Park Wan-suh's Weathered Blossom

After reading my way through the absolutely horrible Hong Gildong (again, not the Jimoondang fiction, but the folk-tale), I was a bit apprehensive about reading Park Wan-suh’s Weathered Blossom, even though I’ve liked everything I’ve read of hers. The fear was purely based on similarity – another small book with a lovely cover and.. maybe .. another crappy translation.

A closer look, however, reassured me that likely all would be well. I saw Yu Young-nan’s name as translator (Who Ate Up All the Shinga, Three Generations, etc) and I have yet to come across any of her work that was not seamless and completely out of the way of the reader.
Also, of course, Park Wan-suh has yet to disappoint me, and this work was no different.

Weathered Blossom is the austered story of a semi-love affair between two older people who meet on a bus to Seoul. The story is arranged in two sections of roughly equal length. In the first section the woman, disgruntled and out of sorts (and even slightly out of time in a hanbok) returns from a family wedding in which she feels she was mistreated. On the bus she meets an elegant-looking older man. This first section proceeds at a leisurely pace as the bus wanders through the Korean countryside.

Once home, the old woman finds occasion to look the old man up, and a kind of romance ensues. In the end, the old woman, bothered by her own marks of age and the lack of lust in an October relationship, breaks it off by flying to the United States to re-unite with her son.

That’s a plot summary that makes the book seem less than it is. In fact, it is a fairly bleak meditation on aging and what that means for emotional life, particularly in those places emotional life intersects with physical life. In essence, the old woman believes that without “lust,” love is unsupportable. Park hints at this conclusion throughout the book; the old ladies’ feeling of abandonment and betrayal at the wedding is a precursor of how she comes to feel about her body and emotions, at the end.

A rather remarkable preface (partly remarkable because it comes at the end of the book), chooses to conclude that Park’s conclusion is a ‘proper’ one, in a passage that is slightly contradictory to parse:

The lady believes that love is beautiful only with lust, as it is the only way to be blinded. Thus she realizes elders in love can not be anything by a charming façade, then humbly accepts reality. However to say her lustless love is not beautiful is incorrect, as she humbly accepts the limitation of age and reality.

This seems, to me, a bit of a surrender to Confucian notions of proper behavior for widowed women. The idea that this might be emotional/Confucian scarpering is buttressed by the fact that the old woman, while unhappy with her aged body, does not begin to chafe against the relationship until her family, and the family of her aged beaux, become aware of the relationship and, eventually, in favor of it. The relationship is fine as long as society is unaware. As soon as society is aware, the widow begins to consider where she will be buried, as though she is in some way betraying her eventual burial plot next to her deceased husband. All of which, I suppose, supports the argument that Park might agree with the preface.

Weathered Blossom also presents a rather bleak view of what one can expect in the emotional life of old age. I am also unclear on how an adequately performed charade cannot be blinding. Perhaps I am not yet old enough, although that seems unlikely from where I sit. ;-)

As usual, Park also charms me by what she leaves out. Discussing the bus ride on which she meets the old gent she says:

We didn’t talk about clichés, such as how old we had been when the Korean War broke out, what kinds of hardships we had gone through, where we had gone to take refuge. Instead we exchanged spontaneous remarks.

I don’t want to put too much pressure on this one passage, but to me it sums up why Park’s writing appealing to westerners. It is not that the things Park’s characters go on to talk about are not clichés – rather it is that they are not intra-Korean clichés; that is clichés that will mean nothing to a western reader.

The only thing that is a bit odd, is that rather than simply alternating pages of Korean and English text, this books lumps them semi-randomly in an effort to keep the rather longer English text somewhere near the Korean text. I would have preferred, perhaps, different text sizes to achieve the same end, but I really can’t complain too much about this.

Weathered Blossom is part of a Hollym series of translations that partly overlaps the Jimoondang series. But these are worth picking up because the original Korean is in them, the books are small but feel substantial, the covers and internal artwork are appropriate, and the books even have the little string bookmarks built into the cover.

The Red Room

While I have some issues with the kind of contents of The Red Room (i.e. more depressing separation literature) I did rather like the stories it contained. This is my review, which is likely to be in the next Acta Koreana. It is rather long. ;-)

In his short, but rather useful afterword to The Red Room, Bruce Fulton briefly discusses each of the three stories in that collection, and argues that their central thematic similarity is that they are narratives of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Fulton’s analysis is accurate, but can be even more localized and explicit: All three works in The Red Room focus on the interactions between personal memories of the trauma of recent Korean history, the resultant PTSD and how this interaction manifests in the daily life of survivors. In the case of these stories, memories are intentionally repressed, obliterated, and endlessly re-played, with drastically varied results.

Along with the central theme, the three stories also share some plot elements, primary among them that in all three stories protagonists are haunted by the death of close family members, with all deaths being related to political strife surrounding the Korean War. These stories range from the very good to the outstanding, and they are presented to us, perhaps intentionally, in order from the slightly hopeful to the utterly bleak.

Perhaps the finest of the three stories is Pak Wan-sŏ’s “In The Realm of the Buddha”, which is also shortest of the stories at a relatively slender twenty-four pages. It is also the narratively simplest of the three works. Pak Wan-sŏ, as demonstrated by other work such as Who Ate Up All the Shinga is a master of using the family-based generational stories to stand for history. Also, as in much of Pak’s other works the Korean War is not far away (though not the dominant theme), nor is the death of a sibling (Pak lost her own brother in the war).

The story is a historically based tragedy, depicting the personal impact of the politically inspired double-murder of the narrator’s Brother and Father who are unnamed (but capitalized throughout in a successful attempt to universalize the characters). The narrator and Mother witness these killings, and they initially respond by attempting to cover up the reality of the events and to suppress their memories.

