The area is absolutely beautiful, and between the village and the Yangsu stop on the Jungang Line (which you can catch in Yongsan, Oksu, or Cheongnyangri) there are tons of pensions.

When we went into the museum, we were quickly spotted by the friendly staff, who whisked us upstairs and played us a short video on Hwang and the area. They also told us that although Hwang has been dead since 2000, his 97 year old wife is stil alive!.

This is a short clip from the movie:

OOPS… removed at copyright holder’s request..

In the story Sonagi, a young boy and girl meet in the course of a rainstorm, and huddle together in a shelter of millet stalks. Thus the grounds are dotted with small teepees of millet stalks and the section of the museum and a part of the fountain are structures of the same shape. In the movie below, the when the fountain is active, we are to see the glass semi-pyramid as representing a sheave of millet stalks. It’s quite pretty.

The museum itself is three stories tall, with about 4 sections. One section recounts the life and writings of Hwang Sun-won, and has pictures of him as well as a reproduction of his office. The next section has life-sized dioramaettes of some of his most important works, including  The Descendants of Cain, Cranes, The Dog of Crossover Village and The Old Potter. Sonagi is given its own section, and there is an e-room which has web access, videos and sound files. Tying it all together is a central room with a timeline of Hwang’s life and an art exhibit consisting of representations of scenes from Sonagi. On the thrid floor is the movie theater mentioned previously, and two outdoor ‘lounges’ that offer excellent views of the valley, and a place to smoke cigarettes if you have them.  Outside, to the left of the building, sits Hwang’s tomb.

The Center of the Museum

Each September there is a Hwang Sun-won festival, and KTLIT will be sure to visit that next year.

NOTE: There are busses that run from Yangsu Station to the Village, but they seem to run on very uncertain timestables. We sat waiting for over a half an hour, before splitting a taxcab with two Korean women. The bus stop in front of the train station will take you to Seojeong-myeon, from which you can catch a second bus, or walk about 4 kilometers by following the signs).

In any case, these volumes came and went without much fanfare and now are only available through specialty bookstores online and at a very few libraries. If you like, as I post this, you can get a copy of Drizzle on Amazon for £188.09.

This volume, number 2, is notable because it has two really iconic authors, Hwang Sun-won and Yi Pom-son, with the former being perhaps the most famous modern Korean author in Korea.

The stories are as follows:

The Drizzle (Hwang Sun-won)
Acorns (Hwang Sun-won)
Stars (Hwang Sun-won)
The Moon and the Crab’s Legs (Hwang Sun-won)
Masks (Hwang Sun-won)
Life (Hwang Sun-won)
The Weighted Tumbler (Hwang Sun-won)
The Children (Hwang Sun-won)
For Dear Life (Hwang Sun-won)
Time for You and Me Alone (Hwang Sun-won)
Stray Bullet (Yi Pom-son)
Cosmos (Yi Pom-son)
Autumn Leaves (Yi Pom-son)
The People of Crane Village (Yi Pom-son)
God of the Earth (Yi Pom-son)

Hwang’s work is relevatory. I had previously known him for: Sonagi, a boring love story that is immoderately loved by Koreans; Descendants of Cain, a rather depressing pundan munhak, and; the short story Cranes, which is a touching story of personal loyalty in difficulty times.

Hwang writes in a space somewhere between parable, romanticism, and hallucination. As the flyleaf notes, “Hwang Sun-won’s stories depict various emotional experiences of brief moment of human life in an outstandingly elegant style. The Drizzle is a rather directly narrative (for Hwang) story of death and surprising life during the Korean War. Hwang appends a lovely, dry and deadpan conclusion. I suspect this story was chosen to lead off partly because it is one of his most traditional structures. Acorns quickly gets us deeper into Hwang’s style with its fractured, fable-like, and semi-surrealistic conflation of life and folk tales. Stars is along this line also, a charming and very sad story of what happens when a young boy hears a chance remark comparing his dead, and highly idealized, mother, to his alive and unfortunately quite quotidian sister. Hwang weaves in celestial symbology and the ending is ironic in at least two cruel ways. The Moon and the Crab’s Legs is initially amusing, the story of a crab perplexed by why he walks the crab-like way he does. The story turns more serious as it goes and features a surprising ending in some ways similar to the ending of Ha Seong-nan’s Waxen Wings (reviewed here in the context of the collection Waxen Wings). Life is one of the lesser stories in the collection (by which I mean no insult), a story of survival during war time. The Weighted Tumbler returns to what Hwang does best, combining a lovely story, in this case intergenerational friendship, with a more tragic story, in this case of familial separation, and concluding by tying it together with a beautiful semi-hallucination that puts the story into a kind of cosmic perspective. The Children is almost not a piece of fiction, but more a meditation on the innocence of children, no matter how dirtied their environment. For Dear Life is premised on something that comes up now and then in Korean literature, the story of the rebel who in some way betrays, or does not live up to the rebellion they are in (Ch’oe Yun’s The Grey Snowman is of this flavor, among others). Finally, Time for you and Me Alone is a quite ironically titled exploration of soldiers, one badly wounded (and this is also a theme Korean literature comes back to repeatedly), and the decisions they make for survival. As Hwang often does, he appends a surprising coda to the tale.

