “I wish there was a sign in Golden Gate Park that was similar to the one instructing visitors how to behave when confronted by a wild boar on the mountain, but that instead unambiguously delineated what to do when passing by young vagrants.” (p. 158) Like a sullen and highly distractible Alexis de Tocqueville, the narrator of A Contrived World wanders around California, opining

and reflecting on everything from the statues in Washington Square Park to the Golden Gate Bridge’s popularity as a place to commit suicide, revealing along the way a certain truth about the true nature of the state. In such a book, however, it is not the plot that matters. The beating heart of A Contrived World resides in the meandering and obsessive thoughts of the narrator. Each of his actions or ideas—whether shooting at cacti in the desert, erasing a name written in the sand, or examining his butt in the mirror—is subjected to a laconic, but unrelenting analysis. “I haven’t been able to take life seriously,” the narrator confesses, “and cannot concern myself with the facts of life, but only with my thoughts on those facts.” Thus, the novel consists of long sections dealing with topics such as the number of kernels on an ear of corn, the fate of the moles living under Golden Gate Park during the 1906 earthquake, or the quintessentially American sport of “noodling” (catching catfish with one’s bare hands). One might describe A Contrived World as Proustian, and the narrator does make a pointed allusion to Proust’s famous madeleine. But the novel bears much more in common with the socalled “autofiction” of Teju Cole and Ben Lerner (novels in which overeducated young men who resemble the author wander around foreign cities and ponder the meaninglessness of life). What emerges from A Contrived World, over the course of two hundred pages, is a narrator whose worldview revolves around the twin poles of meaning and meaningless, obsession and ennui. Or, as the narrator puts it, while eating an unappetizing sandwich: “Fixating on the taste of mayonnaise in the sandwich,

it occurred to me that I was writing fiction to seek revenge on nothingness, meaninglessness, and the baselessness of existence.” (p. 175) There are moments of humor in the book as well as a number of instances when the narrator’s depression breaks through his ironic detachment. But in the end, one comes away with an indelible sense of the narrator’s unrelenting curiosity, about California, the world, and the circuitous inner workings of the mind. by Michael David Lukas Author of The Oracle of Stamboul

The Story of Hong Gildong As translator Minsoo Kang notes in his introduction, “The Story of Hong Gildong is arguably the single most important work of classic (i.e. premodern) prose fiction of Korea, in terms not only of its literary achievement but also of its influence on the larger culture.” It’s one of those books that Koreans tend to know about, even if they haven’t necessarily read it for themselves—Hong Gildong is such a dominant figure in Korean consciousness that his name is used as a conventional placeholder, as “John Doe” is used in the US. As a second-generation KoreanAmerican, I’d never heard of Hong Gildong, and had to reckon with the fact that I quite literally didn’t know the first thing about Korean literature. My parents, on the other hand, are quite familiar with Hong Gildong jeon; my mother read it in junior high. There are thir ty -four extant

The Story of Hong Gildong Translated by Minsoo Kang Penguin Classics, 2016, 128 pp.

manuscripts of the text, with variations major and minor. Kang’s translation follows the longest and likely oldest of these surviving manuscripts, the pilsa 89. While Korean textbooks and other dominant sources attribute The Story of Hong Gildong to Joseon dynasty poet Heo Gyun (1569-1618), Kang presents evidence that the book is much more recent, authored by an unknown man of secondary commoner status looking to produce mass market fiction in the midnineteenth century. This theory makes a certain intuitive sense—the novel chronicles the life of Hong Gildong, an exceptional man with humble origins who becomes Korea’s own Robin Hood-style outlaw hero. His father is a government minister, but

