INTERVIEW

• I Want to Write Novels With All the Intrigue of a Thriller: A Conversation with Jeong You Jeong Vol.37 Autumn 2017

  Jung Yeoul: I’d like to start by asking what you’ve been up to since 28 and The Good Son were released. Jeong You Jeong: From May last year, when The Good Son was released, until October, I was on a publicity tour for the book and attending literary events. I met quite a few international readers in places like Arles and Aix-en-Provence, in France, too. I gave a talk about Seven Years of Darkness at a huge library, and I was really pleased to see foreign readers actively asking questions and buying a lot of copies of the book. Recently, I went to the United States for the first time. My younger sister lives there. I was intending to plan out my next novel under the warm California sun, but we spent so much time swimming and enjoying the sunshine that the trip went by faster than I realized. I’m now in the midst of research for that novel. While I was writing The Good Son, which has a psychopath as the protagonist, I started to worry that the book was getting to me and I was becoming a psychopath myself. But after resting and allowing myself to recharge, it seems like I’m ready to start working on something new. Jung: The premise of 28 is that a disease is transmitted to humans by man’s best friend—dogs. I’m curious to know what prompted you to come up with this idea. Jeong: In 2011, South Korea was struck with an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. As a reactionary measure, countless cows and pigs were buried alive. Millions of cows and pigs, buried alive just like that. When I saw on the news what was happening, it rubbed me the wrong way, but I didn’t think about it much. One day early in the morning, though, I saw a video by an animal rights activist who’d gone to a place where pigs were being buried. The activist was almost wailing as she shot this video of pigs being indiscriminately buried alive. On camera was this scene of holes being dug and pigs being pushed into them, squirming to stay alive and stepping on top of each other, and the activist absolutely bawled while watching. I cried a lot, too. God will spite us for this, I thought. I wondered what would have happened if this hadn’t been foot-and-mouth disease but some truly deadly animal-spread illness—if it had been a deadly infectious disease, something that could be spread by dogs and cats, would we humans have killed all our cats and dogs, too? Those were the questions that came to mind. That evening, I finished a short synopsis of the book. I was originally a nurse, but I needed more specialized knowledge about contagious diseases, so I searched out veterinary professors and studied up on viruses before writing 28. Jung: Unlike your other books, 28 has multiple narrators and is told from several points of view. Did your decision to structure the book like this have a connection to its subject matter? Jeong: With Seven Years of Darkness, I went deep into the narrator’s inner thoughts, but in 28, I was trying to expand my narrative capabilities as much as possible. Just one perspective isn’t sufficient to do that. The main character has blind spots, you see. If I’d told the story as an omniscient narrator, the mentality of the novel’s protagonist or narrator wouldn’t have been as vivid, so I wrote neither in the first person nor as an omniscient narrator—I wrote in close-range third person, with multiple narrators. Since it was the first time I’d written in third person from multiple perspectives, it was really challenging and strenuous, but after completing the novel, I had a new sort of confidence as a writer. Jung: Your work has dealt with the idea of the villain in multiple ways, but you said that in The Good Son, you were able to pursue this idea most satisfactorily and with the most depth. What made you want to explore the inner mind of a villain? Jeong: I think that there are two coexisting sides to humans. You can really see this if you compare us to apes, the typical examples being orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos. Bonobos are a pacifist species, and they try to solve all conflicts with love. Because they use physical connection as the solution to conflict, you sometimes hear that Bonobos are “promiscuous.” Chimpanzees, on the other hand, are masculine and aggressive. I see humans as having both these extremes, the bonobo-like pacifism and the chimpanzee-like aggression. In some regards, humans are unbelievably noble, and in other regards, unbelievably shameful and nasty and wicked. What I depict best is not humanity’s grandeur but its wickedness. Since college, I’ve really enjoyed classes related to psychiatry. This interest in humanity’s dark and wicked sides developed into my curiosity as an author who writes thrillers. Jung: How did your way of thinking change before and after you started to write books? I’m curious to know how your thoughts about evil have changed. Jeong: Before I started writing novels, I thought that it was evil to disobey the norms that have been laid out by our society, to commit acts like murder or theft. But after studying evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, I realized that social norms and morality are elements of cultures, and that these norms are things that humans have created. If other animals fight and kill amongst themselves, we don’t say that it’s wicked or pass moral judgment. I find it very interesting to think about human evils for what they are and to study where they come from without using morality as a restrictive standard. I’ve developed an eye for looking at the “evil itself” without holding it to a moral standard or ethical criterion. Jung: I’m curious to talk about what you’ve been working on recently as well. Your readers are probably wondering, too. What are you writing right now? Jeong: It’s been ten years now since I became a writer, and I’ve published five books. For my sixth book, it looks like I’m going to finally have a female protagonist at the forefront. I’ve only written male protagonists until now. I’m planning to bring a lot of fantastical elements into the next novel. The book will draw from the genre of fantasy while maintaining the elements of a thriller. As in 28, the premise will be widespread societal disaster. Jung: I know that you take copious amounts of notes when you’re working on a novel. I’d like to hear about the writing process, from your initial ideas for subject matter to the synopsis to the completion of the work. Jeong: Once I have an idea and write down a synopsis, I start to do a huge amount of research. First I read a ton of books, next I do interviews, and then I handwrite a draft in a notebook. Then I see what I need to supplement. After that. I go out to gather more information and add what’s needed. This is when the real work begins, and as I start to work on my laptop, I add flavor to the details, make the scenes livelier, and give the characters more of a three-dimensional quality. Even though it’s just a rough draft, I go through these three steps in the writing process. If more than 10 percent of the original draft is left, I consider the