All Hwang’s stories are short, the longest two only being eleven pages each, but they are packed with incident, symbolism, metaphor, suprising wit given some of the topics, and always bring moments of recognition and surpise, often at the same time.

Yi Pom-son is perhaps most famous for his story Stray Bullet (Obaltan). This is a long but remarkable story of a family that is, nearly literally, dying one piece at a time. Placed in “Liberation Village” (currently known as Haebangchon and, amusingly, now primarily a neighborhood for expat hipsters and English teachers – I should note that I type this only 5 minutes away from the foot of Haebangchon), a family that has fled from the north falls apart one seam at a time. The constant beat in the background, the senile grandmother’s plea “let’s go,” meaning back home across the 38th parallel, is both grating and pathetic, but at the same time, by stories’ end, seems to be a Cassandra-like plea for sanity and safety. Stray Bullet is a brutal story, but well enough told that you read through it before the cumulative effect of its brutality becomes clear. The Cosmos is one of those Sonagi-like (Or Kim Yong-ik’s Love in Winter) stories in which a young male narrator approaches love in such a leisurely fashion that it is no surprise that it amounts to nothing in the end. Autumn Leaves is an odd little story about a mad woman who lives just below the 38th parallel. The People of Crane Village is a well-crafted story which, through the history of a small and declining village and its semi-mystical attachment to a tree in which cranes breed, somehow manages to tell the story of the Korean war. Cranes are Korean symbols of longevity and of course Hwang’s “Cranes” used them as a symbol of the Korean people as a whole. The last story in the collection is God of the Earth, and it’s a bit mystifying. The story of a minister and his wife holding their ministry out against redevelopment, it ends rather abruptly and without apparent point.

Perhaps I simply didn’t understand?

That last story notwithstanding, this is an excellent collection and if you do have access to a library that carries it, its worth checking out to read two authors dealing with quite serious social and political traumas in Korea, but in stories quite deftly told and accomplished as literature.

"A Man" named Hwang

Hwang Soon-won’s A Man is the 23rd book in the Jimoondang series, and it seems as though the editors were running out of things to translate (despite the fact that there is plenty still out there). It’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast, with three entirely unrelated short stories tossed together. The stories themselves are loosely plotted and seem more like vignettes tossed together than a narrative.

The first story is, to use vernacular language to describe a literary feeling, super weird. The Dog of Crossover Village is told from at least three narrative positions and covers the relatively unremarkable life of a stray dog called ‘Whitey.’ The dustcover says The Dog of Crossover Village, “portrays life in a traditional rural village but can be read as an allegory of the Japanese colonial occupation or of the fate of an outsider in a highly stratified society.” Neither of those allegorical approaches seem likely (Whitey hardly seems colonized or colonialist and she actually fits her way into the local society of dogs) and that the editor would feel it necessary to toss out these unlikely and to some extent in opposition, allegories seems to hint that he/she was uncertain what to make of the story.

The story that gives the book its title, A Man, is even more bizarre. The sexual politics are inexplicable – very nearly random – but always, here comes that word again, weird. Mr. Kim (“the man” of the title) is completely helpless with respect to women. This is partly because in his first marriage his insanely controlling mother sleeps between him and his bride, then blames the bride when she returns home, a decision which seems sensible enough to my eyes. As the mother dies she leaves a last request that paints the oddity of her relationship to her son, “I’ve known only two men in my life – your father and you. And I don’t want you trusting any woman but your mom.” With echoes of Tony Perkin’s mother from Psycho ringing in his ears Mr. Kim goes from unsatisfying relationship to unsatisfying relationship. The dustcover describes Mr. Kim as hapless, but it obviously goes beyond that. The particular relationships he enters are strung together like a child might string beads – loosely and without apparent logic and the concluding scene doesn’t seem to wrap much up.

A Book Called "A Man"

The third story, Bibari, is also a bit off. It is also the easiest to read, because there is a plot to follow and it is interesting where it points out differences between Jeju and the body of Korea. Those differences have been at the heart of a great deal of trauma on Jeju, and Hwang does a good job of portraying them, even in small ways such as parallel vocabularies (The title, for instance, comes from the Jeju word that would be “agassi” in the rest of Korea). Bibari‘s plot revolves around a love story and a fratricide. The fratricide is relatively emotionally convincing in that the murderer explains the mercy she believes she did by the murder, but the love-affair killing result of the murder seems contrived and without real emotional heft. It seems as if Hwang just tossed a couple of plot ideas together without entirely working out how they would mesh.

The dust cover (again!) says that, “Hwang Soon-won is modern Korea’s most successful short-story writer and perhaps its most consistently interesting fictional voice.” It is difficult to see that judgment drawn from this collection of short stories. Hwang also wrote the seminal Cranes (a short story) and Descendants of Cain (a horrific novel), either of which would be better introductions to his writing. Even Sonagi, which I found a bit predictable and pathos-drenched, would be better. I also have his collection of short stories “Book of Masks” which I hope to read and review shortly.

This book, however, is not the one to buy.