• Fiction

• Poetry

• Criticism

• Nonfiction

• Reviews

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Quis ipsum suspendisse

• 

  [Japanese] Only You Know: きみは知らない (You Don’t Know) Jeong Yi Hyun

  Many works of Korean literature address issues of economic disparity and poverty head on. As depicted in the global hit film Parasite, the threat to life that is poverty sometimes causes families to forge deep bonds. Having to join forces to survive and the closeness of living in a tight space, whether it be small, old, or half underground, pressurizes the family, squeezing the members together. The five family members in Jeong Yi Hyun’s You Don’t Know, on the other hand, are wealthy. There’s plenty of space in their multi-floor villa in Gangnam. They can lead their lives without really seeing each other, so they can be complete individuals. And they can each can sink entirely into their own private worlds, their secrets kept secret. One Sunday afternoon, the youngest daughter, eleven-year-old Yuji, vanishes from their home. At that moment, the adults who we’d expect to be home, who should have been home, were not there. Yuji’s mother, her father, her stepsister and stepbrother from her father’s previous marriage, all have something suspicious about them, and we start to wonder if those suspicious backgrounds have something to do with Yuji’s disappearance. We could say that what makes them suspicious are the things they lack. Yuji’s mother has lived in Korea for a long time, but grew up in a family of Chinese merchants, speaking Chinese. She gained Korean citizenship through her marriage, but maintains a deep relationship with Min, a man she met in university who grew up in the same sort of household. To her and Min, Korea is both a home and a foreign country, and the Korean language is both their mother tongue and a foreign language. The uneasiness of being rootless haunts her wherever she goes, and while her family has noticed that she hesitates for a second before speaking in Korean, they never realize the meaning behind that hesitation. Even after getting married and giving birth to Yuji, she does not end her relationship with Min, and she never expresses her unease to her family. Her husband, Yuji’s father, never discusses the details of his business with family. Yuji’s stepsister is unstable and cannot control her emotions. She hurts herself, behaves aggressively to others, and seeks out sex with partners she barely knows. That may be because she grew up being told she was born from an unwanted pregnancy, or it may not. The human mind doesn’t give up simple answers under analysis. But the one thing that is clear is that she should have received psychological care at an earlier stage, but instead her problems were ignored until she became an adult. Her stepbrother got into medical school but doesn’t attend his classes. He maintains a strange distance from his kind and dependable lover, hurting her. He’s intelligent and sensitive enough to realize what he’s doing, and, as if to punish himself for that, begins committing crimes that benefit no one. All of them are bound by the things they lack but refuse to directly acknowledge. The longer this goes on, the greater these deficiencies grow, and yet they all continue to ignore them. The family, a group of people who live in the same house, joined together by blood and marriage, should bring their hearts together as one, and live with mutual trust. This ideal is most likely little more than a delusion. Even if there were once families that looked like this, weren’t they premised on patriarchy and a familial version of jus sanguinis that ignored inconveniences such as human rights (it’s questionable whether such a concept even existed), and were only able to maintain themselves by expelling without any chance for debate all who didn’t fit their definition of family or questioned their authority? In the modern era, it’s become common sense that individuals have the right to pursue their own happiness (putting aside whether that’s been realized or not), and the unconditional chains of blood and patriarchy have been loosened. This has led to situation where whether blood relations, married, or strangers, individuals must build their relationships with each other as individuals. And in such a situation, what is necessary for individuals to become family? Ethics, reason, imagination, to hope for another’s happiness while recognizing that they have inviolable boundaries. And to achieve any of these things requires dialogue. But that’s not such a simple process. The adults, once in denial, could bring together their deficiencies, share everything, and become a true family for the first time to bring back Yuji. But no, in this story they make no such effort. They all worry for Yuji and hope to save her but, out of fear of the absolutely irrelevant, continue to struggle alone. They variously hire a detective, cling to a shaman, hand out fliers, and seduce the detective. They refuse the help Min offers. They never make up for the lack within themselves. In the last scene, they are a smiling family. Or at least look like one. But when I noticed that they had not shared a single one of their faults, nor comforted each other in the least, when I realized that the only one aware of their regrets and the gaping vacantness within each of them was none other than myself, the reader, I felt an icy wind blow through my heart. Translated by Kalau Almony Hiroko Oyamada Author, The Factory (New Directions, 2019) The Hole (New Directions, 2020) Winner, 2014 Akutagawa Prize

