The Irredoubtable Brother Anthony

Has an excellent page with links to his own translations of Korean fiction. This includes a range of short stories, but the bonus is three novellas and full novels by Yi Mun-yol, either still unpublished or out of print

• Winter that Year
• The Poet
• Son of Man

And two novellas by Yi Oryong, the former Korean Minister of Culture

• The General's Beard
• Phantom Legs

Regular readers will know I'm not as keen on translated Korean poetry (for a couple of reasons) but Brother Anthony also has a page of his translated poems, if that floats your literary boat.

It's also just worth poking around his site, as he has been in the translation game a very long time, and has excellent links and takes.

Bonus Land: Deluxe Version

Working on a comparative translation bit for my Uni. It's on "Potatoes" (titles vary) by Kim Dongin.

I come across an older post on the Korea Times in which Lim Sunjae (and, oh yeah, I emailed the dude) translates 24 super-short Korean stories.

His translations (based on the ones I know) can be clunky in the corners, but generally bring the stories through with vigor.

Happy Days!

And props to Lim Sunjae.

Sonagi - "Rain Shower" by Hwang Sun-won

Heh, I found a modern video remake of a modern-classic Korean story, Sonagi.

Rain Shower, also called Shower in English, 0r Sonagi (in Romanized Korean), is a short story written by Hwang Sun-won in 1959 (Hwang also wrote the seminal novel The Descendants of Cain - a horrific story of greed and betrayal). Sonagi is a brief but a heavy rain shower that suddenly comes down usually on a hot afternoon. In Hwang’s story, the rain shower both causes and symbolizes the short and tragic love of the boy and the girl. The story begins with the boy encountering the girl playing by the stream on his way back home. By the end, the girl is... well, read it for yourself. You can read Sonagi at Brother Anthony of Taize's excellent website here.

For now, here is the excellent modern video version. It contains Korean, but you don't need to know any Korean to follow the plot (It actually ends at about 5:15, the remainder is blooper stuff and credits).

The Flower with Thirteen Fragrances by Yun Ch'oe

Earlier, I posted (after prompting!) a mention of the fact that I had read one story of Yun Ch’oe called The Last of Ha’nako. I really hadn’t liked it that much, as it hinged on a pretty obvious plot twist, although one that might have not been quite so obvious in Korea, at the time Yun wrote the story.

Today I read The Flower with Thirteen Fragrances and I read an entirely different author. With an omniscient third-person narrator, always a good way to deal with a fractured story, Ch’oe relates the story of two lost souls, Bai and “Green Hands” who meet each other in near tragedy and once joined, work together to create beauty.

As in The Last of Ha’nako the ending becomes clear about halfway through the story, but it is not based on sudden revelation (and one that comes as no suprise), but rather it flows naturally from the events of the story. Bai and Green Hands create the “Winter Crysanthemum” a new, beautiful, semi-narcotic, and potentially quite valuable flower. The flower is a result of their love, dedication to handcraft, and partly to their desire to flee society. As the fame of their flower grows, that same society naturally encroaches the couple, and they find their brilliant creation threatened by extinction. Take the “flower” to be symbolic of their love (or not, really) and you have the standard elements of the “us against the world” love story. The Flower with Thirteen Fragrances has a bit more to say than just that.

Ch’oe masterfully mixes her elements of fairy-tale with descriptions of the ‘outside’ world that very deftly navigate space between parody and hard-edged description. As the flower becomes popular, photographers arrive, pa-jeong stands pop up, and cheesy nicknacks begin to proliferate.

Outside the village here is a wonderful scene in a government office as officials attempt to craft, in 40 minutes, a complete program with which to deal with the horticultural, social, and medical implications of the thirteen different flowers. This meeting concludes with the farcical,

“our forty minutes are already up. We’ll make that the conclusion and close this conference.”
“But what conclusion do you mean?”
“What we’ve just come up with.”

I hear echoes of Alice in Wonderland there.

Finally, Ch’oe introduces three un-named characters (They are known as K, L, and M, but might as easily be Paeckche, Silla, and Koguryo) each of whom hope to profit from publishing credit related to the flowers. This section is an amusing commentary on personal pride, patriotism, and idealism, and the possible infamy that can be associated with each. Individually, the 'letter-men' muses on how they might steal credit for the flower and how their name for the as-yet unnamed blossom, is superior to that of the others.

In the end, only their hatred that someone else gets credit remains, and they successfully conspire to destroy the Wind Chrysanthemum. In fact, they proudly trumpet their venal reunion as evidence of their sincerity and probity. This is an amusing take on the traditional notion of modern Korean Literature that re-union, the end of diaspora, is innately a good thing.

In her clever way, in quite palatable text, Ch’oe delivers a message parallel to that of The Descendants of Cain by Hwang Sun-won, without the un-subtle “happy ending” of that story,* that loyalty and love have difficulty standing before treachery and evil.

