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[CHINESE] Father's Liberation Diary: Weaving the Web of Time
Father’s Liberation Diary is a biographical novel written by Jeong Ji A who dedicated over ten years to its refinement. The author, recipient of prestigious awards including the Lee Hyo-seok Literary Award and the Hahn Moo-Sook Literary Prize, became known through her novel, The Partisan’s Daughter in 1990, which recounted the experiences of her parents in guerrilla warfare. Father’s Liberation Diary, seen as a sequel to this work, goes beyond the “partisan” label to reveal her father’s multifaceted nature as both a loving parent and an ordinary individual. Upon its release, the novel became an instant best seller with a circulation exceeding 300,000 copies and received widespread praise, including from former South Korean President Moon Jae-in, and author Jiang Yani. The author structured the novel using the aggregation method of a “funeral,” allowing the multiple characters to appear one by one naturally. These characters, with their varying ages, identities, and ideologies, include former comrades, a teenager, a shopkeeper, Vietnamese immigrants, a younger uncle, a rice cake shop owner, etc. Each gather at this ceremony and tell their stories. Through this masterful storytelling technique that transcends time and space, the father’s different stages in life are pieced together. Death is the starting point. Untangling the knot in “my heart,” “I” sheds away preconceived notions of “my” father solely as a socialist or guerrilla fighter. For the first time ever, “I” grasps her father’s profound love for humanity—a love that extends beyond ideological boundaries—and also comprehends his desires and affections as an ordinary man. Her father, a staunch socialist, is not rigid in his thinking. His great love for non-socialist individuals and his understanding of non-materialistic religious beliefs are touching and admirable—no matter what, he places human values above all else. This structural approach allows for a nostalgic exploration of the father’s life that surpasses mere personal emotional reminiscence, offering an objective perspective of his experiences. The work not only captures the father’s enthusiasm and righteousness, but also “inappropriately” collects his affairs—his flirtation with the shopkeeper and unsatisfied sexual desire during his marriage are honestly written out, revealing the author’s evolving attitude towards her father, from fleeing struggle to sincere understanding. This intricate tapestry of stories spans over fifty years of time. The experience of the younger uncle brings sadness and warmth to the story. As a child, the uncle idolized his brother, the protagonist’s father. However, the relationship between the two took a turn for the worse when the uncle’s son’s promising future was shattered due to the protagonist’s father’s political activity. Whether or not the uncle will come to mourn his brother becomes an ongoing tension that runs through the narrative. The uncle’s belated appearance at the funeral pushes the novel to its climactic moment of “liberation”: all hatred and prejudice find release, not only the uncle’s, but also of the people connected to “my” father. The author understands that her guerrilla father always had within him an unwavering principle of humanity which transcended ideology, race, and class. In terms of language, the beginning sets the tone for the whole novel with a few short sentences: “Father is dead. He hit his head on a utility pole. My father, who’s been living with a straight face all his life ended his sincere life in this way.” The language is clear and simple, humorous and witty, evoking profound melancholy. While recounting the hardships endured by the protagonist’s father, the language recalls a cold mountain village. This coolness is balanced by heartwarming scenes: from taking in a woman peddler and ends up being deceived, to the long-awaited return of the rice cake shop owner, and playful moments spent with her father in the mountains. The death of the father brings liberation. Through this multi-perspective narrative, the father is no longer seen as a guerrilla or a communist, but simply as “my” father. This book is a profound recollection of this father’s life, an exploration of the intense emotions caused by that special era, and ultimately, a final reconciliation with herself. Zhao JingEditor, Shanghai Translation Publishing House
by Zhao Jing
[ENGLISH] Mater 2-10: A Train Ride Through a Century of Korean History
In recent years, perhaps triggered by the commercial and critical success of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, and the American publishing industry’s shift towards selling more diverse literary voices in all genres, there has been a surge of Korean American novels inspired by the lives of the authors’ parents and grandparents—i.e., the experience of living in twentieth-century Korea through the peninsula’s colonial and war-torn decades. Many of these books are finely wrought, deeply researched, and rightly criticize the United States’s interventionist and destructive role during the Korean War. In reading work about the same period of North and South Korean history by Korean authors translated into English, however, one can’t help but notice a greater level of nuance and complexity that a less American-centric authorial lens allows. Few Korean writers are more accomplished and acclaimed worldwide than Hwang Sok-yong. In the author’s original afterword from Mater 2-10, Hwang writes that the novel was born from a conversation with an old man in Pyongyang in 1989. The old man’s father was a railroad worker who had fled from Seoul during a South Korean crackdown on labor unions, which were associated with Communist activity during the Cold War. Now 81, Hwang has authored dozens of books, spent seven years in a South Korean prison for an unauthorized trip to North Korea for which he was later pardoned, fought on the side of the Americans in the Korean Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, and has been a vocal activist for Korean reunification. Mater 2-10 might be his final book, and at nearly 500 pages, it is Hwang’s capstone, a book that brings together the author’s interests in Korean history, reunification, and leftist politics into a single definitive work. The book begins with Yi Jino, a third-generation railroad worker who has been laid off, high in the air. For over a year, he holds a one-person strike on the precarious catwalk, atop a factory chimney, subsisting on meals and medical aid brought up by his union. While he braves the elements as seasons