  by Hiroko Oyamada

• 

  [Persian] An Endless Quest for Home: گلهای آزالیا (Azaleas) by Kim Sowol

  Although cultural exchanges between Iran and Korea date back over 1500 years, Azaleas is one of only a handful of titles of Korean poetry ever translated into Persian. The translation is the result of collaboration between a Korean translator and a Persian translator that  was edited by a Persian poet. The book includes a foreword which provides a brief introduction much-needed to the history of Korean poetry.  Due to major structural and stylistic differences between the two languages, the translators have decided to adopt a more liberal approach to translation. They employed some of the techniques commonly used in Persian modern verse to create a collection that reads smoothly and looks familiar to a Persian reader.  Despite differences in poetic forms, Persians and Koreans seem to have similar perceptions of the role of poetry. Both cultures are very proud of their rich poetic traditions and expect poets to be socially conscious and to reflect on social and national emotions in their work.  Kim’s language is deceptively simple and straight forward, but he uses this seemingly simple diction to express an array of complex emotions and to portray an interflow of sophisticated imagery. A refined and tender lyricism shines through every poem. Love, loss, and loneliness are recurrent themes wrapped in delicate images of nature and subtle references to social and national sentiments.  ‘Invocation’ is a very good example of poetry about loss. The narrator is in deep sorrow and despair and calls his lost beloved by name repeatedly as if hoping to resurrect the dead beloved or invoke her spirit. On a second reading, it can be read as a patriotic poem in which the poet-narrator reimagines the homeland as a beloved; fragmented and lost to occupation. He is prepared to die but will not abandon his homeland. A national suffering becomes his personal suffering, and his beloved becomes a metaphor for the nation.  This subtle and delicate treatment of themes of national significance gained Kim recognition as a voice for nationalistic resistance without undermining his poetic originality. He remained true to himself and his emotions throughout his poetic career. In a poem about homesickness, he expresses his desire to see his little son and the neighbour’s daughter; writing that he never forgets them and never forgets Joseon. The last line is particularly revealing of the political message of the poem: ‘But even the kitchen mice have now escaped’. In ‘O Mother, O Sister’, the poet employs the language of a child pleading with his mother and sister to live by the river. We don’t see the response of the mother and sister, but the desperate tone of the appeal indicates that a favourable response is impossible. Is it because the river and the homes by the river or even the entire country is under occupation? The fact that Kim doesn’t openly talk about the socio-political conditions of his time and the plights of Koreans under the Japanese occupation shows his deep commitment to his perception of poetry as a vehicle to convey inner feeling. This romantic approach requires the poet to ‘internalise’ the subjects he wants to write about and to present them as manifestations of his personal experience.  Kim makes a very creative use of narrative and dramatic devices. In some poems, he sets the scene like the setting in a play. Mountains, rivers, trees, birds, sky, and clouds are described in minute detail. By doing so, he creates a physical space within which his emotions can be shared. Narrative is a common element in oral and folk poetry in nearly every culture. Narrative renders poetry more accessible to a wider readership. It also helps them remember the poem more easily.  Dream and dream-like imagery is another characteristic of Kim’s poetry. Some images are melancholic and unsettling like those in ‘Half-moon’ and ‘Silken Mist’. ‘Silken Mist’ creates a foggy and mysterious environment evoking mixed feelings of the first day of love and the last day of departure. One line in the middle is particularly disturbing and even macabre: ‘It was then a lass sought death for herself / when the snow began to melt’.  Yet Kim’s poetry is not all doom and gloom. There are some very bright poems portraying happy emotions of fulfilling love and carefree gaiety. In one poem, the poet praises not only the physical beauty but also the spiritual elegance of his beloved and expresses his desire to kiss her soul as well as her soft and red lips. In another, he describes a morning sunshine on a peaceful mountainous road while the poet is walking through colourful meadows, reminiscing on teenage memories after a night of comfortable sleep. Alireza Abiz Poet, Literary Scholar, and Translator The Kindly Interrogator (2021) Censorship of Literature in Post-Revolutionary Iran (2020)

  by Alireza Abiz

• 

  [Russian] Girl, Interrupted: Through a Glass, Darkly, but Then Face to Face: Лимон (Lemon) by Kwon Yeo-sun

  I must admit at first to having a niggling suspicion that the immense popularity in Russia of the crime writing genre was the impetus behind this engrossing translation of Kwon Yeo-sun’s Lemon, that this was an attempt to reproduce the success of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo formula. Nothing could be further from the truth. One may as well call Scheherazade’s 1001 Nights a snuff film or slap a “murder mystery” label on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Kafka’s The Trial, Camus’ The Stranger, Kharms’s Old Woman, Hitchcock’s Psycho, or Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. The plot of this gnomic tale (we are given the premise and scope in advance) is so dangerously thin it is easy to wince should the author whiff, but the entire gamut of the grand themes, the intricate network of the enduring values of Existentialism, is present in spades here, so that the sincerest compliment I can pay this slim novella (that can be read in one sitting, something I would not recommend) is: Lemon truly bears re-reading. It is “literary,” and a specimen of realistic fiction (of New Sincerity) in its concerns for intimate psychological states only.  From the get-go, our first narrator, for our text is polyphonic, frames her story within genre conventions: “I draw a scene in my mind that took place a long time ago in the interrogation room of a certain police precinct. This does not mean that I imagined the whole thing . . .” This places us immediately within the realm of memory and re-creation, of the oral tradition whose roots hark back, in the western tradition, to Greek tragedy. Our book in fact begins in the manner of a play, with a preface page of dramatis personae. But this voice, like all the female voices here—three main and an additional one within the eight brief sections, each representing a different social stratum—is disembodied. That these voices are not sufficiently differentiated—the work’s greatest weakness—is also, by design I think, part of its strength (all the women’s voices are part of one woman.) That we as readers find it initially disorienting to determine who is speaking forces us to locate ourselves and, in an act of empathy, collaborate with the various narrators in reconstructing, along with the events, the meaning of meaning. Not merely unreliable but at times uncertain narrators, all sorts of doubling and re-doubling and fragmentation, as in a hall of mirrors, the essential loneliness and emptiness of life, the absence of meaning and connection, the utter impossibility of communication, but also the significance of coincidence and synchronicity, the bonds of family and class, and, finally, the solace of religion and faith (in something, in anything,) always and eternal—the meaning of suffering, redemption, and guilt. Due to space limitations, I can cite only a single example of the intensity of feeling this writing capably evokes—simultaneously, the utter absurdity and the intense pathos of a mother’s doomed attempts to posthumously change her daughter’s legal name to what she had intended it to be as a way perhaps of establishing the necessary illusion of regaining control over the narrative by providing her daughter with an alternate existence. (The word being sacred, just as it is one’s character, so destiny is in one’s name.)  Though the identity of the authors of the crime is squarely hinted at, given the impossibility of establishing the truth with any degree of certainty, it does not ultimately matter. In their attempts to reconstruct and make sense of the crime each narrator kills the beautiful girl over and over again, so that there is enough guilt to go around. Given her objectification, the girl’s beauty had been a curse that made her, along with everyone else’s existence or non-existence, immaterial. While the author’s impulses appear to be genuinely Christian, the book’s title offers us the best clue of her true intentions. Lemon refers to a poem the central narrator, the author’s stand in so to speak, had written in high school about a peripheral personage in James’s Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a hapless Eleanor Rigby of sorts. Like a lingering aftertaste, this self-referential nod reminds us we have just read a constructed narrative, art and not a literal account (these readings are not incompatible by the way). The subject of the poem, that character’s lack of agency, echoes the narrator’s own progressive loss of self (she had long stopped writing). One of a score of themes I found most engaging may serve as a warning of sorts: the greatest danger that confronts each of us in our media-saturated but virtually isolated age is depersonalization. In this sense, I found this novel to be ideal reading for a plague year for the habits of self-awareness, attention, and presence it cultivates. But each reader will find in it a different kernel of truth for themselves. Lemon is a work that I hope readers will return to again and again. I know this reader will. Alex Cigale Poet, Essayist, and Translator Author, Russian Absurd; the Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (2017)

  by Alex Cigale

• 

  [French] Hyun Ki Young, an Expert in Human Souls: Oncle Suni (Uncle Suni) by Hyun Ki Young

