[sample translations]bum shin, park, an empty room eng

Sample Translations

Beom-shin Park An Empty Room E ng l i s h

Book Information

An Empty Room (빈방) Jaeum&Moeum Publishing corp. / 2011 / 30 p. /ISBN 9788957075456 For further information, please visit: http://library.klti.or.kr/node/772

This sample translation was produced with support from LTI Korea.

Please contact the LTI Korea Library for further information. library@klti.or.kr

An Empty Room Written by Bum-Shin, Park

The Author’s Foreword Seeing the Animal in Myself

1 One early morning, after a night of wandering the forests of Guramsan in Yongin, I lay down on the grassland in a narrow valley covered in daisy fleabanes and looked up at the stars for a long, long time. Some stars were white, some reddish, and some pale blue. The Alpha Star of Orion was about 310 light years away, so the starlight I saw must, in fact, be a sparkle of light that broke away from the body of the star during the time of King Sukjong, the 19th king of the Joseon Dynasty. I could clearly see countless beams of starlight streaming in through my thin ribs, moistening my intestines, large and small, and at last settling down to the fine roots of the daisy fleabanes. There were no boundaries between the universe, my body, and the fine roots of the flowers. I heard the stars pulsating my ribs rhythmically, beep-be-be-beep, as if sending Morse code, and the fine roots of daisy fleabanes sticking their tentacles into the inner wall of my large intestines and sucking out the juice. My soul danced a quiet but dynamic dance, full and deep, unoppressed by time and space. Intoxicated by a dream of immortality, I wept until morning broke, overjoyed.

2 In those days when I wandered the forests of the mountain in Yongin every night, I was troubled by my fate of being unable to conceive a child. The series of six stories in this

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book is a meticulous record of the lonely and gruesome performances of those who can’t conceive children. We live in a world in which creative productivity is castrated day by day and the desert of infertility is expanding from moment to moment, and there’s no prescription for the loneliness we’re sentenced with for that original sin. In the end, we cannot embrace even a single star, and we don the vast, deep space upon our head like a huge helmet made of inorganic matter. See how these anxious fugitives who can’t conceive are roaming the cement alleyways of the world even today, sweating in groups. One day we’ll someday see the grotesque portraits of ourselves, after we die and are placed in a bottle of never-rotting water, with the marrow gone, and the maxillofacial structure distorted, and tens of thousands of wrinkles everywhere.

3 The first piece in the series, “Shooting Stars,” was published as a part of the short story collection, The Tale of the Scented Well. It couldn’t be left out since it was the first piece of the series, and was placed as such in this collection. “The Empty Room” was published in Munhak Sasang, “Jar, Jar” in Changbi, “It’s All Right, It’s Really All Right,” in Silcheon Munhak, “When Potato Flowers Come Into Bloom” in Munhakdongne, and “White Keys Black Keys” in Munye Joongang.

I wrote “Shooting Stars,” the first piece, toward the end of the 1990s, so it seems that I haven’t been free from the question of infertility, a major theme in this story series, for the past five or six years. I titled the collection “The Huge Helmet of You Who Are Lonely” at first, but at the suggestion of the editorial department, who thought that it was too long and unclear, I changed it to “The Empty Room.”

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It is often said that the novel is facing a crisis, but I don’t give much heed to this. I have no time to pay attention to such rumors and with the words I want to write down breaking out through my ribs at all times. I imagine, and feel in reality, that there’s a keen and ferocious animal that doesn’t grow old in my body. It has countless claws that are sharp and long, and go completely mad, struggling to tear its way out through my flesh, so I have no choice but to write. I await the day when I can dance in peace without having to tame the animal into my will, but I don’t know if such a dreamy day will come before I die. The light green forest is darkening day by day into black. The thickening forest frightens me, for each and every tree seems to be the animal in my body.

Early summer of 2004, Park Bum-Shin

Shooting Stars

1 I’m not sure when it was that I first became aware of the mysterious gaze. It seems that it was long before the rainy season, or just after the rainy season began. What I am sure of is that even now, at this moment, there are eyes peeping at me in silence, somewhere on the cliff in the pitch darkness out the window. The gaze is one way, but at the same time, it isn’t one way. I don’t see the person so each time, the eyes of the stranger are directed at me through the inner side of the window in a straight line, but since I’m aware of it, the gaze that penetrates the window from without, in the end . . . is the relationship between the stranger and me.

With the deepening of the season, the relationship is . . . deepening.

At times the stranger is at the windowsill at the east, or the south, of my studio, and

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at times, on the other side of the north window of the kitchen, and at times, cunningly at the edge of the bedroom window. I’m not afraid. He’s outside and I’m inside, and he’s in the darkness and I’m in the light, but I believe our relationship has reached beyond such dichotomies. Far from being afraid, I sometimes anticipate the gaze. I can even convey my interest to him in a subtle way by adjusting the opening between the curtains and the intensity of light in the room. In a way that he wouldn’t notice.

2 It was when I went down to Busan along the seacoast, after attending the opening event of a group exhibition held in Donghae with Hyein, that I was met with rain. He thinks marriage completes life . . . Hyein said. The wind was fierce as well, and the coastal waters of Haeundae were deserted. Her nipple, caught on my front tooth, stood up fiercely.

I could complete a man’s life, you know.

When she said that, the night sea was turning over successively, unable to control the passion within. Her breasts were small, but her nipples were unusually large and dark.

Touching her towering nipple with my tongue, Well, what do you know, this guy here looks like my genitals . . . The seasonal rain front kept moving up north. The entire route from Haeundae to Yeongcheon, Yeongju, Jecheon, and to Wonju was wet with rain. You don’t like my nipple, do you . . . she asked out of nowhere. The car had passed through a bypass in Yongin and was making its way into a dark forest path. I recalled the summer evening thirteen years earlier when I slept with her for the first time. She, a junior in college, had nipples that were just as confident and towering as they were now.