change, his ancestors visit him in apparitions or hallucinations. His mother calls and says, “Picketing has always been in the Yi family blood . . . Don’t even think of coming down any time soon. So many have died for the cause already.” Those who have read The Guest and The Old Garden will be familiar with Hwang’s blurring of the boundaries between the living and the dead. The book toggles between the stories of Jino, his great-grandfather Baekman, who started as a railroad trainee in the 1920s, his grandfather Ilcheol, and his father Jisan. Hwang’s novel portrays a colonized nation—first under Japanese rule, then American—that hated and criminalized unions for a century. Workers who demanded fair wages and safe working conditions were routinely kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned, and murdered. While the American labor movement has had infamous eruptions of violence throughout its history, the persecution of unionized workers in South Korea was brutal and ruthless on another level. One of the most complex and compelling characters is Choi Daryeong, recruited and given the name “Yamashita” by a Japanese policeman who struggles to pronounce his Korean name. Daryeong’s job is to infiltrate and spy on labor unions, starting with book clubs formed by factory workers. With the fervor and ruthlessness of Inspector Javert in Les Miserables, Daryeong spends decades encircling his old classmate Yi Ilcheol and his family, first for his Japanese bosses and then for his American ones. He does his job so well that he climbs the ranks from spy to police chief. The exploration of moral gray areas is a characteristic of much of Hwang’s fiction. Daryeong is a nuanced character empowered to choose his own circumstances rather than to simply endure injustice. Though he’s clearly the Yi family’s archenemy, Daryeong describes himself as neither victim nor villain. In a meeting with Ilcheol, Daryeong says, “Just as you drove a train for a living, I did police work—for a living.” Mater 2-10 refers to the locomotive that was originally manufactured during the Japanese colonial period, “Mater” being a Japanese abbreviation for “mountain.” The railroad these locomotives ran upon were eventually seized by the South Korean Army only to be destroyed by the Allies as they retreated. Today, the ruins lie in the Demilitarized Zone as a symbol of the severed connection between two nations that were once one. My hope is that, with the surge of interest in literary work from Korean Americans about twentieth-century Korea, readers will be encouraged to seek out work from writers like Hwang Sok-yong, whose vital, complicated stories come from both research and lived experience. Leland CheukAuthor, No Good Very Bad Asian (C&R Press, 2019)
by Leland Cheuk
[JAPANESE] One-letter Dictionary: The Emotional Lessons of Poetry
Consider reading a one-syllable word as a poem. Out of 창 (window), for example, a skyscraper suddenly rises before my eyes. At dusk, its windows light up one by one until the building glows like an ear of corn made out of light. Behind each window is a person, each living their own life, carrying their own hopes and fears. My head spins thinking of all these lives I’ll never know. A one-syllable word can recall more than just images. I am in a place, 곳, where the wind brushes against my skin. The aroma wafting from a bakery sets my stomach rumbling. Why is the smell of baking bread so enticing? I hear a distant hubbub of voices from a backstreet. The scene is bathed in sunshine. A single word elicits memories of the past, which contain not only our five senses but also sensations within our bodies. These revive vivid moments that must have been important. You wonder where such a precious accumulation of sensation had been hiding. These moments wait until they are called up, sustaining us in ways beyond our understanding to make life bearable. Usually, we read words as their meanings and, therefore, as tools, which is an impoverished way of using language. For an example, try looking up a word in a dictionary. As the poet Kim So Yeon says, dictionary definitions are whittled down to concise outlines from which all nuance is absent. Because understanding depends on sacrificing that which we do not understand, dictionaries lose the warmth, feel, smell, and everything else that should imbue each word. Confined to the present moment, this impoverished language takes away the fullness and freshness of our lives until we spend our days as useful machines. We become so focused on completing our tasks that we are no longer moved by what we see and hear. We have money. We have relationships. But we do not have what we need, or understand what we lack. Then a moment comes where you stop short. Why does life feel impalpable like a cloud, even though we produce solid work? Despite that, though, we can still turn to poetry. Kim’s book offers a lesson for reclaiming our sensations and emotions. Arrange the petals of a dead flower 꽃 and conduct a funeral alone. Put them in a row, then rearrange them into a star shape. The petals transmit their warmth to your fingertips. Their sweet colors draw your gaze. Such things will fade, but they are here now and offer us comfort. We then realize that our emotions have broken out of their shell and are opening up to the petals, and beyond. It is a transition that transcends the boundaries of self, allowing my heart to connect with yours. To find out what is inside a seed 씨, you cannot split it in two. Plant it in soil, water it. Put it somewhere with lots of sunlight. Put it outside, then bring it back inside, look for where it grows well. A few leaves emerge, the stem lengthens. To think that it is possible to care so deeply about the unfurling of a life! Spend time together. The seed ages steadily, and so do we. What was once a tiny seed can show us the meaning of being alive. One realizes that what was inside the seed was the time, the room, the sensations, and everything that connected us and it. The experience even inspires gratitude to the seed, for teaching us this humility. A song 곡 may contain within itself the breathing of another person and the beating of their heart. In a fight, fear makes the heart pound quickly. On a quiet walk on the beach with someone you love, your pulse slows. When we immerse ourselves in music, we settle deeply into the rhythm of another’s breathing and the tempo of their heart. In this way, we reach out from inside our bodies to connect with beings other than ourselves. Consider opening yourself to the outside. When we do this, poetry—the music of words—connects us with one another. Language has had this function since ancient times, and Kim reminds us of it here. Translated by Sylvia Gallagher Koji TokoProfessor of American Literature, Waseda University