  What better tool than literature to challenge stereotypes? For a Western reader, the South Korean island of Jeju might conjure up images of beaches and mandarin trees, charming seaside resorts – perhaps an idyllic honeymoon. But for the writer Hyun Ki Young, born in Jeju in 1941, the picture is rather different. In Uncle Suni and Other Stories, a collection of ten short stories published in 1979, the author’s homeland is above all synonymous with ‘acute depression and grinding poverty’. Or at least, that is the narrator’s impression when he arrives on the island after years of absence. Having taken two days off work to attend his grandfather’s remembrance rituals, he has no inkling that these few hours will change his life irrevocably. In the course of a conversation, he happens to learn of the death of ‘Uncle’ Suni, in fact a woman he knew well. She had recently spent several months living with him in Seoul, helping with the cooking. Hypersensitive, depressed, she had certainly seemed an odd character, but there had been nothing to suggest she would take her own life when she returned to Jeju. What could have been going through her mind? Hyun’s great skill, in this long and magnificent novella, lies in his orchestration of a slow and dramatic crescendo. By exposing the truth behind this single death, the author gradually shines a light on the history of the island as a whole. In the late 1940s, Jeju became the setting for a struggle between pro- and anti-communist forces which ended in bloodshed. Hyun was one of the first to write about the insurrection, its repression, and the ensuing massacres. We travel back and forth in time with him, reliving the fear of the persecuted inhabitants as they hide in the black caves of this volcanic island, at the foot of Hallasan. We bear helpless witness to the razing of their village. We experience the freezing winter, the constant fear, the appalling, gnawing hunger. And we piece together Suni’s forgotten fate, from her youth to her violent death in a field, a patch of land that is deeply symbolic because of the human blood and bones it has absorbed – including, we learn, those of her own children.  Throughout his career, which began in 1975, Hyun has been striving to describe the psychological trauma wrought on the people of Jeju through history, and in so doing, to puncture the silence maintained by successive governments. In these stories, this burning topic returns as a leitmotif. Notably in ‘Father’, an extraordinarily powerful and evocative early text by the author, which describes a burnt village reduced to a pile of ashes together with a tiny white spot that has survived intact in the narrator’s memory: his school playground. And, a few metres away, ‘engraved like an iron seal on [his] retina’, the indelible image of a burned corpse, charred beyond recognition: that of his father.  Not all the stories are set on Jeju, but the island is present even when it is absent. Thus in ‘Shamanistic Ceremonies for the Summoning of Souls’, Jinho – an army corporal who gives his new recruits the ironic advice: ‘Grit your teeth, unless you want them to break’ – cannot bear the thought of returning to the island upon demobilisation. ‘His heart was as heavy as if he had swallowed a stone from one of the black walls on his native island [. . .] He had the feeling of being snatched away, of disappearing into exile in some distant corner of the world, in the middle of winter, under the snow.’ Hyun is a gifted analyst of the human soul. The final story is narrated from inside the head of a condemned man who may be walking towards his death – ‘may be’ because, it seems, his lord has pardoned him. Did he really steal rice? And what does a petty offence like that mean compared to the rampant corruption of the officials? In his panic-stricken brain, everything collides: spasms of distress, ripples of hope, confidence and distrust in the master’s word. For a moment, a long and steady gaze seems to save him . . . until a sudden, unexpected fall. When they close this book, European readers will not only have learned a great deal about South Korea; they will have done so through the emotions of Koreans themselves. Hyun’s characters are often described in simple, factual terms, but they impress with their liveliness, sensitivity and subtlety. They are fascinating in all their contradictions and complexities. Hyun is not only a master of the short story, but also a specialist in the torments of the soul – a moralist, in the truest sense. Translated by Jesse Kirkwood Florence Noiville Writer and Literary Critic Foreign Fiction Editor, Le Monde

  by Florence Noiville

• 

  [Vietnamese] Remembrance of Things Mundane: Oh The Humanity by Song Sokze

  W.G. Sebald, the legendary novelist whose works mostly center on memory, contemplated that, “Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle.” In the same reflective vein on the importance of reminiscence, Song Sokze, a gifted and celebrated Korean writer, touches on the sudden emergence of seemingly buried memories in his portrayal of trivialities in Con người hỡi ôi. Comprised of eight short stories mostly about contemporary Koreans (except for one that is a historical tale set in the Joseon period), the collection swarms with mundane characters whose travails as well as comforts are placed at a focal point. Modern life is realistically limned in a series of absurd and comical situations that present people in their unpolished states: a car accident between a short-tempered middle-aged man and a senior wearing a hearing aid that leads to a quarrel about indemnity; a blind date that leaves one cold because of an unsolicited ecological lecture; a self-taught cultural tour guide who shamelessly upgrades himself to an expert in history. Song’s protagonists make no endeavors to camouflage themselves, but are rather being their truest selves: imperfect, whimsical, and disillusioned. Their characteristics strongly resonate with the author’s dreary vision of the world as a place full of chaos in a time of climate change and globalization. Song skillfully employs memory as a recurrent device to blur the line between past and present, transforming apparently mediocre stories into fascinating ones. As Song himself remarks in the author’s note, we can create the future by preserving the present, because “today originates from the memories of yesterday.” The depiction of the characters’ quotidian activities is thus colored by the act of recalling: a protagonist’s rumination on his encounter with a lonesome wanderer who escaped from Korea to tristes-tropiques Laos in order to avoid leading a pointless existence in “Phương nam” (“The South”); an unexpected mobile message producing an uncontrollable gush of sweet memories of first love in “Tuyệt mỹ” (“A Eulogy”); a tale about a childhood friend adroit at mixing fact with fiction to construct countless personas for himself in “Linh hồn mê muội” (“The Possessed Soul”); or the immortalization of a departed father thanks to an overcoat that the son inherits from him in “Chiếc áo khoác” (“The Overcoat”); or the unjust death of an upright man who lapsed into oblivion in “Yu Hee” (“Yu Hee”), to name a few. Memory is not merely a tool to make people nostalgic, but a means to transport deeply contemplative messages on how modern life renders us lonely and isolated. It is also used to help us keep balance and to seek a haven in the mind. Not every story, however, is equally enjoyable and well written, and several parts are lengthy and tedious. Perhaps, the most outstanding work is “Luân khúc” (“Rondo”) which demonstrates Song’s artistry at its peak. The reader knows he is in the hands of a master storyteller when every single reading expectation is challenged and ultimately rejected. “Luân khúc” consists of three parts in which the reader is lured into the narrative’s trap as he or she tries to make a connection between them, only to be greatly disoriented at the end because of their irrelevance. Song’s brilliant gift for storytelling also lies in his ability to create witty stories written in deadpan prose. In the titular story, a guy spews out endless words to his date, ranging from shrimp and chicken farming, to GMOs, to the pathogen E.coli O-157, to the revenge of the animals on meat-loving humans. A story within a story, or rather several environmental documentaries within a story, nonchalantly recounted by the male protagonist, makes the story farcical and toxically grave all at once. Deftly capturing various aspects of our complex and multifaceted world, Song shows us how remembrance is a way to preserve the history of mundane things and people. His writing transcends them into something spectacular. Con người hỡi ôi is a small gem in a market that is saturated with more familiar names from Korea such as Han Kang, Kim Young-ha, and Kyung-sook Shin.     Dr. Quyen Nguyen Literary Critic

