Deep Blue Night by Choe In-ho

Choe In-ho’s Deep Blue Night is one of my favorite of the Portable Library of Korean Literature translations, partly because it’s theme is so accessible to a western reader. It is a combination of a travelogue and that most quintessential American literary form, the buddy road-trip. The story begins with a scene reminiscent of the opening scene of Lee Kyoun-young's The Other Side of Dark Remembrance; an unnamed narrator waking up after a paralyzing night of drinking. He is shortly revealed to be Hyeong, a man on a road-trip with his friend Jun-ho, who has been exiled from Korea because of a drug arrest. They have traveled a pretty average Korean tourist arc, Disneyland, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, San Francisco, and now they are on their return trip to Los Angeles.

Hyeong frequently discusses seeing things that will be forgotten – what it is to see things that will never be seen again. This theme is actually a precursor to the main theme of the story, that of alienation from homeland. In Deep Blue Night we see something like the traditional Korean arc of separation and (with luck, the ending is ambivalent) return. Even in Korean modern literature set in the United States, you don’t have to scratch very hard to reveal pundhan munhak at the heart of the story. Hyeong eventually makes this explicit when he reveals that his visit to the United States is of no interest to him, “The sole purpose of his journey was not to see … His journey to America was a journey to a self-chosen land of exile.” (45)

Deep Blue Night is a fun read, Jun-ho is presented as a pretty clearly identifiable character, the amiable pot-smoking dolt. Choe’s writing is expressive (and often surprising) as in his description of sunset on the coast, “The army of the sea launches a concentrated fusillade against the disintegrating realm of heaven. Shells explode in a burst of sparks, illuminating the darkness on high with shards of light.” (57)

There are revealing cultural glimpses as well. In Buckwheat Season, one of the classic stories (particularly for Koreans) of Korean modern literature, there is a scene in which two friends play out an oft-repeated scene between each other as one retells an annoying story:

Cho had heard it often enough since making friends with Ho, but he could not bring himself to reveal his boredom. Ho, on his part, feigned indifference and went on as he pleased.

Choe updates this to the inside of an automobile

Jun-ho had a bad habit: he liked his music very loud … The idea was not so much to enjoy the music as to shower himself with it.
With the windows rolled up tight, he [Hyeong] himself felt trapped in a closet. In this small, speeding closet the piercing sound of the music was torture. But he made up his mind not to reveal these feelings. (29)

This is, of course, quite a Korean approach - a deeply respectful approach to kibun.

Choe uses automotive speed in a way quite similar to Kim Young-ha’s use in I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, as a metaphor for modern separation, each one of us endures. As their ability to deal with this anomic existence wears away, so does the mechanical capacity of their automobile. At the end, when Hyeong and Jun-ho are stranded, lost on a highway they hadn’t intended to follow, when their car has finally choked to a grinding halt, with Jun-ho’s secret misery revealed, only then can the characters come face to face with their essential isolation and exile. Lost and weeping, dazed and repentant they both promise/beg to return to their community. Conquered and weak, they long for return. Deep Blue Night concludes with Hyeong broken on the beach, his desires clear, but his future opaque.

Google shows me that this has been made into a Korean movie, although the poster is somewhat alarming in that it most prominently features a woman and child, and there are essentially none active in the story. And reading the movie synopsis it becomes clear that the written story was completely bastardized, alas.

The remainder of the book is filled out with a short story, The Poplar Tree. A kind of meditation, The Poplar Tree is 10 pages long and allegorically addresses issues of desire, transformation, and extinction. Distinctly Buddhist in tone, it interweaves the story of a boy and a blacksmith, and an apple and an oak tree. Somewhere between a koan and a story, it manages to be whimsical and bittersweet. In a way, it is a nice palate-cleanser after the jangled and unhappy tone of Deep Blue Night.

Two good stories, well paired.

The Other Side of Dark Remembrance by Lee Kyun-Young

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 10 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

The Other Side of Dark Remembrance begins in the middle of a fugue state as a Korean salaryman wakes up and springs to his feet in perfectly unfamiliar surroundings. Hungover and thirsty he searches for something to drink and considers his usual morning ritual:

“He considered this darkness he enjoyed with his eyes closed during this blank waking hour a perfect ritual of peace for him. That’s why he made a point to relish this darkness during the morning hours when he was supposed to hurry, and eventually he would sometimes be late to the office or fail to keep an appointment.”

He quickly realizes he has misplaced a satchel containing which contains documents representing an economic windfall for his company. The narrator adopts a nearly third-person tone as he roots around in the memories of other characters to unearth his own actions. This is amusing, and his alternating panic and sense of acceptance about the loss of the satchel are also amusing to read. The novel is also an amusing introduction to the old-fashioned drinking culture of Korean salarymen (and ajeoshi). When the two men move from 일차 to 이차 (from “round one” to “round two” of drinking establishments) “just to gargle out the soju taste from the palate,” a reader with knowledge of Korean culture will chuckle in recognition.

As the narrator torturously recreates the steps of his previous night, he gradually realizes he is seeking not only the papers, but clues about his past (and he had been doing so on the drunken evening as well), the family from whom he was separated by the War--even his proper age, a particularly poignant thing to be missing in a culture like Korea’s, in which age determines all social relationships among men. In fact, in his drunken excesses the previous evening, he had remembered some elusive fact about his past, a fact that had led him on an unsuccessful journey of exploration.

As in most Korean novels of this kind, that elusive fact or memory relates to a tragedy of war and the narrator’s interrupted, now resumed, search to redeem a pledge and restore his family. The novel ends with a minor redemption and a reunion of sorts. Just what sort of reunion is kept intentionally vague, and the ending contain just a hint of the concluding plot of Oldboy. The redemption is not the necessarily the redemption the narrator wants, but it certainly seems to be the one he needs.

The translation is workmanlike, though it could have used one more line-edit. There is at least one sentence that is missing enough words to be completely free of meaning, and there is also at least one case of a sports allusion destroyed by a supernumerary preposition (“matters … he had to tackle with.”). But in general the translation is good, and I have to admit it was only on second reading that I caught the second of these errors.

The last thing worthy of mention is the canniness of the title, which is apropos on three levels and lends itself well to college level analysis of textual symbolism – if someone were to teach this book. First, of course, it applies to the narrator walking up, hung-over, the morning after he has remembered his past and then obliterated it with booze. In this granular sense the narrator wakes up on the other side of dark remembrance, although the memories have again been buried. This leads to the titles relevance to the larger story in which it is revealed that life has obliterated important memories that, inevitably, come back (despite the narrator’s ‘heroic’ drinking). Finally, of course, it is also a reference to the larger process that society undergoes in dealing with historical traumas.

The Other Side of Dark Remembrance is engaging enough as the narrative of a man having a very bad weekend, and its clever introduction of traditional Korean War themes, does nothing to dent this appeal.

"Three Days in That Autumn" by Pak Wanseo

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 8 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

Pak Wanseo’s (as her name is spelled on the book cover) Three Days in That Autumn is an austere, almost frigid account of the end days of a gynecologist (abortionist, actually) and her practice. The title is a clever one, as it refers both to the specific time of the story and the position of the narrator in her life. In fact the narrator, an abortionist, has lived in Autumn since her rape, many years ago. Now, she avenges/re-enacts that rape on a daily basis in her role as an abortionist. The doctor vacillates between a kind of wry guilt for “killing enough people to populate a town" and pride in her role as a provider of relief to sexually abused and exploited women. As is often true in Pak’s stories, Three Days in That Autumn begins in a national trauma – that is, the narrator is raped as a result of the war, and then quickly descends into a personal nightmare. Pak employees such a strategy in other translated fiction (In the Realm of the Buddha) as well as in her recently published “autobiographic novel” (Who Ate Up all The Shinga). Stephen Epstein has summed this feature up in Pak’s work:

[this] narrative strategy is employed frequently in Pak’s work: what may seem initially to be a story with public concerns then turns to center upon family relationships or vice-versa, as personal drama suddenly takes on wider implications

At the outset Pak sets the public line clearly, “The Korean War was the line common to us all, the barrier we had all confronted. What outrageous warping of fate had each one of us faced over that line” (Pak 12)? When the doctor says, "For me it's more important to know that a man is capable of rape than to know his last name," it is clear how profoundly the rape has affected her and as its result she chooses to open a “woman’s clinic,” or an abortion clinic. Her first patient is the only live birth that she ever oversees. Beyond that occasion, she never again overseas a birth, not even bothering to procure the equipment needed for birth.

