Hye Young-Pyun’s  literary debut was in the 2000 Seoul Shinmun spring literary contest with the short story, “Shaking off the Dew.” The theme Pyun confronts repeatedly throughout her work is that of the contemporary urban condition characterized by the horror of daily repetition and sameness. She dramatizes the current irony of our lives, in which the civilized is savage and the savage civilized. But Pyun’s world is not as gloomy as the dark nighttime parks, garbage dumps, construction sites, or sewers that serve as the backdrops of her stories. She reveals to us the value of confronting the abyss. When you read her work there are profoundly uncomfortable moments, but, ultimately, after you close the book, you experience that “Ah” moment when something has been illuminated.  Pyun’s stories allow us to consider stepping forward to endure the depths.

Nothing seems to really reflect the kind of literature that one would expect to see from North Koreans themselves – that is “Juche realism” (LOL, if that term isn’t contradictory).

With that background, it is refreshing to see an academic book (at least) talking about North Korean literature. The book is called Soldiers on the Cultural Front: Developments in the Early History of North Korean Literature and Literary Policy, by Tatiana Gabroussenko of the Australian National University. The book only covers the period from 1945 to 1960, but of course that was a rather important era in the history of North Korea and, one would guess by extension, its literature.

It’s published by Hawai’i University, which has this to say about the book:

Soldiers on the Cultural Front represents the first consistent research on the early history of North Korea’s literature and literary policy in Western scholarship. It traces the introduction and development of Soviet-organized conventions in North Korean literary propaganda and investigates why the “romance with Moscow” was destined to be short lived. It reconstructs the biographies and worldviews of major personalities who shaped North Korean literature and teases these historical figures out of popular scholarly myth and misconception. The book also investigates the specific forms of control over intellectuals and literary matters in North Korea. Considering the unique phenomenon of North Korean literary critique, the author analyzes the political campaigns and purges of 1947–1960 and investigates the role of North Korean critics as “political executioners” in these events. She draws on an impressive variety and number of sources—ranging from interviews with Korean and Soviet participants, public and family archives, and memoirs to original literary and critical texts—to present a balanced and eye-opening work that will benefit those interested in not only understanding North Korean literature and society, but also rethinking forms of socialist modernity elsewhere in the world.

So, if you want a bit of peer through the NK literary window, this is a book to pick up and for an academic book it is relatively inexpensive on Amazon at $33.55.

You can see my contribution here..

Found on the Web

A few things of some interest, but not worthy of entire posts.

• First, HanCinema (in a designation that is amusing to me) labels Shin Kyung-sook “the future of Korean literature.”  It is just possible that there is a more nuanced take on this^^ but nuanced takes aren’t really what this article does:

[Interview : Kim Jeong-oh, Visitor] “Shin Kyung-sook is like a candle. She communicates through warm emotion”.

[Interview : Kang Seul-gi, Visitor] “Shin Kyung-sook is like a comma, a pause in life. Her words reach to your soul”.

Hmmm.. I’m not sure I’d want to be compared to a comma!

• A really interesting author response to ‘illegitimate’ translations of The Moonlight Sculptor a Korean manhwa by Heesung Nam. The work was translated three years ago, the second volume is hung up in some kind of snafu, and online folks have apparently been doing fan translations of it. The author gives limited and I guess semi-official permission for that (I wonder how Nam’s evil^^ agent thinks about this!?!?)

As of now, the Moonlight Sculptor published in US haven’t reached the break-even point. In fact, there is no commercial profit from the book. And I doubt it would ever in the future. My guess is that official translation of the following story wouldn’t happen in near future; not in three years at least. Therefore, I will not exercise my copyrights over the translated works of fifth volume of the story published in Korea. For now, I am saying that my promise will take effect until December, 2014.

Of course, the promise will stay valid under one condition; the readers translate the story with noncommercial intention and enjoy it.

If someone officially profit from the translated work by selling them over Amazon.com and such, it might make things difficult and complicated.

I love that second condition, “enjoy it!”