Gildong is an illegitimate son—Minister Hong impregnates a servant girl named Chunseom (“She may have been lowborn, but there was nothing lowly about her character”) after waking from a vivid dream in which “[a] blue dragon appeared, shaking its beard, glaring with its frightful eyes, and opening wide its red mouth.” Gildong’s magnificence and glorious destiny are immediately apparent; he’s “a precious boy whose face was the color of snow and whose presence was as grand as the autumn moon,” who seems to exhibit great strength and intelligence from the moment of his birth. But his extraordinary nature doesn’t extinguish his low status. He cries to himself, “I have been born into a situation in which I am barred from following my ambitions, and I cannot even address my father as Father and my older brother as Brother.” This injustice is a central theme, not only of Gildong’s childhood, but of his entire saga. It becomes, at times, repetitive—there is a lot of lamenting about lowborn status and thwarted ambitions (his very specific dream is “to enter government service and eventually become a high general in the hope of one day receiving the royal insignia of the minister of war”). Gildong’s refulgent superiority causes great turmoil in the Hong household: his high ambitions and attendant resentment cause tension with his father and a senior concubine named Chorang, barren and jealous of the minister’s love for his son, “plotted his murder every single day.” She comes up with a “wicked stratagem” involving a shaman, a physiognomist, and an assassin. When the ten-year-old Gildong slaughters his attackers—using his strength, cunning, and the “magical arts of invisibility and metamorphosis”—

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REVIEWS he takes leave of his family and “wandered about like a f loating cloud, making the whole world his home and finding uncomfortable rest wherever he could.” Out in the world, Gildong finds his destiny, first becoming the leader of the notorious Hwalbindang—a group of bandits who “go after the powerful who obtained their riches by squeezing the common people and take away their unjustly gained possessions”—then becoming king of his own kingdom on the island of Yul. All of this happens in seventy-seven pages. Gildong is often ruthless and scheming, and he says things like, “You are like little children who could not possibly understand my deep stratagem.” Still, he ’s a fun hero to follow, an underdog despite some superpowers, and his adventures have the quickmoving magnetism of myth. The Story of Hong Gildong lacks some of the elements readers of contemporary fiction may be used to—nuance and three-dimensional characters, for example—but it offers strong emotional beats and a certain classical allure. Hong Gildong jeon represents not only a letter from Korea’s past, but one that modern Korea has selected and preserved as one of its core narratives. As Kang points out, Korea has had its fair share of humiliations since the Joseon era, and it’s likely no coincidence that this story has “a profound resonance in the Korean psyche.” To read The Story of Hong Gildong is to get closer to the soul of Korea, to listen to the stories she tells of herself. by Steph Cha Author of Follow Her Home

Korean Literature Now

Repetition and Difference

Request Line at Noon Lee Jangwook Translated by Sun Kim and Tsering Wangmo Codhill Press, 2016, 68 pp.

What role does poetry have to play in society today? How does poetry address the world around us? If you are a poet or are invested in the poetry industry, it is always good to have an elevator speech at the ready. You might be on a plane someday, and someone might ask you what you do, and to just say poetry or translation or publishing poetry sounds to the layman like you live on the moon and ride unicorns to work. One has to always explain—because how can something which has little to no market value still exist? With its lack of big rhetorical lines

or absence of a direct political message, Lee Jangwook’s Request Line at Noon might not seem like the book you would want to use to explain to nonbelievers the power of poetry. However, I think it is precisely the absence of such gestures that makes it such a good book to explain not only why contemporary poetry matters, but also how it works. This is a book interested in repetition and difference—a poetic materialism argued through praxis, not through declaration. Because poetry has the power to enact philosophy—to put it on stage, here repetition functions as a way to unhinge the mimetic function of language. What I mean is that the politics of these poems are in the machinery of how the poems work, not in what they say. Repetition recycles words by reimagining their function— much like how the seatbelts of old cars can be refurbished into the straps of bags, or made into bags themselves— Lee not only reclaims and recycles, but he also takes language and rolls it out flat like a piece of dough and then cuts it into distinctly separate, but similar shapes. Sup p ose I come upon an alley while walking along the alley, All I can do is to look around. The re are things that start living all of a sudden Fro m a place that happens all of a sudden. The old, new world Tha t unrolls where the blind alley appears. (p. 34)