Pak is skilled at revealing the reality of life in short, nearly throwaway dialogue and descriptions. When, at a temple, Mother and daughter receive a shabby offertory table, all they can afford, Mother shrugs, “I begged them to keep it simple. After all, it’s the heart that counts.” The daughter notes, “My only response was a faint smile” (12). This nicely limns the jaded but affectionate relationship between the two women. Similarly, the narrator neatly describes her knowledge of Buddhism as enough to earn her, “A score of 50 out of 100 on a test. It was like looking at something through glasses worn on the tip of ones’ nose” (6). Even the title is clever, at the same time reflecting the reality of the narrative - most of which takes place in a Buddhist temple – and the relatively happy ending, which features the promise of at least some kind of release.

The narrator’s metaphors of memories are purely digestive – she says that she and Mother, “had consumed the dead” (15), and that she “always felt them in [her] innards; they were something indigestible in the pit of my stomach” (16). For a time, the narrator does attempt to tell her tale, but for various reasons can never get the tale just so, or heard in the way she desires and needs. In the end, however, with the promise of generational change in her mind it seems she finally does “digest” the lump in her stomach and “In the Land of the Buddha”ends on what can fairly be seen as a note of optimism.

The other two stories in the collection do not end on similar notes. O Chŏng-hui’s “Spirit on the Wind” proceeds from a similar personal/historical tragedy, but the nature of that tragedy is not revealed until late in the story. Like “A Visit to the Buddha” this is a family story, in this case a family horribly and inevitably broken down by history and psychological forces beyond its control.

“Spirit on the Wind” alternates between the first-person narration of a husband, Se-jung, and the third-person narration of Ŭn-su, his wife. When we first ‘meet’ Ŭn-su, she is absent. Ŭn-su’s initial absence and the difference in narrative person signify that Ŭn-su is not as tethered to social ‘reality’ as those around her. As the story begins, Se-jung ponders the latest in a series of his wife’s disappearances, the first of which occurred a mere six months after their marriage. As
Ŭn-su continues to wander off all of those around her, including her mother, become increasingly incredulous and troubled by Ŭn-su’s behavior, which they see as an abandonment of her family. Ŭn-su herself is unhappy. She vaguely identifies the root of her wanderlust in the fact that she was an adopted child, but this never quite seems reason enough and she is, “tired of wandering, tired of feeling that the home in which she was living was temporary” (57). Ŭn-su’s continued betrayal of the family bond strains everyone, yet she is unable to control the winds that drive her. Worse, she cannot seem to summon up the memories that might explain it, “Everything before that [her 5th birthday] seemed hidden behind a dark curtain: none of it had surfaced in her mind” (55-56).

The consistent and obvious metaphor in “Spirit on the Wind” is the wind itself, which is explicitly tied to memory: “Whenever she heard the wind, Ŭn-su would nod as if some long forgotten memory has just then surfaced“ (50); and she is left with only, “her anxious quest for identity to be stirred up and given wing by the slightest breath of wind” (56).

The wind can also be a symbol of illness as when Se-jung complains the Ŭn-su has, “the post horse curse. You’re like an untamed pony the way you roam about free as the wind” (54). O uses the wind freely but with a particular context and thus when the son, Sŭng-il says, “Mommy, why does the wind blow? I wish it didn’t do that” (59), a reader might intuit that trouble that lies ahead. It is here perhaps, that O loses a bit of the stories’ unity as Ŭn-su endures a gang rape that seems forced into the larger plot. Admittedly, the rape does provide the pretext (though in a way most readers might not expect) for Se-jung to bar Ŭn-su from their house, and thus furthers the plot. The rape also allows Ŭn-su to present a foreshadowing of what will be revealed about her past, “I’ve experienced something no one should have to experience, something so horrible I can’t even remember it. But I’m going to make sure I don’t remember it” (98-9). But in general the rape seems both too large and random an incident to occur when it does, and it seems played off quite too lightly after it does occur.

In any case, Ŭn-su’s marriage collapses. Ŭn-su is finally reunited with her memories, but by the time that comes, it is too late for a happy ending. Ŭn-su remains in search of that wind that can blow her clean. Unlike the narrator, from “In The Realm of the Buddha”, Ŭn-su is still in search of a way to come to terms with her memories.

Like “Spirit on the Wind”, Im Ch’ŏr-u’s “The Red Room” features dual and dueling narrator-protagonists. The first is a mild-mannered everyman/salaryman O Ki-sop whose casual act of kindness many years before, and slightly suspect family background combine to bring him to the attention of the Korean state security apparatus. The second protagonist is Detective Ch’oe Tal-shik who can say, like Macbeth, “I am in blood, / Stepp’d so far, that should I wade no more, / returning were a tedious as go o’er.” The story is that of Detective Ch’oe‘s attempts to break O Ki-sop down.

Not only does “The Red Room” feature dual narrators, but Detective Ch’oe also has his own internal narrators that represent the voice of his traumas (one voice from his domestic life, the other from his distant past). This internal narration gives an inner dialogue to Ch’oe that is sometimes problematic. He is a man of contradictions, perhaps more contradictions than one character can conveniently contain. It is not that it is unlikely that a man of high standing in his church could also be a torturer (cf. The Inquisition), rather that such a character should also have such clear inner awareness of the sources of his own trauma, be so able to connect those traumas to his existence in his daily life, also be aware of their outcomes, but then draw no conclusions from them. Despite this slightly puzzling aspect, the inner voice is terrifying and tells visceral tales of terror (the internal narration is italicized): “Look, Tal-Shik! He shouted at the top of his lungs, pointing at the bloody corpses. You have to see this. Those sons of bitches are Reds” (140). The Detective’s position is clear – he relentlessly relives his trauma, it cycles around in his head, and consequently he cannot relieve himself of it. Ch’oe’s internal retelling of his trauma is intense and relentless, he cannot make it cease, in fact draws a perverse kind of justification from it.

O’s writing is clear and direct, as befits a tale this blunt. A clever reader will spot a graceful nod to George Orwell and perhaps, in the title, to H. G. Wells’ short story, “The Red Room” and its conclusion that mankind is haunted by fear itself.