The story ends in a romantic, or sad depending upon reader’s disposition, moment, with the two lovers setting out for the “North Pole,” and freedom.

As I noted in my previous comments on this work, it is available at: http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/klt/97wint/choeyun.htm

Of published in The Golden Phoenix: Seven Contemporary Korean Short Stories
Which you can find here http://www.rienner.com/title/The_Golden_Phoenix_Seven_Contemporary_Korean_Short_Stories

Definitely worth the short time it takes to read.

*Both works discussed are translated by Suh Ji-moon, who partners with Julie Pickering on The Descendants of Cain work

“Silently a flower falls” by Ch’oe Yun

A rather long article on a writer of whom I had not heard. It sounds like Yun uses a pretty dramatic narrative technique:

The story is divided into eleven sections. Ch’oe Yuns creates through the application of modern techniques and instruments a chaotic atmosphere that reflects the effects on the baffled society during and after the Kwangju massacre. Ch’oe choice to implement such different and dissimilar figures in her story is perfect to restruct the confusion of the massacre. The created structure of several voices is a unique technique, to give the reader an insight in how far the events have influenced the lifes of different people.

I'll have to try to find this and see if that reads as confusing as it sounds here.

One of her other works, The Flower with Thirteen Fragrances is available here with a short biography of the author. There is also an interview with Yun, here that includes a funny comment on the current Korean obsession with winning a Nobel Prize for literature and a mention of Cho Se-hui's A Tiny Ball Launched by a Dwarf, which is next in line in the PKLT list of books I need to review.

Hatred, Rage, and Aunt Suni

I suppose it is a general credit to the level of translation of Korean literature into English that I have read quite a few works and have just now come upon my second example of atrocious translation.

This case is particularly unfortunate as the story is a classic one – Both classically Korean in that it involves the psychic amputation of part of a people (Dae Han Min Guk is a principle evoked, in this work, to justify the mass murder of Koreans) and also classically global in that it explores the contexts and mechanisms by which massacres become an almost inevitable outcome of political warfare (both intellectual and physical).

The work is Hyun Ki Young’s Aunt Suni, and it is a testament to the story that if a reader perseveres through the bad translation, internal inconsistency, and horrifying typography, that reader is rewarded with a glimpse of Korean history with international meaning and better, is privy to the kinds of psychological accommodations and examinations that follow tragedy.

The story is brilliant on a technical level. The narrator is putatively coming back to Jeju (from Seoul) to attend the funeral rites of his grandfather.

When he arrives he discovers he is also “attending” the death of his Aunt Suni.

As we hear Aunt Suni’s horrific story, we realize that she, tragic, insane, a suicide, is a mangled relic and symbol of historical crimes. She returns, some 30 years later, to commit suicide in the killing field from which she once, ‘luckily,’ escaped.

Suni’s story is revealed in a series of conversations between her one-time confederates, and by structuring the story this way, Hyun allows the multiple narrators to also inject their understandings of the mechanisms of the tragedy as well as of the multiple approaches to the understanding of and/or forgetting of it. Hyun weaves a clever mix of showing and telling in which each 'speaker' reveals some aspect or interpretation of the time, the crime, and the aftermath.

A sub plot brings Aunt Suni to Seoul and here, in the smallest things – accent, rice consumption, burned fish – Hyun reveal Aunt Suni’s psychic trauma. The rest is well-written exposition presented as discussion.

Where the original writing can be discerned, it is brilliant. The narrator muses, as he returns to Jeju, that a 50 minute flight seems too quick a return to a land he has left some 8 years ago and constructs a powerful fantasy of how his return should have been affected.

When he lands, we see why he might well have wanted his journey extended and his destination avoided. Where the bones of plot and the muscles and ligaments of story-telling can be perceived, Hyun’s strength as a writer shines through.

There is a powerful story here.

Unfortunately that story is buried under poor translation. The name of the story is rendered three different ways. Phrases with no English meaning crop up. At one point Aunt Suni “picks a crow” with someone, and later a family is “slain to death.” Each apostrophe is followed by an extra space, and that same extra space regularly shows up between words. Personal pronouns are used without antecedent; articles are used randomly, and modifying clauses are place with daring disregard for the words they are supposed to modify. Grammatical errors are everywhere (e.g. “My hometown was something I had shun from”).

This is an extremely difficult book to read.

The translator, who I will not name, thanks two English speakers for proofreading the text.

If I had not read those lines I would have strongly argued that no native speaker of English had seen this work prior to its publication. The translator was done no favors by his English speaking… well.. the correct word is “accomplices.”