The doubling of the word “alley” conflates space while “all of a sudden” distorts time. Paradoxically, interiority

a n d e x t e r i o r i t y, s i n g u l a r i t y a n d multitude, are not singled out and meditated upon in the idiosyncratic moment of a heroic speaker, rather they (un)roll like the world itself. It is no surprise then that in a poem that echoes Vallejo’s “Black Stone on a White Stone,” Lee writes: I will call you on Thursday. Thursday, I wi ll call you on the sole Thursday. I lost my interest in martyrs today […] I am a skill-less magician, If I go around the corners, Thursday will show up like magic. I don’t like martyrs,

reality, because identity almost has the fluidity of the snow and rain, the poems move horizontally. “A woman who jumped off the 8th floor of Jugong apartment/ Lay on the railing of the second floor/ Her long hair dangling/ There is no music tonight.” (p. 7) When the cognitive mapping of the self merges with the outer world in a single landscape, suddenly it is not only the self, but the entire world that is changed. “When the number 7 bus that I’m on shakes/ I am only the number 7 bus/ […] Shaking my head boldly/ I’ll walk on the road where flowers endlessly bloom.” (p. 49) And like the speaker, none of us are observers alone, but are one with what we observe.

The martyrs from the Nine O’clock News, So I shall call in the rain. (p. 11)

by Jacob Levine Poet, Translator, Editor at Spork Press PhD Candidate, Seoul National University

Most of these poems take place either in the afternoon or at dusk, when the quality of the light makes vision mysterious, when the shadows of things become bigger than things themselves. Objects in the poems are given their own subjectivity and they will often have agency to change on their own. This relieves the speaker from being the center of action, and flattens human subjectivity to that of an animal, an elephant, a giraffe—just another object or being floating in the world. While the poems are always written between an “I” and a “you,” the addressee is often a self-reflexive echo that bounces out, extending into the landscape. “Eleven a.m. I absorbed the sounds./ Eleven a.m. I was as noisy as possible./ Opening the window I became countless voices transformed into the speed of sound.” (p. 13) While Lee’s poetry has been described as operating on the border of fantasy and

Unleashing Her Tongue This first full English translation of a landmark collection published nearly twenty years ago takes us back to a turning point in Korean poetry. When Kim Hyesoon won the Kim Su-Young Literary Award for Poor Love Machine, she became the first female poet to receive this coveted award, following many years when the women poets who had emerged during the 1980s struggled for recognition in a literary culture policed by Korea’s male-dominated literar y establishment. Kim began publishing her work in 1979 and was one of the ﬁrst of few

Poor Love Machine Kim Hyesoon Translated by Don Mee Choi Action Books, 2016, 91 pp.

women to be published in Literature and Intellect, one of two key journals which championed the intellectual and literary movement against the US-backed military dictatorships of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan in the 1970s and 80s. She has since won numerous other literary prizes, and was also the ﬁrst woman to receive the coveted Midang Award in 2006. The naming of prizes after esteemed poets has symbolic force in Korean literary politics, so there was significance in Kim being awarded major prizes honouring both Kim Su-Young (19211968), who was closely associated with “engaged poetry” that displays historical consciousness, and Midang, the penname of Seo Jeong-ju (1915-2000), a poet who stood for “pure poetry.” Poor Love Machine was born out of

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

REVIEWS Kim’s reaction against the still massively popular works of the Korean poets of the 1900s, notably Kim Sowol and Han Yong-un, who adopted female personae to express their grief over the Japanese occupation of Korea. That literary convention or pose involved ventriloquizing an anti-colonialist agenda by appropriating and clumsily feminizing the voices of a gender oppressed and silenced in their own culture:

shrimp and eats. Her squirming throat is omnivorous. […] Having left the party, I begin to vomit as soon as I step outside. Seoul eats and shits through the same door. My body curls up like a worm. It seems that every few days a big

Garbage of the World, Unite! (2011) and Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2014), the first of these a selection from Kim’s earlier books including Poor Love Machine. A UK selection drawing on the Action Books editions, I’m OK, I’m Pig!, was published by my press, Bloodaxe Books, in 2014.

hand descends from the sky to roll out cloud-like toilet paper and

by Neil Astley

wipe the opening of Seoul, which

Founder and Editor, Bloodaxe Books

is simultaneously a mouth and an anus.

