[korean short stories]kim sun woo, muja, fourteen years old by LTI Korea Library

Korean Short Stories

Kim Sun-Woo Muja, Fourteen Years Old 열 네 살 무자 Translated by Sam Cha

Information This work was previously published in New Writing from Korea . Please contact the LTI Korea Library. library@klti.or.kr

About Kim Sun-Woo According to the poet Na Hui-deok, Kim’s poetry is filled with “bashful yet intense sensuality

reminiscent

moist

flower

petals,”

and

“her

femininity

emanates. . .abundance as that of embryonic fluid.” The women in her poetry are “embryos, mothers and midwives all at once.” The image of women as bountiful, lifegiving and life-embracing entities dominates her first volume of poetry If My Tongue Refuses to be Locked Up in My Mouth. The poet’s celebration of the female body is often accompanied by her revulsion of male oppression. In the title poem, the poet visualizes the feminine desire for freedom from male oppression in a series of unsettling imageries such as “a skull of a baby hanging from its mother’s neck,” and “a gush of beheaded camellias.” The protagonist is forced to sew strips of new skin onto a monster that grows bigger and bigger. Her attempt to kill him ultimately fails because her “good tongue is obsequiously locked up in his mouth.” Her second volume of poetry Sleeping under the Peach Blossoms reveals the force of nature in its primeval state through the physicality of women’s body and uniquely feminine functions of reproduction. In A Bald Mountain, it is women’s sexuality and sexual desires that find their expression in nature: “cloud children” pucker their lips toward the “bright nipples of flowers,” and “the tongue of the wind” passes over the waist of the mountain and lifts up the eulalia seeds while “licking the deep valley.” The winter grass bends down to have sex in various positions and the mountain itself is “lying with its legs open towards the shadow.”

LTI Korea eLibrary: http://library.klti.or.kr/node/56

Muja, Fourteen Years Old 1. Shed your iron shoes and shake your bells of bronze sky high, hemp smell, moon-close, wet hair drinks of windsap flutters strand by strand. Girl, you have dug your well deep in your body and from it you draw the water.

Look, the red river overflows.

Throw away your gourd, it wheels and flows over the long dead moonlight's milkflower areola. Whiter than the white blood shed by the moon, night full on the edge of the knife. Tear your wet linen and row your soulboat. With the spirits of the young women inside your body. And so this is an old story (a story about a very old today it is). That dancing child was born in a dragon year, lived in Masan since she was ten....The rumors were that they were taking the maidens, and on the twentieth day she hid in the cremation tent and heard it for the first time, the sound of a cremated belly bursting, the sound of bone burning...and the girl was fourteen... ...Father snatched up the kitchen knife but the gunbarrel first hit his forehead red. Blood.

As if it had been dyed with hollyhock. Mother cried, Let her dress at least before

you take her. Swoon and hollyhock. Choking up. And torn. The brocade jacket smeared with red dye. Dragged out in my black skirt, I was fourteen... Busan. Shimonoseki. Hiroshima....The military police turned us over to the army and left and then... ...and there was the day the actors came on tour for the troops with the smell of face powder coming off them in waves and they twirled their umbrellas and sang, they did, like a dream that didn't end, and those little rounded umbrellas were so pretty, I dreamt that night of twirling umbrellas, I did, in the cremation tent filled with the smell of

burning flesh like a thick white fog. A dream of twirling little round umbrellas jumping from one cadaver's chest cavity to another... At the base they gave the women names, they did, and mine was Muja [which means dancer] they pronounced it Maiko, though up till then I'd never danced. And in Hiroshima I picked clementines and figs all day. When the soldiers poked at our backs with the ends of their guns, the yellow of the clementines dangled in my cravings for meat, and I'd retch... ...the ship came, they said. We were going as nurses and the name of the ship was Midomaru. The ship was very big and on it we even learned army songs from a whitewhiskered grandpa of an officer. Like we were riding the waves with our hands on our hips, we shook the waves and sang, we did. Parao of the south Pacific islands. Off to Parao, like the inside of the mouth of a burning animal. That child she was fourteen. 2. The full moon has risen, come out of the basket. The body naked like the full moon. Under the moon,

the moon greeting flower,

the evening primroses have bloomed. And if you pick the moon greeting flowers and put them in a basket, the inside of the basket will be a hell for eighty four thousand. Shake your bronze bells and cross the thresholds of water. The spirits of the girls await you. Decapitate the flowers. In one flower throw your papa and the flower shadow. In one flower your mama throw. Offer them as food for the dead. Those children will chew them and swallow and they will see the road for ghosts. ...where they dragged us was the comfort station behind the Koror Hospital

...and this is a story about long ago.

(A story about a very old today it is).