Incredible.

So I said.

Incredible, they’re like dark plots of land.

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My studio was on the northern outskirts of the town that would come into view after driving through the forest path for about five more minutes. It was three years ago that I cleared up my studio in Hwigyeong-dong and moved here. Before the dark studio stood her car, wet in the rain, which we had left there when we’d gone to Donghae. It’s pouring, you should stay the night . . . I said, and she said, No, I’d rather not . . . She got into her car and revved up the engine. The wind had died down. For as long as I’d been with her, I had always whispered into her naked ear, They’re so incredible. They’re like dark plots of land. Your nipples are so sexy. But she had asked, as if sneaking up on me, You don’t like my nipples, do you . . .

It seemed that she had caught on to the trickery in my long uttered words. When her car turned the curve and disappeared down the town road, I mumbled to myself.

Yeah. Your nipples are always towering.

Now it was time to park my car in the spot where she had parked hers. I backed up, then moved forward, making a big turn with the steering wheel to the left. Next to the empty lot, there was a vegetable garden of 200 pyeong. The potato flowers have come into bloom . . .

I had said, filled with joy. It was the morning we’d left for Donghae. When she came, I knew that some potato flowers in the garden had come into blossom. I took her out to the garden and said with pride, Look, there’s been a spring drought for a whole month, but these guys didn’t get scorched to death, they’re thriving and have even come into blossom . . .

I was grateful for the timely rain.

I looked out at the potato patch that came into view through the headlight beams. It was the first time I had planted anything in the garden, and I couldn’t help but be excited that the potatoes, which I’d never grown before, had thrived and blossomed. The rain would make the flower stalks even stronger.

But what was going on?

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Astounded, I turned the car toward the potato patch and moved the headlights up.

The leaves, which had been growing thick just days before I’d left for Donghae, were now withering yellow. I’d never even imagined something like that happening. Something had gone terribly wrong. What happened . . . I wondered, going hastily through the potato patch in the rain. Left as they were, the potatoes would all shrivel up.

That’s it, it’s the composite fertilizer.

I understood.

One day, when the potato sprouts had come up as tall as my finger, the town foreman who happened to be passing by told me that pouring composite fertilizer between seedlings would help the potatoes take root. Dreaming of an abundant harvest, I had dug into three or four spots wherever there were sprouts, and poured a good amount of composite fertilizer.

Since it hadn’t rained at all in the meantime, the fertilizer must have stayed as it was, and having dissolved all at once in the rain that had been falling from the day before, it must have worked like poison to the young potato roots. Without even stopping to change my clothes, I jumped right into the patch and began to shovel up the remaining composite fertilizer. The earth, wet with the rain, sank wherever I stepped. The wind had ceased, but the rain was relentless. I took off my shoes, then my socks and jacket. The town was more than two hundred meters to the west, and the buildings, newly constructed in early spring, were located on the mountain slope beyond the field on the south. My shirt and pants were soon covered in mud so I had to take them off, too. The frogs, which had stopped croaking for a time, began to croak loudly again. The composite fertilizer, wet with the rain, looked like dark, sticky paste. They say the darker your nipples, the more fertile you are . . . I recalled saying to her.

Her breasts were spread out low like a weathered tomb, but her nipples were always towering.

Soon enough, I took off my undershirt as well. I felt as confident and pleasant as her nipples.

The wet dirt was soft, the streaks of rain beating down on my bare flesh was refreshing, and

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the beams of the upturned headlights formed a solid boundary with the pitch darkness on the outside. I painted, freely crossing the boundary between the light and darkness like a mountain animal. I was happy painting. I was in such high spirits that I would forget what it was that I was actually doing.

When had I ever felt this way while painting?

In the three years since I moved to Yongin, I felt myself grow distant from nature at times, despite having come right into the middle of it. I met another one . . . she would talk about another prospective marriage partner whenever she came down to Yongin. I was a man of forty years who didn’t paint much even though I was called an artist, and she was a woman of thirty-five. My paintings grew more and more abstract with time, but the center of those paintings, incomplete, were empty.

What kind of a painting is that? she would often ask.

It seems like the center’s empty . . . she would say. Sometimes she would ask seriously, What’s at the center of this painting? And I would answer, irrelevantly, That’s not the center you’re pointing at . . . Where is the center? I wondered every time I sat down before the rectangular canvas. If the rectangular frame of the canvas was what determined the center, it should be said that the center was not at the center but at the rectangular frame of the canvas.

I felt much better after scooping up all the composite fertilizer.

I was utterly exhausted, but felt as if I’d gotten my teeth cleaned for the first time in a while. Without collecting the things I’d taken off and thrown aside, I staggered over to the car and finally turned off the headlights and engine.

A sudden silence fell when the sound of the car came to a stop.

It seemed as if the sound of the rain and of the frogs croaking had stopped at the same time, and in the darkness of resolute silence, I suddenly felt the gaze upon me. I

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distinctly felt someone glaring at me. With my hand on the car door, I first looked over at the town. The houses under the outdoor lamps looked like a mass of low roofs. No, that’s not it, I thought. A two-story building stood on the mountain slope across the rice paddy in front of the studio where the frogs were croaking. The two-story building, constructed just this spring, and the annex were all studio apartments. The building was intended as a gosiwon (boarding house for those preparing to take the higher civil service examination), but there was no one there preparing for an exam, only several caddies who worked at the golf course beyond the mountain. The light was on in only one room on the second floor. I quickly turned my head and glared toward the direction of the northern mountain that formed a boundary with the vegetable garden.

Yes. That’s it.

My intuition moved almost like a wild animal.