Her decision turns out to be a canny one, as local prostitutes soon begin to make use of her services, and as the neighborhood changes her clientele moves on to housewives forced to follow the population control model of two children per family, only. The Doctor cannot develop personal relationships of any kind, even a madam refers to the Doctor as “a block of wood,” and she lives in a sort of dusty cocoon reinforced by her pretty close to complete contempt for the rest of the world. The doctor considers her prostitute clients “illiterate morons,” churchgoers to be hypocrites because the doctor “[knows] what sins they have committed,” and she is embarrassed by the closest thing she has to a friend, the madam.

As retirement approaches, is literally three days away, the doctor feels a strange longing to deliver a life, rather than the termination of life and this longing brings her back into contact with the madness at her core. This begins to manifest itself in bad dreams, peculiar (and unremembered) behavior in the clinic, and a sudden recognition that she has lived a life entirely without love. She begins to obsess on the notion that delivering a baby could be a small, but significant, way in which to re-establish her link with the life and love she had forfeited or had stolen, or some combination of both, some 30 years before.

Finally, unexpectedly, a chance for redemption occurs on the Doctor’s last day of business, and painfully projects the Doctor into the past, and memories of her own abortion.

The conclusion is dramatic and subject to a literal or symbolic interpretation, depending upon the reader’s inclination. Either way, it is extremely powerful.

Koreans like to imagine the day that a Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to a Korean, and there are certainly few candidates in Korea who can step up to the level at which Pak writes.

"The Land of the Banished" by Cho Chong-rae

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 7 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul


Cho Chong-rae’s The Land of the Banished is one of the best of the “political betrayal themed Korean novels. At work we are attempting to taxonomize translated Korea literature by theme, and one of the recurrent themes we see is that of people and families torn apart as alternating waves of leadership followed political and military victories by the North of South.

Cho’s tale, however, is particularly compelling because he ties it to the sad story of Mahn-seok, a man who was probably never good, but was given extraordinary chances at evil and failure in the aftermath of the war.

Cho begins his tale with some clever bits of mis-direction. Mahn-seock is a destroyed old man begging an orphanage to take his young son. Mahn-seok is nearly prostrate with grief and guilt as he offers the orphanage his last money, and hands them his son’s pitiful personal belongings. The scene is a tender one, and it is followed immediately by a partial explanation of how Mahn-seok and his son have come to this unfortunate place: They have been betrayed by Mahn-seok’s second wife. Mahn-seok is portrayed as a bit ingenuous in this passage; he had lept into the marriage perhaps knowing better. In a bit of funny writing Cho describes Mahn-seok’s state when he met his second wife:

As soon as the woman took to wagging her tail like that, he should have mercilessly cut it off. But like a cat exposed to the odor of fish, he was intoxicated.

There is a lot going on in that passage – you have to love the cat/fish metaphor that nicely suggests the attraction was strongly sexual, and the “mercilessly cut it off” is a brutal foreshadowing of what we shall shortly learn about Mahn-seok.

Mahn-seok’s willingness to be lead does not lessen the betrayal he feels. After getting married he had put down roots (the reason for his previous rootlessness will shortly be revealed.) and tried to live the life of an upright man. This betrayal, Mahn-seok’s pitiful contrition, and his sons wails at the thought of separation, all combine powerfully.

This framing technique is repeated again at the book’s conclusion, which returns to Mahn-seok in his aged and weakened state. By framing the central story in this way, Cho builds substantial compassion in the reader for Mahn-seok, a compassion the reader will find need to draw upon as Mahn-seok’s back story is revealed.

A second way in which Cho builds compassion for Mahn-seok, and one of the reasons his book is such a skilled example of the genre, is to give Mahn-seok intensely personal and interpretable reasons for his hatred, anger, and the actions of his younger life. Mahn-seok is revealed to be a bit more than your average cad, as a very specific personal history and social history, combine to make him a very bitter and angry man. This differentiates Cho’s work from other similar pieces, in which the waves of politics are presented as nearly external to the characters.. the machinations of chess pieces sweeping across a board. It is evidence of Cho’s skill as an author that he achieves all of this in a relatively scant 86 pages.

After the first 23 pages of scaffolding has established the picture of Mahn-seok as a pathetic old victim, the next 8 pages neatly desecrate that picture by introducing the ‘real’ plot of the story, the social turmoil of the war and its aftermath. In a series of quick and violent scenes, all of which flow organically out of Mahn-seok’s personal experience allied to the dictates of shifting political power, Cho reveals the heart of darkness at the center of his story.

For the remainder of the story (which I largely elide here), Cho interweaves Mahn-seok’s political and personal history, his life with his second wife, his desire to return ‘home’ and his friendship with Hwang, an old man in his home village. When, returned home surreptitiously, Mahn-seok talks to Hwang, Hwang reflects on Mahn-seok’s history saying, “I may know know much, but it seems to me the times are to blame.” This is a partial benediction, but one that Mahn-seok, an active moral character to the end, seems unwilling to accept.

The Land of the Banished concludes neatly, though ironically. Mahn-seok makes one more trip to his home village, where he is believed to be already dead. The Choe family, Mahn-seok’s mortal enemies and social superiors, have been returned to power in the village, and the bones of Mahn-seok’s allies lie unmemorialized in pits. Mahn-seok staggers out into the night, and dies alone, after discovering that Hwang, also, has died.

Cho leaves open the question of what, if anything, was accomplished through the political upheavals of the time. Further, his careful deliniation of Mahn-seok as flawed, but at the core profoundly moral in many ways, and the reasoned judgment of Hwang (who acts something like a Greek-chorus) combine in an unsettling way. One concludes the book aware that one has just read the story of a monster, but it is impossible to entirely blame Mahn-seok for what he became. Mahn-seok, in the final analysis, is merely weak, and Cho makes us feel this weakness and traces its horrific, pathetic, and most likely useless results.

An Appointment with My Brother by Yi Mun-yol

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 13 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

Yi Mun-yol’s An Appointment with My Brother is a full-fledged political lecture wrapped in the garb of a short novel. Yi makes no effort to hide the fact that the central discussion is, in many ways, a minor part of the formal plot, although it is also quite clearly the important part of the novel. It is to Yi’s credit that he personalizes his protagonists so well that, even as they (The two step-brothers as well as a businessman who appears in the novel) argue what is essentially predictive political theory, both the story and the argument seem lively and important.

The plot is fairly mechanical. The narrator meets with his stepbrother, a child from their father’s second marriage. The father’s second marriage occurred after he defected from South to North Korea. This plot is reminiscent of Yi’s own life, which was substantially complicated, both economically and politically, by the fact that his father defected to North Korea. The meeting takes place in China and the meeting is between stepbrothers because their father, whom the narrator had initially hoped to meet, has died.

The meeting between separated brothers is an old trope in Korean modern literature, “In Korean popular discourse, the division of the peninsula into two separate nations after the Korean War is often symbolized as two brothers who, in the shadow of their parents’ death, are tragically separated across an artificially imposed national line.” (Wood 129) Presaged by political discussions between the narrator and, successively a businessman and a professor, when the two brothers meet the conversation becomes a nationalistic one with each brother retreating to the platitudes of his homeland. This leads to some fairly crackling interactions, including one of my favorite passages:

I heard that the traitorous plutocrats have millions of square meters of land, and that all the scenic places are taken up by their deluxe villas where they cavort with young whores.

That’s some funny writing and also does a good job of relaying the overblown oratory-style the North Koreans sometimes use when discussing the South at the same time it limns the lack of sophistication of the North Korean brother. Other characters have similarly vivid personalities and Yi does an excellent job of weaving them in and out of the story.

The brothers struggle to find common ground and in a very “Korean” scene, their differences are bridged by drinking soju, and the brothers perform a joint memorial service for their father. Nationalist sentiments never quite quit intruding, there is an amusing scene in which the brothers argue over the meaning of their offerings to their father, but in the end familial unity is restored and a sort of judgment seems to be reached, when the Northern brother accepts a gift of cash from the Southern one. This action also echoes one of the ongoing political themes of the novel, that re-unification may end up being an economically costly process. That is only one of the political/economic options the book explores with respect to re-unification, and it is one of the minor miracles of the book that Yi makes all the options/predictions stand on their own two legs; in most cases he is quite good at leaving judgments out of his text.

This is a suprisingly light and entertaining read.