In “The Red Room” there is no hope of escape from trauma, the cycle is burned in too deeply, and recurs to frequently to break. At its conclusion Detective Ch’oe enjoys/endures an epiphany of revenge featuring the disturbing and vivid sanguinaryimage “A blood –colored sea filled the room ….As I prayed, I felt with vivid clarity a sacred joy and benevolence envelop me with warmth, before beginning finally to fill the Red Room” (189-90). Even O Ki-sop, the mild everyman becomes a vessel of hatred. As O Ki-sop finally wanders home in a daze, he accosts a stranger, “Something is rising inside me, something hot and burning. It’s spreading hot throughout me, building an enormous heat – It’s my rage” (188). So the cycle of trauma continues.

It is nearly supernumerary to note that the translation here is excellent. When an experienced reader of translated Korean literature sees Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton’s names on a translation, it is a guarantee of high quality. Still, with sloppy translation still occasionally going to print (The recent Aunt Suni, perhaps being the exemplar), it is worth noting translation that goes beyond workmanlike. The Fultons are brilliant at this, from accurate use of idiom on the granular level (“Next it was my brother-in-law’s pet theory”) to their ability to stay out of the way and let the stories tell themselves. In 190 pages of translation, there was not one “gotcha” moment, that moment in which a reader finds an infelicitous phrase, poor grammar, or other error.

The only slightly dissonant note in The Red Room is the foreword, which seems to stray from the subjects of the fictions. Written by noted historian Bruce Cumings, it accurately points out that the stories are “the fruits of the popular struggle for democracy in Korea” (xi), but the rest of his introduction seems oddly off track, focusing on resentment towards the United States and United States’ lack of understanding and knowledge of Korea. Certainly those realities exist, but they seem tangential to the stories themselves and at times the foreword seems to have been written for another book entirely.

Putting such minor criticisms aside, The Red Room is an excellent collection both for what it contributes in its approaches to and descriptions of trauma and memory, as well as revealing to Western readers the depth of the damage history has done to the social and psychological structure of the Korean psyche.

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.

Korea Journal Book Reviews

Good news on the lit-front.. Looks like I will be reviewing two books for the Korea Journal

Toy City: Lee Dong-Ha, tr.Chi-Young Kim, (St. Paul)
Who Ate Up All the Shinga?: Park Wan-suh, tr. Yu Young-Nan and Stephen Epstein, (Columbia)

Which will be good for the CV, among other things....

I've already discussed Toy City on this blog, but as I look back on how I treated it, I'm not particularly happy with my level of analysis and will take a different tack on it. One thing I note is that I was unhappy with the particular translation I read, and this edition is by a different translator. So that should help.

Who Ate Up All the Shinga, looks fun, though I have a slight conflict of interest in that I know one of the translators. ;-)

Unrelated, I just got back from ICAS 6 where I was the organizer/discussant and presenter on a panel (Through the Looking Glass – Korea and the Western Gaze) which included Charles La Shure's excellent take on multiple translations. I was so happy to look at three translations of "Buckwheat Season" but Charles found six!

The Next Review of to 10 Asia

I'm still troubled by the short format. ;-)

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES
Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

A romantic novel with brains (delicious human brains!), Pride and Prejudice and Zombies begins, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more." With this truism established, author Seth Grahame-Smith is off, updating Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to a post-apocalyptic zombie-strewn landscape. This idea works brilliantly, and tension between the delicate novel of manners and the horrorshow zombies is played for broad comic effect, as in:

"The creature advanced, and Elizabeth landed a devastating chop … The limbs broke off, and the unmentionable fell to the ground . . . Elizabeth found herself … within view of the house … face glowing with the warmth of exercise.”

Published by the appropriately named, Quirk Publishing, Pride, Prejudice and Zombies is also available for kindle download from Amazon.com. Shamble out and pick this one up!
(320 pages, 15,160₩)

150 words


BROTHER ONE CELL
Cullen Thomas

Brother One Cell is a cautionary tale with an inspirational conclusion. Cullen Thomas illegally teaches English in Korea, and on vacation in Thailand mails hashish to Seoul. This scheme unravels and he is sentenced to 3.5 years imprisonment during which time he overcomes personal demons and comes to accept personal responsibility for his own fate.

Cullen’s flat, observational writing style is appropriate when he describes his entry into the Korean penal/judicial system, which appears largely opaque to him: What he does see tends to be depressing. Cullen’s descriptions of the psychic price of his double isolation (prisoner and foreigner) and powerlessness are matched with his growing appreciation of small pleasures, such as his joy at being given simple jobs.

A novel of personal growth in difficult circumstances, Brother One Cell also gives a peek into a side of Korean culture even expatriates rarely (thankfully) see.
(347 pages, 19,500₩)

150 words


OUR TWISTED HERO
By Munyol Yi

Our Twisted Hero is a retrospective meditation on power by narrator Pyongt'ae Han who was weak and bullied in elementary school. The bully, Sokdae Om, rules with an iron fist and keeps nearly perfect order. Han is not used to this arbitrary power, and rebels. For this, he is ostracized: Om has created an all-powerful cult of personality. Han not only works his way back into Om’s good graces, but even comes to perversely admire him. When Om’s reign crashes down at the hands of even greater power other students turn against Om, with only Han refusing to completely repudiate him.

Readers with knowledge of post-war Korean politics will particularly enjoy this work. Although it is simple and brief, it also clearly allegorizes political issues (dictatorship, the role of intellectuals, suppression of revolt) that preceded and surrounded its original date of publication in 1987.
(119 pages, 7,000₩)

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.

"Trap of History"

Jeong-Hyun Shin's The Trap of History should have been a contender. Instead it’s underlying reactionary politics render it worthwhile to read, but better to distrust.

The first issue is Shin’s palpable dislike of Korea, in the present and as a recent historical concept:

During the nineteenth century, however, the Korean people failed to transmute their energy to higher and more subtle levels; instead, they abandoned themselves to the national vices -moral, economic, and political corruption; factional struggles; and the inflating of the elite class, thus severely straining the political and social system of the nation. As a result, the twentieth century has been the worst of times for Koreans.