  by Dr. Quyen Nguyen

• 

  [Spanish] The Rules of the Game of Life: Mr. Monorail by Kim Jung Hyuk

  Mr. Monorail is a novel about a game, and game playing in general, and about life as a game, and how games can resemble life and vice versa. A young man nicknamed Mono (because he can’t hear in stereo, having lost his hearing on one side) invents a tabletop game called Hello, Mr. Monorail that allows players to journey across Europe without leaving home. Mono’s parents are obsessive about game playing and compete against one another to resolve the most minor disagreements, spending hours battling head-to-head to determine who must do a five-minute chore like taking out the trash. They are also sticklers to following the rules, which Mono always wants to rebel against. He is constantly getting roped into playing with them for games that require more than two players, and he always gets solidly and mercilessly trounced by his progenitors. Therefore, when he invents his own game, one of the rules is that tricks and cheating are an integral part of the game. Mono brings in his slacker friend Woochang to test play the game and together they tweak the rules, fixing its flaws and otherwise pulling together the whole package on the fly, which they decide to release commercially. (Woochang sketches a conventional train to put on the cover despite the game’s name because he doesn’t know what a monorail looks like; their slapdash solution is to just erase one track.) Hello, Mr. Monorail unexpectedly proves to be wildly popular, selling millions of copies in Korea in just a few months (as well as licenses abroad) and producing bucketloads of cash for its creators. All of which is almost just a prologue to the rest of the book.   Rules for reviewing Mr. Monorail 1. Read the book. 2. No spoilers. 3. Have fun.   For a novel ostensibly about a game that requires you to break the rules, the novelist likewise breaks a few of his own in complicity with the reader. Or rather, what seems at first like one kind of book (Mono’s story or even the story of “Hello, Mr. Monorail”) turns out to be another: something more philosophical, and less focused on the stories of the individual characters (or do I mean players?) involved. Despite its considerable length (over four hundred pages in the Spanish translation), it’s an agile read, and whenever it seems like things might get bogged down, there is a twist of fate or even perhaps of genre that raises the stakes of this grand caper and sends the story off in a new direction and keeps the reader turning the pages to find out how the author is going to pull this off. The novel is Korean on the one hand, but the emphasis is on continental Europe, first within the game invented by Mono and Woochang (neither of whom at the time have been to Europe), and later as the various characters crisscross Europe in a convoluted international chase as if they were actually playing out a live round of Monorail. (Though published in Argentina, the Spanish translation reads like that of Europe, where the action takes place; my one complaint might be that so much is left untranslated in English, especially names, whereas many Korean foods or terms are localized.) Often things are defined by contrast, as when Mono’s suitcase is stolen at the train station in Rome and he compares how onlookers would have reacted back home in Korea versus what happens in Italy. Rules for reading Mr. Monorail 1. Read the instructions before beginning. 2. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. 3. Have fun.   Agatha Christie once said (and I’m paraphrasing) that humor is national whereas tragedy is universal. (Spelling is also national as she would have written “humour.”) While in general I think this to be true, Mr. Monorail is also a very funny book whose many different kinds of humor resonate well with readers in translation. There is, on the one hand, a sort of slapstick humor, an almost visual humor that hearkens back to the Keystone Kops or Buster Keaton, with plenty of missed connections, and an air of the caper to the escapades of the book. There is also a gentle satire of family, game-playing, and even religion (sorry for the spoiler) although its bite is almost always softened by more profound observations or lessons. There are some puns, mostly Anglophone in the original, which are hard to re-create in Spanish and which are left in English in the translation as well. This is perhaps the humor that works least well, especially for a monolingual Spanish reader. But most of all, there is some very witty dialogue and banter between the characters and even by Mono by himself, who imagines dialogues between players of his game or possible situations he might get into (or out of). As readers of Mr. Monorail, you can break any rule except that final one.     Lawrence Schimel Bilingual (English/Spanish) Poet, Author, Translator

  by Lawrence Schimel

• 

  [Japanese] Believing in the Possibilities of “Another Story”: Twelve Women Already Dead by Bak Solmay