novel to be a failure. This is because what I think of first tends to be at the surface level of my consciousness, and I find that that’s not where my real creative inspiration lies. I’m not the type to trust myself. Only if I skim off that first superficial idea will the real story hiding at the bottom of my consciousness rise to the top, so I revise my drafts multiple times, throw them away, and write them again. Lastly, I read the manuscript backwards. If I have chapters one through twenty, I read from twenty to one. When I examine the story backwards like this, I can see the final holes in the manuscript. Filling those holes is my last job. The novel that was the most different from its original synopsis was The Good Son, and the most difficult to revise was 28. Jung: You’re also a really diligent reader, as you read widely in a variety of fields for your research. What have you been reading recently? Jeong: A while ago, I developed an interest in astrophysics. I’ve been learning about the Big Bang Theory, too. I looked at some books on quantum physics as well, but they were so difficult that reading them would make my mind go blank, and I’d slump over as if I’d just taken ten sleeping pills at once. [laughs] Now I’m very interested in anthropology. Jared Mason Diamond’s books are all good. Recently I’ve been reading research on apes and chimpanzees, anthropology and social psychology readings, things like that. Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus is really interesting, too. Jung: If you look at your previous works, they all have strong components of a thriller. Is there a reason you’re attracted to thrillers in particular? Jeong: I think there are two kinds of novels. The first type is a novel that makes you think and the second is a novel that gives you experiences. Novels that make the reader think are philosophical and are difficult, profound stories. In novels that make readers have new experiences, the most important thing is a feeling of solidarity with the reader. You have to grab the reader’s hand and pull him or her into a new, unfamiliar world. Then you have to lock the door so he or she can’t escape. I always wanted to write those kinds of novels. I wanted to show this world that I created to readers and say, “This is how I see the world and humanity and life. How do you see them?” And that’s how I came to enjoy thrillers, because they incite curiosity in readers. I like fear, too. When I was writing Shoot Me in the Heart, I spent about a year going hiking alone at night in order to understand the psychology of a blind person. It was a little scary, walking through cemeteries alone. I’d like for readers to feel that same sort of chilly terror when they read my books. I hope that reading my books has that same thrilling excitement, the feeling you get when you turn around thinking, “Is there something behind me?” or because it seems like someone just brushed by you. Jung: Shoot Me in the Heart has been turned into a movie, and Seven Years of Darkness and The Good Son are currently in the process of being made into films as well. How do you feel about this? Jeong: I think that movies are really in the realm of the director. I don’t care if the director caters to my own novelistic intentions; I just want the movie to show off the director’s creative vision. I actually hope that the director can present some completely new perspective that I’ve never thought of. The scriptwriters have all told me that out of the books they’ve worked with, my novels are the most difficult to make into movies. There’s no fluff that can be cut out. If you remove even one plot element from the original novel, the entire narrative structure falls apart. When I last saw the script for Seven Years of Darkness, it was in its thirtieth draft. The thirtieth draft! They said that after that, they revised it seventeen more times. That’s how difficult and frustrating it is to make novels into movies. Jung: Thrillers are such a firmly established genre abroad that it must have been a challenge to break into the market. I’d like to hear if you think that there are certain characteristics common to your novels, traits that distinguish “a Jeong You Jeong thriller.” Jeong: I don’t target foreign readers when I write novels. I don’t even target domestic readers. Readers say that I’m not a reader-friendly writer. It seems like I always do the exact opposite of what they want. They ask me, “Please, could you just stop writing about villains?” but I don’t. Other readers ask, “Can’t you make your dark stories a little more palatable and write something happy with nice characters?” I’m the kind of writer who doesn’t bend to the will of my readers at all. Instead, I try as hard as I can to make them enjoy my writing. If that means I need humor in the book, I write humor, and sometimes I even make the story lewd—whatever it takes to make readers interested enough to turn to the next page. But with that in mind, the premise and the subject matter are completely my own. I don’t work around readers’ tastes but focus rather on the psychological thriller at hand. I pay a lot of attention to shedding light on characters’ inner psychology. Jung: I want to hear what you’re going to write next. What do you plan for the future? Jeong: I want to tell the most fundamental, basic life stories. Just like everyone else, there have been a lot of twists and turns to my life, and we all have our own grief. I want to write about these simple twists and turns and sorrows. My hope has always been to put out novels regularly, and at a certain level of quality. I hope that I can continue to write for the rest of my life.     by Jung YeoulLiterary Critic and Write

FICTION

• 28 Vol.37 Autumn 2017

  Prologue   The Bering Sea had vanished. A stark white filled its place. The wind whipped the snow around and the icy fog walled him in. It was that vicious witch of the North Pole—the whiteout. Jae-hyeong squeezed his eyes shut. This didn’t happen often, but then again, there was nothing extraordinary about it. Not the fact that he had fallen off the speeding sled while dozing on his feet. Or that he had hit his head on the ground and his eyes had flown open to find he was all alone in the wilderness. Or that he was left dazed at the thought of the dogs galloping on without him. That was what it was like on the Iditarod. This was just another thing that happened in the race as the sleds dashed through the snowy fields around the clock. The unfortunate part was that he couldn’t expect rescue during a whiteout. Just seconds before he opened his eyes, he had been mushing Shicha, his team of dogs, along the Bering Sea toward Nome’s Front Street—the finish line of this race of endurance. He was thinking of Maya who was probably ahead of him on the support truck with his mentor Nukon. Maya was the champion sled dog who had groomed him—the “Idiatrod Kid”—into a competitor. For many years, she had been the lead dog of his team as they roamed the snow-covered North American terrain. She was the mother and grandmother of the sixteen dogs that comprised Shicha, and his frail old partner who taught him how to communicate with a glance. When he