As I began writing poetry, I often felt as if my tongue were paralyzed. I had no role model for poetry. The woman’s voice made by Korean men, the voice that is even more feminine than a woman’s, was not mine. I had no role model, especially because even pre-modern women’s poetry only consisted of songs of love, farewell, and longing for the other. The impetus for Kim’s poetry came from her decision to explore in her own voice “the possibilities of the sensory” and to believe in her own “feminine individuation, its secrets.” In sharp contrast with the language of passivity and contemplation typical of earlier women writers, Kim’s work—along with that of Choi Seung-ja—was resonant with what her translator Don Mee Choi has called “a stunning language of resistance to the prescribed literary conventions for women.” So the publication of Poor Love Machine—with its grotesque imagery of rats, pigs, holes, garbage, excrement, and death—delivered an almost physical body-blow to the established corpus of Korean poetry in 1997: Pigs enter. The pigs oink and suck on Seoul’s lips. She dips the meat from the pig ’s neck in pickled

Korean Literature Now

“Seoul’s Dinner”

Born and raised in Seoul and Hong Kong, but long a resident in the US, Don Mee Choi has taken on the task of metamorphosing the living, writhing body of Kim Hyesoon’s Korean poetry into English with the zeal and personal advocacy of a kindred spirit committed to doing more than just translate words and phrases from one language into another. The whole body of the poem conceived in Kim’s reinvented mother tongue has to be totally absorbed into the self before being spewed out in Choi’s adopted language. Her bodily response to Kim’s squirming, seething language is transmuted via the alchemy of an unusually visceral translation process: “I howl and I shriek and I translate. So the miserable images I translate are the same as the letters I send out into the miserable world. I come to translation, the language of echoing, the language of howling, under the US imperialism. Translation = Antithingification.” Po o r L o v e M a c h i n e , w h i c h s h e calls the “ignition point” for Kim’s subsequent collections, is the fourth of her translations to appear with Action Books in the US, following Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (2008), All the

The Paradox of the Möbius strip Take a sheet of A4-sized paper. Cut out a strip lengthways, around three centimeters wide. Put down your scissors, pick up your glue stick, glue the end of one side and then the other, twist the paper without folding it and join the two pre-glued parts together. Now take an Asian man carrying an unwieldy suitcase, place him on the strip and tell him to walk all the way to the end. This is the world of Haïlji’s novel The Republic of Užupis: a fantastic story that takes the reader on an obsessive quest for memory. An Asian man steps off the plane at Vilnius airport. He receives a lukewarm welcome from the authorities: He is the only one forced to show his boarding card, or to be questioned by two immigration officers. “There is a simple reason for our interest, sir—you’re traveling without a return ticket.” “Well, yes,” replies Hal, the novel’s main character. “I don’t plan to stay in Vilnius. I’m heading for the Republic of Užupis.” There is indeed in Vilnius—the capital of the formerly Soviet-occupied Baltic

La République d’Užupis (The Republic of Užupis) Haïlji Translated by Kyungran Choi and Pierre Bisiou Le Serpent à Plumes, 2016, 256 pp.