The Ma Rok Biographies by Seo Giwon

It is not easy to make Korean history, which has so often been tragedy, into a farce, but Seo Giwon (ably edited by the redoubtable Kevin O’Rourke) pulls off this unlikely trick in his The Ma Rok Biographies. In three short stories (stories 2, 3, and 5 from the original work) , all featuring protagonists named “Ma,” Seo handily portrays the random, absurd, and farcical nature of Korean history in three different eras; the pre-Japanese feudal system; under Japanese rule, and; during the Korean war. In the course of this he also passes judgment on individual humans: He finds them powerless, feckless, and silly; flotsam and jetsam on seas of indeterminacy. Finally, he also passes judgment on human systems, our war-making and our political systems particularly, and finds them wanting.

FALLING UP – THE MA ROKSOM BIOGRAPHY
The first profile (the second in the original text) is perhaps the most random of the three stories. In it a hapless political-science student is battered about by events surrounding the North Korean advance down the Korean peninsula. In hopes of escaping the North Koreans, Ma Roksom swims the Han River and is immediately arrested as a North Korean spy. By a bit of luck, he is recognized by a friend and instead of becoming a prisoner of war, or being killed as a spy, begins a long and perambulating series of events in which, until the end, even his most ridiculous behavior is eventually rewarded. After his swim across the Han, Ma heads down to Busan, far away from the encroaching communists.

In, perhaps, an intentional parody of the odd position of power that English sometimes confers in South Korea, Ma Roksom’s limited ability to say random English words gains him a position as interpreter. This position causes him great psychic and physical strain, and he is almost happy to lose it and move to a position as an interrogator closer to the lines. There, Ma ‘attacks’ two prisoners, in fact he is more or less trying to reason with them, but he gains a reputation as a tough-guy that follows him even as he is transferred to a job even closer to the front. Again, he is a translator, and again he fails. This results in his move to the Military Patrol, by now all the way up near Pyeonyang where he is given command of a POW camp. A reader can’t help but notice that as soon as Ma Roksom starts “winning” through his inexplicable tussles with reality, he moves closer and closer to just that which he had endeavored to escape.

At the POW camp, Ma recognizes old friends who he knows are not communists. At this point Ma makes his second act of personal will (the first being his swim across the Han) and directs a fraudulent execution scene that allows his friends a clean escape.

In a universe of random absurdity, however, directed deeds – even good deeds – represent a tear in the fabric of life, and of course Ma is caught and punished for his attempt to instill some kind of sense into his life.

The punishment is also absurd. Ma is forced to strip down to his underpants (although the translation also says “naked”) and run across a bridge in the dead of winter. Ma thinks about the absurdity of crossing two rivers only in his underpants but his final thought is that “The scene when he reached the neck of the bridge was gratifying: he was like a sprinter breaking the tape.”

As a comment on the war itself, Seo is clearly arguing something that could only be argued in a farce: that decisions were being arrived at arbitrarily and that the situation outstripped the ability of any understanding; so reason was tossed out.

FALLING DOWN – THE MA JUN BIOGRAPHY
The second profile (third in the original book) features Ma Jun, a “conscientious official” who is actually officiates nothing. This story likely takes place in the late 1600s, as it is placed in the middle of the historical power struggle between the Noron and Soron political parties during a period in which the Noron control the country that is also an “end of the century culture.” (p 52)

In any case, the Ma family has been in decline for several generations, are associated with the out of power Soron, and if Ma does not receive an official position, his family will be stricken from the ranks of nobility. Certainly Geo presents the test for an official position as rigged, but Seo is never a writer to suggest only one “reason,” because ultimately he is arguing that reason has little to do with outcome. So, Seo adds another burden to Ma - unfortunately, generations of bad luck and malnutrition have taken a toll:

The presumption was that a hole had been bored in the Ma family brain. The tragedy of the father and son was their complete failure to realize this.

Seo’s breezy and clever style is evident in this passage from the absurd image of the family sharing one brain, to the notion that the damage done from boring into it is so great that the damaged themselves cannot assess it.

Before his death Ma Jun’s father counsels Ma Jun to assiduously court a local politician, Lord Kim. Unconvinced, Ma Jun seeks advice from his friend Choe Chiyol, who recommends steadfastness in the Soron cause and studied indifference to base political power. Ma Jun eventually rejects Choe’s advice and insinuates himself into the house of Lord Kim. As the story comes to its climax, Ma Jun is given a family-saving magistracy in Jeongeup at just the time that his feckless friend Choe leads a hopeless attack on Lord Kim’s court.

This is an act of suicidal rebellion and in the course of it Choe reprises Geo’s estimate of the Ma family as have a “hole ... bored … in the … brain” by braining himself with an axe. This senseless act by Choe causes Lord Kim to,whimsically give the magistracy of Jeongeup to Choe, who Kim rightly identifies as a useful idiot. In several strokes of a pen (“the bespectacled recorder’s writing brush moved diligently”) the Ma family line is destroyed by random, absurd and farcical events.

If the first biography revealed the farcical nature of the Korean war, this biography shows the farcical nature of the feudal political system and neo-Confucian social system that pre-dated Japanese colonialism.


FALLING FOR IT – THE MA YEONG BIOGRAPHY
The third profile (fifth in the original book) begins with an absurdist introduction: “I propose to detail one undocumented case, a man by the name of Ma Yeong.” From this technically impossible opening salvo to the (almost) happy ending of the short story Geo paints the picture of a rather charming collaborator named Ma Yeong. This profile takes place during, obviously, the Japanese occupation of Korea.

The story is of two father-son relationships gone bad. First is that of the collaborator, whose son hates school, because the other children tease him about his father’s job. Ma Yeong responds with the “everyone else is doing it” argument, and I found this the only slightly weak section in all three of the stories. The bigger problem is to be found in the household of Mr. Kim, a far larger collaborator who serves on a puppet governmental agency of the Japanese. Mr. Kim’s son loathes him and becomes an anti—colonialist.

Ma Yeong is being pressured by his handlers to produce something actionable, and the plot revolves around his efforts to both ensure that Mr. Kim’s son is not killed by the Japanese and that Ma himself can turn something useful over to the Japanese. It would ruin the story to reveal the clever stratagem the Yeong uses, but he does manage to navigate the Scylla of the Japanese and the Charybdis of Mr. Kim and get out of the situation with a bit of aplomb.

This is an amusing story, but it has to be noted that it breaks the mold of the other two in the sense that this Ma is able to use information, reason, and planning to arrive at a reasonably sensible, and to some extent remunerative solution. As a non-Korean reader I suspect that in this story Seo was not able to resist the urge to tell a B’rer Rabbit type story in which the humble Korean outwits the colonial Japanese. The absurdism in the third profile is not carried to its, if it is not misusing the word, logical conclusion.

A good story, entertainingly told, but not precisely of the same cloth as the previous two.

The translation is quite good, getting the randomness and stupidity of Seo’s universe across with appropriate verve. One example: In the third/fifth Biography the translator gets bureaucratese exactly right:

The background to his becoming that most hated of entities, a police informer, was not without its own extenuating circumstances. However, a prolix introduction of such trivialities at the beginning of this account is not to the purpose. Suffice it to say that the noble ambience emanating from his single character name indicated that he was the seed of a family line of some substance.

That’s just brilliant stuff by Seo and Kevin O’Rourke, with the language simultaneously amplifying and deflating the bureaucratic pretensions of the narrator.

The liner notes, on the other hand, seem a bit suspect to me. They claim:

Ma Rok, which stands for the various protagonists with the surname of Ma in this series of five short stories (of which only three are included here), actually means “the horse and the deer” in Chinese. This odd combination of the two animals refers to a classical Chinese anecdote in which the powerful can coerce others into seeing a horse as a deer.

I’m honestly not sure how this applies to the book I was reading as this particular anecdote is more about the coercive power of the state, and the stories in Ma Rok are much more focused on randomness. I'd be much more likely to attribute the title to another Chinese anecdote, the race of the horse and the deer, in which a horse and a deer who are friends are brought to death and slavery by their absurd envy, and the power of the fox. In addition, “marok” is the Japanese word for idiot, which also seems a bit closer to the mark. I have a suspicion that the liner notes are in some kind of error here, although only Seo could know for sure, and I'm not sure how to get in touch with him to find out.