This bothers me because, as I mentioned, Hyun has (to the extent a reader can play literary archeologist and see past the wreckage left to view) done a brilliant job of creating a blessed (survives the massacre) and doomed (in some ways does not survive the massacre) character in Aunt Suni. Aunt Suni’s story is compelling enough that, after cursing the translation out, I ran to the internet to find the historical background of the Jeju revolt. It is a tangled and horrible story and wikipedia has an adequate summary of it.

After digging through the story and the history, I have a feeling that Hyun’s story, retranslated, or merely edited, would be an outstanding read.

For now, it is so difficult to navigate the text, just as text, that I wouldn’t pass this book along to anyone.

The good news is that my research turned up another book, apparently not available in Korea, titled “Dead Silence” which is 8 short stories about the Jeju imbroglio. And Amazon has it. ;-)

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.

A "hidden" Kim Young-ha

I just noticed over at my e-buddy's site (Liminality) that he has a previously unpublished Kim Young-ha short story, Christmas Carol. Worth taking a look at, if you're in to Kim.

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! ;-)

"Twofold Song" Yi Mun-yol

Twofold Song, by Yi Mun-yol, features a kaleidoscopic style that it quite unlike the two other pieces of his that I have read (Our Tortured Hero and An Appointment With My Brother). Yi’s style in this piece, something like the painting of Salvador Dali, combines absolute realism with passages of lovely surrealism. It is the story of separation, the separation of a man and a woman, the separation that all humans must endure as they go, alone, through life, and the additional separation which society adds to this.

The story begins as a man and woman come into being through conversation, or perhaps it is better to say, take human form through conversation. Perversely, when the conversation turns for the worse, the man and woman lose their forms as in the following passage:

Only then does her voice lose its sharpness. The blue cracks around her mouth gradually merge to form a wan smile. But the man has already changed back into a wet plaster statue. More than half of his right leg is buried deep in the ground because he inadvertently stretched it while talking.

This is nicely done pastiche, with the surrealistic shape-shifting described as enabled by the quotidian stretching of a leg. Much of the story is done in this style. The man and woman talk, with the practiced bitterness of old lovers and undertones of Confucian responsibility, of morality, meaning and death. The man and women are single entities for narrative purposes, but by giving them, in their surreal world, nearly eternal lifetimes (‘it looks like a trinket I used to play with and lost about a hundred thousand years ago) and scattered body parts, Yi clearly intends us to see them as standing for human beings in general.

As Twofold Song continues, we get our first glimpse behind the surreal curtain as to what the “reality” of the story might be. The man and the woman ‘build’ a space to have sex, and commence to do so. At this point, not surprisingly for a story by Yi, and not surprising for a story by a modern Korean, the issue of homeland surfaces, but quickly turns away from the typical Korean usage of the term as a return to, or reunification of, Korea itself. Instead the man yearns for the “first” homeland, which he imagines as the primordial sea. Amusingly, this narrative is interpolated with the actual sex act. During the sex act, the bodies lose their surrealistic nature and become, for the first time, human: “Veins like heated steel surge up taut, wrapping around each other on various parts of the man’s body, which once resembled wet plaster. The cracked and cadaverous flesh of the woman also blossoms.”

As sex continues, the tale features its first metaphor/description of a comfortable environment, the jungle, for which both the man and woman long. This metaphor works on several levels, not the least that one can quite easily read Adam, Eve, and Eden into it, or read it as a metaphor for evolution. Nearing orgasm the man and woman alternate ‘sentences’ of short phrases that can also read like gasps of sexual pleasure:

“I remember now … I’m a trilobite … a coral … a proliferan”
“We’re taking shelter from the rain … in the hollow … trunk of an old oak tree. You, you feel … oh, so … warm.”
“I’m an elasmosaurus. I’m a dolphin … a tuna”

At climax, in perhaps the quickest cast of post-coital depression in literature, the tone of the conversation changes, turning again to regrets at leaving the jungle. Once the sex act is concluded, the man and woman turn from beings of flesh, back to beings of surreal imagination.

As the story winds down, the surrealistic elements remain, but Yi changes the arena, narrowing it to a park, and now giving the man and woman specific character – they are lovers, looking for meaning outside their families and spouses, and this is their final assignation. They share one last kiss and part with traces of love and fresh springs of bitterness.

Yi has one more surprise in store, however, as the next paragraph, jarringly, begins with a “just the facts ma’am” the description of an unknown character. That character, a bellboy at the hotel in which the man and woman had their final meeting, briefly describes how the story seemed in his eyes: “Perverts … all that noise in broad daylight … at a time like this.”

This is a bold authorial stroke, as it breaks cleanly with the style and content that preceded it. It is also a tactic that Yi used in An Appointment With My Brother but to astoundingly less effect: as there it seems more consonant with the foregoing tone, but at the same time arbitrarily takced on. In Twofold Song it is a good and clean stroke though, as the bellboy (Kim Si-uk - the only character in the novel who is given a name), who himself accepts commissions from street girls, applies a damning benediction and hypocritical judgment for society, and in doing so shows one more mechanism by which we are all separated.