by Koji Toko
[SPANISH] Semilla: Some Machines Are Happier Than Human Beings
The literature of Bora Chung is both easy and uneasy: easy because her clear and direct writing allows us to enter the story like a knife into a block of tofu, uneasy because her stories scrape like a punch on a block of ice. Watch out: it’s fascinating. Her readers in Spanish already have significant proof of it in Cursed Bunny—whose English translation by Anton Hur made her a finalist for the International Booker Prize in 2022—and the recent Semilla (Seed), a collection of stories selected and published by the Colombian publisher Vestigio in 2023. Seed is composed of a dozen stories. The last three break with the rest: they have continuity and form a brief trilogy; they almost seem like a nouvelle in three parts. [Known as the “Princess, Knight, Dragon” trilogy in Korea.—Ed.] Here Chung adapts the classic medieval fairytale, the one that begins with “Once upon a time” and ends with “happily ever after,” the plot unfolding among castles and forests, red-lipped damsels and knights in shining armor. The author apparently likes this format, having used it previously in the story “Ruler of the Winds and Sands” in Cursed Bunny. It offers her the opportunity to reformulate the archetypical figures of kings, queens, dragons, fairy godmothers, princes and princesses. As Vladimir Propp outlined a century ago in his Morphology of the Folktale, in all such tales, myths elaborate tropes such as spells upon the princess of virginal beauty, kisses from the prince to awaken her, wishes and betrayals. The author shows some of her cards—fantasy, spells, terror—in this sort of tarot deck that opens the doors to the earthly world and the underworld, but also to the classical and contemporary sentimental worlds. In “A Very Ordinary Marriage,” for example, Chung transforms an activity as routine as talking on the phone into something extraordinary. The story considers how enigmatic we become the closer we get to our significant other. It is an observation of the codes of discretion that married love requires. It is about treating the framework of the couple with horror and humor, an invincible combination when it comes to defining the sociological, or even anthropological, gaze. “The End of the Journey,” a science fiction story, further elucidates Chung’s view of human behavior. There is a ship like a modern Noah’s Ark filled with doctors, biologists, chemists, and pharmacists. There is a sick planet, a cannibalistic epidemic spread in a rural town in Iowa. And there is a protagonist, a survivor and expert in deciphering texts. In line with the last element of “The End of the Journey,” it is interesting how Chung slips reflections on language into her plots. In “Seed,” the title story, vegetal language is the backbone of some of the themes that interest the author: environmental crisis, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (a topic that is also present in “Goodbye, My Love,” Cursed Bunny) and vegetal intelligence. Here, trees speak through their dense networks of roots, as they perhaps also do in real life. Pollen as word, word as pixel, Chung emerges victorious in this complex exercise of endowing humanity to plant-characters in a story about the smallness of the world facing the plague of civilization and the hugeness of macrocorporations. Technology is the key to all of this, as we find out in “Maria, Gratia Plena,” where a consciousness-scanning machine, the PAM-21, becomes the protagonist of a violent noir story that serves as denouement for a settling of scores in the gender struggle. Neurology, consciousness, and technology in the style of Philip K. Dick or Ursula K. LeGuin, this is a story where Justice and Technology end up being presided over by the same ministry. Machines are happier than human beings—or, as the author ventures, at least some of them are. But beneath the dystopia shrouding her stories bears the deepest and most committed ethics: that which is perceived without any apparent complaint but swells in our consciousness after reading. As the author confesses in a closing note for her Spanish-language readers, before science fiction (although she prefers to speak of speculative fiction), all these stories are ultimately love stories. Translated by Lucina Schell Bruno GalindoWriter and journalist
by Bruno Galindo
[FRENCH] Impossibles Adieux: A Tragic Yet Tender Journey Into the Depths of Winter
It was ten years ago, in 2014, that the French public discovered Han Kang, with the translation of The Wind Is Blowing. The novelist was forty-four at the time. Next, we discovered The Vegetarian, the 2016 winner of the Man Booker International Prize, followed by Human Acts and Greek Lessons. However, it was only in 2023, when Éditions Grasset published a translation of Impossibles Adieux (first published in South Korea in 2021) that the great novelist finally gained widespread recognition among French readers and critics. In part this was because it was awarded the Prix Médicis for translated fiction, previous recipients of which include Milan Kundera, Umberto Eco, Philip Roth, Aharon Appelfeld, and Doris Lessing (who would later win the Nobel Prize in Literature). The same work was also shortlisted for the Prix Femina. It is with great tenderness, and a sort of all-encompassing poetry palpable on each page, that Han explores the close relationship between two women, the narrator Gyeongha and her friend Inseon, against the backdrop of a tragedy that is little known in France and still unhealed in South Korea. The cruel and bloody incident in question took place on the southern island of Jeju where, before the start of the Korean War, some 30,000 civilians were massacred by the South Korean army and police under the pretence of hunting down communist activists and sympathisers. Gyeongha and Inseon first met when Gyeongha was a journalist and Inseon a press photographer, and their friendship has grown stronger over the years. Having withdrawn to her family home on Jeju, Inseon, an only child, requests her friend’s help after losing two fingers in a work accident. It is the middle of winter, and the island is battered by snowstorms. Gyeongha, who suffers from migraines and nightmares, arrives at this remote house, built from stone and wood, to find her friend in a weakened, melancholic, tormented condition, her days brightened only by the presence of her white parrot and her cabinet-making work. With her strength waning, Inseon has even decided to draw up her will. Inseon tells her