made it into Nome, he was going to run to her, embrace her, look into her eyes, and whisper, “Maya, your children are back.” Now, awake and retracing his dreams, he knew he wasn’t by the Bering Sea. The compass on his watch indicated that he was somewhere north of the Yukon River. That is, if his departure from Eagle Island at dawn hadn’t been a dream. He had to choose—sit and wait for Shicha to return, or wander into the white darkness looking for them. Either way, the prospect of a reunion was nil. Shicha wouldn’t return to him. They wouldn’t stop and wait for him to stumble upon them, either. After all, they had been trained to do only one thing: run. Jae-hyeong brushed off his stiff, frozen legs and stood up. He noticed a rope tied to his belt. What was this? He must have startled awake at one point, and, instinctively anxious that he would fall off the sled, tied one end to his belt and the other to the handlebar. He tugged on the rope, pulling it taut. The sled was ahead of him somewhere in the white. The dogs had stopped. Otherwise he would have jolted awake as he was scraped along. His relief in learning that he wasn’t lost in the wilderness was so great that he should have danced over to the sled, but he didn’t move. His instinct stilled him. Why did they stop running? He couldn’t see anything. He knew he shouldn’t move hastily. He rummaged in the pocket of his parka and found a pocketknife and half a chocolate bar. He touched the high-frequency whistle around his neck. Only dogs could detect its sound waves. Nukon, an Athabascan musher, had given it to him as a token of his mentorship. It would summon Hook, the current lead dog. If he was within range, they could have a secret conversation. Jae-hyeong shoved the whistle between his frozen lips and blew once, then two short bursts. Hook, what’s going on? From somewhere in front of him came low, growling barks. A warning. Something unpleasant was ahead of them. From much farther away, the thing introduced itself—wild howling vibrated the air, chilling Jae-hyeong’s blood. It wasn’t a dog. Eight distinct howls erupted from different locations in a wide half-circle around Jae-hyeong and his sled, indicating their presence. A pack of gray wolves. When the reverberation quieted, his dogs began to growl. The assassins of the snowy fields had barred his team from crossing, demanding a toll. Jae-hyeong had fallen off the sled because Hook had come to an abrupt halt, silencing the agitated dogs and feeling out the wolves. Jae-hyeong felt his heart drop. A sense of foreboding chilled him. He and his dogs faced skilled hunters ready to drive their bared fangs into their victims’ necks. They were as fast as his team, if not faster, and more persistent. Most importantly, they would be starving. Having raced for ten days straight, his team would be depleted. They’d never come across a pack of wolves in the middle of nowhere. What was he to do? An amorphous bloodlust was creeping toward them through the white. Jae-hyeong thought he could see red eyes flashing through the icy fog. He tightened his grip on his pocketknife. His gut shrank and twisted. The team’s growling pitched higher then dipped lower, gradually getting louder. They weren’t accepting battle; their voices betrayed terror, tension, and anxiety. They were lowering their tails in the loudest way possible. The standoff was over; musher and team alike had collectively waved the white flag. There was only one thing left to do—to run away as hard as they could. Jae-hyeong grabbed the rope around his waist and began to move toward the sled. Hook barked three times, loudly and urgently. “Hook! Wait!” It was too late. At Hook’s order, the team sprang forward into the snowstorm, barking. Jae-hyeong flew forward. “Hook! Stop!” Nobody was listening. He couldn’t reach his whistle. He rolled and tumbled as he was pulled along. He tried to sprint. It was futile. The team ran to the right, drawing an arc, going back to where they’d come from. The wolves ran up from behind Jae-hyeong and charged the middle of the arc. Their roars and panting, and the sound of their paws kicking off the snow, sailed over his head. The dogs’ screams sliced the white air. Jae-hyeong was tugged along even more jerkily. They were no longer dogs; they were a fur-covered bullet with sixteen feet. They abruptly changed direction. Long bumps jutted up in front of Jae-hyeong: two boulders embedded in the ice. For the team they were trivial objects in the scenery, but for him, sliding along the outside of their path, they were unavoidable obstacles. He wrapped his arms around his head. His side exploded in pain. He thought he heard his leg shatter. The rope linking him to the sled was wedged between the boulders, and his body was stuck under them like a bar across a door. From the other side of the rocks the wolves roared and the dogs screamed. The dogs’ leaps and shoves were transmitted to him through the rope, which tightened around his midsection, squeezing his chest and crushing his ribs. He managed to remember his pocketknife. It was still in his hand. Thankfully his arm wasn’t broken. Jae-hyeong cut the rope. He fell backward. He rolled until his shoulder caught something. He hadn’t gone far. He wanted to put more distance between himself and the wolves but he couldn’t move. He couldn’t feel one leg and the other dangled below the knee. His ribs jabbed his lungs. He felt paralyzed by the growls of the wolves and tormented by the screams of his dogs. He lay back and shut his eyes, hoping the dogs would run far away, taking the wolves with them, sparing him his life. He didn’t know if they really did move away or if it seemed that way because he hoped so desperately for it to happen. The shrieks grew fainter. Quiet returned. He stared at his own breath as it frosted over his face. Was he safe? A new enemy was opening its maw inside his broken body. The unforgiving molars of pain ripped through his chest and brutal fire licked his legs and shot up his spine. He bit down but couldn’t stop screaming. He couldn’t stay awake, either. The white darkness covering the world leapt back and the deep, dense black of his subconscious swept over him. The first things he saw nineteen hours later were Maya’s brown eyes. Maya and Nukon had found him. She looked so happy, her eyes brimming over with trust and love. Her gaze was cautiously asking, “What did you do with my children?”   They’re Coming   “101, over.” The walkie-talkie blared. Han Gi-jun looked down at his watch. 