country of Lithuania—a self-proclaimed “Republic of Užupis.” The Republic was established by a group of friends in a bar one night, in a fit of drunken, merry inspiration. They drew up a forty-onepoint constitution, proclaiming their rights, in equal measure, to happiness and sadness, to silence and sharing one’s mind, to eternity and each passing second. This rather admirable republic is to be found in the part of Vilnius known as the Other Bank. The driver who picks Hal up at the airport in the snow and fog makes a halfhearted effort to find the Republic, but to no avail. After driving around for some time, he leaves his curious passenger at the Hotel Užupis, where Hal encounters

a group of high-spirited companions who are to accompany him on an evening full of surprises. Hal’s gaze is directed constantly forwards—all his efforts focused on the goal of making the past correspond with a future that seems to lie within his grasp yet permanently eludes him. He tells his story to anyone who will listen: describing his father who was an ambassador for the famous Republic before it was conquered by a belligerent neighboring country, or his family who then had to live in exile in a distant Asian nation. Hal even shows his new friends postcards sent from the Republic of Užupis, but they remain skeptical, even when it transpires that some of the women among them remember a man on a similar quest who killed himself before he could achieve his goal. Watching over Hal’s shoulder, the reader doesn’t miss a beat. This is a central feature of this gripping novel: the author, Haïlji, has decided to position the reader just behind the main character. We hear everything Hal says, without learning anything else. We see everything he sees, while sharing his inability to discern anything through the fog and snow. We, the readers, are simultaneously immersed and detached, by which I mean we are made to depend entirely on the central character and his point of view while being kept at a certain remove from his quest. There is a fascinating effect of shifting involvement. We could discuss here the author’s various sources of inspiration, thinking perhaps of Kafka’s The Castle, Korea’s recent history, or the tragic news story of a French actress who was killed by her husband while making a film in Vilnius. We might even attempt to remove the

mask from each of the novel’s characters, to discover people we know and give them their real names—but that’s not the point. The Republic of Užupis is neither a roman-à-clef nor a whodunit; it is a descent into the cacophony of memory. We must simply accept the distance at which the author keeps us and let ourselves be taken on a journey, accompanied by the almost farcical irony that pervades the text and imbues it with an additional, playful dimension. We must content ourselves with our role as the reader—a pure spectator. Haïlji has said that he wrote this novel after initially wanting to turn the story into a film. So imagine that the film is one side of your A4-sized sheet of paper, and the novel is the other. Cut out a strip around four centimeters wide. Put down your scissors, pick up your glue stick, apply glue to one end of the film side and one end of the novel side, twist the paper without folding it and join the two preglued parts together. Now take a very beautiful woman named Jurgita and let her run the length of the strip, escorted by her swallows. by Pierre Bisiou Publisher, Le Serpent à Plumes

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

REVIEWS A Small Contemplation of Life’s Big Problems

Der Fisch, der zu den Sternen schwimmen wollte (The Salmon Who Wanted to Swim to the Stars) Ahn Do-hyun Translated by Hyuk-Sook Kim and Manfred Selzer Insel Verlag, 2016, 96 pp.

When I first saw Ahn Do-hyun’s The Salmon Who Wanted to Swim to the Stars on my desk, I wanted to put aside this thin book with its stylized Japanese illustration on the cover. To tell you the truth, I don’t normally find this genre, a fable for adults where the main character is a salmon who is different from the rest of the shoal, very interesting. However, I was drawn in by the title and began 72

Korean Literature Now

to read it. From the title I could make the assumption that the main character would be someone who yearns to go farther than the eye can see, someone who dreams of accomplishing something more in life, someone who would live and could even die by that dream. And yes, this fable deals with those things. The main character is a silver salmon who shines within, but at the same time is distant from the shoal because of the silver scales on its back. This distance occurs because the silver salmon sticks out among the school and needs protection thus becoming the target of jealousy and complaint. The silver salmon knows he is being protected, but feels frustrated by it. This is because the one thing forbidden to a fish is to dream. In particular, he dreams of going out of the water and looking up at the stars, and of living on land. He then finds out that to be a salmon means to complete life by fighting upstream to lay eggs and die, but he cannot believe that his life has no greater meaning than that of all the other salmon. In fact, in this tale the salmon’s story holds so much more than that. While on their symbolic journey upstream to the spawning grounds, the silver salmon and the rest of the shoal are faced with danger and challenges lurking in every corner. All of which represent the big questions that determine a person’s true nature, such as “What is life?”, “What is the true nature of existence?”, “What do we want in this world?”, and “How can you reconcile individual desires with society and its indispensability?” This thin book suggests answers to these questions with its figurative illustrations that feel simple and childlike, yet convey the essential truths the book holds. At the start of the story, a hungry eagle appears