The mountain area, where tall nut pines stood in abundance, was actually so dark that I couldn’t even see the outline of the trees. Even if someone was standing there looking at me, I couldn’t see the person, and the person probably couldn’t see me either, now that I had turned off the headlights. But I could sense the person with my animal senses, and felt that the person could see me as well. So we were looking at each other with fires in our eyes in the darkness. Was that a wild cat? Or perhaps what I’d heard was a family of squirrels that often came down to the potato patch that had come on a walk. But no sound other than the sound of rain came from the dark forest of pine nuts. I seemed to have heard something, the sound of something alive, but it remained quiet even after a long time had passed. I took the car key and walked down the muddy path in my naked state to the studio door, then stopped again.

There. Someone was there.

It was unmistakable. Something chilly was being emitted from the center of the

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darkness of the pine nut forest in my direction. I hurried inside, turned on the bath for the sound of water, then quietly opened the north window in the kitchen and pricked up my ears.

If it was a wild cat or squirrels, the sound of their movements would have been muffled out by the sound of the rain because they were light.

For a split second, my hair stood on end.

Behind the studio was a hill with a pretty sharp incline, and a subtle sound was coming from the path that wound out from the interior of the mountain. I thought for a moment. The sound was not the irregular sound of animals or the wind, but the regular sound of consistent steps. Had someone, then, been lying face down in the darkness, peeping on me as I frantically went about scooping up the potato patch in my wild state? No . . . I mumbled in my head. That’s not possible, not in this rain . . . I mumbled in my head. That’s not possible, in this rain . . . But the next day, I finally put a second lock on the metal door, which I’d been putting off doing for a long time.

The rainy season was long.

3 The rainy season was long. The peeping eyes were beyond the window most of the time. The person usually came deep in the night, and of course, made almost no sound.

One evening, I was painting.

The painting had a mostly grey monotonic space at the center. I painted a reddish black color on the edges of the canvas, and kept thinking about the space in the middle. I want to fill up that empty space . . . I said to myself. Fill it, if there’s anything to fill . . . replied my other self. It was long past midnight. Angry at myself, I threw paint at the center of the canvas. Red paint splattered in every direction.

At that moment, I distinctly heard the sound of someone sighing.

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I instinctively raised my head and saw something move in a flash beyond the pale light between the curtains that looked like the first light of day. To the east was a window. A cornfield stretched out beyond the yard and met the foot of the mountain on the east. If I had quickly turned on the outdoor lamp in the yard and went looking, I probably would have caught sight of the person running away. But I didn’t do anything. Listening carefully, I heard the sound of something hastening through the cornfield. What I knew for certain was that it wasn’t the sound of squirrels or a wild cat. I’d known that since before the rainy season began.

Another thing I knew for certain was that the mysterious person had no intention at all of doing me any harm or forming a relationship with me in any concrete way. That was clear.

All the person did was come to me in silence and sneak a look at something of mine through a crack, through which light leaked out from my side. I couldn’t, of course, tell what the person was looking at. I usually never fell asleep till dawn, and slept from daybreak till past noon. During the long rainy season, wet fogs often covered the valley, where hills of about the same size stood together.

Hyein didn’t come.

When I got bored I went out to the potato patch and plucked out weeds, when I got hungry I plugged in the rice cooker cord or unplugged it, and about once every three days I went to town and stopped by at the public sauna and then had something that wasn’t spicy at a restaurant I frequented. I’ve been painting for nearly twenty years, but I had never had an invitational exhibition at a gallery of my choice. The center of the art world was always far away. There was a time when, with ambition, I often painted on canvases taller than me, but since I moved to Yongin, I never painted on a canvas larger than a size 20. But it wasn’t that I felt my talent was being persecuted by the brutal system of the world, or resented the world for being too easily swayed when I stood upright. I never had the talent to be persecuted to begin with, or a center to be upright in.

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In other words, I was a man without a center.

On days when I went to town, I went out to the yard and lifted weights or did dumbbell exercise for over two hours. I began doing dumbbell exercise when I started painting, and did it two or three times a week without fail, so I was often told that I was quite good at it. So pretty . . . Hyein once said. My upper body was neither thin nor fat, but was firmly toned. What’s so pretty? I asked, handling the dumbbells with ease, and she said, Your forearms . . . It wasn’t like her to talk like that. She had gentle eyes, but had a strong sense of identity. That’s what kept her from realizing that it was completely empty inside my solid, well-shaped forearms. Her nipples were just as firm and big as her sense of identity.

Could it be that she was the one peeping on me?

I wondered one night as I sat shirtless eating a steamed bun, heated in the microwave, and felt the gaze fall on me from beyond the northern kitchen window. At the steep foot of the mountain stood a huge mulberry tree. The leaves were so thick that it was dark in their shadow even during the day. The mysterious person was at the center there, in the darkness.

I sat so that I’d be more easily viewed from the spot, and greedily bit into my third steamed bun, and as I did, I thought of Hyein. It would take her forty minutes to drive down from her boutique on Rodeo Street, since the road was clear late at night. I pictured her driving down here, frantically stepping on the gas. She would park the car on the outskirts of the town, change into light sneakers, put on a black velvet cape that would help her hide in the darkness, and walk like a nocturnal animal in the rain through the forest path, and at last reach me, here in the bright light of my studio, biting into a steamed bun, me with my pretty forearms. At pretty forearms, I smiled, baring my teeth.

There were red beans at the center of the steamed bun.

I finished the bun, and stood by the window for a while, looking out at the shadow of the mulberry tree in a detached way. It was dark in the shadow of the mulberry tree, of course,

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and I couldn’t see anything. But the person was looking at me in a concrete way, and I was looking at the person in an abstract way. Looking . . . in a concrete way . . . in an abstract way . . . I thought. But was that really the case? It was true that I was seeing the person in an abstract way, but I wondered if the person was seeing me in a concrete way. The person always came to me in the middle of the night, and so never saw me outside of artificial light.