  Bak Solmay’s Twelve Women Already Dead is a collection of short stories compiled for publication especially in Japan. The copy on the book’s bellyband says that the author “confronts social issues such as the Gwangju Uprising, the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, and femicide” with her “unique imaginativeness.” I cried so much I emptied a full box of tissues while reading Han Kang’s Human Acts. I saw A Taxi Driver, starring Song Kang-ho, in theaters, and left with my handkerchief soaked in tears, a newly made fan of Ryu Jun-yeol, who I first saw in that film. Whenever I see or hear the word “Gwangju,” I think, I know. I know. What happened there, at least, I know. “Social issues such as the Gwangju Uprising, the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, and femicide.” I know the stories that are told along with these words, I think. So I prepared myself mentally before opening this book. No matter how painful the story, I must accept it, stand with the victims, and swear anew from the bottom of my heart to never let these atrocities be repeated. But on those pages, I found a space I had never imagined spreading out before me. If I were to put it into words, it was a quiet willfulness that refused to simply move the reader, refused to let them come close. The characters that appear in Bak’s stories are confused. So confused that it makes the reader pull back and ask, “Do you have to be so lost?” There were times when the characters themselves couldn’t accept their confusion. A certain credulity I had expected was missing, and the characters didn’t feel the things I expected them to feel. The world they looked upon was in constant flux, and they continued to change as well. They wouldn’t let me think, I know. In “Swaying into the Dark Night,” Busan Tower, which the main character is certain should exist in front of Busan Station, vanishes from their mind, transforms, and when they actually visit the spot, has actually disappeared. In “Beloved Dog,” the narrator has no faith in their recollection of 1994, which they must have lived through. When they think back to the year, “a variety of feelings and sensations” well up, yet they also recall without the slightest emotion “incidents, numbers, and people’s names carved into my mind by the words I saw in newspapers.” In “The Eyes of Winter,” two characters watch a documentary about the Kori Nuclear Power Plant and discuss how they wish they could have seen different kinds of movies. And in the title piece about femicide, the narrator evades telling us how they feel about either murdered or living women, including themselves. In “Well, What Shall We Sing?” the narrator, a Gwangju native joining in an event for students in San Francisco interested in learning Korean, listens to the stories told about the Gwangju Uprising while thinking about how they had expected “lighter” conversation. On the uprising’s thirtieth anniversary, the narrator visits the South Jeolla provincial office building that was the site of a massacre during the uprising. They think, “the people who actually know what happened here, maybe they’d tell us another story. Something that we haven’t talked about yet.” It seems Bak is always considering the potential of “another story,” that there is always “another story” behind everything that happens. In Japan, when someone creates a fictional work portraying actual incidents or events, I often see the “timing” of taking up those topics debated on social media. Isn’t it too early? It’s not yet over for the people who experienced it, they say. But these incidents never end. Suffering and sadness don’t heal with the passing of time, and events that have bred resentment in society are always passed on and stay in this world. Strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as perfect timing. If that’s the case, maybe one way an author can approach fiction with “integrity” is by quietly placing “another story” in some corner of this world. “Another story,” different from what we are all convinced we know. Bak writes about the lives of those of us who, in the face of these atrocities, cannot turn back time or save those who have lost their lives, who have no choice but to go on living out their lives in the places where those atrocities happened, where they still happen, and where they sometimes seem—though maybe not—to have come to terms with this past. The “other stories” she creates have a sedating effect, returning those of us who always wind up thinking “we know” back to a state of ignorance. Of course it is important to know history and the facts, but it is not a bad thing to be forced to remember, “That’s right, I don’t know anything.” And that is how these stories will make you feel.     Translated by Kalau Almony   Aoko Matsuda Author, Where the Wild Ladies Are (Soft Skull Press, 2020)

  by Aoko Matsuda

• 

  [English] Daily Bread for Bodies that Don’t Diminish: Pillar of Books by Moon Bo Young

  From the opening poem of Pillar of Books, Moon Bo Young shapes a new cosmology where God dons a down jacket stuffed with the “feathers” of human lives. That God carelessly plucks out the feathers to send humans from one realm to another, an afterlife in which the soul floats and drifts through the air, to settle on some undefined ground in the great beyond. From this vast, airy opening, Moon’s collection stacks up a pillar of poems in diverse forms (free verse, prose, lists, dialogues) and cycles through tropes of literary meta-referentiality, anthropomorphic accessories and cosmic clothing, and Ovidian animal-human metamorphoses. The entire collection carries on that feeling, of moves as powerful as death blows, accomplished in such graceful motions that even revelations of biblical import come floating down like feathers. Similarly, as the transmutation of the human being to the afterlife of the soul is grounded in the physical metaphor of the feather moving from jacket to open air, sentences become knots, twisting like insects, and Moon’s effortless transformation of people, animals, objects, and words imbue the totality of existence with a comforting continuity. That may be why she can pull off a volume with perhaps a dozen poems mentioning death that still feels like a walk in the park. In a move that seems to blend Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” with Julio Cortázar’s “The Continuity of Parks,” the library’s architecture is both a database of linked first chapters and a basement where the chain can be hidden. The trope of the library is also central in the eponymous poem, a place where books are stacked up in pillars in which the book on bottom—always the one we want to read!—“sums up all the books above it.” The weight of literary history bears down, and reading becomes a defiance of physics like the game Jenga; when the reader slips a book out to read it, there is always the risk that the tower will come crashing down. From the title, Pillar of Books, it will come as no surprise that the volume breathes with a sense of homage to literature and its paper manifestations. The recurring figures who are given only the first names of Antoine, Strains, and Gemelle, roam an intellectual, literary scene of unspecified geography, attending poetry lectures, chatting and joking about their writing techniques (“You have a brainstorming book? How cheesy!”), and pushing the boundaries of creativity and interpersonal relationships. This collection hums along in meta mode from the very cover, itself a gorgeous concrete poem instantiating the pillar. By the second poem, we are engaging with Kafka, both his novels and with supposedly biographical details of his childhood. Kafka serves as a bridge to the theme of novels and storytelling, and within the poems we find speculation about narrative craft, the depiction of characters and how to portray their deaths. The casual traversing of boundaries (between living beings, between fiction and reality, between discreet books) is also most suggestive when its cosmological musings take on a scientific note, dropping facts—“Even in heaven 44.5 C is fatal for wasps”—that instills in us the urgent sense that we would do well to study up on this volume before we die and must make use of its contents like a rational person’s handbook for the afterlife. Moon’s gnostic God recalls that of César Vallejo (“On the day I was born / God was sick”), and commits a single sin while bustling about doing laundry. A husband sits at the table, chucking a spoon in exasperation, calling God a quack. Angels too “sometimes have to fill in for the devil,” and even on good days, their work involves rolling the hearts of the dead into gray blobs like eraser dust. The translations are absolutely butter-smooth, with a great mix of the slang-infused colloquial (a baby’s head is described as “stupid big”) and elegiac eloquence. Hedgie Choi is clearly committed to the craft of translation, and anyone interested in diving into the lavish decisions and strenuous labor (“you take a comma out, you put a comma back in”) in more detail may do so through Kyle Williams’s interview with Choi (Full Stop, May 12, 2021). The Korean poetry world has long been a place of some of the most interesting, compelling, practiced voices, and Moon’s volume in its masterful translation by Choi is a stand-out even in great company. I would highly recommend this thrilling, absorbing collection, both for hardcore poetry lovers and for fiction-centric book clubs. They will likely find that its mix of prose storytelling and highly suggestive poetic language provides ample room for discussion with abundant footholds for those new to climbing to heaven to gain new perspectives on the cosmos and on our daily lives below it and in it.     Jordan A. Y. Smith Professor, Josai International University Partner/Creator, Digital Will Editor-in-Chief, Tokyo Poetry Journal Author, Syzygy (Awai Books, 2020)