The Wounded, by Yi Chongjun

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 4 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

In The Wounded Yi Chongjun deals with issues of identity. As in An Assailant’s Face that identity is tightly connected to the question of a face, in fact in both stories the question of what and who the face is, and to what extent it is important to know one’s face. Obviously, face is used here in the symbolic sense of identity

The Wounded is a complicated story, featuring a story within a story – really layers of stories within stories, and then a revelation of a final fiction that sets the entire story on its ear. The key characters are two brothers, with two peripherally related female characters serving more or less to show the outlines of the personalities of the brothers. One brother is a doctor and the other an artist. The artist suffers a “wound” that makes him faceless, while the doctor suffers a wound that he feels defines his face. In an intriguing philosophical sub-plot, the faceless artist argues with himself (although considering his brother) about cowardice/omission and action/commission. The former is associated with facelessness and the latter with a ‘defined’ face. As the story works its way through, it becomes clear that Yi believes that without defining the ‘unknown’ face of evil, morality or even just functionality, cannot be achieved.

The doctor has just lost his first patient and the artist has lost a potential wife. The doctor’s response to his trauma is to begin a piece of fiction, based on an event in his life (and related to a childhood trauma), in which a soldier (the doctor), trapped behind enemy lines, kills one of his compatriots. The doctor, unfortunately, cannot bring himself to finish that story. In a doubly unfortunate event, the artist, who is struggling with a painting, reads his brother’s story and somehow finds its inability to conclude to affect his own ability to complete his painting. This painting is intended to be his first painting that includes a human face. That the painter is attempting this is implicitly tied to the fact that Hyein, one of his students, to whom he was attracted and with whom he had a brief physical relationship, is marrying another man.

The doctor’s fiction is of three men trapped behind enemy lines. The first character is the ‘narrator’ of the story within a story, and that is the doctor. The second character is a hapless, and perhaps masochistic, soldier named Private Kim. The final character is the sadistic Sergeant Gwanmo, who is also a homosexual rapist. With Private Kim wounded, and all three trapped behind enemy lines, the captain decides that there are not enough supplies for three characters and that Private Kim should be killed, “when the first snow falls.”

Upon writing the scene in which the first snowfall does fall, the doctor is seized by writer’s block and cannot write the critical scene of the murder, what he has written ends with the doctor, saying, “it was then I thought it was alright for him to die.” As the doctor has already admitted to the painter that he committed a murder, it is clear that the doctor killed Kim, although Gwanmo’s role in the murder is unclear at the outset.

The painter, exasperated beyond patience, takes it upon himself to conclude his brother’s story, hoping to bring them both closure. This is a clever plot development from a purely writerly point of view, as it creates a story within the story within the story. The painter has his brother pull Private Kim from the cave and shoot him in the snow.

This leads the Doctor to reveal the “real” story he intended to write - I will not spoil this, as it is the beginning of a brilliant run up to an event in the present that shatters every story previously told. Suffice it to say that the tightly wound plot releases in a most unexpected way.

As I mentioned at the outset, the face is the key symbol/metaphor of The Wounded. Towards the start of the The Wounded the doctor looks at his brother’s painting of the faceless person and muses:

“… depending how you look at it, it could be a finished piece even through the face has no features. It could be God’ most faithful son – with no eyes or ears, living by merely following God’s will. But once it gets eyes, a mouth, a nose, ears, it’ll be different, won’t it?”

Why the doctor associates an unfinished face with goodness becomes clear as his story-within-the story ends, the doctor saying, “I saw a smiling, blood-covered face. It was mine.”

The painter argues that this final revelation will be give the doctor the strength to continue, as he will have defined himself. The painter feels that he is crippled by NOT having a face and at the end of the story, after the doctor has destroyed the faceless painting, the artist reflects:

My work, my canvas lay in pieces like a broken mirror. I might have to lose even more before I could start over again. Perhaps I would never be able to find a face. Unlike the one behind my brother’s pain, there was no face in mine.

While Yi suggests, in this pairing of stories, the difficulty of putting a single “face” to victimizers or victims of the Korean War, he clearly also sees the necessity of confronting the ‘faces’ involved in it, if only to provide a platform from which to go forward. . frame

Yi echoes this theme in the sub-plot of the painter and his student Hyein. Hyein sends a letter (yet another framed device in this multiply scaffolded work ) to the painter analyzing him as having a “war wound” despite the fact that it is his brother who was actually in the war. Hyein writes:

You … have a wound with no origin. … Your symptoms are more serious, and your wound is more acute because you have no idea where it is located and even what kind of wound it is.

In other words, it is the undefined face with which the painter struggles. Again, this is thematically linked to An Assailant’s Face, making this pairing of stories both evocative and explicative.

Technically speaking, Yi Chongjun is a talented writer, as carrying off his ambitiously multi-framed novel suggests. He is also quick and skilled (and so, I should add, is his translator) at drawing a character. A reader learns all he needs to know about the Doctor’s wife in two quick passages in which the painter describes her as:

The kind of person who enjoys humiliating actors by applauding when they miss their lines.

And

My sister in law disliked complicated stories

Which is a doubly judgmental line when placed in a novel of such labyrinthine nature.

The combination of Yi’s skill as a writer and the powerful story he tells, makes The Wounded an excellent short novel for a beginning reader of Korean literature. It is modern in the telling, has existential themes that resonate without requiring particular knowledge of Korea or its most recent war, and it also evokes the psychological damage caused by the fratricidal (it is no coincidence that the characters here are brothers) war.


NEXT: The Ma Rok Chronicles: A much lighter look at the absurdities of war.

Yi Chongjun "An Assailant's Face"

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 4 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

Yi Chongjun's The Wounded (and the included An Assailants Face) has had me a bit stumped.

(Parenthetically I should note that Yi, unfortunately, died last year of lung cancer)

Together are important works, they deal with the traditional modern Korean fixations, war and bifurcation, but they are also a bit of a move out of the grim and on-the-ground realism of that genre of modern fiction. The latter is a reason I should like them, and I guess I actually did like them.

But they pretty much halted me from writing for reasons that had more to do with my preconceptions than the works themselves.

First, I was put off by the (to me) predictability of the back flap, which begins:

The civil war between the North and South left both physical and psychological wounds and the permanent division of the nation still haunts those families separated by the 38th parallel.

I originally thought, cripes, here we go again. In a way, I just didn’t know what to do with these stories.

I’ve backed off this stance a bit. As I work through my ever-expanding reading list I realize that my response to these Korean themes, that they are repetitive and self-reflective to the point of solipsism is grounded in my western upbringing, particularly coming from the US. My reaction of, “why do they keep harping on this stuff,” would be no different than a Korean reading US fiction and wondering why we focus on automobiles, neurosis, and infidelity in our short fiction. It is an identity that the things important to a culture are repeated and a reader (by “a reader” I mean me) should look at this fact as important cultural evidence and not as some chore to wade through. Unless it’s Russian literature – then it’s just too bloody long to wade through!

But second, I think I was trying to assess all the levels that Yi writes at in these works, because he is a fairly skilled writer and I could sense that there was something in the stories that I just wasn't getting.

To break myself free of my little blockage I’m going to review each story in this volume individually, beginning with the second one, An Assailant’s Face. I chose this first, because both stories, really, ask questions about the face of the 'other.' So even though An Assailant's Face is the second story in The Wounded, here it goes!

An Assailant’s Face is technically clever in several ways. Yi is a tactical writer and he does a variety of things to slowly bring his real story into focus. His first tactic is to break the story into three sections, which are delineated (besides chapter numbers) by increasing technical focus on the characters. What does that mean? In the first section there is only one named character, and that character is the one who has already disappeared - one who will never actually be seen. Characters are, the boy, the sister, the man. In this way they also become generic, or perhaps more accurately, symbolic characters for all of Korea at the time. This is in important strategy because it ties in which Yi’s broader argument about the effects of the war. In the second chapter Yi brings a bit more focus as the boy (although explicitly never losing the generic wounded boy within) becomes a professor. Finally, in the final chapter, everyone gets names, although Yi introduces a key character, Kim Sail’s (the Professor) daughter in the same way he has previously handled specificity; at first she is just “the daughter” and only later does she get a name.

Additionally, there is Yi’s fluid an naturalistic representation of conversation. This is particularly important, because in the third chapter Yi presents some relatively thick ideological arguments, but he does it in a way that does not seem forced or heavy. In fact, the first time I read An Assailant’s Face I sped through the ideology without it hindering, at all, my attempt to see how everything ended.

The title is also a clever one. The theme of the book is the impossibility of “delineating between victims and victimizers,” or maybe even the irrationality of it. By titling the book An Assailants Face and with so many victims and victimizers in the story, Yi is opaque as to who the assailant actually is, and even at the end, when an assailant is named, it is an unexpected name and the power normally implicit in the word “assailant” is stripped from it. I wonder, given that Korea does not have articles in the way that English does, how this subtlety was handled in the original Korean? I hope it is there, because its ambiguity matches up nicely with the issue of how you judge who is guilty of what in a circumstance in which assailants and victims have multiply traded roles.