and circles the shoal of salmon saying that life is a cycle of things achieved and things that fade away—those who eat and those who are eaten. For whether in water or on land, we are all one. The silver salmon who suffered for looking different from the other salmon, uses the power of love as the impetus to overcome pain and disability. When the shoal of salmon comes to an enormous waterfall, the other salmon are scared to jump over it. But the silver salmon tells the rest of them to follow “the salmon’s path,” the way of nature. Born in 1961, author Ahn Do-hyun has sold a million copies of this book and has said that nature was a big inspiration. It started when he was asked to write an article on salmon fishing for a fishing magazine. After he sent in his piece, he received some enraged letters from readers and started to research salmon. While doing this, he began to see that we humans are just like the hungry eagles, haughty and looking down at the salmon with greedy eyes hoping to catch and eat them. Now he understood! Ahn saw how humans lack respect for nature. It can be said that in this work, Eastern wisdom meets Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. Glissant understood that there is much to be learned between humans and nature and emphasized the connection. He believed that anyone and anything can be connected to the background or existence of a another, which we call “interconnectedness.” In this short fable that can be read within an hour, Ahn Do-hyun scales down and explains this concept. If you are expecting an eminent work from Korea, the seventh largest literature market in the world, you should not put your hopes in this slight

book translated into simple German by Hyuk-Sook Kim and Manfred Selzer. Nevertheless this book is a simple yet profound meditation—for readers who do not mistake ‘simple’ (schlicht) for ‘bad’(schlecht). by Claudia Kramatschek Literary Critic Jury, Weltempfänger-Liste

Cutting into the Darkness of Korean Society Soft things change shape according to the vessel in which they are held, and transform to fit their environment. Accustomization is a form of chemical reaction, as well as a manifestation of the instinct for survival. Human existence is originally extreme, sensitive and soft, transfiguring according to time and place. Cheon Un-yeong’s latest book, the fulllength work Ginger, tells of the multipaced contrast between such a “vessel” and the mind and body, whilst also boldly cutting into the darkness of contemporary Korean society. The story begins with a monologue of a peculiar venom. The speaker, repeating the phrase “beautiful technique,” seems to be urged by a strong impatience as if filled with self-confidence, and it is almost as if his crazed eyes are looking up from between the lines on the page. Yet despite the heartless words, the sentences seem to become embodied with an extreme heat, and even the sour smell of sweat can be sensed. Readers with no prior

生姜 (Ginger) Cheon Un-yeong Translated by Hashimoto Chiho Shinkansha, 2016, 357 pp.

information will turn the pages following this disturbing and incomprehensible monologue, and in time, little by little, learn the background of this man. This man, who goes by the name of Ahn, was a shrewd operator amongst security police—inflicting brutal torture upon suspects appearing to be communist spies, however never causing them to die, only to make them “disgorge.” Just as his glory days are brought to an end, intoxicated by torture through this “beautiful technique,” the story suddenly switches to the bright, fresh spring in Seoul. Soni has just entered university, and she is filled with the hope of her brand new campus life. However, before long, a shadow begins to appear over her sunny days. Her father, from whom she had not