  by Jordan A. Y. Smith

• 

  [Turkish] Gazing upon the Trembling Statue: Badem (Almond) by Sohn Won-pyung

  now i’ve found the great wall of china that everyone sensed encircled madly now everyone’s irked insensibly so now i get myself into deep water. Turgut Uyar   A few years ago, as I wandered the Ephesus Archaeological Museum where the ruins of the ancient city of Ephesus are on display, I saw a little boy standing stock-still, his eyes fixed on the eyes of the statue of Antinous. Though his mother persistently kept calling him to her side, the boy couldn’t pull himself away from Antinous’s attentive gaze, the statue’s neck turned to the side. He gazed upon Antinous as though he could, just by looking, fill in the missing parts of that familiar object. At the time, I’d thought of the boy’s frozen stance in front of the statue as a kind of admiration, but now when I envision the scene, a different possibility comes to mind. The boy, his fresh ego filled to the brim with curiosity and wonder, was waiting for Antinous, who hadn’t budged for approximately 1,900 years, to blink. Waiting for that inveterate statue, filled with emotion, to tremble. Dwelling on the gaze of that boy as he tried to overcome the sharp border between human and human-statue, dwelling on his insistent, staring, expectant focus, I think now about the borders of the object in his focus, about how the border is itself bounded by everything else, about how every border in our world of perceptions is boundless. And indeed, although we cannot comprehend the bounds of the universe, even the universe itself has a border. Just as we can’t comprehend the boundlessness of so many emotions whose names we don’t yet know. Last year, a Korean novel titled Badem (Almond) was released in Turkish. A “silent” novel in Turkish for the moment, it hasn’t yet been noticed by readers. And yet, the novel’s senses are open, even as the protagonist begins his life utterly lacking in emotion due to the insufficient development of the amygdala in his brain. This is the border that leaves him outside of culture. He describes emotions by following the traces they leave in the body, trying to recognize them by describing each one. Like a written text, he attempts to take on each emotion by rationalizing it. The ego, shaped by anger, trauma, and relationships, is, in his ghostliness, a perpetually blank page. If what we call the ego is an orb of consciousness endlessly pulsing and bleeding in the tower of childhood, then the protagonist of Almond is shrewd but sans ego. He is a freak of nature. As a consequence, we might name him directly by his illness—Alexithymia, the inability to recognize emotions. The organic, pathological border of Alexithymia makes the protagonist brave, for he knows no fear; tranquil, for he knows no joy; calm, for he knows no rush. In these times when we are trying to hear our inner selves, when we are learning to grapple with our egos through different kinds of meditation, Alexithymia appears as a freak of nature, as a real phenomenon in the face of the modern person imprisoned by emotions. Though his basic senses are highly developed, he lacks the intuition, instincts, and faculties to turn whatever he touches into individual images or figures of speech, and he remains stuck in the realm of description. Because the reason the protagonist has been so successful in the realm of description is his lack of poetry. Or, more figuratively, his lack of a heart. It is remarkable that the habitat that Alexithymia narrates over the course of the story, purged as it is of emotion and thus of soul, is girded with such towering description. Life exists but its sensuous trace is missing. While the past becomes absolute in material forms, the mind cannot escape from its chronological ordering in an album. The past, instrumentalized by Chronos, comes to resemble a vacant landscape, completely disconnected from Cosmos’s involuted, polysemous perceptions. In this novel about a person who is nothing more than a rationalized body, the story’s tragic weight is left entirely to the reader. We find ourselves taking on all the emotions in this poignant story. It’s almost as though the statue might tremble, isn’t it? At any moment it might tremble: it is about to tremble. We might read Almond as a novel that rather strikingly demonstrates the possibility of a past without memory. In order to survive and to adapt to society, the protagonist has to cast off the appearance of having a heart of stone by learning the common behaviors that emotions elicit. But that does not suffice. Because adapting to one’s environment isn’t what makes a human human, but the oikos that forges him into something incomparable. A person in pursuit of the descriptions, figures of speech, and images that abstract the world, from the crudest to the most refined, finds his ego. Every ego is of course transitory. Every ego takes on new forms alongside new experiences; for the ego is not a sturdy, unchanging, fixed entity. As for Almond’sAlexithymia, that blank page in the mind is simultaneously a ballad of possibilities. But what I really want to touch on here, beyond the inherent potential of the ego, is the process in which the protagonist, living on the dark side of its sensuous border, begins to come undone, which is to say, begins to transform. Following all the horrible things he undergoes, our protagonist feels neither grief nor solitude nor guilt nor sorrow, but he begins to discover the oikos where he remains in intractable contact with a peer who experiences his emotions to an excessive degree. Only a freak can heal another freak. The passage of our protagonist into humanity scintillates in the relationship he forges with another person who also could never have been a “normal” human. This novel maps out an unexpected route for thinking about the connections between borders, passages, and transformations; it reverses the usual path that emotions take from the heart to the brain, starting its adventure instead in the brain and coming to an end in the heart. One of the most striking insights that the novel offers the reader through its wayward references is this: that the well of morality is the heart, while the brain is simply a living abode where moral law is governed. Another significant insight is that counterparts never become one another. When it comes to the ego, every dissimilarity that approaches another, that collides in approach, that bleeds in collision, serves as a sacred text to the outcast. Just as Antinous has stood for 1,900 years, about to tremble in the eyes of a boy, so the boy there, too, is a prospective poet, ready to be sculpted by Antinous.     Translated by Nicholas Glastonbury   Sema Kaygusuz Author, Every Fire You Tend (Tilted Axis Press, 2019) The Well of Trapped Words (Comma Press, 2015)

  by Sema Kaygusuz

• 

  [Spanish] Have You Ever Cried at Work?*: Neon Labyrinths by Baik Soulinne et al.