• Finally, for those of you interested in the competition over at the MAN Asian Literary Prize, @ConzieSays (from the “If I Had a Minute to Spare” blog) tips me off to a page that briefly discusses all the competition. About Please Look After Mom, the site says:

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin: Kyung-Sook Shin is something of a literary phenomenon in South Korea. Please Look After Mom (Mother outside the US) is her seventh novel, and it has sold in excess of one million copies in her homeland. Maybe the most remarkable thing about her latest offering is how she manages to fashion something so unique and soul-searching out so ordinary a conceit. So-nyo, an ailing wife and mother, disappears on the Seoul subway on a trip from the country to visit her eldest son. Her siblings and their father join together in a futile quest to find her. In the course of their search – split between the points of view of son, daughter, father and finally, So-nyo herself – they agonise over how they took her for granted, and in doing so raise the kinds of questions that can apply to us all. Most of all, it offers rare glimpses of life in rural South Korea, and asks whether the nation’s insatiable push for progress has come at a price.

Check out the whole thing.

정말????

The other day I caught the 401 bus, just to see where it ran. After a bit, it went by the COEX in Gangnam, which contains a reasonably sized Bandi & Luni. So I hopped off.  After a cup of coffee in a Caffe Bene, I went down to Bandi & Luni look for some exciting new translation I hadn’t previously seen.

I went to the “translated Asian literature” section, which was one panel of a bookcase.

I  was utterly dismayed by incredibly small number of books in translation. There were three big books that I had never heard of, The Dwarf by Cho Se-hui, two books by Kim Young-ha, a soft and hard cover version of Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look After Mom. And that was it. The total.

In fact, there were more books by Korean-Americans than by Koreans (don’t get me started on the risible notion that Korea seems to have that Korean-Americans are somehow actually Koreans and should count in with native Koreans when book numbers are totalled), with Chang-Rae Lee having all his books represented.

Far worse, Japanese and Chinese literature made up well over three-fifths of the total (please note, in the picture below, that the Japanese and Chinese books are so numerous that they must be stored library fashion, while the Korean works are placed with the front covers facing out).

It was eminently clear to me that Bandi & Luni has no concern at all for the success of translations of Korean literature. There was no Yi Mun-yol, no Park Wan-suh, and no Ch’oe Yun.  This is completely remarkable in a horrible way, and demonstrates that the pure profit motive has completely outweighed what I might call “patriotic” or “branding” approaches to what is stocked in this minute area of the store. This seems foolish at a time at which the number of foreigners is steadily increasing in Korea, and has reached 3%.

In the photo below, the Korean works are outlined in red, works by US authors are outlined in green, and works from other Asian countries are outlined in yellow. It gives a graphic idea of what I am talking about.

Shin becomes the first Korean to make the list!

Razia Iqba, the announcing judge, called the decision “pleasurable and daunting.” The books were so good they broke with tradition and upped the list to 7 books from 6. Four of the shortlisted novels were originally written in English; the novels from South Korea, China and Japan are all judged in translation (out of 90 books submitted), according the the judge, were translations. This is likely a result of the fact that many of the original nominees were written in India, and thus in English.

They mention Shin as a writer who will/does inspire more translations. They also note that they only hear of three or four books a year being translated into English from Korean. Translator gets $5k and the author gets $30K. The speaker notes that translation is a very important issue.

Here is the short list:

JAMIL AHMAD (Pakistan) – The Wandering Falcon
JAHNAVI BARUA (India) – Rebirth
RAHUL BHATTACHARYA (India) – The Sly Company of People Who Care
KYUNG-SOOK SHIN (South Korea) – Please Look After Mom
YAN LIANKE (China) – Dream of Ding Village
BANANA YOSHIMOTO (Japan) – The Lake
AMITAV GHOSH (India) – River of Smoke

The judges were: Pulitzer-prize finalist and author of The Surrendered, Chang-rae Lee,  Vikas Swarup, author of Q&A which was filmed as the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire,  and Razia Iqbal a Special Correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

The Long List was:

JAMIL AHMAD (Pakistan) – The Wandering Falcon
TAHMIMA ANAM (Bangladesh) – The Good Muslim
JAHNAVI BARUA (India) – Rebirth
RAHUL BHATTACHARYA (India) – The Sly Company of People Who Care
MAHMOUD DOWLATABADI (Iran) – The Colonel
AMITAV GHOSH (India) – River of Smoke
HARUKI MURAKAMI (Japan) – 1Q84
ANURADHA ROY (India) – The Folded Earth
KYUNG-SOOK SHIN (South Korea) – Please Look After Mom
TARUN J TEJPAL (India) – The Valley of Masks
YAN LIANKE (China) – Dream of Ding Village
BANANA YOSHIMOTO (Japan) – The Lake

Final LOL.. they streamed this as video and only 42 people watched it.^^

Oh Young-su
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Oh Yong-su
Occupation Novelist
Nationality South Korea
Period 1914-1979
This is a Korean name; the family name is 오.