Besides, the person was outside and could see me only through the window, and would get a different angle depending on how wide the gap was between the curtains. On top of that, I put on an act at times, knowing I was being watched. I’d turn on the lights up or down, strip myself down to the waist, pretend I was painting, and then read a poem out loud, suddenly using theatrical gestures. I didn’t feel close to the person yet, but I knew that I was beginning to enjoy the gaze.

Hyein never called once.

I went to town and bought fashion magazines with pictures of models wearing her clothes, and looked at them as if I was looking at her. She was a pretty well known and promising fashion designer. When she was attending a fashion design institute in Paris, I was in Paris as well, studying painting. I had inherited a considerable legacy, so I was never badly off, whether my paintings sold or not. The year or so we lived together in a monthly rent apartment in a back alley in Montmartre was probably the last days in which I loved her.

Every night, I would be rapt, making her nipples erect. I want to have your baby . . . she said one night. Even during those days, I never had a burning ambition about painting. I was painting, but my life was in neglect, with all the screws loose. But she was full of ambition, despite her meek appearances. She clung to her studies from early morning to late at night.

I’d fall asleep after passionate lovemaking, and wake up to find her sitting in front of the sewing machine at the break of day. There’s a time for everything, even studying . . . she would often say. She believed that life lay on a straight one-way line, and that things like

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birth, coming-of-age, college, and marriage were systematically placed on that line. The same went for becoming a fashion designer. She believed that Paris was like a fast, functional stepping stone to becoming a fashion designer. So for her, letting her life in Paris, into which a good amount of money had to be invested, pass by with the screws loose was something unimaginable. The fact that she, who held such beliefs, said that she wanted to have my baby, unable to resist the institutional objective of raptly erect nipples, seemed to say that she had raised a banner of rebellion not against me, but against herself. A baby . . . what about studying design? You said there was a time for everything . . . I asked in surprise.

I don’t know, she said.

In any case, I want to have your baby.

That was probably when I began to feel a loathing for her big, black nipples. A baby . . . I shrieked inside. I detested making something I had to be responsible for. What do you arrive at by following the straight line of time? She said fullness and I said emptiness, but I rather liked the disagreement. If we had a baby and her fullness formed a connection with the emptiness at my center, I wouldn’t be able to bear it. I fled Paris. I hated myself for making her nipples full every night. The shadow of the mulberry tree was so deep that the wick of the darkness seemed fixed there.

4 My acting became more calculated and concrete after I found a woman’s hairpin in the shadow of the mulberry tree. The next day after I felt the mysterious person hiding in the shadow of the mulberry tree and watching me eat a steamed bun at night, I looked under the mulberry tree around noon and discovered a gold hairpin. From the looks of it, it was something that young women used to tie their hair back. It’s a woman . . . I concluded.

The rainy season was coming to an end.

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There had been forecast that a typhoon was coming from the Okinawa Sea, and that the rainy season would be over after the passing of the typhoon. The potatoes, some of whose leaves had withered, had passed through the crisis, with flowers blossoming here and there. If it’s a woman . . . I mumbled. Standing by the south window, I could see the valley, quietly buried in the mountain, at one glance. Fingering the hairpin, I looked over first at the gosiwon where there was no one preparing for exams. A woman was walking up the slope toward the building with her back to me. I thought of the young woman I’d passed by at the entrance of the town. There were only three rooms in that two-story building in which people lived. If there were two to a room, there would be six people in total, and one or two of the rooms could be used by only one person, so there could be five people living in the building, or four, or just three. Was it last week? I’m not sure, but I’d been driving to town late in the afternoon when I saw an old women and two young women waiting for a bus, who raised their hands, and I drove them to the town terminal. I couldn’t tell because she was far away, but the woman walking up the slope now could have been one of them. One of them was tall, the other short. I couldn’t recall the face because I hadn’t looked closely. One of them had asked, You live in that isolated house behind the town, don’t you? The old woman was clutching a bundle tightly. We can see your house from our room like the back of our hand . . . the woman had added. The old woman and the other woman never opened their mouths to the end. I wasn’t sure if the woman who’d talked was the tall one or the short one, but one of them had been redheaded, for sure. The town foreman had asked me once if it was true that some of the golf caddies were easy. Very occasionally, going home late at night, I’d see a fancy car that wasn’t usually seen in town parked, with the engine on, in the dim shadow of a tree outside the town entrance. I often imagined a young woman and a middle-aged man entangled in the dark car. Their hair is so brassy . . . the town foreman would say, as if to himself. The tips of their hair were unusually red because they were exposed to the sun year

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round.

The rain was coming down in fine misty droplets.

I pictured the gold hairpin on the long red hair I saw. The tall motels that were rising abruptly day by day along the riverside came to my mind. Some of them were red, like the caddies’ hair. The fog flowed west, covering the thickets behind the gosiwon building. I couldn’t see the golf course. Without the fog, you could see the nine-hole fairway of the golf course across from me to the southwest, but now it was covered by the wet fog. I was about to look over at the town, but stopped.

Why hadn’t I thought of that woman?