loyal friend about the documentary films she once made (about an old Manchurian woman with Alzheimer’s, or the sexual violence perpetrated by the Korean army in Vietnam), about her superstitious mother, her father’s experience as a political prisoner, her youth, her faded ambitions. She relays her mother’s account of the Jeju massacres, the victims of which included several members of her family, and describes the veil of silence that has fallen over this tragedy ever since. This is what led Inseon to make a documentary on the subject—a sort of inquest in which she faithfully records even the worst acts of violence, together with images of mass graves being unearthed. While exploring the labyrinthine depths of both collective and intimate memory (or amnesia), Han also excels in the attention she brings to everyday scenes: a cedar forest, the blustery wind, the colour of the sea, the way the slopes of a mountain resemble an unfolded fan, the smell of old rags, a handful of cranberries, a candle’s flickering flame, the greyish blue of dusk, the voice of a stranger—and the ever-present, dazzlingly white snow, which almost becomes an additional character in the novel, a vital element in this dialogue between two women and between the present and History. In short, Han evokes the beauty of the world, reaching out to it from the other side of this traumatic past and its memories. This strange and sometimes disturbing atmosphere, a kind of gentle, muffled space between fantasy and reality, gives rise to all sorts of images and dreams. Indeed, at one point, Gyeongha says that the sight of the swirling snow makes her feel like she has entered a new dimension; she seems to be fascinated by anything that can separate time from space. Impossibles Adieux is an entrancing work, one that casts a subtle but hypnotic spell. Though written in a different register, it calls to mind the best novels and writing of Yasunari Kawabata and W.G. Sebald. In its pages we find lessons in comradeship, friendship, an acknowledgement of what is kept and lost between generations, as well as the importance and burden of that transmission—and of love, which can also be a source of ‘terrible pain.’ Translated by Jesse Kirkwood Thierry ClermontAuthor, Long Island, Baby (Stock, 2022)Literary Critic, Le Figaro littéraire
by Thierry Clermont
[DANISH] She Sings with the Voices of the Dead
The publication of Kim Hyesoon’s Dødens selvbiografi (Autobiography of Death) in 2021 marked the first ever direct translation from Korean into Danish of a contemporary Korean poet. Translated in a collaboration among three individuals, this publication ventures along new paths within the art of translation while beautifully reflecting the polyphonic nature of the source text.
Autobiography of Death is a wildly experimental and linguistically dense work that moves beyond conventional literary boundaries, in both South Korean and Danish contexts. Because literary convention is created by men, Kim calls herself a poet without a mother tongue, and instead of working within the predefined structures that lead to colonization, violence, mutilation, and death—as well as the culture of silence that surrounds this very violence— Kim creates a different space in which the grotesque, banal, material, cruel, and humorous aspects of death all coexist. In this work, death is a process, not a state.
Autobiography of Death is a suite of forty-nine poems, representing the days before a spirit’s reincarnation according to Buddhist tradition. Originally published in 2016, Autobiography of Death was written in response to the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster in which 304 people lost their lives. In the introduction, we learn that the tragedy was largely the consequence of a deregulated industry in a society characterized by patriarchal violence and a pervasive culture of silence. This information provides a useful entryway, given that the average Danish reader will be familiar with neither the history or literature of South Korea in general, nor the specific circumstances inspiring the work.
However, the historical framework fades into the background when reading these excellently translated poems, not least because of their ferocity and sensory immediacy. The poems give voice to the dead and address the reader in the second person, a relatively rare literary device in Danish, and its usage creates an intimate space where the deceased is spoken to by an inconspicuous, lyrical “I.” “You” are known to someone who acknowledges that “you” are there, were there, and the poet sees “you,” even in death.
It is particularly striking that the deceased is not a singular unit, but a multitude of fragments that can exist in several places at once, dissolving and dispersing in the transition from life to death, as suggested by the Buddhist framework of the forty-nine days. Almost theatrical in nature, the poems possess an intricate materiality that is both repulsive and compelling, and a non-hierarchical relationship is established between “you” and the world. “You” can be found in multiple places at once, physically slipping into the material world in unexpected ways. An example is found in “Day 4,” where water “leans on you even more” when “you” try to lean on it. Death has a strong material presence (“you” are wearing a “gravel skirt,” eyes are “two sips of sea jelly, it’s very salty” in “Day 13” and “Day 14”), but the gruesome images do not constitute a relishing in zombie-like horror for its own sake. Instead, they demonstrate a willingness to look death in the eye and make room for the dark, the horrifying, and the sorrowful, and in so doing, grant the dead the space that the culture of silence denies them.
The poem’s speaker takes on the role of shaman; one who dwells in the intermediate space between worlds and allows the dead to speak. Grave, tragic experiences are conveyed with humor and intensity, leaving the reader with a wry smile but ill at ease.
In her afterword, translator Maja Lee Langvad notes that she found herself in a similar role when translating the poems. Professor Karin Jakobsen first provided a rough translation into Danish, and Langvad then conferred with artist Jeuno JE Kim, who speaks fluent Korean, to assemble and rewrite the poems in Danish. The translation process involved listening to her readings of the source text to reproduce its strong sense of orality. This approach aligns well with the work’s recitative quality that emphasizes rhythm and tone, repeating sentences with minimal alteration. The reader is whirled into a kind of trance, losing grip on linear progression, with only rhythm and alliteration to hold onto.