Each room had a name and number pasted onto it and in Parao also my name was Maiko. Maiko the dancer. With clothes ripped off. Thrown into a narrow room. And it was: Dance, Maiko, deeper than death. And I was fourteen... 4

...one two three four five six....from mouth and nose and from down there, till the blood came exploding from every hole in my body... Dance, Maiko. Paralyzed all over I saw the Yellow Spring otherworld, I did. The dark sky tearing black and the Yellow Spring water falling... If you cross the river it's the ghost road....Ancestors mine ancestors mine dead and gone ancestors mine grab my umbilical cord and hold on to it please. I touched the Yellow Springs and held on to the side of life. 3. The ghost in the stones, they rise out of the stone tied to rock. Look, moonlight shakes the ghost pole, and when the girls with their wild hair swim to us on white silk milkrope

clang, clang, clang, the sound of rock

breaking, look, they come cross the Western heavens between the gap of earth and sky on a tightrope over hell.

look they shake their torches

they cry and limp

they

come ...The young girls fell to the officers, Father! Father! When the old officers would throng the door of my room,

Father! I shouted, I did, and then sometimes there'd be one

who'd buckle his belt back on and turn and I'd walk the black knife's edge of sleep and when I'd wake like a roof raked by lightning, my feet would hurt... ... Go ask your mom to do that! Oh Mother, I am sorry. The day a soldier wanted me to do something so unspeakably vile, I couldn't hold back and screamed and fought back.

teeth broke and I got bruised all over and everywhere I was bruised. I had knots like poisonous snakes in tangled thorn grass and my body was ninety thousand leagues of hell...and some who saw this hell settled for just fondling my breasts and leaving.... ...There was a lieutenant by the name of Yamamoto whose mother was a Joseon woman and he spoke good Korean and sang a good "Arirang"...Yamamoto brought me a fork and I sharpened it. I meant to shank an officer I couldn't stand and die with him but it didn't go well. I got dragged off and beaten till my back burst...Yamamoto's "Arirang" sang in my mouth like a red bird, it did... ...the Korean soldiers who'd gotten forced into service got us things like aspirin and on the medicine we'd forget that our legs were sore and that we were getting torn up down there...and sometimes we'd get assigned to troops on islands without women on sputtering little boats and if you get sent, it's ten days... Parao ...injection number 606, the baby prevention injection, And if you told them it was really hard they'd give you a single sleeping pill each time, they did. I was fourteen...(and so this is an old story), 4. The girl who dances swallows a peak of firewine. At the end of the ghost pole she hangs a ghostcatcher cloth full of blood and pus, look, the river of redblack petals trickling from the edge of her mouth. Look, the bits of flesh that have managed to survive insult, that have no memory of the blinding furrows. Catch this ghost naked. Ghost. Ghost. Ghost. Catch it. The war started about a year after we went to Pa-ra-o. After that there were twenty, thirty, men a day. On weekends the soldiers formed long lines to take their clothes off took their belts off

didn't even have time

left them next to gunbarrels

and they'd

unbutton their pants... ...Both thighs burst and trickled bloody pus. The medic came and swabbed out the wounds and put some gauze on them... Recon planes. Fighter planes. Air raid. Recon planes. Fighter planes. Air raid... Moonless nights when we'd get caught in an air raid on our way to an island we'd wait quiet as the dead with the boat engines off, bullets fire-raining down into the empty sea, and in the morning the ocean would be foaming crimson red... Some of the older girls were hurt below and fought back, refusing to surrender their bodies and got dragged off to a cave, shot in the groin and breasts chopped off...Mieko and Yoshiko, names two older girls went by, died in those days... ...after I turned nineteen the bombing grew even worse. You'd go to sleep and there would be a high-ranking Japanese officer who had committed suicide. Even Yamamoto who had been kind to us, he pushed the hilt of his sword in the ground, fell on it and died

even the soldiers who'd pounced on us died in the morning died in the night. It

was near the war's end. 5. The chilly moon rises over bare feet marked with the innumerable cuts of knives. You come to me splitting the linen you waver, dance on the water mud on the small of your back, mud that flew here long ago and piled up a river of mud. The wildflowers are in full bloom. They have pushed through the red, red scales of the water, they ring bronze bells, the girls who tread light so light at the stern of the soul boat. Look, the gate of the moon opens, it swallows the rocks heavy with sin, and the ones in the rocks cry out, look, it's like a snake has swallowed the white moon. Look, between heaven and earth, hell grows hot.

Heaven upon heaven sobs between the legs of the girls. The basket you wove with your nakedness with nothing to hide, the basket opens wide your open gate and all the male beasts of the mountains have caught the scent on this night when they swell with dead babies. I came out of Parao.