The story starts with a plot straight from Hwang Suwon's Descendants of Cain. In the chaos of the war, innocent people are forced to align and re-align themselves as alternating waves of troops overwhelm them. There is, as usual, a trade in betrayal, and the story begins with an amusing parody (if that can be said about a game in which the stakes are life and death) of idealogues and non-idealogues converting, re-converting, and killing the heretics.

In some ways, the start of this novel is a homicical version of the “splitter” scene in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” in which ideological splits become so ridiculous that they can scarcely be kept track of. A young boy’s brother-in-law disappears in the war (in a welter of betrayed beliefs) and later, when the brother-in-law’s partner in escape gets back to the boy’s house, the boy turns the partner out. The partner is turned out in the politest way possible, but he is nonetheless sent off to his death.

The story then follows the boy as he grows up and joins the southern intelligentsia, but can never entirely leave behind his history and assumed guilt. As an adult, the boy/professor realizes that he passively betrayed his brother-in-law’s friend. Unsure how to deal with this, he assumes guilt, “he willingly exchanged his comfortable position of innocent sufferer for the painful position of guilty participant.”

The professor becomes afraid his brother-in-law actually will return. His return would seal the professor’s guilt for putting out the friend – the one who should have died, returned; the one that should have been given succor, dead. There is a beautiful passage midway through the story in which the boy/professor attempts to explain what happens and argues that his brother-in-law might have stayed alive longer than expected because, trapped between two ideologies contesting over bodies, both dead and alive, the brother-in-law was like a rabbit. One eagle would have shortly dispatched him, but with two eagles fighting the rabbit had a running chance. The rationalization of a survivor perhaps, and the story is consumed with survivor’s guilt, but a beautiful metaphor for a kind of survival in political ecotones.

The professor keeps his shabby house because it is the only link his brother in law might have to find him, though as noted above he sincerely hopes that moment will never come. The previous bifurcations eventually replay themselves in the professor’s relationship with his daughter and their arguments over reunification – she sees it as a meeting of victims, he sees it as a meeting of aggressors.

This generational disagreement about the basis for reunification contains a quite good (and easy to digest) conversation about possible approaches to the issue. To a western eye, Yi’s narrative stacks the deck against the father when he, for example calls the daughters conclusions “spare and simple” and her father’s argument a “retreat.” However, the general conversation on the distortions and contradictions attendant to reunification is an important one and done as even-handedly as I have ever read.

In the end, the daughter makes a remarkably selfish decision that even the narrator cannot seem to completely endorse, and as the mother notes, reduces her father to a “pitiable assailant.”

An amazing story in which everyone is an assailant and a victim, and very few seem to have the conscious choice of their role, rather they are like marionettes, or shadowy hand fingers on some distant wall, performing roles that seem to come from above, or below, with only the consciousness that they are being pushed by forces that they cannot completely comprehend.

A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball, by Cho Se-hui

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 2 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

Those who dwell in heaven have no occasion to concern themselves with hell. But since the five of us lived in hell, we dreamed of heaven… Each and every day was an ordeal. Our life was like a war. Everyday we lost a battle. (Page 7)

This passage is drawn from the first paragraph of Cho Se-hui’s A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball, and it aptly sums up the tragic story

A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball is the keystone story, of 12 total, in the larger work The Dwarf. This short story introduces readers to the main “character” in the larger work, a dwarf and his family. The dwarf is physically handicapped, only 117 centimeters tall (roughly 4 feet), and 32 kilograms in weight (roughly 70 pounds). The family: father, mother, Yeong-su, Yeong-ho, Yeong-hui, stand for the entire Korea working class of the 1970s; oppressed, marginalized and if needs be, discarded, in the new economic structures of production, consumption, and distribution that the Korean state is avidly building.

Worse, they have built their house in an unauthorized area, and the house is now due to be razed. The government offers “recompense” for the loss, but it is not sufficient for the dwarf’s family (or any of the other displaced families) to rent new housing. The family is sundered, the dwarf becomes ill and dies in a factory smokestack (in my previous post I said he had committed suicide, but this is not made entirely clear by the text, and it can be read either way), the children are forced to go to work in soul and body-crushing factories, and the daughter eventually prostitutes herself in order to get the deed to the families’ property back.

This is one of the translated works that makes me wish I could read Korean, because I feel that certain elements of the story are floating beyond my comprehension. One example of this is a “book within a book” motif that Cho uses. He mentions a book The World after Ten Thousand Years and it sounds like he is referring to a real book (whether real or not, this is another clever authorial stance – creating a fantasy within the dingy fantasy of the larger story), but the translation of the title turns nothing up on Google and I can’t refer to the original text to track it down. Similarly, the dwarf launches an airplane and a ball towards the moon and in translation I’m not sure if he see (or if there actually is) some symbolism in these phrases. Is the “metal ball” a spaceship? I simply can’t tell. Perhaps I’m not supposed to be able to tell, but it is a bit frustrating. ;-)

Technically speaking, he book is divided into three chapters, each one told by one of the children. This is the first indication of Cho’s atomized writing style, a style that is ideally suited for the description of an atomized society such as the one he writes about. Shin Soojeong notes, about Cho’s general style:

Cho opened up a new history in the form of Korean novels by renouncing the standard of realism, experimenting with sentences, and by being bold enough to draw a fantasy-based reality based on fables into the narration of his novels. He brought about a turning point in the history of Korean novels, which allowed for the yoking of realism and anti-realism, and the unity of social and aesthetic aspects in literature. As long as the questions proposed by A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball remain current, its meaning will not be diminished. And therein lies the power that enabled this book, first printed in 1978 … to go through over 240 printings up to the present.

I have read that there are now over 245 printings of the book. It is very brief, only 84 pages in print, and if you are interested in reading it, you can find it in downloadable PDF (only 24 pages!) from from the fine folks at the Korea Journal.




References:

Shin Soojeong

The Cry of the Magpies, but Kim Dong-ni

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 3 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

The Cry of the Magpies, By Kim Dong-Ni begins with an unusual literary conceit. The narrator tells us that what we are about to read is his retelling of a book he once came across that moved him as he felt “fraternal” with the author. Despite, apparently, having the story in hand, the narrator only promises to “stick to the author’s own words and expressions as much as possible.” This warrant raises a variety of questions, but without addressing them, the narrator jumps into ‘his’ story. We never directly see or hear from the narrator again, as the story ends without comment from him.

As typical in the Portable Library series, this story is a sad and perverse one. Bong-su returns from war after having shot his own fingers off. He is returning in search of his fiancée. Upon his return he finds his mother mortally ill, and his fiancée the wife of another man. His mother has internalized the cry of local magpies, and converted them from a symbol of good luck to a symbol of doom. Now, whenever the magpies cry the mother coughs and often begs for Bong-su to end her life, a request he frequently feels sympathetic to. Bong-su tries unsuccessfully to regain his fiancée, and by the end of the story he too has apparently gone mad, in a somewhat unexpected conclusion that features his fiancee’s sister. To say more would be to destroy the surprise of the ending.

The symbol of the story is the magpie, but Kim, perhaps suggesting something about the larger story, somewhat inverts the meaning of the magpie. Koreans typically think magpies bearers of good news and heralds of good company. In fact Wikipedia notes that the magpie “has been adopted as the "official bird" of numerous South Korean cities, counties and provinces.” Kim subverts this and turns the magpie into a more ambivalent symbol, one that can bring either good news or very bad news. Kim indicates this kind of inversion or yin-yang relationship in text as well: “The way I looked at it, “Help me” could very naturally become “Kill me, as suffering deepened into bottomless despair.”

At the end of the story Kim has left us with a similarly entangled message that only love can survive the war, but the war ensures that love can only kill.

As The Cry of the Magpies is very brief, Joomindang also included another short story, Deungsin-bul which is even shorter and of less consequential plot. As in The Cry of the Magpies, Deungshi-bul begins with a brief setup. A young Korean, conscripted by the Japanese army, looks for a way to escape. He sets his mind on escape to a Buddhist temple and here he finds a life-sized statue of a legendary Buddhist monk who burned himself as a sacrifice in order to redeem sinful and weak humanity. The young Korean struggles with the outward appearance of the Buddha, which is not traditional, and by the time he comes to peace with it, his superior seems to hint that the young Korean himself has some aspects of Deungshi-bul in him.