On the southern end of the town, there was an annex that was now turned into a pickled radish factory, and beyond that stood a pair of two-story houses built last fall. The two houses were built by two women who were friends, one a college professor and the other a writer. The professor, who taught English, was a married middle-aged woman and was using the house as a sort of vacation home, and the writer lived there. The writer, who looked around my age, lived alone. She said, The mountains here are relaxed, like cows on the ground . . . I’d had tea there a couple of times. She was severely nearsighted, and at dusk every day, she would go past the slope in front of the gosiwon building to the small Buddhist temple at the foot of the mountain on the east. From my studio, I could see her on her way to the temple every day. The book she had signed, putting on a thick pair of glasses because she was so nearsighted, was still on my table. I didn’t read the book, of course. Reading, for me at least, was nothing but a pathetic effort in futility. I knew that all sentences, even practical ones that merely conveyed facts, were consistently burning toward a center to no purpose. I believed that sentences had the most tragic fate of having to run desperately to fill a center, without saying that what was empty was empty…no, even when saying what was empty was empty. That felt even more terrible to me than Hyein saying to me, I want to have your

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baby . . . I picked up the woman’s book, lifted the cover, and looked at the picture inside. She looked back at me behind a pair of glasses in an ambiguous way. They say that the main part of your life lasts until you’re forty . . . she said to me early last year when I ran into her on a walk. It seemed that she’d just turned forty. That’s what Schopenhauer said . . . she added, and I smiled without a word, feeling pity for the woman whose main part of life was over.

The mountain that surrounded the town rose up behind her house and grew taller across the south, joined the mountain with the small Buddhist temple and formed the eastern skyline, then flowed north, reaching the shadow of the mulberry tree in my backyard. Approaching my isolated home without anyone knowing wouldn’t be difficult at all, not in deep darkness, at least. If it was the writer, she would be taking a shortcut by circumventing the town, taking the path through the thicket below the gosiwon, and then the ridge between the rice paddies in front of the studio. But what would she need a shortcut for? There were roads everywhere, and the streets became deserted after early evening, so it took more or less the same time no matter how she got here through the darkness.

Surprisingly, I didn’t really care to know who it was that came to me in secret in the middle of the night and peeped on me. It didn’t mean anything to me if it was one of the caddies living at the gosiwon, the English literature professor, the writer who stayed up all night every night in search of the main part of her life, or a girl from the town who worked at the pickled radish factory. What did it matter whether her last name was Yi or Kim, whether she was tall or short, or whether her hair was black or red? She wasn’t coming to me in order to reveal herself, and I didn’t want to go out and enter into a relationship with her, either. But the fact that she was a woman redoubled my interest. She was on the outside, I was on the inside, she was in the darkness, I in the light, and yes, she was a woman, and I was a man . . . or so I thought. I didn’t care to know why she came to me every night in the middle of the night and peeped at me. Asking why gave rise to just as much hatred in me as reading and

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conceiving babies, maybe even more so. She merely came and went. By repeatedly coming and going at night in secret without leaving a trace, she had more than proven that at the center of her desire was emptiness. We had a tacit agreement regarding the fact that we desired no changes.

Thus, I came to look forward to her visits.

She came in the middle of the night on the day the typhoon passed through. I was doing dumbbell exercises. The curtains on the east window were already half drawn, for I had opened them during the day. I’d been waiting tediously for her to come since early evening, so my sensory antenna was infinitely open toward the darkness. I didn’t forget to open the window a little as well, so that I’d be able to hear any sound that came. Outside the east window was a wooden deck, so I could hear even the sound of cat paws, subtle as it may be, if I was on the watch. I kept the curtains on the other windows completely drawn, of course, to lure her to the east deck. Indeed, she came carefully treading on the deck. I lifted dumbbells with great intensity, sweating with my upper body exposed. My well-toned muscles moved with suppleness, to hide the emptiness within. I stood where only about half of my body would be seen through the gap in the curtains. I felt like an actor in the spotlight, my entire body awash in light. Sweat poured down my body after half an hour of exercise.

Would she say, Your arms are so pretty? All the cells in my body opened up at once, and the emptiness within me rushed out through the open holes, then rushed back in.

I felt an indescribable pleasure.

It was a different kind of pleasure than what I felt when I saw Hyein’s nipples stand up through the night sea; I felt like filling up my emptiness with another kind of emptiness, inflating my body like a balloon, and then exploding, exploding . . . Hearing the mysterious woman leave the deck, I put the dumbbells down at last. I felt as if an orgasm had swept through my body. I slept very long, and whistled when I woke up at noon, and went for a

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sauna in the town.

That was my daily life consisted of.

Time flowed slowly, and the rainy season passed slowly and idly through my idle days. When the rainy season had passed, sunlight poured down day after day as if it had been waiting its turn, and the mercury jumped up. I often set the air conditioner on the rapid cool setting. I almost never painted, and didn’t go visit Hyein, either. Very occasionally, when I could see the empty center of the mulberry tree shadow, for instance, when the sun shone down too brightly, I would think of her nipples that would always kick back against the tips of my fingers, but I did no more than think about them. Even with the air conditioner on rapid cool, I would mumble, lying down by myself, It’s hot, this heat is driving me insane . . . At dusk, I always saw the writer walking toward the small Buddhist temple, and sometimes, I saw the caddies walk up the slope.

The mysterious woman didn’t come to me for a while after the rainy season.

No, perhaps she came every night, and I was just not aware, exhausted from the scorching heat. I still went to town once every three days, and looked at the reddish motels that stood imposingly as I passed along the riverside to go to the public sauna I frequented. A young, muscled guy sitting in the middle of the tub said, I’ve been getting a lot of caddies lately at the motel . . . Another guy said, Business has gone down lately, even at the golf course . . . And the muscled guy said, Last night, it was that tall girl who carried your bag last Wednesday. I’d never talked about golf while having sex before. . . Even the food at the restaurant I frequented seemed tasteless now. I often skipped meals. It was when I’d skipped dinner, fell asleep, and woke up out of hunger that the mysterious woman, who hadn’t come for a while, paid me a visit again. I was thinking about eating a steamed bun when I heard the subtle sound of someone passing through the cornfield. I perked up my ears and was about to raise my upper body, but then I held my breath, my feet on the couch and my upper body

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remaining on the sedge mat on the living room floor.

The east window was wide open.

I heard quiet footsteps moving cautiously on the deck.