This is the oldest sort of complaint, the equivalent of an old man hollering to keep children off his lawn, then slumping back into his rocking chair and murmuring about “the good old days.”

Or as Cicero put it, “o tempora, o mores!”

The second issue is that this stain in his brain leaks, as stains do, out to tarnish what he thinks of modern Korean literature:

“Unfortunately, I cannot in these works find any intelligible set of ideas for how to transcend the present, how to move out of the pasts, how to reconcile the past with present life, and how to create a national self.” (xiv)

This is an interesting view of what literature should do and I’m not sure it is consonant with Shin’s claim, which is key to his dismissive attitude about current Korean lit, that previous Korean literature had been good.

Certainly what Shin describes (with approbation) as:

literature, old myths, religious rituals, and nursery rhymes were elevated to the form of hyang-ga, songs, si-jo, ga-sa, and finally the modern forms of the novel and poetry. (x)

do not seem primarily to be literature of transcendence, rather the literature of acceptance of the 'old days.'

Further, Shin’s ultimate point, “For more than half a century the literature has been largely concerned with the expression of some anachronistic foreign values in patriotic guise.” (xv) seems accurate but largely without importance since for the last half century the country of Korea has largely been concerned with the expression of anachronistic foreign values in patriotic guise and it is largely because of this approach that Korea has been able to remake itself in the remarkable fashion it has.

Historically, this is where Korea is, and that can’t be escaped by longing for the good old days.

Shin is a literary moralist in the old-fashioned sense. When he discusses “A Fire” by Jin-gun Hyun he concludes that the narrator’s final act of revenge is flawed because “the fire at Sun-i has discovered in the end should be used creatively and positively to break her own fetters.”(8) This borders on the absurd, given the already well-limned territory of control and pain that that the narrator is trapped in. If the story doesn’t have some notion of human perfectibility in it? Shin will pan it.

Shin also has an annoying habit, one I’ve detected in several other essays of Korean critics, of beginning his essays with tangential discussions of various theorists (From Umberto Ecco to Andrea Dworkin), before finally veering back to the literary work under examination. My favorite introduction leads off Chapter Five. Shin weaves Heraclitus, Macbeth, Achilles and Adam, Faust and Confucius, into a perfect cotton-candy of analysis, all of which leads up to a conclusion something like, “The Koreans have a different, and not worse way, of addressing fate.” To return, for a moment, to Macbeth, it is sound and fury, signifying nothing. As a new reader to Korean criticism I make the snap, and probably incorrect, judgment that this kind of writing is to prove some kind of minimum daily requirement of western literary thought. If that is what it is, it is pretty unnecessary.

Sometimes, also, his analysis is perverse. When Shin argues that the traduced maiden in “The Lunatic Painter” represents “how ordinary people become dead in the course of daily life” he seems to miss the actual point, that the death of her “inner light” is absolutely not in the context of daily life. Despite this, Shin begins there and builds a progressively more breathless argument that radically misinterprets part of the story. It often seems that Shin’s analysis precedes his reading.

Shin’s belief that Koreanness includes some kind of inherited racial history is clearly carried through his analyses. Reviewing Yi Saeng’s “The Wings” Shin argues that, “There is no denying that we feel some limitation in Sang Lee's use of interior monologue; because of the narrator's limited mental space the monologue does not reveal his cumulative memories and wishes.” (39)

That is, of course, nonsense, Yi presents his narrator as living in a permanent present haze as part of his presentation of the character and his numbed disconnection. Why Shin believes that each and every character in a story should be a walking talking representative of the cumulative social and political history of Korea is unclear, but it is an unfair and profoundly philistine concept.

Shin seems to know this elsewhere. When he argues that (about the narrator of “The Wings”:

There is an everlasting horror in the narrator's life. He may never become liberated, may never find utopia. He is confined in his wife's world.

Shin explicitly admits that this character is unnaturally bounded in, yet at the same time he wants him to be the vast canvas of Korean history. These thoughts are paralogical.

Moralist that he is, Shin gets in some good digs at narrator’s wife, and these are well earned. Shin is a good writer and often a skilled critic; but one wearing blinkers.

This blinkered condition is demonstrated in his analysis of “Kapitan Lee” which is one of the most amusing, if derogatory, stories of a collaborator in the canon of such stories (if there is one?)

Shin says:

on the way to be servile yet again to another foreign power -- he falls into a reverie on his long history of servility to foreign power

Kapitan Lee certainly serves any ascendant foreign power, but he is not servile in the dictionary sense, rather he is cunning as a weasel, and this is not a difference without a distinction.

Shin wants to portray Kapitan Lee as a mere bootlicker. Lee certainly licks boots, but he is a cold-hearted opportunist, and that has an entirely different meaning than the one Shin tries to tack onto the horrible, but oddly attractive, Kapitan Lee.

It is a topic for another paper, but Shin also does an amusing job of assessing the narrator “behind” Kapitan Lee and how the two clash. Blinders on, Shin misinterprets that relationship, but it is clever that he detected it – I certainly didn’t, but the moment I read Shin’s analysis it came crystal clear.

Finally, there is Shin’s catastrophic misunderstanding of "Seoul: Winter 1964," by Seong-ok Kim. This is a classic story of the random anomic state of citizens (An and Kim) in a society governed by those with economic goals, and how this makes social, personal ties, meaningless.

Miraculously, foolishly, Shin says:

The setting is not delineated well enough; the characters are not fully developed; and their actions are not given enough motivation and conflict

This, of course, is precisely the point of the story, and Shin’s tin-ear for meaning is painfully revealed by his analysis.

"Tin-ear "might be unfair. But Shin’s moralistic streak, his desire for every story to show us some path from Gehenna to Paradise, shades his understanding of modern Korean literature, which has progressed far beyond simple stories of Good versus Evil.