Some of the challenges the translator describes—the compactness of the Korean and the necessity to insert personal pronouns where Korean has none—are valuable additions, offering an expanded perspective on the difficulties of translation. However, the work stands firmly on its own in all its unruliness, its peculiarity, and its desire to give voice to the dead.
by Juliane Wammen
[INDONESIAN] Age of Deception
In Chang Kang-myoung’s thought-provoking novel, Pasukan Buzzer, readers are invited to explore the political world in a new digital era, filled with intrigue and hypocrisy, where an insidious PR firm deftly manipulates and distorts facts on social media. At its core, the story revolves around Team Aleph, an online PR start-up hired by the National Intelligence Service of South Korea. Their goal is to dismantle politically progressive internet forums and undermine the success of films that address controversies surrounding large corporations that neglect the lives of workers. Within this narrative, key characters like Sam-goong, Chatatkat, and 01810 emerge as integral members of Team Aleph, and form the so-called Buzzer troops. These characters use their persuasive writing skills to shape public opinion on the internet. Their services encompass orchestrating black campaigns by crafting negative comments on social media or web portals like Facebook, Naver, Daum, Ilbe and Jumda Café. Their expertise lies in the art of navigating and utilizing social media, opting for cloned accounts bearing real identities rather than anonymous personas. The storyline’s architecture and linguistic style employed by Chang are nothing short of exemplary. From start to finish, each facet of the narrative is meticulously crafted. The author vividly describes the essence and intricacies of each character, empowering readers to seamlessly follow the evolving trajectory of the plot. Moreover, the narrative is enlivened by the rich linguistic diversity of the Indonesian language, presenting an engaging, structured experience through its wide array of language and boundless imagination. Moving beyond the traditional dimensions of a novel, Pasukan Buzzer delves into the moral values carefully woven into its narrative. Of particular note are the ethical principles explored within the storyline, which offer profound insights into the complexities of human behavior. Chatatkat, for example, is a virtuoso at constructing compelling sentences and formulating strategic plans, while 01810, a proficient computer operator, quickly pinpoints the means to manipulate individuals through the labyrinth of the internet and social media. These characters prompt us to explore the question, ‘How far can human desires go, even if they end up harming communities?’ In addition to illustrating the dynamics of manipulation, Chang skilfully portrays the characters’ self-absorbed beliefs in their ability to shape the world according to their desires, something that began as a mere amusement. Unbeknownst to them, they become ensnared into the machinations of a clandestine organization, resolute in a playing a treacherous political game of eliminating all perceived threats by any means necessary. Rich with intrigue and innovative concepts, this narrative offers readers opportunity to reflect on the values of truth and goodness. This remarkable work not only cautions readers as they navigate the intricate web of social media but also emphasizes the multifaceted impact of Buzzer troops, contingent upon individual perspectives. Readers are encouraged to recognize the pivotal role played by the Buzzer squad in the context of real politics. Pasukan Buzzer kindles a spirit of critical thinking and introspection, provoking readers to contemplate the potential of a Buzzer squad as a force that spreads fake news and manipulates public opinion in their own lives.
by Agus Sulaeman
[JAPANESE] An Inconvenient But Heartwarming Place
When you think of a novel set in a convenience store, the first thing that comes to mind is Japanese author Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori, Grove Atlantic, 2018). In this novel, a bestseller in Japan that has also received international acclaim, the protagonist tries to live a life as conveniently as a 24/7 store, where everything is made possible because everything comfortably follows a manual. There’s no space for emotion. The main character, a woman who finds life difficult because she has trouble understanding and empathizing with others, is able to find her place in society by integrating herself with this mindset, because, at least in Japanese and South Korean urban areas, there is nothing more essential to people’s lives than convenience stores. Uncanny Convenience Store by Kim Ho-yeon, which became a bestseller in South Korea, is also set in a small convenience store in Cheongpa-dong, a popular neighborhood in Seoul, but unlike Murata’s work, the convenience store here offers no functionality or convenience. Instead, the store, which has few customers and suffers from a shortage of staff, is run by an old woman named Yeom, a former high school teacher. One day, Yeom loses her wallet. She receives a call from the man who has picked it up, but when she goes to meet him at Seoul Station, she finds that he is a large, homeless man who has lost his memory. However, Yeom is impressed by his sincerity and hires him to work at her convenience store. The presence of this man, who has forgotten even his own name and calls himself Dokgo (meaning “solitary”), brings about an unexpected transformation in the struggling store. Each chapter focuses on the struggles of a single character with connections to the store. A young woman who works part-time constantly worries about her future, but in this store she feels at home. An elderly female clerk is puzzled about how to connect with her son, who plays video games in his room after quitting his job. A salesman who frequently stops by has trouble with his job and with his family, so he sits alone at a table outside the store, drinking alcohol and eating instant ramen and kimbap. A former actress and playwright struggling with writer’s block becomes interested in a mysterious, middle-aged clerk working at the store, who she observes from the room where she writes her plays. A private investigator, who has lost his former job due to corruption, is also drawn to this mysterious clerk while investigating his identity. Yeom, in addition to dealing with the daily stress of running the store, is also facing pressure from her son who wants her to sell it so that he can use the money for a new business venture. Each of the characters’ troubles are different. However, by carefully portraying them, this novel also brings to light the economic and educational disparities as well as gender discrimination issues in Korea. Like many Korean movies and dramas that are now popular around the world, Uncanny Convenience Store captivates readers through its brilliant story, but doesn’t shy away from bringing attention to societal issues. The people who gather at this convenience store in Cheongpa-dong feel suffocated by the pressure of Korea’s fiercely competitive society. None of them leads what can be described as a successful life. The most notable example is Dokgo who is homeless. Dokgo’s past, as revealed at the end of the story, is both shocking and painful. Despite this, Dokgo always brims with deep compassion toward others, and he changes the lives of other characters who are suffering from loneliness. By encountering Dokgo’s warmth, they each regain bonds with others that were lost. Dokgo’s humanity transforms this uncanny convenience store into a “third space” that provides people with a genuine sense of belonging. For us readers who live in a stressful, modern society, Uncanny Convenience Store itself will become such a third place, a place of relaxation which we will want to visit over and over again.