I was naked. I felt the arrow of her gaze pass over my entire body. I was no longer hungry. I was pretending to be asleep, of course, but I could even sense her breathing as she stood very close, with only the screen between us. I want to get it up . . . I thought suddenly.

Would she rejoice if she saw my sleeping genitals gradually but firmly stand, penetrating the center of emptiness? But my genitals lay as if dead, even though I said in secret, Get up, stand . . . Like the shell of emptiness.

5 That was the day when I thought I should try shifting our grounds. It was all because of a hat that I thought I should put myself in her shoes on the day I slept naked without sleeping, the day I heard her breathing quietly beyond the screen.

The mysterious woman was wearing a hat.

That night, the moon had risen over the thin layer of clouds, and a hazy light filled the valley, and if there was something that looked unique in the light, it was the hat. I made sure that she had disappeared back into the cornfield, got up, went into the darkened main room, and looked out with my nose pressed to the window. If she took the forest path on the eastern foot of the mountain, I wouldn’t be able to see even her outline, of course. But she must have thought I was deep in sleep, for she passed through the cornfield, then turned at a right angle and entered a footpath between rice fields. It was the first time that I saw her back, if only as a silhouette-like image. The attire was definitely that of a woman, and she was wearing a sports cap with a long brim that young girls often wear. Very slowly, she was sucked into the shadow of the mountain across the rice paddy, as if being sucked into the

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empty center of life. It was a very mysterious yet sad image, just the cap without a body, like a phantom, like time flowing. I want to go after her . . . I thought. As if summoned by a spirit, I wanted to go after the cap.

From the next day on, I became a completely different actor than from before.

I began to wait for her, making it seem as if I were inside with appropriate lighting and music, and closing the curtains completely so that she couldn’t look in, and going up to the roof. I slathered on mosquito repellent, but they flew at me mercilessly. Summer was reaching its peak. For about a week, the heat wouldn’t cool off even after midnight. But I persevered, like a patient hunter who had set a trap. As I waited, I saw the flesh of the full moon wear out day by day and at last die. A month was the death of the moon, and the center of darkness.

She walked right into the death of the moon.

Stars were pouring down.

She used the east path she most often used. I sat huddled up, listening to the sound of something brushing against corn leaves, and saw a black shadow cross the yard without a fence and approach the east deck. The curtains were completely closed so she wouldn’t be able to look inside. The sound of television came from inside. She moved about, trying to find a gap in the curtains. I was hiding in the darkness, and she was in the faint light that flowed out through the curtains. I looked down on her from just above her head. She was wearing the cap. It was a pity that, because of the cap, I couldn’t see the glitter of her eyes that might be as bright as the morning sun. When she saw that she couldn’t look inside from any direction, she was visibly disappointed. For a long time, she just stood there vacantly, her small body in the middle of the deck. I heard a night bird cry, not too far away. Hyein must be designing the trends for the new spring season even now. It’s not about being ahead by a season . . . she’d said. She said that in order to survive in the fashion world, you had to be

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ahead not by a season or two, but at times had to take a time machine several years into the future, and create a style from years ahead. The computer could freely put on countless pieces of clothing on virtual future women in virtual space, and take them off as well. Soon she might come to own a thoroughly organized file of styles that she would then have to create throughout her life until the day she died. Trends would repeat themselves, and computers would formulate the accumulation of all the cycles of fashion styles that have changed over thousands of years. I remember an interview by a scientist who said that the current degree of integration for semiconductors could be increased by over ten thousand times by using graphite carbon molecules. If all the fashion styles were formulated by year until she died, she would have done more than her life’s work; what kind of marks would she make, then on the straight line of time?

The woman was still standing on the deck— looking pitiful— without moving.

She was taking in the light of countless stars with nothing but a cap with a wide brim.

I felt the urge to run down and throw open the curtains that I’d closed and say, Look . . . The Milky Way flowed from the northeast mountain ridge to southwest. There were at least thirty trillion stars in one galaxy, and in some cases, there were tens of thousands of light years of a dark and cold chasm between stars. I thought, One light year is the distance light travels in one year . . . there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of billions of galaxies whose effective thickness alone is dozens of light years away . . . With her flimsy brim, she was receiving the light of stars that had traveled thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of billions of years. Some of the light that fell on her must have left the luminous body from which they came thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of billions of years ago.

At last, she moved.

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She disappeared toward the cornfield, as slowly as she’d come.

For no good reason, the word eternity came to my mind. I quickly climbed down the ladder I’d set up, and made my way through the dark footpath between rice fields, making almost no sound. I was right on target. It was long after I’d made my way through the rice paddies that she, who had taken the long way around, taking the path at the foot of the mountain on the east, appeared under the outdoor lamp at the entrance of the gosiwon.

The path forked off into three directions.

The path that led straight down would lead to the town, the one at a 45 degree angle would lead to the back of the annex, and the one at a 90 degree angle would lead to the gosiwon. The woman took the one at a 90 degree angle. There was no doubt now that she was one of the caddies living there. All the lights in the building were off and it was dark. I took extreme care not to make a sound, and followed her into the front yard of the building. I heard the sound of her slow, tired footsteps walking up the stairs to the second floor, as if to fall into eternity, and then the light came on in a room. I knew that I finally had a chance to see her, as she’d seen me. Her lighted room was at the southern end, and luckily, there were some old pine trees that hadn’t been cut down, from which the room could easily be seen.

I climbed one of the pine trees like a night animal. The curtains were completely open.

Hiding in the darkness outside the window, I held my breath and looked at the woman who was in the light. I could see everything. A very short young woman, wearing jeans, a sleeveless black shirt, and a sports cap with a long brim was standing next to a fluorescent light.

Slowly, she took off her cap.

My mouth fell open in spite of myself.