Shin later claims that An and Kim are “are buried alive in history, which is painful in every sense.”

Of course the opposite is true – they are buried because they have no history, they float like leaves.

If you only have a moment to read “The Trap of History” this is the chapter to read, as Shin’s moralizing is most ridiculous and clear in it.

With all of this said, Shin is probably worth reading. I like him, well enough, merely on account of his dislike of the noise of modern life. He can sometimes see through a stories’ structure and get at the knotty issues below. The problem is that he might, with his prediliction for “good old day” Koreanisms, completely misunderstand what the problem is.

Still, Shin is brave enough to be a public intellectual critic in a culture in which that is not always a safe thing. Props to Shin for writing his work, demerits for his sometimes staid, if not regressive, analytics.

I Have The Right To Destroy Myself

Kim Young-ha’s “I Have The Right To Destroy Myself” is a short novel that attempts quite a lot and achieves almost everything it attempts.

A good story, cleverly told, and one that will prove very entertaining to a casual reader as well as a critical one.

The story features multiple narrators.

Perhaps.

Kim has a rather tricky way with narrators.

In the three translated stories of his I have read, and in “I Have The Right To Destroy Myself” he sometimes pushes narrator believability to Nabokovian limits. Like Nabokov, though, he does it in such a way that a reader puts blinders on, happy enough to go for the ride directly before their eyes.

Kim never directly lets his narrator lie, but he does give his narrator a certain approach toward versimilitude:

Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic. I learned at a very young age that it was easier to make up stories to make a point. I enjoy creating stories.The world is filled with fiction anyway.

“I Have The Right To Destroy Myself” features a “narrator within a narrator” structure, in fact it features some chapters of triply embedded narrative as the omniscient "author/narrator" writes a fiction using the internal narration of characters he cannot, in reality, be in the heads of . The meta-narrator is allegedly novelizing events in which he has participated and thus using his authorial power to represent the lesser narrators. Close reading reveals that similarities exist between the meta-narrator and one of the characters, C. They are both artists, the narrator is, in a sense, a performance artist and C is a video (fairly close to performance in one sense) artist. Both are also deeply interested in aesthetics, as artists would be. Then, there is the point that their lives overlap entirely with respect to the two suicidal women who feature in the narrative.

There is also the issue of the narrator’s job. He is, by his own account, a literate and friendly version of Dr. Kervorkian. His job, more of an artistic avocation, as he explains it, is assisting suicides. The meta-narrator goes to great pains to explain his techniques for acquiring clients, and these techniques represent an ultra-winnowing effort. In fact, the meta-narrator explains his winnowing techniques both as a moral and artistic tactic to … well… create art. The narrator remains, of course, unnamed, but he speaks with the smooth assurance of a true-believer – or one who wants you to believe.

A reader gets the sense that the narrator is a true believer, but by the novel’s end the reader might still be asking themselves, a “believer of what?”

The narrator, as noted above, is an omniscient one, and he only waits until page 10 to elevate his own status (as only the all-powerful narrator can) from omniscience to Godhood. It is Kim’s skill that this monomania seems perfectly sensible, given the geography of the novel. It is also Kim’s skill, that he litters the novel with clues that the narrator is untrustworthy.

The narrator begins his tales with an ellipsis in quotation marks. As a non-Korean reader I can’t tell if this is accurate translation, but if it is, it suggests irony in the inverted commas, and editing in the ellipsis. This is all before the tale is properly begun. Perhaps the most stunning assertion of narrative omniscience the narrator makes, and one I completely missed on my first reading of the novel, is that he narrates the stories of his clients’ deaths solely through the voices of the brothers, which only the clients have met. This is an epic jump of narrative stance, from outside the narrator, through the stories of those who he has met, and to the characters who they have met – and their story represented as that of the narrator.

Then there is the issue of how and why these two, of the narrators few suicides, are related to the brothers. If the brothers were marked off, in any way, as a common thread that would push women towards suicide, this might make sense, but as it is it seems verging on the conspiratorial. Judith, the first suicide, is a troubled woman who shares (sexually) the brothers. Mimi, on the other hand, seems to be a stronger character and her connection to the brothers is finally revealed to have been through the hand of the narrator himself – if the narrator can be trusted in telling his story at two removes from himself, and even then tossing in an obscurationist meeting of the two, “He went back to the gallery. At the entrance, he saw a very familiar man, but he couldn’t place him.” The two should be very familiar, because they are separate voices of the same narrator, placed in the same time and place.

It is brilliant writing, because it pulls this hall-of-mirrors self-referentiality in an effortless and naturalistic way.

There is a hint of Mishima in Kim’s work. He does not describe mere existential angst, rather it is the point that one should live the right way which includes, particularly if bored or pointless, dying the right way. In a perverse way the unnamed narrator of the book echoes John Randolph of Roanoke’s philosophy that “life is not so important as the duties of life.”

It should also be noted that the novel is bookended by discussions of paintings of two famous death scenes, The Death of Marat and The Death of Sardanapalus. My review is on Kim’s book, so I will only note that the world gained something when Kim went into writing, and lost nothing when he did not go into art-criticism. His reading of the visual pull of Delacroix’s work is dead wrong.

I end with one of Kim's concluding symbols – fake flowers. The author describes Mimi’s death and then says the novel he will write (the very book we hold in our hands) “will be a beautiful fake flower arrangement that will be place on their graves.” The fake-flower notion is introduced late in the novel and it, as Kim does throughout the novel, seems to interrogate the notion of the narrator as an artist and as someone whose aesthetic decisions can be trusted.

Still, you close the back cover of this book and you wish that, maybe, there had been a bit more. The clever balances, the counterpoised aesthetics, the omniscient narrator whose omniscience is possibly unmoored from reality, the brilliant narrative itself, the alternately propulsive and comfortably numb plot, all of these combine in a uniquely satisfying way.