An amusing sub-plot, perhaps even closer to a theme than a plot, is that Deungshi-bul is partly revered because his self-martyrdom has been extremely remunerative for the temple. Kim works this in at sly angles, but it helps to keep the story grounded, and also adds a slight air of humor to the story.

Chinatown by Oh Jung Hee

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 22 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

The Portable Library of Korean Literatures’ twenty-second imprint is Chinatown by Oh Jung Hee. This contains three stories, the eponymous Chinatown, Wayfarer, and The Release. These stories have been translated by the reliable team of Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton.

Prior to reading these three short stories, Oh, was relatively unknown to me. The only story I had read of hers was the tragic Bronze Mirror in which an aging couple faces the legacy of their only child’s death in the Student Revolution. Bronze Mirror, which is available both in Land of Exile and another volume also confusingly named Chinatown (about which I will talk more, shortly), is along the traditional lines of post-war Korean fiction.

But Oh’s work in the Chinatown collection struck me as fresh and different from most of the other works in the PLKL in that they are not particularly concerned with political states, either the aftermath of the war, or issues related to historical Korean divisions.

Chinatown
Chinatown takes place, in Incheon’s (Once Chemulpo) famous Chinatown, a tourist destination in the modern era, but a slum at the time. Though the story is placed in the post-war era, and does feature the unavoidable fallout from the war, it is much more a coming of age tale than a tale about effects of the war.

Chinatown shares, with other works in the PLKL collection, descriptions of hardscrabble existences; the children scrounge from coal trains. Additionally, US servicemen are present, and portrayed as sexually suspect, a Korean categorization that to some extent lives on today.

However, the heart of the story is of a nine year old girl who comes to a greater awareness of sex and death. As the narrative moves forward, the girl observes the relationship, family, and eventual death of a prostitute named Maggie, as well as the sad death of her own grandmother. As backdrop to these events, Oh gives us the seventh pregnancy of the girl’s mother. Oh blends these stories into a collage representing the circle of life, and then drops a final graceful note in a one sentence paragraph with which the narrator concludes her story:

“My first menstrual flow had begun.”

Typically stories focusing on young girls coming of age are not my favored fictions. Oh, however, does such an excellent job setting the scene that when it became clear that this was a coming of age story, it was not only NOT a disappointment, but it came as a clever and happy surprise.


Wayfarer
Wayfarer is the sad story of a woman who has been abandoned (in a cruel replay of childhood trauma) by her family and society. After killing a burglar, and spending two years in a mental hospital, Hye-Ja returns to a world that wants no part of her. Family and friends have reframed the killing of the burglar as the murder of a man who may or may not have been somehow related to Hye-Ja. In other words, Hye-Ja is suspected of having killed her lover. Oh cleverly weaves metaphors of blankness, coats of snow, and inaccessibility to paint a picture of Hye-Ja’s isolation, an isolation so profound that Hye-Ja is spurned even by beggars. At the end, drunk and staggering, Hye-Ja walks down a road that she knows will never end.

The Release
The Release portrays a mother and daughter united by a shared but separate tragedy. Both women have lost their husbands at an early age, and in a culture that is historically inimical to widows, this is a social kiss of death. The pain they share is exacerbated by the mother’s intimate knowledge of what her daughter must undergo. As in Wayfarer Oh is clever in her use of symbols – a toothbrush, Artemisia, and in the end, three unlikely carp, combine to make this very short story (a scant six-pages) touching and troubling.


Two Chinatowns
Internet research shows that there is a second volume titled Chinatown, also by Oh and published by Hollym Press, which is hardback and contains seven stories (with only the title-story being shared between the volumes). As noted above, this volume also contains the excellent Brass Mirror and as the only overlapping work is Chinatown it is probably worth getting both volumes.

Kim Yu Jeong .... The Camellias

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 14 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

I read my first stories of Kim Yu-Jeong while concurrently reading the essay Extravagance and Authenticity by Kim Uchang. This proved an interesting set of readings as the essay and the stories focus on romantic love.

Kim Uchang’s essay follows the development of “free-love” as a new cultural artifact in Korea at the start of the 20th century. He is particularly interested (his modern politics, perhaps, showing) in demonstrating that this notion was external, initially quite artificial, and largely at the expense of women. Kim Uchang argues his points on the basis of the works of Yi Gwang-su, Kim Dong-in, Yeong Sang-seop (who wrote the critically noted and important “Three Generations”) and how they demonstrate the artificiality of the notion of romantic love Korea at the turn of the (previous) century.

This notion, of course, can be overplayed, since works as old as Yi-Saeng Peers Through the Wall clearly displayed a notion of romantic love untied from social status or the onus of social procedures. Yi-Saeng would have been written just about the time the crusades were going on just a bit to the west, so romantic love does have some pedigree in Korea dating back further than Kim Uchang discusses. And Kim Yu-jeong’s stories all seem to focus on a fairly pure ‘romantic’ love. I am too new at Korean fiction to assess if this is a function of how Kim Yu-jeong chose his subjects, or if Kim Uchang is over-simplifying. Updates, I suppose, to follow.

Kim Yu-jeong describes love, in stories that are brutal and simple. The liner notes say that Kim “sought his own way of describing … unfriendly reality by composing dark yet humorous stories that usually portray the persevering spirit in the underclass life.”

All three stories are resolutely focused on love and although the stories are not western in any sense, they all describe a love that seems, to a modern eye, a “free” one. In The Camellias love is chosen across class lines, in The Scorching Heat love is tragically lost to a fate as simple as nature, and in A Wanderer in the Valleys we see a love that causes a wife to metaphorically risk every wolf in the human valley.

The Camellias is a “first-love” story in which a rather bumpkin-ish boy confronts Jeomsun a rather higher class girl who loves him. The tone is rough and humorous as Jeomsun is only capable of showing her interest through aggression – the “potato incident” and the “cockfight” being two of the more amusing cases of her sublimated love. The young love is complicated, too, by the fact that Jeomsun is the narrator’s social superior, and this causes him to see Jeomsun’s solicitude and aggression as a form of class warfare. Of course it is, in a way, as Jeomsun pulls stunts that would get a social equal smacked on the head, but Kim plays this for broad comedy and the unnamed narrator’s denseness nearly justifies the lengths that Jeomsun feels she has to go to in order to demonstrate her love. The story ends happily, with the narrator in a symbolic fashion, crawling towards a greater destiny: “I had no choice but to crawl away on hands and knees, up along the rocks towards the mountain peak.”

Kim Uchang may argue that romantic love was a bad match for the early 1900s in Korea, but The Camellias playfully argues that romantic love was a feature of Korean culture at the time.

The Scorching Heat is a sad story, and unleavened by humor. Deoksun, a loving husband physically carries his ill wife on his back, to a hospital that he believes will cure, and pay, her. The story is a detailed pointillist achievement of encroaching despair. When, at the end, the husband and wife walk back to their home, the wife crying on Deoksun’s back and outlining her final wishes, the deep love the two share is nearly heartbreaking. The last sentence, a brilliant concoction of multiple short phrases, and cascading punctuation, puts the tragic message of the story home: This love may not end, but one life assuredly will.

A Wanderer in the Valleys falls somewhere between the other two stories. A wandering woman enters a small settlement, revitalizes a drinking establishment, and marries the son of the owner. On her wedding night she reveals where her true love lies and at the stories’ end Kim gives us a vision of a world threatening and closing in on the narrator, “From all around the howling of wolves drifted down, echoing among the valleys and hills”

One thing I should note, is that liner notes refer to Kim’s “colloquial dialect” and “humor.” On the plot level I could see this, but in terms of writing style, little of this came through the translation for me, and when a bilingual Korean friend noticed the book on my coffee table she picked it up and began to leaf through it. She dropped it back onto the table in about three minutes and said, “This doesn’t sound anything like the original story.” So, perhaps there may be a few translation problems here, although the broader outlines of the humor do come through a bit, particularly in The Camellias.

Finally, I should also note that Kim Yu-Jeong was a college dropout, and like Yi-Sang, died tragically young – at age 29, from consumption.

The Wings ... Yi Sang

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 1 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

In a recently published essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Edmunson pleads for a contingency that I hope someone can help us achieve:

If I could make one wish for the members of my profession, college and university professors of literature, I would wish that for one year, two, three, or five, we would give up readings. By a reading, I mean the application of an analytical vocabulary — Marx's, Freud's, Foucault's, Derrida's, or whoever's — to describe and (usually) to judge a work of literary art. I wish that we'd declare a moratorium on readings. I wish that we'd give readings a rest.