The long hair was in a tight ponytail, but it wasn’t hair burnt red in the sun, but

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blindingly white hair. She must have had no teeth, for in her profile her lips were pursed, and the deep wrinkles were as deep as could be, with a distinct contrast of light and shade. With a gloomy face reflecting the woes of this world, the old woman took off the sleeveless black shirt and jeans, piece by piece. Age spots covered not only her face, but her entire body as well. She moved so slowly that I felt as if I were watching a video in slow motion. When she had taken off the jeans that were much too large for her, only a handful of her remained. But unlike Hyein, who must be awake, studying like mad to be ahead by a just a year or two, the old woman looked indifferent, as if she were just starting out on a journey of tens of thousands of light years. At that moment, a taxi drove up the slope to the gosiwon. A woman got off the taxi and came stomping vigorously up the stairs. The old woman, who was putting her loose hair into a bun, lay down in haste.

Grandma, you’re old, you shouldn’t lie down without a blanket, said the young woman who entered the room.

The sports cap and the jeans were scattered on the floor. The young woman with long hair, who was about to cover the old woman with a blanket, saw them and tilted her head.

What are these doing here? she mumbled again. She put the jeans and the cap in the wardrobe and began to take off her clothes. She had red hair, was very tall, and full-bosomed. The white fluorescent light came flowing down the young woman’s lustrous shoulders and became absorbed in the angular face of the old woman pretending to be asleep.

I looked at the face of the old woman, who looked as if she were dead.

At that moment, a shooting star penetrated the center of my body. The old woman, who was only a handful of being, entered the center of my empty canvas, and . . . was lying, quietly . . . like a corpse.

An Empty Room

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1 I met a construction designer in order to build a house.

Can there be sunlight everywhere? I asked. The construction designer had a strong build. Well, let’s see, he said slowly, and bent down to see the land registration map on the 24

table.

The plot stretches out to the north and south, he said.

Some dandruff flakes fell from his shaggy hair onto the land registration map of the land on which my house would be built. Suddenly, I felt unreasonably angry that the designer had a strong build. Such a possession of big and strong things was nothing more than needless surplus. I pretended to yawn so as not to let on that I was angry, and said, It does stretch out to the north and the south, but isn’t it long enough from the east to the west, too?

The designer said, It’s possible, of course, but it might cost you. The well-built man seemed to have stayed up all night, probably playing poker or mah-jong or such. You don’t need to worry about the cost, I said, sounding confident. He reached into his shirt and scratched his wide chest.

So you want to sit in the sun even when you’re inside? he asked.

His eyes lightly swept over my forehead. They were still the color of water in a puddle. A house, he suddenly raised his voice. A house needs dark areas. If you make the windows wide, you’ll lose that much wall space, and without walls, you’ll have nowhere to sit and rest. Westerners place a dark room for solitary rest next to a bright room on purpose. I hadn’t expected at all for him to say so much, and all at once, so I was momentarily taken aback. The top of a spire in the smog filled city soared above the shoulder of the well-built man.

I’m trying to leave this city.

Having said that, I looked into his eyes, trying to catch my breath. I want to rest in the sun. I don’t need a dark room. I said firmly, as if to say that there was no room for further discussion, and the well-built man yawned, his mouth stretching wide. The yawns we exchanged were surplus. I felt sick.

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2 The brook that flowed from north to south and the brook that flowed from east to west met at the eastern end of the town. The brooks formed a long T. The right inner side of the T was the hub of the town, and on the other side lay a school and houses and apartments that looked much the same, along the low mountain slope; and for some time now, new buildings had been rising up at the center of the T, or in other words, on both sides of the brook that flowed from east to west. With the sudden influx of population in the area, the town, which was the seat of a county office, began to change day by day as well.

The New York Times chose the letter T as the symbol of the 21st century, I hear.

Whenever I went to town, I recalled what the barber had said early in January, with scissors in hand. The barber, with a buzz cut, was forty-one years old like me, and had been in the special forces. You could see his military spirit in his stubborn jaw, and he was always reading something, whether it be a paper or a book, to put a bridle on that transcendental fate.

The first stroke of the letter T was a symbol emphasizing the diversity of information we must acquire in all fields, and the second, vertical stroke, said that you could survive in the 21st century only by acquiring expert knowledge in one area, as deep as a well.

In other words, you need to go deep and wide.

As the barber said that, the scissors came deep within my hair. The line I moved in whenever I went to town was also in the shape of the letter T. I would drive for about ten minutes before coming to the brook that flowed from south to west, which I would drive

along for about five minutes, and then there was a large supermarket I frequented, and the bridge that led out from the supermarket would lead to a showy motel area and an eighteenstory building with the only nightclub in town. Very occasionally I went to a motel at midday, and often entered the eighteen-story building. On the thirteenth floor of the building was a stock company where I could trade stocks without going to Seoul. I usually ate at the Korean restaurant on the third floor, checked to see the increase or decrease of my liquid assets on the thirteenth, and had coffee at the sky lounge on the eighteenth, or stopped by at a motel and bought a woman. Usually it was an old hostess who worked at a bar nearby, but once in a while, a young teashop girl or a golf caddie. There were many golf courses around town, many of which used golf carts, so caddies with no work would come to the motel for extra income. I actually preferred the older hostesses or prostitutes over the young teashop girls or golf caddies. I went to a motel about once a month, but even then, I couldn’t get it up that easily.

Suck my ash tree.

Or so I would often say.

It was Hyein who first told me that ash trees were used as gun barrels and ax handles.

Last spring, I think it was, I was pruning the ash trees in my back yard when Hyein suddenly showed up. Why don’t you try pruning your own ash tree? Who knows, it might grow as solid as a gun barrel. That’s what she said when we had difficulty making love. Whether it was an old widow or a hostess, or a young caddie, I didn’t need their inner pockets. Suck harder, so hard that you sweat, I often pressed. I knew from experience that my ash tree would stand like a gun barrel only when sweat poured down their faces. I failed much more often than I succeeded. The women didn’t do their best, even though I always tipped them generously. That’s why I expanded my line of activity from the south-north line of the town, which corresponded to the horizontal line of the letter T, to the east-west line.