LAND OF EXILE

As I've expanded on some bits of this, I thought I'd blog the whole thing. It was first published in Acta Koreana in June, 2008.

The expanded edition of “Land of Exile” (first published in 1993, republished by M.E. Sharpe), translated and edited by the late Marshall Pihl, and Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, takes a very good, but slightly dated anthology, and with an infusion of four new stories improves the quality of the original volume while simultaneously bringing it into the twenty-first century. The new stories substantially broaden the brief of the anthology, expanding the narrative styles as well as extending the geography of exile that constitutes the main theme of the collection.

A reader of the first edition might be forgiven for assuming that all Korean fiction was about exile. There was a tension between the anthologies’ tight focus on exile and realism, and its self-proclaimed status as “the standard English-language anthology of post-1945 Korean short fiction.” The anthology still revolves around exile, but it has extended its purview beyond only the specific Korean exilic experience, and on to more generalized experiences of alienation. This expansion should make the collection accessible to a broader range of readers.

This new edition also brings the anthology current. The first edition had a balance of stories from the years between 1948 and 1984. This is an interesting symmetry, but one that left the anthology without representation from one-third of the post-colonial era. The new edition adds a story from the 1980’s, one from the 1990’s, and two from the new millennium. These additions allow “Land of Exile” to properly assume the crown Thomas Hughes grants it as “the richest, most comprehensive selection of postcolonial South Korean short fiction currently available.”

Two themes thread in and out of the short stories in “Land of Exile” – collaboration, and cyclicality. Collaborators stud these works and while collaborators are exiles in one sense, they are also a particular and protean kind of exile. These works show collaborators at work on all levels of society and with a wide range of intents. The consistent theme of cyclicality in these tightly drawn dramas suggest that they are merely showing one turn of the wheel, but that the wheel will continue to turn. Some of the pain contained in these stories is exacerbated because the author allows no possibility of future alteration. These stories dramatically remind us that the theoretical concept of contested terrain is an ethereal version of what contested terrain amounts to in the geography of real life. This is one of the powers of this fiction – although it never precisely happened, it gives us glimpses of the humane and the inhumane.

The stories published in the previous edition are largely powerful reading and primarily examples of the “tight” exilic theme. Three of the original works are not as substantial as their companions. “The Wife and Children,” by Ch’ae Manshik is a trifle of a story. With its ‘returning-only-to-exit’ husband, and confused wife and child, it is short on character motivation and of light emotional impact. Kim Tongni’s “The Post Horse Curse” also seems a bit light for the topic of the anthology. Its plot is a hoary “mistaken identity” one that seems heavy-handed and obvious even as it is read. Finally, “Land of Exile,” the story for which the collection is named, may be its weakest story. In attempting to concatenate subplots of an alternately bitter and sentimental old man leaving his son at a orphanage, going home to die, two instances of family betrayal, and several turns of the revolutionary wheel, author Cho Chongnae simultaneously attempts too much and too little. “Land of Exile” is overwhelmed by a soap-opera plot and clumsy dialogue.

Kim Sungok’s “Seoul: 1964, Winter” is much more successful and was recognized as something new in Korean Literature immediately upon publication. It is, as its anomic title indicates, existential, nearly ludicrous, and represents a first step away from an ultra-narrow focus on traditional exile. Two young men meet an older man and attempt to spend the money he has received for selling his wife’s corpse. After reading this story it comes as no surprise to learn that Kim studied French Literature and apparently, learned some of its lessons well. The three men meet as atoms might collide. Just as when atoms do collide, they create a short heat and careen apart. An outstanding work and one whose title, unfortunately, was not suited to be used as the name of an anthology.

The remaining stories are also excellent. Hwang Sunwon’s “Mountains” is an impressive and brutal tale featuring, in shifting third-person narration, multiple levels of exile and a relentless ending suggesting the cycle of exile is unbreakable. When the narrator receives the advice, “As long as you live in the mountains watch out for large animals – don’t even think of going near them,” neither he nor the reader cannot foresee that this exilic advice extends to the largest of animals, man.

“Kapitan Ri”, by Chon Kwangyong, is a remarkably cheery portrayal of collaboration. Dr. Yi Inguk is a collaborator with a “can-do” attitude extending to everyone except Koreans. He is exuberantly proud of past collaborations and the story is partly of his accepting his new collaborators. Yi reminisces on the fruits of collaboration with the Japanese, recounts how he came to terms with the Soviets, and realizes that the American “big-noses” are another such opportunity despite his discomfort that his daughter is marrying one. Yun Hunggil’s “The Man Who Was Left as Nine Pairs of Shoes” implies that anyone can become collaborator - the unfortunate character of the title notes that “There are times when you can do something you wanted absolutely no part of, and not even realize it …Just because you haven’t cooperated [with the police] in the past doesn’t mean you won’t cooperate [with the police] in the future”

Pak Wanso’s “Winter Outing” is a sobering mixture of personal alienation and a horrific story of the impact of political bifurcation. An alienated wife travels to the country and meets a heartbreaking victim of internecine Korean brutality. O Chonghui’s “The Bronze Mirror” and Im Cho’ru’s “A Shared Journey” are linked by their consideration of the cost of rebellion and ensuing exile. In “The Bronze Mirror” an elderly couple live with memory of their son, killed twenty years earlier in the April 1960 student revolution. “A Shared Journey” by Im Cho’ru, tells a story subsequent to the 5.18 Massacre in Kwangju. When one protagonist still on the run and another uneasily settled back into day-to-day life meet, they find that once common ground has become mysterious and obscured. Physical exile and return mirrors the exile and return of unfortunate memories.

Hwang Sogyong’s “A Dream of Good Fortune” is reminiscent of Choi Se-Hui’s “The Dwarf” without that work’s relentless depression. “A Dream of Good Fortune” is a tightly realistic depiction of the marginal life of the underclass. It is notable for it’s description of how, on social and economic margins, small events are of magnified importance. The plot revolves around the unlikely combination of the pregnancy of a family member and the neighborhood joy brought by coming into the possession of a dead dog.