by Masatsugu Ono
[GERMAN] Breathing in Harmony
We are living in times of great upheavals, in terms of both technology and society. Our traditional beliefs are increasingly being questioned, requiring new ways of thought to meet the challenges of the future. The science fiction genre is one literary form where such changes can be sketched out and rehearsed. As is the case with the novels of Cheon Seonran. The author, born in 1993, has been a renowned name in South Korea’s SF circle for many years, her books reaching a broad readership. A Thousand Blues won the 2019 Korea Science Literature Award, South Korea’s highest distinction for SF works. In this novel, Cheon thematizes the societal effects of uncompromising progress and its rigid optimization constraints, to which both humans and animals are subject. The story takes place in Korea in the not-so-distant future where robots, or rather humanoids, replace the population at an increasing scale, causing rationalization measures to run rampant and jobs to become precarious. One of the protagonists is a robot named Collie, who is used as a humanoid race horse jockey. During his initial assembly, he is mistakenly implanted with a chip that allows him to experience human emotions. This feature also affects his relationship with his horse, Today. The horse, however, physically exhausted from all the intense racing and no longer able to ensure consistent performances in the races, is no longer of value to its owners. The horse is meant to be euthanized, which Collie wishes to prevent. At his side is Yeonjae, a tech-savvy, socially isolated girl who loses her part-time job to a humanoid robot, along with her older sister, Eunhye, confined to a wheelchair since contracting polio. All three could be described as socially marginalized victims of progress. An operation which could offer Eunhye the ability to walk again, for example, is financially unfeasible. Here, Cheon touches on the topic of inclusivity. The author portrays her protagonists as people who fall through the cracks of capitalistic efficiency and are thus at risk of being left behind. And this does not only apply to people: animals, too, are commodified solely for profit, and even the humanoids serving people are compelled to submit to ruthless capitalist principles, only to be discarded in case of any malfunction. Though humans and robots are often pitted against one another, the author does not define their relationship negatively. In fact, it is humanoid Collie who, with his ability to empathize, brings the protagonists closer together, allowing them to overcome old family conflicts. Technology in the form of robots or artificial intelligence that understands and supports people shows its potential to shape progress and automation in a humane way. Collie is even able to feel something like happiness while riding his horse, feeling its heartbeat, “breathing in harmony” with the horse, and feeling alive. Significantly, Collie falls from his horse while staring longingly at the blue sky—a deeply human moment of contemplation and reflection. The sky may be read as a metaphor for joy and striving for something greater. Every one of us has their own personal vision of fulfillment, and hence, A Thousand Blues. The race track, a place where animals are expected to deliver increasingly faster results, can be seen as a symbol for the ever-quickening pace of life where a dehumanizing, profit-oriented rationale dictated by unconditional turbo-capitalism finds its maximum expression. Cheon uses her novel to plead for deceleration, for mindful progress with room for development, allowing each person their own speed and their own time. The language of the novel is clear and unadorned. Its excellent translation reads smoothly and allows the reader to effectively experience the plot and the characters’ perspectives. With narrative finesse, the book begins and ends with the humanoid Collie falling from his horse, the scenes told in time-lapse detail. A Thousand Blues is not a dystopian SF novel; it is rather a utopia that seeks to convey hope. In opposition to a rigid profit-oriented view of progress that creates division in society between the privileged and the socially disadvantaged classes, Cheon passionately advocates for the strength of humanist values: empathy, solidarity, and respect for all living things. Progress and automation can succeed in harmony with these values, an aspect that is particularly relevant in the current discussion on artificial intelligence.
by Sebastian Bring
[ENGLISH] What Has Passed and What Is to Come
Despite being the best-known Korean science-fiction author in the English-speaking world, Kim Bo-young claims not to write science fiction, at least not intentionally. “Many of the stories I’ve written came into being without me consciously trying to turn them into SF. The tales I’ve told have simply unspooled from inside me. It’s only later that I found out that readers labeled them SF.” So she declares in a curious mini-essay included in her collection On the Origin of Species and Other Stories. “My own body came equipped with a set (of breasts),” she explains; she didn’t decide to install them herself. Science, by the same token, is just one of the elements of her fiction that has arisen organically among many others, especially conspicuous though it may be.