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A five-day market was held on the riverside road, the vertical line of the letter T. On the cement road where cars should be, countless merchants and townspeople mingled together every five days. The barbershop was around the middle of the riverside road over which hung a bridge. It was the busiest spot on market days. People who had come to sell dogs, cats, chicks, soft-shelled turtles, rabbits, and ducks encamped there, and on the junction joining the bridge, people who sold fruit, clothes, cheap shoes, and silkworm larvae were all mingled together. The road was paved, but I felt as if there was a dust storm everywhere. It was quite dynamic. At first, of course, I didn’t see the barber shop pole on the entrance of the faded two-story building in a corner of the junction. What I saw first of all was a bicycle that passed by, almost crashing into my shoulder, as I walked among the people.

The old bicycle with an unusually large carrier was passing deftly through the throng of people, so large that it was difficult for me to even walk. The bicycle soon came to a stop on a side of the junction, and a stocky man with firm shoulders got off, taking off his helmet.

It was around noon, and the sunlight was strong and harsh.

I realized at last that what had drawn my attention to the rider of the bicycle was the helmet. What’s he doing wearing a helmet when the bicycle’s so old? I mumbled to myself.

The helmet was black. The strong, harsh sunlight met the helmet, slipped helplessly, then quickly penetrated the surface of the helmet. The man who held the helmet in his hand had a buzz cut. Because of his round, solid head, he looked as if he were still wearing a helmet.

Where had I seen that man?

The moment he turned his head in my direction, I recalled the public sauna next to the motel I went to once in a while. He was the barber who worked at the public sauna. The one who had talked about The New York Times and the letter T and the 21st century early in January. He parked his bicycle next to the watermelon vendor. The watermelons, which also looked like helmets, were piled up in a heap on the cement ground. The man must have been

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thirsty, for he was about to turn around, but then he bent down toward the heap of watermelons. In other words, you need to go deep and wide. His words rang clear in my mind.

Next to the watermelon vendor, sitting on the ground, was a watermelon split right down the center for sampling a taste. The obese, middle-aged vendor sat there lazily plucking his nose hair, as if he didn’t care about selling watermelons, then saw the man and gave a nod.

The man moved as if he weren’t moving.

The man, quietly and nimbly, but as if he weren’t moving, cut out a circle of watermelon, a part with few seeds in it, using a kitchen knife. You couldn’t have drawn a circle more perfectly, even if you were drawing one on paper with a pencil. He drew a circle as if using a compass, then pricked the center with the tip of the knife, and, without a sound, drew out up a cone of watermelon into the air against the sunlight. The watermelon was red, so red. The man raised it high, his back straight, and took an eager bite. The man was someone who knew what a center was, and could take it. The busyness surrounding him, the dust storm and all, didn’t have any effect on his center. A drop of water plopped down. I thought it was water from the watermelon, but it was sweat. It made sense, since he had come riding a bicycle through the crowd with a helmet on. My jaw dropped. Sell a lot of watermelons, I think the man said. I noticed the dusty barber shop pole on the pillar of the building only after the man, helmet in hand, disappeared into the entrance of the two-story building behind the heap of watermelons.

I began to walk quickly, afraid that someone might notice.

The ash tree at my center was slyly pushing up against my pants. How can this be? I mumbled to myself, blushing in secret. It was only later that I learned that the man owned the right to carry out his barber service in the public sauna as well as owned the basement barbershop. The basement barbershop, equipped with women, took mostly massage customers. It was open around the clock, but there were almost no customers during the day.

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The man was usually at the public sauna during the day, and returned to the basement barbershop on his motorcycle, as if going on a business trip, whenever a customer looked for him at the barbershop. I rode the bicycle that day because someone went out on the motorcycle and didn’t come back, he later explained to me. I kept wandering around the people crowding up the bridge, selling dogs, cats, chicks, soft-shelled turtles, rabbits, and ducks, then when I saw the man coming out of the basement barbershop and going toward the public sauna on the bicycle, I stealthily entered the two-story building with the barber shop pole. The building was very old, and the dusty basement stairs were dark with no light. I suddenly recalled the window of the stock company on the thirteenth floor of the eighteenstory building, where I’d dropped by around noon.

I hesitated for a moment, then opened the door to the barber shop.

There was a room next to the entrance.

Three half naked women in their thirties, who were playing Go-Stop, looked up and said hello. How did the little butterfly fly up all the way up to the thirteenth floor? I wondered irrelevantly. A little butterfly kept slipping while trying to land on the middle of a large dusty windowpane in the stock company on the thirteenth floor. I kept thinking about the butterfly as a woman led me inside the barber shop through the short corridor in front of the room.

When she turned on the fluorescent light, I could see the barbershop in its entirety, and it was surprisingly spacious. There were makeshift walls between the chairs, and large chairs facing the large mirror in each division. There were no customers. Faded red carpeting absorbed all sound, and the noise from the market was shut out. My reflection in the large mirror looked like a phantom. I thought for a moment that the little butterfly flew up too high to return to the ground. A woman wearing a sleeveless black dress that was short enough to show her thighs asked, Do you want a haircut? I shook my head, and she turned off the main light and turned on the dim light on the mirror in front of me.

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The quiet, wide space disappeared in the mirror like magic.

For a moment, I felt a strange, peculiar sort of peace, as if I were sitting in my mother’s womb, or an old basement tomb. The image of the butterfly, which kept slipping while trying to settle on the windowpane, was no longer in my head. The woman pushed her hands, the fingers spread out like a fan, into my hair.

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