“The Boozer,” by Ch’oe Inho, is a story of loss and delusion. The unnamed narrator is a young boy searching for his drunken father. The tale is told in semi-fantastic narration in which verb tenses slip from the present, to the past, and back to the present, and the impossible is presented as real (“You know, once he took copper and made it into gold. Gold!" ). The nature of the boy’s quest alters subtly through the course of events, and the ending is poignant, suggesting the story is one day of an endless cycle in lives that also endlessly cycle.

It is the four new stories -- "Scarlet Fingernails" (1987) by Kim Minsuk; "The Last of Hanak'o" (1992) by Ch'oe Yun; "Conviction" (2003) by Ch'oe Such'ol; and "From Powder to Powder" (2004) by Kim Hun -- that extend the metaphor of “exile” so far as to make it stand for a more general alienation. This allows the anthology to dramatically increase its range. In a review of the original volume, Kevin O’Rourke noted that “People keep saying ‘Korean fiction is not much fun’ … one feels bound to point out that until Korean fiction becomes fun to read it will not make much of a mark on the international stage.” While the new stories are serious, sometimes harrowing, they are also fun in the literary sense: These fictions play with expectations and expand forms. These works, though difficult, are ‘fun’ to read.

Of the new works, "Scarlet Fingernails" hews the closest to the traditional Korean narrative of exile; in fact its subject explicitly is exile. It is a family story written in a style that balances the exuberant and tragic. "Scarlet Fingernails" tells the tale of a wife and daughter (and her husband and children) who have repudiated a ‘communist’ husband and father who defected to the North. This defection ruined their careers and that he returned to the South and was promptly imprisoned, has antagonized them more. Now, on his 61st birthday, an event of some importance to Koreans, everyone must come to some kind of terms. The conclusion is surprisingly light-hearted, which makes this work unusual among its companions.

"The Last of Hanak'o" is a story of a different kind of exile and the main plot turn at its end may not come as a complete surprise to a Western reader. Yet Yun handles the narrative and plot deftly. "The Last of Hanak'o" concludes with an additional half-twist that gives the story a masterful partial inversion of the typical story of exile. By the conclusion of “The Last of Hanak’o” it is unclear who is exiled from whom, and who has done the exiling. It is also worth noting that this is the only story of the collection set in a foreign land. This reflects the Korean reality that exile is very often an intra-national affair and thus where Korean writers typically focus, as well the fact that the new edition of this anthology is stretching such traditional boundaries.

“Conviction” is positively J.G. Ballardian and teases the contention of the introduction that the anthology does not contain extra-reality (“Boozer” also contains surreal touches, particularly in descriptions of exteriors and in its young narrator’s internal monologue). The introduction to “Life In Exile” notes that “Conviction” tells the story of “a man whose mind and body are increasingly but subtly estranged,” and compares it, properly, to Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” That comparison surely suggests that Ch’oe’s goes beyond specific issues of Korean exile and into general issues of body and mind? “Conviction” is a compelling story of a man’s struggle, conceived of as a competition between water and desiccation. The story weaves a web in spiders, sand, the River Styx, mold, and the death of a childhood playmate by drowning. The final image is literally arresting.

The concluding story, “Powder to Powder” hammers a cyclical message home with bleak nihilism, leavened by flashes of alarming humor. The story begins at the deathwatch of an advertising executive’s wife. The death scenes are harrowing, and the conclusion is even more so. At a crematorium the theme of cycles and alienation is mechanical and explicit:

A display:

Incineration 121: Will the bereaved please come to the observation room to receive the ashes.
Incineration 122: Cycle to end 130 PM
Incineration 123 Cycle to end 1:40 PM


After the death of the narrator’s wife, a series of unexpected but not unlikely events result in the narrator severing all personal connections. The narrator concludes with a passage that can be read as a threat, a Buddhist promise of nirvana, or simple banal evil. “That night, for the first time in a long while, I slept deeply, ever so deeply, my awareness dissipating into nothingness.”

As a grateful reader of works translated from Korean, I should take a moment to praise the wonderful literary quality of this translation. The text is smooth and elegantly idiomatic while the essentially Korean nature of the works comes through cleanly. In addition the editors have, particularly with the inclusion of the recent four stories, done an outstanding job choosing stories that will engage western readers. The Introduction seems to need a slight overhaul - it is adapted from the original introduction and still has too much of that genetic material in it. But beyond that minor point, the upgrade to the volume is substantial and impressive. It may be a bit premature to hope for, but I already look forward to what the next edition will bring or, even better, to the next volume of short stories newly translated and anthologized by the Fultons.

Not Exactly All About Korea - but first reviews in "10 Magazine Asia"

Three little ones - the problem was actually to get them down to 150 words and still say something. I guess I'm a wordy writer. These will publish next month.

THE APPEAL
John Grisham

Summer reading season is here. On Gwangali or Boryeong beach, or huddled by your air-conditioner, you can count on John Grisham to deliver a solid summer book; a long story, simply told, in which the bad guys are really, really bad. “The Appeal” delivers page-turning plot and doesn’t let anything interfere. If a character is evil his chauffeur describes him as “ a hothead with a massive ego,” and the action speeds ahead.

“The Appeal” focuses on a small legal firm that has just defeated the deep-pocketed and evil Krane Chemical company. Krane responds with a multi-pronged counterattack hinging on the increasing politicization of the judicial election system and a Machiavellian manipulation of unrelated social issues. The story races towards a satisfyingly downbeat conclusion and with the exception of a few clunky phrases and occasional caricature, is a brilliant choice for beach or sofa. (482 pages, 10,390₩)


THE AQUARIUMS OF PYONGYANG
Chol-hwan Kang & Pierre Rigoulot


“The Aquariums of Pyongyang” tells of a childhood partially spent in a North Korean internment camp. Chol-hwan Kang, recounts his happy childhood in a family that moved to North Korea from Japan. The family arrives as heroes. When the patriarch turns against the state he ‘disappears’ and the family is exiled to camp Yodok. Nine year-old Kang spends ten years struggling to remain alive. Starvation, beatings, overwork and disease are daily fare at the camp, and sensitive readers might flinch as Kang unsparingly recounts his experiences with hunger, sadism, and “the death of compassion.” Kang’s family is finally released, but the specter of re-internment never leaves. Kang escapes to China and then to South Korea. The book’s conclusion, preface and introduction (the last by Pierre Rigoulot) contain some political posturing, which seems hard-earned and does little to lessen the book’s general impact. (238 pages, 14,400 ₩)

LAND OF EXILE
Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton eds.