Indeed, certain of the narratives in this book seem, at first, to have nothing to do with science, at least in the high-tech form in which it manifests in conventional science fiction. For instance, the long story “An Evolutionary Myth,” set in second-century Goguryeo, seems to take place in the realm of fantasy, where an unexplained condition causes humans to transform into chimera-like creatures. It happens also to afflict the narrator, an exiled prince, whose personal transformation proceeds according to a grotesque evolutionary logic. Though each of the tales seem to cover a disparate topic, common threads that run through the entire book are Kim’s apparent fascination with the mechanics of evolution as well as her skill at transposing them into worlds both like and unlike our own.
“Stars Shine in Earth’s Sky” takes place in a world that, at first, more closely resembles our own. After describing herself as suffering from “narcolepsy,” its narrator goes on to explain how she’s come to manage its symptoms: “I fatigue more easily than others” “my nerves are quick to fray, often diminishing my mental acuity. And yet as long as I stick to my routine of going unconscious from time to time none of these issues bother me.” The only challenging part for her is synching her daily rhythm with others. But as it soon becomes clear, those around her don’t sleep at all, nor do they accept her habit of climbing into a box and plummeting “into a state of total oblivion for a minimum of five to six hours.” Such a high density of stars surrounds the narrator’s planet that the sky remains perpetually bright. The box is necessary because nowhere else can she find darkness, even at night, or what we on Earth call night.
It takes some effort for a reader to imagine the rhythms of life on such a planet, just as the inhabitants of the narrator’s planet struggle to imagine the rhythms of life on Earth. Set apart from the rest of her race by her need to “faint” for prolonged periods, the narrator feels a natural connection to that strange and distant world. “It’s my belief that most creatures on that planet have the same condition I do,” she says. These thoughts lead into deeper speculation as to whether her ancestors came from a planet like Earth. Then they, too, may have had narcolepsy, which was then passed on through the generations.
In “Stars Shine in Earth’s Sky,” as in other stories, Kim creates a society that could plausibly have descended from our own, albeit through a time so long as to be impossible to calculate. “Last Wolf” takes place in a modern-day Seoul that has fallen into ruin after an apocalyptic event. Amid its crumbling infrastructure live tribes of humanoid wolves—the result of mutations in the evolutionary process—and, towering above them, a ruling class of enormous dragons. More conventionally realistic is “Between Zero and One,” whose characters are concerned with such rigorous yet ordinary Korean pursuits such as studying, making money, and street protesting, but with the added dimension of time travel.
In “Between Zero and One,” we encounter a time traveler who tells an unhappy teenager that grownups came/have come from a different era. The time traveler points out that everything about them was antiquated/old, their values and their teaching methods. That they looked down on younger people, pretending to be mentors. “They had forgotten that they were people who’d come from the past,” the time traveler says. This resembles many complaints heard in Korea today, especially by students who rail against the country’s educational and economic systems as well as their representatives. But Kim turns this generational gap into a scientific premise: when a student says her teachers “came from the 1970s,” she means it literally; other teachers, she says, come from the colonial period (1910-1945) or the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910).
Though Kim’s work often incorporates elements of Korean society, culture, and history, On the Origin of Species’ central story—more a novella, not only in length but also in ambition—looks past the specifics of the nation to deal with the existence of humanity itself. In it, Kim posits a dark, airless future Earth populated entirely by robots who owe their survival (if “survival” is the right word) to the black layer of pollution filling the atmosphere. This robot society grinds along uneventfully until a rogue group of robot scientists discovers a way to create life: organic life, that is, of the kind thought to have been driven into permanent extinction long before. Robots were created in the image of man, which leads to man being re-created in the image of robot. Most science fiction asks where humans are going, not where we came from, but in Kim Bo-young’s conceptually and temporally capacious imagination, those become two inseparable aspects of the same question.
by Colin Marshall
[FRENCH] Do Jinki’s Frightening Response to Edgar Allan Poe
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the detective story as a genre, born under the sign of deduction and intellectual play, has progressively embraced different periods and different geographies by developing complex literary systems: elegant British charades, sensual American crime novels, popular French or Italian atmospheric novellas. Some countries—like Iceland, the United States, Sweden, or South Korea—have even turned the detective story into a national genre in its own right. But the ingredients are always the same, always simple: an investigator who confuses, outwits or accompanies the reader, an enigma that sounds as complex to solve as an impossible mathematical problem, a dark part of society to explore. The same is true of the novels by Do Jinki, recently published in French by Éditions Matin Calme, which specializes in Korean literature. The character of Judge Gojin is in a way very typical: he takes on a Koreanised version of a figure similar to that of the great European detectives at the turn of the twentieth century, the policeman who is not quite a policeman. Like Sherlock Holmes, he’s a great psychologist. Like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, he’s also a man who inspires confidence, a reassuring figure who keeps his distance from the dramas he explores. A former judge, Judge Gojin is a member of law enforcement, but he’s also an outsider. He’s a maverick, who first seeks to unravel a mystery by the book and doesn’t play the vigilante. But that’s where the classicism of Do’s novels ends. This quickly becomes clear on reading Mental Suicide, the second novel to be published by Éditions Matin Calme. From the very first page, the writer seeks to lead his reader astray. The narrative alternates between different, sometimes contradictory, points of view, each of which cultivates a different enigmatic