1946.

And so this is an old story,

It was the first day of the new year when I got home. My mother had drawn three bowls of water. She'd placed them on top of a big earthenware jar and she was bowing to them. Weeping, she'd been making offerings to my spirit because it was New Year's Day, and so this is a story about a very old today. I've never spoken a word about anything that happened to me in Parao. Never in my whole life did I go to the baths with anyone. I was born in the year of the dragon, 1928, in Hikone City, I was, the name was Soon-ae, I lived in Masan the year I turned ten...

*Parao is now called Palau. **Elder Kang Soonae was a comfort woman (sex slave), a victim of the Japanese army. In 1993, the year she turned 65, she participated in a Wednesday demonstration, a gathering of former comfort women, and made a clean breast of her sorrow-filled life. She said it felt good, getting these stories off her chest, where they had been her entire life, and out into the open. In 2005, at the age of 78, she passed away. ***Forcibly Impressed Army 'Comfort Women' from Chosun, the gathered findings published by the Korean Society for Chongshindae Research served as a reference.

Listened to the Sound of the Emile Bell.

Watched an Eclipse

-what did you look like before your mother was born?

I sent you off and because of you I hurt you went before me because you worried about my hurt

and you hurt

and so Emile - suffering around Yeonji for a thousand leagues and so I hurt I spring from a place where I am not and so I hang from your clenched bronze hand and you hang from my cold palm I am shaped by the things that are not me and so I love you who are shaped from what is not-you Regard me regard me, while across the river a love full of tribulations blooms and fades while the flowers, now acquainted with parting reach the graves, while the roots of the stars close the ecliptic Emile-O, sinews of the other self, mother and father with ragged thighs

Your Stump A long-necked dead branch of a quaking aspen has jumped out of my body. I was small and barefoot, playing with summer light like the strong pollen of pigweed, oblivious even to my underwear getting wet. I'd reached this place with such difficulty, clinging to the sweat glands near my mother's follicles and meanwhile mother was hoeing goosefoot, whiteman's foot, water pepper, all uprooted, tossed away from the cabbage patch on the ridge around the field those sorrows, grown too thick to distribute, bowed now and then in the jangling sunlight.

I pick up a dead branch and I look long into your stump, the navel that cries from the center of you. When I walk into the navel where tears, grown mushy like well-soaked grains of rice, have stuck one by one, Mother trembles far away at the end of the waterfall. Why did Mother have to jump from such a high place? They say she had growing in her belly a single green sprout. I see myself playing in the dirt of the old embankment, picking out yellowed cabbage to dip in bean paste and eat, the faint smell of mother's milk wafting from goosefoot and whiteman's foot and water pepper, from the strange names of sundry weeds....Why did the inside of the cabbage blanch so yellow while the weeds were uprooted and thrown on the embankment? Why can't a tree grow another branch from the place where a dead branch has fallen? The twilight that makes itself known without need for hard questioning comes. I no longer tell Mother to live a long, long time. On those evenings when I pick up a dead branch I merely think of things like a deep and bright cave, and the snake of disappointed love inside it. When one dies after a long unrequited love, they say the snake of disappointed love enters into the navel of the beloved and lives there, and the fragrant snakes inside the stump and the green snake inside mother's belly twist together in a beautiful pattern like that snake, and I just gaze calmly at it, I do, merely joyfully worrying if your navel might be too narrow for me to enter and dwell also.

Three Poems by Kim Jung-whan: Differentiation and Integration Sometimes, worn down by the soles of feet, the knots in the wood start to look like facial expressions. We don't flinch but this is when we see "the true face"

of time. It's so old now, it doesn't even bother us. The past vivid only in that it is already too late, formless as the net of the nerves of a plant that gathers dew, the way the title of a song that you can't recall shapes itself into another melody. Deficiency overflows. Like a too tardy confirmation. Like the weight of anemia.

Like those frames

that seem more predestined than the unfamiliar families in business card-size photos. Even before you open the page of the graduation album where white suits have turned grimy. Without the flow of death, fearsome are the differentials, fearsome are the integrals of time and space. The sunken Diving Bridge, the overflowing waters of the Han River these are already legend, at seven in the morning, milky with monsoon fog at the edge of the water, once more the Han swells its shrimp-briny waters right up to your nose. Where to where to where to where to where the waters seem to shout, as the Han stops flowing and swells. And life takes leave of life.

Buildings and History Space is the condensate of time. More willful than the work of memory that builds memory's house, inexorably time builds the house of space. For instance: that campus where the smell of the uncomfortable cast from breaking your arm falling off the chin-up bar seemed so new and strange,

that elementary school, where the poplars were so tall and the yard so wide.

Even that blurs so much.