Readers looking for a quick but comprehensive primer on Korean post-WWII short fiction should purchase a copy of the updated “Land of Exile.” A semi-canonical work within fifteen years of its first publication, four new stories substantially broaden the brief of the anthology, expanding the narrative styles as well as extending the geography of exile that constitutes the main theme of the collection. Co-editors and translators Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton have added "Scarlet Fingernails" by Minsuk Kim; "The Last of Hanak'o" by Yun Ch'oe; "Conviction"(2003) by Such'ol Ch'oe; and "From Powder to Powder" (2004) by Hung Kim. According to Amazon.com, none of the stories in this anthology are in print in any other volume. The “Land of Exile” continues to wear the crown Thomas Hughes grants it as “the richest, most comprehensive selection of postcolonial South Korean short fiction currently available.” (343 pages, 37,640₩)

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.

In the Depths

Hahn Moo Sook’s excellent volume of short stories, “In the Depths,” contains nine short stories. These works focus on issues of control and loss of control. The stories, while all satisfying, approach and achieve greatness to the extent that they focus on mechanisms of control, whether these be political, social, personal, or economic. Hahn’s works are weakest when she pulls away from this explicit theme and instead focuses on what I would characterize as symptoms or conditions resulting from lack of control.

The collection begins with a painful trifle, “Shadow,” the story of a woman trapped in amber between the incompletely socialized emergent paradigm of romantic love and the embedded Confucian paradigm of loyalty to family. This piece serves as a kind of appetizer for what is to come.

The second story, “Put Me To Sleep,” along with “Among the Marching Columns,” is one of the two revelatory stories in this collection. Both stories are the tightly plotted intertwinings of lives in which social expectations unsettle existences and, ultimately, destroy lives. “Put Me To Sleep” begins:

The whole thing was neither true nor false; nevertheless it was experienced. One had to accept it through the senses; logic had nothing to do with it.

“Put Me To Sleep” proceeds to follow the story of “marked” child and a “marked” doctor, and the childbirth prophesies which follow, and lead, them to their graves. Hahn does a brilliant job of interlacing instances of symbolic palimpsesting (a father to be writing, erasing, and re-writing messages in sand), precognition, and deja-vu in such ways that they clearly suggest an unusual relationship between the doctor and the child, but when the nature of the relationship finally is revealed, it comes as a shock nonetheless. Hahn also cleverly interweaves flashbacks into her story, and when the final two flashbacks reveal how the doctor and child are related across time, and the outcome of their final meeting, most readers will shudder in mixed amazement and loathing. “Put Me To Sleep” is a remarkable story.

“Among the Marching Columns” also interweaves life stories. In this case two youths whose lives have been connected, far across social lines, since birth. As in “Put Me To Sleep” the narrator is a step out of beat with society. This “semi-detached narrator” in these two stoires is a clever approach, as it allows Hahn to created some narrative breathing-space in her tight plot. “Among the Marching Columns” ends semi-paradoxically, with the main characters finally re-united by tragedy.

“In the Depths” is currently out of print, but on the basis of these two stories alone, it is worthy of a reprint.

Two of the other stories are less dramatic, certainly less claustrophobic, but also quite good. “Dr. Chung” describes the re-union of two doctors, some thirty years after their friendship and competition in medical school. They have taken radically different paths, one going on to fame and fortune, the other to a reduced practice in a backwater village. But there is a link between them still, of less tenuous existence than it initially seems, and the shadow it casts is far more powerful than its narrator might have expected.

“A Halo Around The Moon” is a different kind of story. Its narrator is an elderly woman, widowed early in life, who has cocooned herself in a steely-withdrawal from all things sensual. When one of her tenants goes into childbirth, the widow finds herself face to face with a lifetime spent insulated from physical connection and must decide whether to follow control, or in some way give in to life.

The remaining stories are less strenuously plotted, in fact some tend towards the purely descriptive. These stories are well written, entertaining to read, and often laced with bathos, but they do not rise to the ferocious inevitability of “Sleep” and “Columns,” or possess the narrative strength of “Dr. Chung” or “Halo.” It is not that “slice of life” stories are inherently limited: Cho Se-hui’s “A Dwarf Tosses a Ball” uses the same kind of approach, but by providing more variegated slices of life, Cho puts together a much more coherent picture than Hahn does.

“In the Depths” is a fairly standard bit of melodrama – young lovers, an affair, and madness. I could easily see this work translated to modern Korean TV drama. “By the Fire” tells the story of dispossessed orphans, “Splinters” the story of dispossessed families, and “A Place for Fate and Festivity” (surely one of the worst short-story titles of all time?), tells the story of a woman who will shortly lose possession of her life. All are entertaining, readable, but not spectacular.

The translation is occasionally a bit clunky, but it is serviceable. The book-sleeve alarmingly warns that ‘the western reader may find some minor difficulty” in reading the stores, but this should be taken with a grain of salt; it is more a relic of the era in which the book was originally published (the 1960s) than a real worry.

I found this work available online at Amazon.com. It is always a happy surprise what the internet has done for the availability of out of print works. The bad news is, of course, the seller is asking $98.00 dollars for the work. Oh yeah, it’s also in Chinese!

Fortunately, Bibliomania has an English version available for only 75 dollars, but I may just snap it up.

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.