5:59 p.m., one minute before the end of his shift. “New rescue call. Can you respond?” For the past seven hours, the East Hwayang Fire Rescue Squad No. 3 hadn’t been able to return to the station. They’d gone around the entire east side, moving from one rescue call to another, following the dispatcher’s commands—to Baegun Tunnel, the scene of an eleven-car pile-up; to Baegun Nature Village where heavy snow had caused a bald cypress to fall on a house; to Suan Agricultural Industrial Complex to deal with collapsed greenhouses. This time they were being asked to go to Hwayang Mansion, the apartment buildings behind Baegun Library. A sick man with limited mobility was home alone, and he wasn’t answering the phone or the door. His wife had called several times and the security guard had gone up to ring the bell. “Check it out and take action.” The fire truck had passed Baegun Library five minutes before. They were almost back at the fire station; it was only 500 meters ahead. It was the worst time and place to turn around, but Gi-jun couldn’t refuse. “Copy that.” Yun Mun-sik turned on the siren and swung the vehicle around. The ambulance trailing them did a U-turn, too. Gi-jun wrote down the wife’s cell phone number. He gave her a call. As soon as he said, “I’m calling from the rescue squad,” the woman’s words peppered him like a machine gun. Her husband had gone to the Hwayang Medical Center for swine flu and returned home two days ago; this morning he was running a fever and not feeling well but refused to go back; since she had to go to work, at a textile factory in the Northern Suan Industrial Complex about twenty minutes away by car, she’d already left; unfortunately she couldn’t head home because she had to work overtime. To Gi-jun’s ears, it sounded as if her priority was making money. She was sending the firefighters who were paid by her taxes to make sure her husband was fine. “Do you have any family around here?” Gi-jun asked. “A daughter, but she’s married and lives in Seoul. I can’t ask her to come all the way here. Even if she did, she doesn’t have a key, and even if she had a key she isn’t getting along with her dad—” Gi-jun cut her off. “If he doesn’t open up, can we force the door?” “Force the door?” she asked begrudgingly. “Then we need to get a new one, right?” “That’s right.” “Isn’t there another way? What about through our veranda?” “If the windows aren’t locked, we might be able to come down from upstairs—” “It isn’t locked,” she interrupted. Gi-jun hung up. Although it was during the afternoon rush, they didn’t encounter many cars or pedestrians. Only the blizzard careened through the silence with a haunting scream. Gi-jun put his nose to the cracked-open window and cooled his impatience. By now, he should have been sitting in a cab heading toward the bus terminal to take the last bus to Inje at 6:50 p.m. “Jesus. What the fuck,” came a drowsy murmur from the back seat. Gi-jun glanced at the rearview mirror. Park Dong-hae, the twenty-two-year-old public service worker and assistant, was almost completely horizontal in the back. He jiggled his leg and kept clicking his pistol-shaped lighter. It was a huge commercial torch lighter with a trigger and a laser pointer scope. When he pressed the turbo button near the hammer, a strong flame and a light whooshed on at the same time. Dong-hae considered it the prize of his lighter collection, amassed over a decade. “Cut it out,” snapped Eun-ho, who was sitting next to Gi-jun. Dong-hae’s eyes bugged out as he pointed the lighter at Eun-ho. With a whoosh, the flame and light stretched toward Eun-ho’s face. “Hey!” Eun-ho’s neck and ears flushed red. Dong-hae looked down and buried his pale, delicate face into the collar of his jacket. With his small, red, parrot’s beak-like lips, he murmured, “Fuck.” Gi-jun shook his head at Eun-ho, signaling for him to calm down. Dong-hae was a major nuisance for the team. He didn’t have any respect for hierarchy; he had no skills to speak of; and he couldn’t even read a one-page official document in one sitting. If one of them told him to bring something over, Dong-hae would lower those long, thick lashes and ask, “Where’s that damn thing?” If they reprimanded him, they were paid back doubly, like on the first day Dong-hae reported for work. That day, Dong-hae had done the same thing: he’d pointed his lighter at Eun-ho, clicked it, and pretended to shoot. Ever impatient, Eun-ho slapped it away. The following morning, on an online bulletin board, someone posted: 911 Rescue Squad Team Member at East Hwayang Fire Station Assaults a Public Service Worker Eun-ho had to write an official apology. As the manager, Gi-jun had to go to headquarters and file a report. After that, especially after the squad learned of the kid’s past, nobody bothered him. The men were rarely moved by anything, but even they were shocked and appalled by Dong-hae’s history. Dong-hae hadn’t been a public service worker from the beginning. After a mere twelve months of being enlisted in the army, he’d caused an uproar and was switched over to public service. Apparently, he had killed all the company dogs. He hadn’t lost his temper and beaten them to death, or gone nuts and killed them in a single night. Instead, he’d methodically cut out each dog’s tongue, branded a cross on their Adam’s apples, and hanged them in plain sight. The military doctor diagnosed him with a personality disorder requiring long-term treatment, which was code for the army’s inability to deal with that kind of creativity. Gi-jun’s squad was living with a dog killer the military had kicked out, and they all hoped they didn’t look like dogs to the kid. At 6:05 p.m., the fire engine and the ambulance pulled in side by side at the entrance to Building 2 in the Hwayang Mansion complex, which consisted of thirty-eight-year-old five-story buildings. The squad members grabbed their gear. Dong-hae and Mun-sik remained in the truck. The stairs were shrouded in darkness. Gi-jun switched on his helmet light and ran up to the second floor with the others. The medical technicians followed with a gurney and an emergency medical kit. The frail, broom-thin old manager-cum-security-guard of the building came up the rear. The front door to #204 was locked. Nobody came out when they rang the bell. When they banged on the door, the next-door neighbor, in an undershirt and a cigarette in his mouth, poked his head out. Gi-jun led the security guard and Eun-ho up to #304. The security guard explained to the tenant that they had to use his veranda. The tenant grudgingly opened the door to let them through, grumbling that the man’s family should come and open the door downstairs, asking if the fire department would pay for any damage to the veranda railing and insisting that they hurry since he’d just turned on the heat and it would escape through the open windows. Gi-jun tied a rope to the railing and slung one end around his midsection. He hung a hatchet on his belt. Eun-ho wrapped the other end of the rope around his waist and sat down, his feet braced against the railing. When Gi-jun went over the railing, strong winds slapped him against the wall. The snow and ice-covered windows were slippery. The snow was hurtling down at such a rate that he couldn’t see anything. He held the brake line in one hand and, with the tips of his shoes, gripped onto the windows as he went down. When he balanced on the veranda railing of #204, his underarms were damp with sweat. Unfortunately, the veranda windows were locked. All the lights in the cave-like apartment were off. Gi-jun shoved the hatchet between the windows and twisted. The lock broke off. He slid the window open and hopped down into the veranda onto something round and soft. He flinched and moved his foot but he’d already heard something crunch. An unpleasant hunch made his thigh tense up. He looked down and