The first taste of red

wine grows to resemble the aftertaste of vomit. An orgasm grows to resemble sex. The cause resembles the effect. The time of death grows to resemble the story. The tribes of grammar grow to resemble society. That is not my space alone.

The only space that is mine alone

is the pain in my chest where an unfamiliar woman and an unfamiliar beginning and an unfamiliar parting overlaps. It is engraved. And even that space is not necessarily spared subdivision. My wife is familiar and soaking wet. That is the world. In her body there is a room away and a street beyond that, and in that street there is a drinking tent with tasty handmade noodles. My wife is the only passageway through which I know death. The unique becomes duplicated. A woman is already a multitude of women. I smile with my x-ray bones I am scrawnier still.

And there is no sorrow in the aging scent of my wife

when she has finished her shower. It is plain, and warm, and it is a reassurance that death is also plain. The building stands and vanishes and history is a performance that walks towards us. For instance the ragged party of Gija

comes from the direction of the eatery-alleys

near the Independence Gate, and one leads many with the authority that comes with age, and that young upstart Wanggeon and his gang, still playing the subordinate to Gungye , are in the middle of shooting a movie on the benches in the park with the History Museum on Shinmun Street and Defense Secretary Kim Jongil has just gone straight for the Seoul Press Center where his sunglasses are blacker than MacArthur's. Onjo and Biryu.

There are no beggars to compare with them. The largest communal farms in the

East and even the refugee trains weren't as chaotic as they were, but still today they are the welcome guests of the Blue House. And at the KTX ticket office at Seoul Station, they get treated like kings. But the present isn't the crystallization of history yet. And so it is nothing to the future. From east to west, from west to east, from south to north, from north to south they come, straight or slanted, historically, simultaneously, the older ones come fast from a great distance, and they come slow from nearby the newer they are. They do not overtake each other but they do not arrive simultaneously, for all that. Fireworks dance chaotically, the black chimera, vermillion crane, blue dragon, the white tiger. The present is yet the moment of the perpetration of all realizations. Poverty is still the only common thread of history, and originality itself is poorly dressed. All we have is the equation of culture and space. Kato Kiyomasa and his party are confusing the eaves of the Great South Gate with the edges of their samurai swords. In Cheonggyecheon 3 Street Kim Yushin conducts the reunification of the Three Kingdoms more worn out than an old school fag and his people are in the virtual reality of King Gongmin. None of them show any signs of arriving yet. Before 1972, the school still had its campus. Now there are no students. I ponder why it was a black school uniform. I ponder why passion and death went so well together.

I ponder how, when one converts the time elapsed since graduation into distance, thing seem more inevitable the further they are. I ponder how oblivion dresses as death, how death has dressed as oblivion, and how they cancel each other out. And I ponder how, back then, the rumor of the body was also consigned to oblivion. Abstraction is ideology made concrete but ideology and wounds alike have left no trace. Even reconciliation merely ripens without purpose. Before 1972, the school still had its campus. Now there are no students. There are no teachers, either. The yard with the towering soccer and basketball goal posts; the stairs that shot upwards dreaming of growing tall; the vanished campus is a perfect formality. The body reveals itself entire. The lecture hall and the AV room come to my bosom and between them in the distance of time there soaks through the meaning = light of footsteps = path. and the succession of music that transcends the differentials of musical notes. Their intermittence and continuity form a continual harmony, and without that, the only thing left whole is the nightmare of folktale in which space is separated from time. History and memory and scandal blur together.

Dissolution is modesty and modesty is dissolute. The story's differentiated, integrated. There is nothing except for the temptation of a conservatism deepening even as we retrace our footsteps and of a progressivism growing shallower with the retracing of the path we have not yet taken. Without that even the ubiquity of mercantile distribution is only the liveliest of deaths. Epilogue: Before and After I've aged a few decades while looking at the school yearbook. It's a strange thing, to be sure, but the middle school yearbook ages me more fundamentally than the high school yearbook. Strange, to be sure, but it also means that I have grown a few millennia younger relative to history. Strange but that is the miracle of space. The miracle occurs only once and there's no occasion to open the yearbook again. Strange to be sure but that means I have acquired the eyes of the school yearbook. This is the even more fundamental miracle of space. The strange thing is that music flows inside it. The even stranger thing is that even the silence

of tissue paper flows as music. The minute hand disappears, then the hour hand. Expressions vanish and the vanishing is exposed. I am inside the yearbook. I am inside the eye of the yearbook. The thought that I was writing these words in just this way even in a former life is completely different from the premonition that I will be writing these words in just this way in a life to come, but the velocity of their overlap is coming to resemble the speed of light. And more, of course. I see the three in one of the three in one. No, I hear it.