heard for a very long time, and who had been the pride of their family, suddenly appears one day, and goes into hiding in the attic. From there Soni and her mother begin to live together with her father, separated just by a single ceiling. This father is Ahn, the man who had been known as the “torture technician.” The story progresses, told in turn by Ahn and his daughter Soni. Their tales show an intense contrast between darkness and light, and as the daughter begins to learn of her father’s past and seek out answers for herself, the story heads towards new ground, at the extreme of neither dark nor light. There was a real life model for Ahn: Lee Geun-an, who as a member of the security police maneuvered behind the scenes to detain communists and suppress the democratization movement, and shook contemporary Korean society as the “torture technician.” His fate changed for the worse in 1988, the year of the Seoul Olympics, which were an opportunity for Korean society to take a great leap towards democratization and internationalization. With the transformation of Korean society, Lee became a negative legacy of the dark period, and he spent nearly eleven years in hiding, from the end of 1988 to the fall of 1999. After voluntarily surrendering and spending time in jail, he became a priest. Through his missionary work he began to confess about his past, and was later excommunicated from the church. Korean audiences will be reminded of the real-life “torture technician” at the outset of Ginger. For those international readers as myself who proceed to read without any prior knowledge, the story is fresh and terrifying, reeking of blood. Yet, the reader somehow feels connected to

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

REVIEWS each of the characters who appear. The words revealed by Lee Geun-an, the model for Ahn, after surrendering and being imprisoned, pointedly demonstrate the nature of himself, of society, and of human beings: “At the time I thought I was a patriot, however now I have become a traitor.” The world, thought to be a definite and eternal “vessel,” restrains people with great ease, and with the same ease almost disappears. Those who have acclimated to and settled in the “vessels” of the past are incapable of keeping up with changes in these such “vessels,” and are left far behind. It is painful that even despite this, no matter their environment, the instinct to stay alive and protect those they love through any means remains consistent. Yet, who is really able to pull away from the bottom of their heart? W hen looking at Ahn and his daughter and wife who harbor him, as well as when following a man tortured by Ahn in the past and burning for revenge, the reader is led to question themselves. While Ahn is one individual, he is also a product of the military dictatorship. If born under different circumstances, he may have led an ordinary life. Or, if he had been a completely pure and good person, he may have disappeared from this world long ago. If you were driven into extreme circumstances, how would you transform? If forced to live in hatred and revenge, how would you take action? This tale is about universal aspects of human beings, transcending nations and regions. It is about neither justification nor condemnation. Combining fiction modeled on reality, it sublimates into a literary investigation into human nature, beyond good or evil. The author Cheon Un-yeong writes 74

Korean Literature Now

in the afterword that while Lee was the model, the story which appeared as time passed was “not his story,” and was instead an opportunity to learn more about herself. Ginger is something you may wish to evade at times, yet at the same time, Cheon tells that the title was selected to speak of an existence sharpening the five senses. This book novelizes a serial published for fifty days on the website of Changbi Publishers, which generated great interest domestically. As well as the courage of using taboos of modern history as material and directing a piercing gaze on contemporary Korea, the objective perspective and seeking out of clues to question the human existence within could be said to be a force pioneered by this particular generation. T h e Ja p a n e s e t ra n s l a t i o n w a s published in April of this year, and is now displayed at the new release corner of the Korean literature section within bookstores. Translator Hashimoto Chiho praises the author’s “capacity for challenging depictions,” and in this work, the pen of Cheon Un-yeong is alive in telling of human beings and memory, through body and flesh. Not only this, the writing could also be said to be exceptionally precise. As the author tells of the man known as Ahn, she is also indeed sharpening the five senses. by Naoko Hirabaru Culture Writer, West Japan Daily

A Parable of Compassion

Я встретила Ро Кивана (I Met Rho Gi-wan) Cho Haejin Translated by Lee Sang Yoon and Kim Hwan Hyperion, 2016, 176 pp.