shone his light on it; he had put his foot through an apple crate. On a puppy. His foot had crushed the puppy’s head. Smashed eyeballs were stuck to the bottom of his sneaker. Gi-jun swallowed hard. It couldn’t—it couldn’t possibly have been alive. He shook his foot frantically to get the eyeballs off, not noticing that the sliding glass doors were open or that there was something lurking in the dark. He yanked his foot out of the box and looked up, belatedly seeing it. A gigantic gray animal was flying at him, into the light. Alert ears, golden eyes roiling with fire, glinting fangs, long legs outstretched like a racehorse taking off. A wolf. The animal’s tank-like shoulder slammed into Gi-jun’s face as he threw himself to the side. His hatchet clattered away. The beast vanished out the open window. Gi-jun got to his feet and looked outside. The flashing lights of the fire truck and ambulance were illuminating the garden below. He got Mun-sik over the walkie and asked if he saw a wolf jumping from the second story. The answer crackled over—Mun-sik didn’t know if it was a wolf or a dog, but a dark shadow had just gone over the back walls of the complex. The air caught in Gi-jun’s throat leaked out. His head began to throb; he had slammed it into the floor in his attempt to get away from the animal. The afterimage of the gray animal hurtling toward him like a bomber glimmered in his sight. A wolf? It didn’t make any sense. Gi-jun wasn’t pleased with himself either, panicking and falling over like that. This would remain a scar on his pride, as he was a man who lived and died by the cool demeanor he assumed in any situation. “What should we do?” Mun-sik asked over the radio. “If it’s really a wolf, people are going to go nuts.” “We can’t go after it right now. Tell the dispatcher and call the police.” Gi-jun went into the living room and turned on the lights. Now it made sense. That animal was a dog. Along the walls were cages marked with nametags: Ching, Seola, Kkami. Big, small, yellow, shaggy dogs; a dog lying down with its head splayed to the side; another on the floor with stiff legs; yet another curled into a ball. The dozen or so dogs shared the same characteristic—the typical blank stare of the dead. A Husky named Ann was on her side inside a cage, teats engorged, having vomited blood. Her wide-open eyes were bloody. Blood was sprayed around the cages. Gi-jun opened the front door to let the squad in. “What the hell is all this?” Eun-ho murmured as he stepped into the living room. The master bedroom was empty with the door wide open, a clothing rack on its side in the middle, and the windows to the veranda shattered. Shards of glass glittered on the bed. Gi-jun opened the bathroom door to find a blood-filled toilet and a man in an undershirt collapsed next to it. He was gurgling, bruised hand trembling. Gi-jun grabbed the man under the arms but released him. He looked down at his hands. Blood. His fingers were wet and slippery. His fingerprints remained under the man’s armpits like bloody welts—small drops of blood had formed close to each other on the surface of the skin, approximating bruises.  pp. 7-22   Translated by Chi-Young Kim

• 28 Vol.33 Autumn 2016

  He spent a week sleeping, his chin glued to the ground. In that time the man didn’t appear once. Nobody came by to give them water or food. Horrible things started happening to the dogs in the shed. At first it was just one or two, and then many. They began coughing and dripping foul-smelling snot before squirting diarrhea and collapsing, their chins and legs trembling. Two mornings ago, the man appeared. He cursed, looking at each of the dogs, and began to put healthy ones inside cages. He grabbed Ringo by the scruff of his neck and shoved him into a cage. Ringo suppressed a sudden urge to bite the man’s hand. He knew how to endure humiliation; as humans would say, he was well trained. Surprisingly, the one who resisted was the brown female. As soon as the man picked her up she growled and bit him on the wrist. It wasn’t a bad bite and he wasn’t even bleeding that much, but the man went ballistic. He pulled her out of the cage, slammed her on the floor, and kicked her until her stomach ruptured. The brown female died, bleeding, her intestines leaking out of her body. In Ringo’s mind, that was how it all started. The man loaded Ringo and the other dogs on to a truck and brought them home to a woman who yapped as much as the brown female. “What were you thinking, bringing an animal like that?” she cried, her index finger stabbing the air in Ringo’s direction. “That’s a beast, not a dog! What will you do if he eats all the other dogs? What if he eats us? You can’t keep him here. I’m too scared. Take him back to the shelter and get a refund. Who wants an animal like that?” “Jesus, woman.” The man rolled his eyes then glared at her. “What are you, stupid? Do you even know what kind of dog this is? It’s worth way more than the others!” They herded the other dogs in the living room, but the man placed Ringo on the veranda by himself. The next day, the man’s eyes had become yellowish craters. An unpleasant smell laced his breath. It was an entirely different stench from the one the sick dogs were emanating in the shed. The smell made everything before his eyes turn black, the way it did when the tranquilizer hit him. If the smell in the shelter was a gray fog, the man’s was inky black. Even the food the man brought him was enveloped in black. Ringo didn’t go near the food or lick a drop of water. Black fog snaked up from everything the man touched. It took over the entire apartment in a single night. This morning, the man came out into the living room, looking like a prisoner trapped in black fog. A more intense, saturated black fog flickered in his sallow eyes, in his nose, and in his mouth. It crawled out of the man’s flesh like tens of thousands of thin snakes, leaving behind black pore-like marks. The woman set the table for breakfast and kept nagging. “You’re asking to get sick. Why won’t you go to the hospital? It’s a dog bite! What if you got rabies? Why are you so stubborn? Don’t you remember how you had to be admitted for swine flu but you insisted you only had a cold? That was only last week! If you had a bad experience once, you should know how to take care of yourself after that.” The woman wasn’t swallowed by that same fog; her eyes and mouth were completely normal. The man disappeared into the bathroom. “Do whatever you want,” the woman yelled after him. “I don’t care if you die! If you aren’t going to the hospital, at least get rid of that dead puppy on the veranda before it rots and we get maggots!”     