  The other day, I saw a post on Instagram that explained the existence of a phenomenon called internalized capitalism, which consists of bringing a hyperproductive mentality into all areas of life. Thousands of people shared the post and it made me think that the entire world—myself included—suffers from that brutal syndrome. Over the next few days, as in a revelation, I realized that this was just one more way of putting the weight of an entire system on top of the wobbly pillar of individual responsibility, branding us as workaholics. Not long after, I began reading the book that concerns me here, Neon Labyrinths, and I found myself with six stories like six simulacra of worlds very similar to this world. Of all the themes I could identify, there was one that ran through the pages of the anthology, from beginning to end, like a sort of clothesline that kept each of the texts aligned: work; the characters’ relationship with the office, their salary, or promotions. A living corpse who continues going to the office out of pure inertia; a character who begins collecting her salary in loyalty point cards; a journalist whose life is ruined yet still trusts in meritocracy; a man who falls in love with his ex-colleague; a contingent worker in higher education; two co-workers who are going to celebrate their respective weddings. Everything revolves around work: life, death, love. At various times, throughout the collection, the characters are described, beyond their physical qualities, by their aptitudes for the world of work. I identified a tendency to employ language lifted from coaching slang, marketing, apps and new supposedly horizontal work dynamics. The landscapes of the six texts share, besides a high level of plasticity, an urban setting. The narratives tend toward precision, in accordance with the rectilinear figure of Seoul’s skyscrapers or the austerity and perfectly domesticated nature of places like Pangyo—the Korean Silicon Valley. In this sense, I can’t help but think of Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener. Chung Serang (1984), Jang Ryujin (1986), and Baik Soulinne (1982), the three authors selected, share the same period of birth: the eighties. They are women in their thirties, the period of consolidation into adulthood, the epitome of the productive subject of capitalism. Under these texts beat the anxieties of a generation of Korean millennials: globalization, the culture of dieting or frustrated love, among others. Chung Serang seemed to me, without a doubt, the most poetic. She is a master of the genre as can be seen by the dexterity with which she employs the tools of narrative: one example is her use of the device of the found manuscript in “As Everyone Knows, Eunyeol,” a text in which she develops, masterfully, two parallel stories set in very distant time periods. Her imagery is very vivid and, occasionally, unpleasant. She reminds me of the Ecuadorian author Mónica Ojeda, since both have the capacity to generate their own universes. I must note that, although I enjoyed her writing, I think the first story of the anthology—“Size L for All Eternity”—seems out of place with the rest. Between the other two authors I found great connections. Baik Soulinne possesses the power of the gaze. Her metaphors and comparisons are sublime. I must admit, however, that my two favorite stories were “The Joys and Sorrows of Work” and “We’ll Be Happy and Eat Partridges,” both by Jang Ryujin. The way in which she constructs pathetic characters and is able to move the reader with their humanity transported me to works by Lorrie Moore or Miranda July. I adore that tendency to ratchet up the tension in everyday situations until it reaches unforeseen limits. That sensation where the realistic ends up becoming far-fetched and quasi-supernatural. In the three authors I discovered a kind of “anti-system” gaze that they demonstrate through the use of absurd humor. Their characters tend to behave in unexpected ways, rebelling against the very universe they inhabit. They are required to separate, categorically, the private sphere from the public in the workplace, but their lives enter the office irremediably. They can’t help but act emotionally. They end up getting up from their chairs and locking themselves in the bathroom in order to cry at work.     Translated by Lucina Schell   Andrea Abreu Author, Panza de burro [Donkey’s Belly](Editorial Barrett, 2020) Featured in Granta’s “The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2” Spring 2021 issue