area, giving the story a syncopated, jolting rhythm where chiaroscuros are constant. This is true, for example, in the depiction of the character Kil Yeong-in: we don't know whether he’s a victim, a witness, an executioner, or a bit of all of these until the very last pages. The same goes for Yi Tak-o, a doctor with ambiguous morals, whose role could be that of Dr. Frankenstein, or of Judge Gojin’s nemesis; or he could be a false lead, a false culprit. The reader is quickly lost. Do’s talent is to leave the reader wondering, keeping us on the edge of our seats for more than 300 pages. In this context, Dr. Yi Tak-o’s consulting room, where he offers his patients “mental suicide,” is a literary invention of great importance. His aim is to kill part of his patients’ minds to push them into dissociative disorders. In fact, the characters lose touch with reality—particularly Kil Yeong-in, who goes to Yi Tak-o to cure himself of his melancholy following the sudden departure of his wife, whom he discovers had a lover. The drama of Mental Suicide, as we shall discover at the end, lies in the desire to reinvent oneself, to disappear by changing one’s life, personality and identity. It plays with the multiplication of personalities made possible by contemporary life, the internet and social networks—to the point of absurdity, even murder. In doing so, the novel, which is deeply rooted in a reality that is both Korean and universal, becomes almost fantastic. It comes close to a tale, a horror story, in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the great pioneers of the detective story. In the end, Gojin is clearly closer to Poe’s protagonist C. Auguste Dupin than to the detectives of Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle. He succeeds in finding the logic, the reason, behind the madness. A madness that turns out to be perfectly contemporary, perfectly credible and realistic—unlike the plots of Poe, which bordered on the unreal. Perhaps the most important lesson of Do’s beautiful second novel translated into French is this: today’s world, in Korea as elsewhere, has made Poe’s horrific narrative architecture possible and credible. Two centuries later, Do Jinki has turned Edgar Allan Poe into a realistic novelist. Nils C. AhlWriter, Editor, Literary Critic for Le Monde
by Nils C. Ahl
[JAPANESE] Journey to Memory and Identity: Hope in a “Passive” Narrative
Contemporary society holds speed, clarity, and rationality as traits of indisputable value. We’ve grown increasingly impatient and rapidly consume easy-to-digest novels and TV storylines. When approaching Bae Su-ah’s novel Uru Is Going To Be Late, however, the reader is immediately intercepted by the text. The chronology and characters are ambiguous; the story chaotic, with episodic fragments of memory scattered throughout; and the metaphors sometimes border on the absurd. Despite the vagueness of the text, one still finds oneself turning page after page. What is the force behind this mysterious allure? Uru Is Going to be Late is composed of three episodes, each featuring a female protagonist named Uru. The stories take place a few days after January 23, 2019, just after the death of the American filmmaker Jonas Mekas. Although the three Urus have different lives in different spaces, they cannot remember who they are or where they’re from. Still, they share the common themes of memory and identity loss. In the first episode, Uru travels to a foreign country to meet a shaman. In the second episode, after living in Brazil for some decades, Uru returns to the home of her deceased mother to write a novel. The third Uru finds herself at a hotel within a dream and finally decides to leave everything behind. The timeline is disjointed, and the only certainties that resonate with the readers are tension, anxiety, and nostalgia along with a faint hope, and an intangible, looming presence. Grappling with this fragmented text, readers are pulled between the lines, peering beyond the words. Behind the text, unseen and inexpressible entities come and go, occasionally revealing passages that speak to the essence of life. Just as readers grasp something, they feel a momentary sense of relief and excitement, but it is merely a shadow that quickly slips back into the space between the lines. The author Bae Su-ah studied in Germany, engaging in both creative writing and translation work. She holds a unique position among Korean writers due to her avant-garde style, which attempts to deconstruct grammar and syntax. Her search for the true essence of things through disorder, rather than consistent, structured thought, may have been cultivated through her experience as a translator. Translation requires conveying not only accuracy, but also the essence and feeling of the original work. This work captures Bae’s distinctive approach: it is visually conceived, like a monologue in a theatrical performance. The three episodes were inspired by the structure of a triptych, characterized by intense impressions that linger like afterimages. One such lingering impression is the memory of the primordial. It might be found in the protagonist’s name “Uru,” which brings to mind the first Mesopotamian city-state of Uruk (or it may be a reference to the German prefix ur-, from which we get uroboros, the ancient symbol of a serpent eating its tail—Ed.), or in the storytelling done through Uru’s deceased mother. Another afterimage is the flesh through which we experience bodily sensations like dancing and eating. There are words that are “spoken” through the body and then disappear—the unexpressed words within. In an interview, Bae stated that she does not wish to control the direction words take. Rather, she lets the words take her in the direction they want to go. She called these “words of passivity.” She writes by listening to the voices echoing within her—waiting, and surrendering herself to them when they appear. Something primitive lies therein. Bae finds hope in such passivity. As a tactic to ease the violence felt in a world such as ours, one might even call it “adaptability.” Grasping a sense of awe and hope in moments that escape expression or brushing against the soul through a passage dripping in vivid colors, through which we might touch the soul—these sensations allow us to experience the shamanistic aspects still inherent in modern Korean life. Opening a channel of communication with the reader through her writing, Bae manages to express the inexpressible. Her endless challenge is writing itself. Only Bae can open this communication channel that carves out a new possibility in literature, returning to the essence of what a word is/can mean. Through repeated readings of this book, readers too will eventually pass through that channel to a world of new meaning, perhaps like Uru’s journey.
by Naoko Hirabaru