After she left, the man came out of the bathroom and headed into his bedroom. Ringo could hear his ragged breathing as he vomited and moaned all day. The dogs in the living room were suffering from the same thing. They all had yellow holes for eyes. They gasped and vomited, their bodies encircled by black fog. The white dog moaning hoarsely was the first to froth blood at the mouth and collapse. Ringo was overcome with fear and anxiety. The voice in his heart repeated itself: If you don’t want to be a corpse, you’d better escape. But it hadn’t even occurred to Ringo that escape was a real option. Not trusting humans was different from escaping them. He had wolf genes but had been raised as a dog. For a dog, humans were the entire world, one that guaranteed food, shelter, safety, and decided his fate. Getting away from humans was the same as discarding your world, becoming a stray. Which was better? To become a stray or a corpse? The phone rang in the living room but the man failed to emerge. Ringo began to chew on his leash, with which he was tied to the metal bar of the railing. The leash was as thick as the bar but it didn’t take long. Next, he had to get out of the cage. He had to open the lock on the door. He pushed and made the cage tumble forward. He rolled to the side and to the front several times until the cage crumpled, the door broke, and the latch sprang open. That was when the bedroom door opened. Ringo stood by the wall where he couldn’t be seen. The man crossed the living room, trembling, and opened the glass door to the veranda. He stuck his head out and turned to look at the cage and toward the wall where Ringo was hidden. It was an excellent opportunity for Ringo to attack; it would have been a walk in the park. But Ringo refrained. He didn’t want to touch the man. He could just threaten him—he raised his fur on end and growled, his teeth bared. The man screamed and ran away, jumping into the bathroom and slamming the door behind him. Ringo ran toward the front door and rammed into it. The door didn’t budge. He tried again but it was no use. He hurtled toward every door he could find, wondering if there was another escape route. But nothing gave way. Only the bedroom door was open. He saw a window through the door. Ringo flew toward it. The inner window shattered instantly but the outer one stood as firm as the doors. Through the glass he could see the veranda where he had been imprisoned. Beyond the veranda windows, the blizzard was beating the building. He went back into the living room and rushed at the veranda window to see if it was made of breakable glass. It wasn’t. If only he could shatter it, he could jump to the ground from here. Ringo went back to the bathroom door. He heard vomiting inside. Then the thump of the man falling. It became quiet. Ringo lay down by the front door; the woman would come home at some point. The day waned. The apartment sank into darkness. Dogs swallowed by black fog vomited blood and died. Ringo’s anxiety and impatience ballooned. Where was this woman?    pp. 49-52 Translated by Chi-Young Kim AUTHOR'S PROFILE Jeong You Jeong’s Seven Years of Darkness sold more than 500,000 copies in South Korea alone, and its German edition ranked ninth on the Zeit and Nordwestradio “Best Crime Fiction of December 2015” list. Her most recent work, The Good Son, climbed to the top of the bestseller list even before it was published, through pre-orders on South Korea’s major online bookstores. It was also voted first by readers on Kyobo Book Centre’s “Best Fiction of 2016” list. The English edition of the book is set to be published in 2018 by Little, Brown in the UK and Penguin Random House in the US. The thriller is also being adapted into a movie and plans are underway to turn it into a webtoon. Jeong’s novel 28, featured in this issue, plays out over twenty-eight days in a city caught up in the turmoil of a zoonotic epidemic that causes people’s eyes to turn red.

• Seven Years of Darkness Vol.32 Summer 2016

  The new manager didn’t show up even after Seung-hwan finished making the depth gauge. He calmed his nerves with beer he bought at the rest area. Only after he downed two cans did he realize what he’d drunk could kill him. He waited until nine, doing push-ups, trying to clear the alcohol from his system. He had to go to the lake that night. He had to enter the lake without the people from the lowlands and the company housing finding out, and seek Atlantis between today and tomorrow, when he was alone and off duty, to complete his mission of taking detailed pictures of the scene below. Once he was on the other side of the fence, Seung-hwan turned on his headlamp. He made it as bright as he could but he still couldn’t see very well. The fog was too heavy. It was the peculiar fog of the lake that came at you like a snowstorm. It began to rain. He had to turn off the lamp when the path ended, as there was a CCTV camera under the first entrance to the lake. Darkness descended. He arrived at the dock ten minutes after he began walking by feeling the fence around the lake. The dock was the one point of entry to the lake that was guarded by a steel door. The door was about as tall as the fence and there was an air gap of about thirty centimeters between the ground and the door. A thick chain was coiled around the handle and fastened by a padlock. He turned on the lamp at the lowest setting. He needed light to unlock the padlock. Once inside, he slung the chain and the padlock on the inside and locked it, to ward off anyone who might possibly disrupt him. The concrete ramp down to the docks was about twenty meters long. On either side were the banks of the lake, tangled with branches and vines. The floating bridge was at the end of the ramp; tied to it was a boat by the name Joseong, a barge used for regular cleanings by the trash service company for the dam. Seung-hwan put his backpack down in front of the Joseong’s cabin. He took out the fishing line, tied it to the pier, and prepared to enter the water. When he tugged on the pin strap and slid the breathing apparatus in his mouth, his watch said 9:30. He entered feet first. He turned his lamp as bright as he could and descended, carefully unraveling the fishing line so it wouldn’t get tangled. When he passed the first thermocline, he spotted the yellow center dividing line of the two-lane road. A long time ago, when cars, people, and cultivators used the road, this place was called Ssangryeong Peak. The undercurrent was fairly strong but visibility wasn’t bad, considering he was underwater. He wasn’t sure but he could tell there was a long valley beneath the road. Seung-hwan wrapped the fishing line loosely around a tree so the current wouldn’t wash it away and continued his descent. He slid along the undercurrent as though he were skiing downhill. Seung-hwan stopped descending when the water became cold enough to give him a headache. His feet were on the bottom of the valley. It was dark and quiet. The objects were colorless and only the concrete road reflected by his underwater lamp glistened in silver. On the other side of the darkness, the phantom of the vanished old village flickered. He felt conflicted: afraid, excited, and overwhelmed. He swam into the darkness along the road. Welcome to Seryeong Village, the sign engraved on a rock at the entrance of the village greeted him. A bus stop was next to it. He looped the fishing line around the rusted sign. He wrapped it around the bus stop; its glass was gone and only the frame was standing. He wound it around a large tree trunk. Aquatic plants had grown thick on the ruins of a rice mill; fish swam through its walls. A telephone pole lay in the street and the red rusted