  by Andrea Abreu

• 

  [Japanese] The Baton Has Been Passed: A Different Person by Kang Hwa Gil

  Jina reports her boyfriend, who’s also her superior at work, to the police for choking her. She rejects an out-of-court settlement, but all he faces after a trial is a trivial fine of about 300,000 yen. He doesn’t lose his job, and faces no jail time. Jina writes about this injustice online. While there come voices of sympathy and encouragement, they last only an instant, and are soon replaced with comments mocking and slandering her. Ultimately, Jina winds up leaving her job. We cannot fully understand others. When our sex, age, and position in society are different, mutual understanding becomes even more difficult. Because of this we must rely on our imagination whenever interacting with others, whether they be family, friends, lovers, or those who just happen to sit next to us. However, with the birth of the internet, unilateral communication where we ignore the feelings of those we’re talking to has become much easier. Occasionally, that sort of communication becomes a type of violence; it can harm others and chase them into a corner. Jobless, Jina closes herself up in her room and spends her days reading all the comments deriding her. She can’t help herself. One day, she finds amongst all those comments one from someone who seems to know her personally. Because of that comment, she returns to Anjin, where she used to live, to face her past. Jina’s memory, just like anyone else’s, is spotty. Events are reversed and mixed up. Things are rewritten to fit her expectations. She searches, knowing there’s something important there, and she meets old acquaintances, talks, and tries to remember. Her best friend Dana; her childhood friend Sujin who, for some reason, she grew distant from; her classmate Yuri who died young in an accident. It becomes clear as all their memories are recounted that all the women in this novel are deeply injured, both physically and mentally, by unwanted sex. Unexpected pregnancies, sexually transmitted viruses, physical injuries; their bodies swell, fester, and hurt. The suffering they face is all quite familiar to me, even though I live in Japan. They’re all the sorts of problems you can’t plan for ahead of time, the sorts of misfortune you can only pray does not befall you or anyone close to you. As I moved through the pages of this book, I had no space to enjoy my reading. I had no space to even hope that the characters would somehow be saved and all would end happily. Misogyny is real. Whether you try to deny it or just shrug it off and say women actually have more power these days, that is an undeniable fact. And while how much of any group believes we must put an end to this discrimination varies from community to community, it is most often the societal discrimination that they are talking about. Unfair wages and hiring practices, biased school entrance examinations. This book, however, depicts not only societal discrimination, but something more primal: the pain of physical difference. Only certain bodies can become pregnant. There are sexually transmitted diseases that leave men’s bodies unharmed but do serious damage to women’s. And when someone tries to hold someone else down and force their desire on them, it is by far most often men who have larger bodies and thus greater physical strength. We know that. Of course we know that. Anyone who has lived for some time as a woman knows that. We don’t mention it, and we seem not to pay it any mind, because if we don’t live as though those facts don’t bother us, we won’t be able to go on. Victims are blamed for not looking out for themselves, are treated as villains trying to ruin men, and the legal and welfare systems can’t provide sufficient support. Jina, Dana, Sujin, and Yuri. The memories of these women come together, and it is thrilling to see the linking of the pain and suffering hidden therein, the connections between the experiences each of them considered their own personal trauma. As I read, I imagined a closing scene where these women join forces and challenge that which robbed them of their dignity. But that is not what this author chose. While she does offer glimmers of hope, she does not free us with a cathartic ending. Countless Jinas and Danas and Sujins and Yuris continue to suffer, and their enemy is not one person, but an endless number of individuals, and, on top of that, the very atmosphere of society that produces such people. We are living now. Can we—who sometimes even benefit from that same social atmosphere—can we tell such a dramatic story where the women face down their oppressors? So the author has passed the baton to the reader. It was not handed to me alone. Countless readers (women and men both), must take that baton. It is our turn to run.     Translated by Kalau Almony   Hiroko Oyamada Author, The Factory (New Directions 2019)The Hole (New Directions 2020) Winner, 2014 Akutagawa Prize

  by Hiroko Oyamada

• 

  [Indonesian] Lives in a Space of Necropolitics: Saha Mansion by Cho Nam-joo

  Saha Mansion is a dystopian story about how places and bodies are regulated in a city-state taken over by corporate power. It asks questions about lives that matter and what survival means in a capitalist regime where stability is maintained through necropolitics. Necropolitics, as conceptualized by Achille Mbembe, refers to the power to decide how some people may live and how some must die or are allowed to die. Refugee camps, prisons, or slums are places to govern populations that don’t fit into notions of productive bodies. Saha Mansion, the name of a poor housing complex in the novel, is about how precarious lives are located on a map. Who will care about your death when you are disposable? The appeal of Saha Mansion is in the construction of an uncanny world set in the “Town,” a city-state that marks the total victory of capital over the state. As the power of a corporation focusing on IT and biotechnology increases, the city is rebranded, and people start calling it by the name of the corporation. “Town” emerges as a sovereign city-state when it claims “independence” from the bankrupt government. To sustain Town’s strong economy, censorship is key to stability, supported by strategies such as the centralization of media and the closure of some university programs, presumably the ones that don’t fit into the capitalist framework. As Cho Nam-Joo writes, there are songs that must not be sung, books that must not be read, and streets that must not be crossed. Welcome to the marriage between capitalism and authoritarianism, complete with anxieties over borders, as one does not enter or leave Town easily. Categorization is an important part of Necropolitics. Town residents are categorized into two groups: L and L2. Ls are citizens with the required skills to contribute to Town’s economy, whereas L2s receive temporary permits to stay in Town under particular conditions. Many L2s are citizens of the former state before the corporate takeover but they don’t qualify to be Town citizens. A “Saha” is not even an L2. They’re pariahs with no status, visible but unwanted, deprived of proper health care, education, and social security. The novel opens with a Saha mansion resident Do-Kyeong discovering that her girlfriend Su is dead. Su’s death anticipates a whodunnit question (the police soon identifies Do-Kyeong as a murder suspect, linking Saha with the crime), yet what is more intriguing is the complex class interaction and mobility behind the lovers’ story. Su, a privileged citizen, is a doctor who loses her license because she helps Saha Mansion residents without a permit. Su leaves her comfortable life to live with Do-Kyeong in Saha Mansion while trying to maintain some “luxury,” which are merely basic necessities such as water pipes and a heater. While the novel has some elements of a thriller, its real charm is in the stories of people—undocumented migrants, former rebels, victims of violence—who occupy the building. Cleverly structured into apartment units (Unit 701, Unit 214, or Unit 201), the novel resembles a collection of short stories connected through a single place to reveal that the untouchables have histories and reasons as to how they ended up in Saha Mansion. Citizenship status is fleeting. For instance, a resident’s mother was a hard-working citizen in pre-independence Town, but she did not qualify for L status. She received L2 but lost her status and ended up as a Saha. A feminist viewpoint is not surprising from the author of Kim Ji-young, Born 1982. In Saha Mansion, women drive the narrative forward, including Jin-Kyeong, who tries to find her brother and discovers the secrets behind the regime, Su, who defies class rules, and Grandmother Konnim, who helps women to give birth in the mansion. The novel also problematizes access to safe childbirth and abortion, which is not cheap, and highlights how people help each other to survive. In a bleak world, tactics and solidarity give us hope. Unlike powerful neoliberal states in our contemporary time that depend on global mobility, economic, and political influences, Town strangely limits its connection to the outside world by not taking part in any regional or international organizations. Yet Saha Mansion also reminds us of detention camps in Nauru and Manus Island in Australia, where asylum seekers can be detained indefinitely after risking their lives at sea. Although the novel does not focus solely on refugees, it poses an urgent question of how liveable and disposable lives are managed under capitalist-driven governance. Some of us are privileged because we’re probably living the lives of L residents, but there is no guarantee that we will always fit the dominant norm of productivity. If we slip, we might end up in Saha Mansion. In a space of necropolitics, unless you can provide value—dead, alive, or in-between—no one will hear you scream.     Intan Paramaditha Author, The Wandering (Harvill Secker, 2020) Lecturer in Media and Film StudiesMacquarie University

  by Intan Paramaditha