Yi’s skill in this novel is at limning the fixed spaces between us. Twofold Song echoes Samuel Beckett’s description of a painting by Jack Yeats:

The way he puts down a man’s head & a woman’s head side by side, or face to face, is terrifying, two irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between. I suppose that is what gives the stillness to his pictures, as though the convention were suddenly suspended . . . . A kind of petrified insight into one’s ultimate hard irreducible organic singleness.

And, of course, that kind of talent can create a story that is quite disturbing. I should also note that the Hollym edition (2004) I purchased, is slender but worth searching for. It not only contains, interleaved, the Hangul version of the story, but it is also well illustrated by Kwak Sun-young, is printed on excellent stock, and has that cool attached cloth bookmark thing that I am a major fan of.

Perhaps not all germane to the literary content of the work, but it did make my reading even more enjoyable.

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.

From Powder to Powder by Kim Hun

From Powder to Powder by Kim Hun
Land of Exile
East Gate
Armonk, New York

Many Korean short stories are about cycles. Sometimes this is the traditional (historical) Korean cycle of separation, diaspora and return, and sometimes the cycle is a far less optimistic one. Such is the case in Kim Hun’s “From Powder to Powder” which hammers a semi-cyclical message home with bleak nihilism, leavened by flashes of alarming humor. The clever title evokes the Biblical phrase on cycles, “from dust to dust,” while also describing the equipoise of the tale – a man positioned between the death and incineration (creating the first powder) of his wife, and his career marketing beauty products (the second powder). As the story works towards it’s dusty ending, it becomes clear that while some cycles are inevitable, hope of return is vain.

In the main plot, physical and emotional exile reaches everywhere into life, even into souls. At the same time a sub-plot focused on advertising products to women brings unexpected levity. The story begins as the conventional (if that is fair) deathwatch of the wife of an advertising executive. Here Kim uses stark, brutal terms to describe how this cycle ends, “the flesh around her vulva had wasted away as well … the outer lips of her vagina blackened and stuck together like two pieces of charred meat. I couldn’t believe that out daughter had been born from that place.” Kim’s vision of “the circle of life” is decidedly not that from “The Lion King,” and by focusing on the mother’s reproductive organs and the daughter’s life, Kim strongly suggests we all be aware what awaits the daughter as well. Later, Kim has a doctor make the argument explicit: “The life-force can’t be adulterated; it can’t be transformed. And the impossibility of transformation is what defines the phenomenon of life.”

This goes beyond mere stoicism.

Kim injects humor in two set pieces, one describing the narrator’s bladder being drained and the other discussing strategies for marketing cosmetics to women. At a board meeting Director O muses, about a vaginal cleanser, that, “it worked well enough, except that it failed to remove all of the menstrual flow and had side effects, such as inflammation and a burning sensation in the vaginal wall. And there were cases in which the jelly was contaminated with urine and found its way deep inside the vagina, where it turned into a foul-smelling discharge.’ (321) Later, another director discusses the vagina, “So each one is different – well, even if they are, how can we manufacture something for each and every one? Here we are with a wide-open market and it’s hard to get in the door.” This is not only amusing for its semi-askew metaphorical content, but also evidence of the cleverness of the translation (by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton) which allows bawdy double-entendres to come shining through. It also makes me wish I could read Korean, so I could judge how close to the original thoughts, these metaphors are. In any case, they read splendidly in English and there is certainly at least one good academic paper waiting to be written about this stories/ obsession with the female vagina, but that won’t be the one I’m doing here. ;-)

As his wife dies and in the aftermath of her death, the executive focuses on his infatuation with Ch’u Únju, another employee of the company. The death scenes are harrowing, but the conclusion of the story is even more harrowing. The executive attends his wife’s cremation and the theme of cycles and alienation is mechanical and explicit as he watches:

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

(p. 337)

Finally, it ends, “we saw the red display above the door to the incinerator: end of cycle.”

After the death of the narrator’s wife, a series of unexpected but not unlikely events result in the narrator severing all personal connections. Ch’u Únju is let go by the company and by that time the narrator is removed from concern for her. More shockingly he takes Pori (named for the Buddhist term for “supremely enlightened), his wife’s healthy dog, in to be euthanized on the basis that he will not be able to care for it and “My wife wanted it to be reborn as a human next time around.” (p. 339) Kim stresses the venality of this: Not only was the dog his wife’s “first thought” after her tumor-induced headache attacks, but the dog is a full-blooded Jindo, the national dog of Korea.

Finally, the narrator has disposed of his wife, his ‘dearly beloved’ Ch’u Únju has gone to the United States, and the dog Pori has been sent to join his mistress. 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” (p. 339).

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.