God knows, after all, how many enjoyable novels and stories have been ruined, for readers, by the academic necessity to pin some kind of theoretical tail to the simple and innocent donkey of the story.

Hey academics, we know, theory is what you have. We don't want to steal that from you. We wouldn't steal piercings from teens, Ferraris from 40 year old men, or the Vagina Monologues from Berkeley.

However, if you do take that sabbatical from theory (perhaps have a coffee black instead of your soy-latte with nutmeg and coconut shavings, or have a fight in a bar) and come back? Or even if the tweed is too tight and you refuse to give up the bound paper-teat of your preferred theory?

I give you Yi Sang’s The Wings.

Yi is an author begging for a biography. He died at the romantically young age of 27 (as calculated in Korean years) and from remaining photos, seems to have been ruggedly handsome. His stories in this volume focus on unfortunate and doomed love. The booksleeve darkly hints that Yi had a “femme fatale” in his life, while other sources indicate that he might have had a drug habit (Michael Stephens, The Dramaturgy of Style: Voice in Short Fiction p. 197), an unfortunate attraction to financial insolvency, and a fatal case of consumption. Being Korean, he likely smoked as well. As is traditional for a certain kind of Korean writer of the era, he ran afoul of the Japanese authorities, who certainly hastened his death.

The Wings is his emblematic story, in this volume accompanied by Encounters and Departures and Deathly Child. As I noted in my top-of-the-set-burner, this work is rich with ore for theory miners. It can be read an allegorical complaint against colonial oppression, an existential/Dadaist/surrealist/suicidal withdrawal from the insanity of contemporary life or, more prosaically as the schizophrenic decline of a man who has lost his relationship with his wife. With its dual foci on sexuality and the totemic role of currency, it also lends itself to feminist or Marxist analytics. All this is packed into a relatively slight 33 pages.

The Wings begins nearly randomly, with short paragraphs and semi-nonsensical epigraphs (if that is possible) slowly coalescing into the narrative of a profoundly alienated man and his semi-schizophrenic life with his wife. The plot might have been a bit more opaque when the story was written - this is to say that the modern reader will quickly discern what the wife’s “job” is, but the narrator so convincingly describes his own alienated state that his continual ignorance and avoidance, interlarded with brutal comeuppances that bring him face to face with it, seem perfectly logical.

Near the outset, the narrator notes, “a mirror is a practical thing only when it reflects one’s face.” Yet this narrator can never come face to face with himself or reality. He lurks in the “dusky” corners of the world, despite his nyctalopia, which would suggest brighter environments. He is young, at 26, but seems immeasurably older, partly because Yi is a master at describing long torments in compact prose. The narrator lurches from darkness in his bedroom, to darkness in the outside world, only through the prism of his wife’s bedroom, and the guests she frequently entertains. The narrator is only able to navigate the outside world by virtue of money which his wife awards him in an alarmingly ritual and impersonal way (Here, a perceptive reader can imagine feminism and capitalist critique intersecting). The wife’s money is a necessity for the narrator, but he despises (and loves) it. Initially he won’t spend the money, once he even tosses it into the toilet that, at the time, probably didn’t mean a porcelain fixture. Obversely, without the money, he is helpless.

The other stories work as plot counterpoints to The Wings. Encounters and Departures could serve as partial prequel to The Wings as it tells the story of a husband and wife/prostitute and how they meet and marry (and partially repeat this cycle in classic Korean short-story cyclicality). Encounters and Departures is similar to The Wings in its symbolic uses. The narrators in both stories are presented as preternaturally old looking and hairy. Both narrators seem to exist in a sequestered perpetual time that does not intersect with the prosaic schedules of the remainder of humanity. Yi’s narrators are gaunt and insubstantial, existing in an uncomfortable state of liminality, somewhere closer to Hell than limbo, but in which they are their own Charon, endlessly ferrying themselves from nowhere to nowhere, with only a bleak darkness behind the stage.

The final story, Deathly Child, is brilliantly experimental. Another lost narrator is incapable of navigating day to day relationships, reporting them as absurdist travelogues between mutually incomprehensible natives of the same language, land, city, even the same relationships. The story is in titled fragments and (as the translation reveals it) may be on of the first Korean short stories to include English loan words.

The three stories in this collection are brilliant; painfully dark jewels from an author without much optimism about anything, but with a keen eye for absurdity.

Run out and purchase it online from Seoul Selection.

So, really, since it is online you don't have to run at all! ;-)

Some thoughts on the “The Portable Library of Korean Literature”

The Portable Library of Korean Literature (PLKL) is an outstanding collection. It is easy to read, inexpensive, colorfully bound (though the hangeul cover design is in mirrored text, which seems an odd decision), and chock full of great stories, often several to a volume. If there is one flaw in the “The Portable Library of Korean Literature” (published by Jimoondong Publishing in a series of quite readable and slender volumes), however, it is that it has sometimes focused too intently on issues of the Korean War and the bifurcation of the nation.

I don’t say this because I think that these historical realities are not important to Korean literature – in fact those particular histories infuse everything that happens in Korea, even today. There is no denying the history. These issues are also, of course, critical to Korean literature because of the trauma they represent. Literature is often driven by trauma.

In a brilliant essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Elaine Showalter notes that May Rowlandson (an early female writer in the US) became a writer largely due to trauma. Rowlandson was "not a highly educated woman, and she might never have become an author had she not been captured, along with her three children, by the Narragansett Indians and held hostage."

Trauma begets literature (as does love and notions of fairies flitting hither, thither, and yon) and war and dissolution are two of the most important traumatic issues to Korea. These issues are important right now and back into history. So I don't say this literature is bad, or that it shouldn't be translated. Rather, I worry at the focus of translated literature as someone who dreams that translated Korean literature will become more popular on an international scale. In addition, the PLKL focus on directly historical themes limits the interest of translated Korean literature for foreign readers who aren't aware of Korean history. This 'unaware' segment is the vast majority of potential readers.

To draw a parallel with my nation of birth, one might say that the Civil War in the United States was its defining national crisis. Similarly, one might claim that the mythical cowboy was the “re-defining” historical figure in the United States re-unifying and growing. If these examples make you unhappy, pick your own critically important figure, moment, movement, or theme.

Once that theme is chosen, however, imagine that 40% (all figures 100% snatched out of thin air) of literature translated from English to other languages solely focused on that theme and how the results of that thematic selection or historical reality damaged and depressed the United States. Such literature would not be improper or bad, but it might alienate a potential foreign audience.

This is close to what you have in the KTLI’s Portable Library. Add in stories focused on the costs of forced industrialization, and you probably move above 70% of the series. Again, everything here is historically accurate, and the literature is good, but is it literature that will read in translation?

Perhaps not.

My point here is a marketing one; it is partly (and only partly) the range of topic in most modern literatures that makes them attractive. I live in Korea and as an expatriate can often only guess about what is happening from day to day, and how social and historical realities affect that daily existence, but I can also tell you that day to day existence in Korea is often an efflorescence of enjoyment. Little of this is displayed in The Portable Library of Korean Literature. In fact, I can only think of A Dream of Good Fortune, in "Land Of Exile." This is certainly partially a function of my newbie status with the literature, but still that is chilling. If an aficionado has to struggle to find these works, how would a casual browser ever find them?

In another way, I suppose, I am being perverse in my argument. One thing I thoroughly enjoy about Korean Modern Literature is that it is about things. It is in no way caught in the “academic trap” that United States modern literature seems to be ensnared in. I await, with horror, the development of a fully throated literary criticism movement in translated Korean literature. It will kill much of the joy of these works.

Unambiguously, the Korea war and succeeding bifurcation are subjects that are real, non-theoretical and non-abstract. Nonetheless, the uniformly dour nature of the translations in the Portable Library series, give me some pause to wonder if this is a) representative (a thing I can’t assess as I can’t read works in Korean), and b) a good marketing strategy (since it inevitably comes back to that in my head)?

I’d like to see some more light-hearted or ephemeral works in this series. After all, South Korea must have its indigenous version of Lemony Snickett, eh?

Somewhat related, while in Busan I went to an excellent bookstore by the 9th exit of the Seomyeong Station (lines 1 and 2) and discovered that while I was napping, the excellent folks at Jimoondong Publishing had pushed the number of titles in the series up to 25. Regardless of my concern with choices of topic, this is an unreservedly good thing, and I look forward to getting them all, reviewing them and trying to develop an online “reader’s guide” to them.