body of a cultivator was stuck in the link canal. He wound the fishing line around them all and went into the village. A rock wall had crumbled, a shingle dangled on one end, a wall’s steel beam skeleton lay exposed, a doorframe was broken, roof tiles were scattered about, fallen trees were rotting away, a stroller was missing a wheel, and a well was covered with a steel lid. Was this what the world would look like after humans went extinct? His Atlantis was desolate but beautiful, melancholic but charming. With this single encounter, he’d become bewitched and given over his entire soul. Seung-hwan flitted around like a fish among the roads and bridges and stone walls. He watched an elderly couple enjoying a relaxed evening meal in a lot where only the walls remained. He sat at the bus stop bench and listened to people talking as they waited for the bus. He heard the story of how a young mother met her husband as she pushed a stroller. Pieces of his imagination were stored one by one in his camera. He felt he could put the pieces together and create an amazing story. He felt he could write it really well. Time underwater flowed as capriciously as the current. Sometimes it was as slow as a threeyear-old’s tricycle and other times it sped by like the motorcycles of a biker gang. Atlantis’ time was like the hand of a magician. In the brief moment he waved his hand once, an entire hour vanished into his sleeve. Seung-hwan’s body heat fell dangerously low and he had little feeling left in his skin. His vision shook, and not because of the current. The village scene, which should have looked washed out, became overlaid with vivid colors. He was feeling ecstatic, to the degree that it was getting dangerous—warning signs that he was starting to feel nitrogen narcosis. This is the last one, he told himself, as he pointed his camera at the nameplate hanging on a house. That house stood at the highest point of the village. He pressed the button and the flash popped over the dark letters of the nameplate. The nameplate disappeared under the flash and the letters floated up like they were embossed. Oh Yeong-je. 10:45, 120-bar remaining. Seung-hwan hurried out of the village. He started to take the air out of the buoyancy compensator and ascend. He didn’t have time to take the same route out so he ascended directly above the house. He looked down at the village as he ascended at nine meters per minute. Everything was starting to return to black and white. His mind stopped at the nameplate of that one house. He recalled a man and a frighteningly pretty girl. It had happened the first weekend night after he moved to Seryeong Lake. The manager had gone home to Seoul for a visit and Seung-hwan was alone at the house. Around midnight, at the moment he started to nod off, Seung-hwan heard a sharp scream. His eyes flew open but everything was quiet. He closed his eyes again, thinking he’d heard it in his dream. A moment later, he heard a quiet weeping and woke up fully. It was faint but he could tell where it was coming from—outside his window. He picked up his underwater lamp and opened the window. Outside there was a cypress tree whose trunk was divided in two with each half curved across the other. A girl was hiding in its shadow. His light revealed the girl in her underwear, her arms crossed in front of her chest. She crouched into a ball and cried, “Don’t look, don’t look!” her voice dripping with a deep shame. Seung-hwan decided to listen to her. He didn’t know what was going on but he thought it would be better to pretend not to have noticed. If she hadn’t fainted right then, he wouldn’t have changed his mind and climbed out of his window. She looked as though she had met a mugger in the woods. Her nose was swollen and phlegm rattled in her throat each time she drew in a breath. Her body was covered in whip marks. Her skin had broken in some places. He wrapped her in a blanket and ran to the main entrance, carrying her in his arms. He’d remembered there was a clinic in the commercial area. Figuring out whose kid she was and who’d beaten her up was a secondary concern. The doctor was present even though it was a weekend night. The young doctor, whose head was buzzed like that of a soldier, took an X-ray and told him that her nose was broken. He asked Seung-hwan something he couldn’t answer. “What happened?” “I don’t know. She was in front of my bedroom window and just fainted.” The policeman who arrived after Seung-hwan’s call knew the girl. The daughter of the owner of the arboretum, her name was Se-ryeong and she was twelve years old. He also knew how to reach her father; he took out his cell and made a call. Soon, a man wearing a navy suit and shiny shoes appeared. “You must not be coming from home,” the policeman observed. “I got your call on my way home,” the man said, not bothering to glance at his daughter. He stood as though he meant to block the door and looked at Seung-hwan. His dark pupils were wide open. It was as though his eyes were all pupils, no whites. “Who are you?” Seung-hwan coughed. “I live in 102.” “Since when? I’ve never seen you.” Seung-hwan could feel his breath getting shallow, which was what happened when he became nervous. It was because he’d glimpsed something unpleasant in the man’s eyes, something people usually called a challenge. “It’s been a couple of days,” he said slowly, to regulate his breathing. “I didn’t know she’s your daughter.” “Tell me why you brought my daughter here.” “I want to ask you something too. Why did your daughter faint outside my window?” The man addressed the doctor. “Is there evidence of assault?” The doctor repeated what he’d told Seung-hwan. “Her nose is broken. There are abrasions that look like whip marks…” “Is that all you can see? What I see is my daughter lying naked in the clinic, and this man who supposedly brought her here in the middle of the night.” Seung-hwan stared at the man. His words felt like a punch. The doctor clacked the chart closed, displeasure spreading across his round face. “So doctor,” the man continued unpleasantly. “Are you saying you don’t see the police who’s here because of a report?” The policeman was looking down at the girl. Se-ryeong was now awake, glancing sideways at her father. The man realized that she was listening. “What did this man do to you?” he asked, pointing at Seung-hwan. “Did he hit you? Did he touch you?” Seung-hwan drew in a breath. Se-ryeong whispered, “No.” The policeman took over. “So how did you get hurt?” Se-ryeong’s gaze scanned over the policeman and the doctor and paused at Seung-hwan before returning to the policeman. She seemed to be trying her best not to meet her dad’s gaze. Her large cat-like eyes glistened with moisture. It looked like tears but it wasn’t. Seung-hwan would bet an entire month’s worth of his salary that it was fear. “Mr. An Seung-hwan, did you say? Please step outside for a moment,” the policeman said. Seung-hwan couldn’t do that. Step out? The girl had his life dangling between her small teeth. “You too, Director Oh.” The man didn’t move, his gaze fixed on his daughter. “Didn’t you hear me?” the policeman pressed. The man and Seung-hwan glanced at each other before