Cho Haejin’s I Met Rho Gi-wan can meet various kinds of readers’ expectations and draw interest of those who seek tasteful reading, as well as those who wish to explore human psychology, or even those who position books as bearers of eternal values. The plot features several interwoven storylines centered around two main figures: a North Korean refugee named Rho Gi-wan, and the narrator, a South Korean scriptwriter who comes across Rho’s interview and decides to travel to

Belgium to meet him. Both characters enter the story through personal tragedy. The narrator runs away from Seoul blaming herself for possibly causing the progression of a young girl’s disease whom she happened to be caring for. Rho Gi-wan goes to Europe after his mother’s death using the money he gained for her body, morally destroyed by what he did to survive. Today people are usually aware of North Korean issues and the refugee situation, yet this novel offers a new approach to these problems through K o re a n s p e c i f i c s o f e m o t i o n a n d representation. Unhackneyed metaphors enrich the vivid and poignant imagery, along with non-intrusive means to maintain subtle intrigue, as well as space and musical associations—all which convey common concerns in a particular and personalized way. Secondar y characters present even more issues for readers to think about becoming a sort of catalyst for philosophical renderings in the text. Among the many issues the author touches upon—the social and moral ones are presented in abundance—ranging from euthanasia, charity, creative work or romantic relationships, to conscience and the psychology of getting over a loss or hunger. Each issue is discussed with careful attention to such personal aspects as loneliness, sincerity, or compassion. Though the story keeps shifting to the narrator’s world with her complicated interrelations with others, its dynamics are realized mostly on the streets of Europe, where the narrator roams as she follows Rho Gi-wan’s diary. In a way, this book echoes Patrick Modiano’s novel Dora Bruder with the narrator on a quest for the invisible tracks of a girl who died in

a concentration Nazi camp as he walks the streets of contemporary Paris. While Modiano makes connections between careless contemporary times and the forgotten tragic fates of World War II, Cho Haejin calls for our attention to tragedies that may be invisible right beside us, regardless of political background. In Korean literature, wandering typically ser ves as a means for the protagonist to find the self. Rho Giwan’s wandering indirectly brings several people to peace with themselves and helps restore their tattered relations. The driving motives in this “road-book” are based on the conflicts the protagonists face (disappointment, hypocrisy, and open indifference), but as the story progresses, they gradually come to an inner and outer harmony. Translators of the novel into Russian, Lee Sang Yoon and Kim Hwan, did their best to convey the author’s gentle style and manner of speaking about serious things without anguish. Lee Sang Yoon shares that they were inspired by the humanism of the story, and its appeal to readers to be attentive to people around us, as there may be many Rho Gi-wans we meet. Prose of the late twentieth century was inhabited with anonymous protagonists, symbolizing their generalized characters and dissociated people. This novel illustrates a recent trend—a name becoming part of the title (e.g. My Sister Bongsoon by Gong Ji-Young, Lee Jin by Shin Kyung-sook). Names are meaningful in Cho’s novel: the narrator’s full name remains unknown to readers, while other characters attain names gradually, yet Rho Gi-wan comes into the story fully introduced from the outset. The novel itself becomes a process

of changing him from an official and sensible “R” (surname) in the first phrase of the book into a tender and intimate “G” (given name) in the last sentence. And this is a process of turning this humiliated, ignored, and lost figure into a content and happy person with new roads to travel that he needn’t travel alone. It is almost an exception for contemporary Korean prose not to end tragically, but in this novel it is hope that plays the final chord, opening new perspectives for overcoming— overcoming the status of alien, a fatal illness, or misunderstandings of the past. Harmony as a conclusion for the story is one of the best ways the author could choose to formulate an antithesis for hostility and indifference, which unite politically grounded and personal dramas in the text. In a sense, this novel develops other contemporaries’ plots, where protagonists strive for reconciliation with the self. Seemingly setting these personal issues in a political context, Cho Haejin still speaks about the value of people and their relationships under any historical circumstance. by Anastasia A. Guryeva Associate Professor St. Petersburg State University

Vol. 32 Summer 2016

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VOL.32

SUMMER 2016

VOL. 32 S U M M E R 2 0 1 6

Han Kang The White Book The “Docile Body” and “Organs Without a Body” Ryoo Bo Sun

A Parisian Encounter with Korean Literature Aurélie Julia

Daniel Hahn on Brexit and Literature in Translation BOOK REVIEWS Neil Astley, Steph Cha, Michael David Lukas & more

9 772508 345006

ISSN 2508-3457

REIMAGINED 2016