Lee Dong-Ha's “A Toy City”

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 20 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

Lee Dong-Ha's “A Toy City” is, in my short experience with Korean modern fiction, a bit unusual, as it tells the story of family moving TO the city (having been kicked out of their small town by unnamed political pressures). In the course of this move the narrator’s father, a respected and loved man in the village, is reduced to a bumbling caricature and the narrator comes to realize that this move has also stolen his own voice. Oddly the narrator generally views all of this with a remarkable sense of detachment highlighted by his occasional notion that the city he lives in is“A Toy City.”

Unfortunately, Lee tries too hard. "A Toy City" is stuffed with sub-plots and symbolisms that pop up, sputter to life, then gutter out with little apparent reason; it is full of sound and fury but short on significance. Some of these subplots seem intended to provide amplification or comment on the plots events (and thus on the role of the city, pretty clearly Seoul, but un-named in the text). When the narrator gets to the city there are several scenes in which food and drink are presented as poisonous, and Lee does this with absolutely no subtlety: When, for instance, the narrator throws up a glass of orange punch, it is still orange and still exactly one glassful, as though it had no interaction with this stomach. This seems a bit too exact for vomit, and in this arena I'll put my bonafides against anyone's! Rice, important to Koreans as both a staple food and cultural signifier, tastes so bad the mother won’t eat it. Finally, when the family tries to cook food for sale, that food tastes bitter and chemical – their failure to sell this food means that, each night, the family must choke it down, themselves.

What isn't obvious, is inexplicable. There is a substantial subplot in which the narrator is at first beaten up, but then mysteriously befriended and protected, by classroom thugs. An imaginative reader might tie this arc to one in which the narrator’s father finally finds some kind of criminal work. But even this connection requires some imagination (in the reader) about the timetable of the story, and even if established, it is not clear why any of it is important.

Similarly there are subplots of the narrator acquiring a best friend, Tae-gil, who lives a rather tragic existence, and another of a woman who, twice, accidentally exposes herself to the narrator. But these subplots seem nearly random and are difficult to place with respect to the larger story. The woman who exposes herself does so, the first time, in front of the narrator because sanitation facilities are inadequate. Fair enough, this is a story about forced urbanization and this could be a comment on the costs of it. But what is a reader to make of the second incidence of her exposure, an accidental self-exposure to a large group of children sharing an adventure? The connections are absent and thus her two exposures within 60 pages seem arbitrary, a writer’s conceit. Tae-gil, also exposes himself. Tae-gil's mother beats him regularly, forcing him to strip before she does so. Tae-gil runs away, with his “pepper” dangling and exposed. Again, fair enough, but what then are we to make of the fact that this flight never saves Tae-gil from any whipping and once he has exposed himself he always returns to his mother to have his punishment concluded? While three+ instances of embarrassing exposure in one novella seem to beg for some kind of conceptual connection, it is impossible to see one in this work.

These are merely representative subplots.. there are more..

At 102 pages, “A Toy City” is a very long short story, basically a novella, Many of my criticisms here seem to result from Lee’s choice of this length, It seems that Lee is either extending a short story to a novella, and thus throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, or he has the outline for a novel, but has not fleshed that novel out. In either case, this was a work that could have used a good, and persuasive, editor to push it one way or the other.

As a set of final notes, I should first add that this story is the one that occasioned my previous rant on bad translation, and it is difficult for me to guess whether Lee’s original writing was more subtle and/or connected in the original Korea. I certainly hope it was.

Second, I should note that “A Toy City” is, according to the back flap, the first in a trilogy of novellas, and it is possible that the Portable Library of Korean Literature has done Lee a disservice by publishing this work unmoored from its siblings. Once I've worked my way through the remaining works in the Library, I intend to track down translations of the other two pieces and revisit “A Toy City” in their context.

House of Idols by Cho In-Hoon

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 16 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

Cho In-Hoon’s “House of Idols” begins with an unnamed narrator and the sentence, “The war was over, the capital back in Seoul.” Despite the apparent “return to normalcy” of the first line, the story describes a world in which the neo-Confucian basis of Korean society has only totemic significance – a play of semi-random and meaningless interactions set against a bleak background with which Greek stoics might easily identify. It is a story, as many of the time, which delineates the broken social and belief structures of post-war Korea. The story also suggests that personal identities are fluid and meaningless as its main characters are all unnamed and seem quite impermanent.

The unnamed narrator is the acolyte of a famous writer who, in possible homage to Kafka, is named “K.” This is difficult to tell, as the work is translated. In this case the translation is by John Holstein and it is sturdy and serviceable.

The narrator regularly meets K at the Arisa Café. One day a stranger walks in and treats K with a kind of willful disrespect that is extremely difficult to imagine in South Korea. This is the first indication of sundered social ties.The narrator is properly appalled, and dislikes the interloper immediately, both because he breaks the proper social order (in a classically Korean moment, the narrator fulminates that the stranger is “more that twenty years” younger than K) and because he is a threat to the narrator’s relationship with K.

This is frame to the center of the novel, a quick friendship and a complicated and extremely convincing lie that the stranger tells. At the mid point of the story the narrator and stranger (as unnamed as the narrator) have a discussion about relationships and the stranger says directly, “I’ve been cursed, I’m under some curse to destroy anyone who comes close to me.” The narrator responds, semi-ironically, that this might lead to the “bitter fruit of disillusionment,” but he clearly believes himself immune to this poisoned fruit. The narrator has quickly persuaded himself that he and the stranger have a “special relationship.” In a moment of bonding the stranger tells the tale that putatively underlies his ‘curse.’ It is full of sound and fury, and while the stranger implicates himself in its course, it is primarily a cry for sympathy

In the stranger’s personal narrative her describes the destruction of the North; he sees US bombers in his mind. He also falls in love with a literary character, Dumas’ Nana, and finds a living incarnation of her (once again an unnamed character) in Korea. In a first indication he might not be all that he seems to be, the stranger, by his own admission, becomes George, a character from Dumas’ novel. Then, when his unannounced love is “betrayed” the stranger, in an act of omission, becomes complicit in her death. The stranger’s tale is one in which he accepts a tremendous burden of guilt.

The stranger’s story, as it happens, is merely a story and when the narrator comes to visit the stranger he discovers that the stranger lives in a psychiatric residence. Here a doctor greets the narrator with the unhappy news that the stranger’s story is a fiction.

There is a brilliant moment. The presiding doctor says of the stranger:

He’s got a variety of complexes all wrapped up together in him like a ball of yarn, and I can’t really sum up his condition in one word. Exhibitionism, megalomania, Oedipus complex, hero complex … a confusion of these roots all tangled inside of him.

To which the narrator replies: “But I don’t see anything wrong with him, other than this story of his.” In response the doctor assents: “That’s exactly what has me stymied, that no other symptoms have appeared. His is the most difficult sort to fix.” This is intentionally ridiculous – all the symptoms have been named, but there is no diagnosis forthcoming. This most likely seems a comment on the irrationality of post-war Korea.

Then, without any reaction from the narrator, the stranger turns violently against him, shouting and accusing the narrator, in a variety of colorful ways, of the crime of being bourgeois. The narrator, in turn, leaves without a word or a defense. They repudiate each other without a moment’s hesitation.

This is emblematic as no personal relationship in this story is what it seems. In purely technical terms Cho takes away the personal by creating a story without formal identity. Characters are nameless (I should note that this is characteristic all the three stories of Cho’s that I have read), described as “various types,” the “gaunt man” and “in (their) forties.” In fact, the only named ‘characters’ in “House of Idols” are physical locations.

Within the plot, the stranger’s story within a story is the clearest example of his lack of real social bond, as its central relationship is purely imaginary. The narrator’s relationship with K is also demonstrated to be weak, perhaps imaginary, as the narrator quite clearly fears the stranger, the “interloper.” The narrator seems unable, prior to meeting the stranger, to make real relationships. He is a kind of ass who believes that he can accurately assess people’s worth, which he does in his search for “compatibility,” by which he essentially means usefulness. Even K’s relationship to the stranger is finally left intentionally opaque. I don’t think most readers here need a primer on how a world lacking relationships is a non-Korean and non neo-Confucian world. It is a world without moorings.

The story begins to end with K walking into the asylum while the narrator is walking out. Needless to say, they exchange no words or recognition. One walks in, the other out of, the asylum that is the “House of Idols.”

“House of Idols” is a nameless ghost story, showing a moment of time in post-war Korea in which relationships are doomed to be, as in the last image of the tale, in “desolation expanding without end.