turning toward the door at the same time. “Don’t go far. I’ll just be a minute,” the policeman said. The man sat in a chair outside the doors. He leaned on the armrest, threw his head back, and looked down over his cheekbones at Seung-hwan without expression. His black, dilated pupils, his tense, coiled shoulders—the man looked like a wild animal about to pounce. Seung-hwan sat down across from him. He tried his best to look calm. He tried to relax and maintain a poker face. It was hard. All rational thought flew out of his head. Rage, humiliation, and nervousness filled its spot. His breathing became rougher and rougher. He craved a cigarette but couldn’t leave because he couldn’t tell what these people would do in his absence. There was no sound coming from the examination room. Twenty minutes slogged by as though they were twenty hours. Seung-hwan was about to pass out by the time the policeman came out. “She says she was playing tag with a cat she met in the forest and crashed into a tree,” the policeman reported, standing between the two men. “So she tried to go home but she got confused with the house next door because it was dark. She felt dizzy because her nose was bleeding and she fainted. She wanted me to tell her dad that she’s grateful to the next-door neighbor who brought her to the clinic even though he doesn’t know her, and that he never hit or touched her.” Seung-hwan stood up. Rage was coursing down his throat like hot water. “So you’re saying that a twelve-year-old girl was playing tag with a cat? In the middle of the night? In her underwear? You actually believe that?” “What did she say the cat’s name was?” the policeman muttered to himself. “Anyway, she said it was his favorite game.” “How did she explain the lash marks on her body? Her shoulder is all cut up.” “She said the cat scratched her. I guess they played pretty rough. Anyway, the doctor says he can’t determine whether there was sexual assault, and according to the X-rays her nose is definitely broken.” The girl’s father stood up. “So are you saying that we need to go to a gynecologist to determine that?” “If it were me, I’d take her to an ear nose and throat doctor first. The doctor says that pretty nose is broken. It’s not too late to pursue an official investigation after that.” The girl’s father went inside and carried her out wrapped in a blanket. He didn’t say anything. He looked at Seung-hwan as though he were pummeling him with his gaze and left. The policeman grabbed Seung-hwan’s elbow. “Come with me to the station.” Seung-hwan shook him off. This was unfair treatment. He didn’t know anything about the law, but he knew enough that bringing an injured child to a clinic wasn’t something that required a visit to the police station. And the child had stated his innocence. “Come with me. Since you reported this, you should file an official report.” The policeman strode out of the clinic. Seunghwan followed him to the station and wrote down the events of the night. He suppressed his urge to throw the pen; his fingers cramped. His head was whirring busily as he tried to understand the puzzling words and actions of the girl, her socalled father, and the policeman. Why was she lying? Why was her father trying to make him out to be the criminal? Why was the policeman uninterested in getting the person who abused her? The actions of the three shared a silent premise that he and the doctor weren’t privy to. They knew who the perpetrator of the violence was. The girl’s father hadn’t gotten the call on his way home, and the policeman seemed to know this. Seung-hwan mulled over the situation in his head. For some reason, Se-ryeong was beaten in the nude by her father. She ran away but she was unable to do anything. She was too scared to go into the forest, and she couldn’t go to the main road because she was naked, so she hid under the tree near her neighbor’s window. Her father looked around for her. At that moment, the nosy neighbor butted in. The father watched as the neighbor brought his daughter into the house and then took off running toward the clinic. A little later, he received a call from the police. The policeman knew that the girl was beaten on a regular basis and that the neighbor was caught in a dicey situation. But he still pretended not to know and defused the situation. To Seung-hwan, the truth was simple. The girl’s father used him as a smokescreen to hide the assault on his daughter. But that didn’t make any sense. Korea wasn’t the kind of society where they sent the parents to prison because they hit their child. The parents’ reputation might suffer a little, but that was about all. The dad’s defense went overboard compared to the penalty. It was as though he’d swung a chain saw to remove some cobwebs. It was as overreaching as it was risky, since he could be liable of making a false accusation. Why would he do that? Park, who was well informed on the history of the area, gave him a clue. The man was in the middle of divorce proceedings and a custody battle was brewing. Oh wasn’t a “director” due to his status as the owner of the arboretum. He was a dentist by trade and he had a medical building in S city that housed eleven private practices, including his own dental practice. Not only that, he was the only son of a large landowner who lorded over the entire Seryeong River area, amounting to 100 li before the dam was built, and he owned the Seryeong fields on which the people of the lowlands depended for their livelihoods. Seung-hwan could understand the policeman’s attitude. Director Oh versus a dam security guard; a native versus an outsider. In both power and fame, there was a marked difference. He could read Director Oh’s message, too: Stay out of my family life. Even as August came to a close, no investigation was initiated at the police headquarters. Seung-hwan heard Se-ryeong’s screams a few more times. He also heard her desperately cry, “Dad!” through her open window. On that house, on the nameplate of 101, was that name. Oh Yeong-je.     Translated by Chi-Young Kim For publication inquiries, please contact Joseph Lee KL Management: josephlee705@gmail.com AUTHOR'S PROFILE Jeong You Jeong’s Seven Years of Darkness sold more than 500,000 copies in South Korea alone, and its German edition ranked ninth on the Zeit and Nordwestradio “Best Crime Fiction of December 2015” list. Her most recent work, The Good Son, climbed to the top of the bestseller list even before it was published, through pre-orders on South Korea’s major online bookstores. It was also voted first by readers on Kyobo Book Centre’s “Best Fiction of 2016” list. The English edition of the book is set to be published in 2018 by Little, Brown in the UK and Penguin Random House in the US. The thriller is also being adapted into a movie and plans are underway to turn it into a webtoon. Jeong’s novel 28, featured in this issue, plays out over twenty-eight days in a city caught up in the turmoil of a zoonotic epidemic that causes people’s eyes to turn red.

ESSAYS

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• [Writer's Notes] I Dream of Fire, Always Vol.37 Autumn 2017

REVIEWS

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