Oh Yong-su (born 1914) (Hangul: 오영수) is a South Korean writer.
Contents
[show]
[edit] Life

Korean author Oh Yong-su was born in Onyang (Ulsan County, South Kyongsang Province) on February 11, 1914 [1] and in his early life attended a sodang, a traditional Confucian school. He graduated from elementary school in Onyang in 1928 and four years later traveled to Japan to attend an intensive program at Niniwa Middle school from which he graduated in 1935. He then attended Nippon University to study Engineering, but acquired beri-beri and was forced to withdraw and go back to Korea. Oh returned to Japan in 1937, but quickly left again to avoid ‘voluntary’ impressment into the Japanese Imperial Army. He returned and finally graduated from the Tokyo National Arts Academy [2]. Upon his return to Korea, he quickly traveled to Manchuria, a common pathway for Koreans seeking to escape the Japanese colonial rule. Sometime thereafter he returned to Korea and married in 1942. His parents died the following years, mother in 1943 and father in 1944. In 1945 he moved to Kijang Township (Tongnae County) where he taught at the Kyongnam Girls High School in nearby Busan. In 1952 he changed jobs, moving to the Pusan Middle School [3]. In 1954 Oh moved to Seoul to help prepare the first edition of the Modern Literature Journal. [4] He quickly became the editor of the journal where he worked until an ulcer forced him to stop in 1966. After his resignation from Modern Literature, Oh became very ill and oppressed by the tax burden of his house, moved from Seoul to Uidong.[5] After surgery removed 2/3 of his stomach Oh became housebound, eventually moved back to his South Gyongsang and died in his home in Ulsan in 1979.[6]

[edit] Work

Oh’s first publications occurred on his first return trip to Korea (1935-7) during which time his children’s poetry was published in the Chosun Times (Choson ilbo) and East Asian Times (Donga ilbo). In 1949 he published his first fictional work, Nami and the Taffyman, which appeared in the New World Magazine. This was quickly followed with Wild Grapes which won an award from the Seoul News (Seoul Shinmun).[7] In 1952 Oh published Uncle in Soldiers’ Literary Digest (Sabyong Mungo) and The Woman from Hwasan in Literary Arts (Munye). From 1954 to 1966, as editor of the Modern Literature journal[8], Oh contributed almost 30 stories, including Spring’s Awakening, Migratory Birds, and Girl from an Island. Oh also wrote for other periodicals including the work A Death at the Mill. Inn 1955 Oh received the Prize of the Korean Literature Association and the Asian Liberty Literature Prize in 1959. (376) In 1968 Oh issued an omnibus of his work, the five volumes of which contained 90 stories.[9] Three years before his death, Oh published his sixth work of anthology, Dusk. In 1978 he released his last anthology of stories and received an award from the Academy of Arts as well as a governmental Cultural Medal of Merit.
[edit] Critical Reception

Oh’s works were brief in length and laconic in dialogue.[10] Oh’s critical reputation has declined in recent years as, like Hwang Sun-won, Oh has been called outdated and escapist and lacking in a national or historical consciousness. In fact, Oh is rarely overtly political and seldom judges larger political and economic systems, still, his works are laced with on the ground snapshots of what these systems conclude in. [11]
[edit] Works in English

Good People: Korean Stories (Writing in Asia)
Loess Valley and Other Korean Short Stories (Modern Korean Short Story Series No 1)

[edit] Works in Korean (Partial)
[edit] References

^ p. 376
^ p. 376
^ Good People, Heinemann Publishing, 1986 p.xiv
^ Good People, Heinemann Publishing, 1986 p.xvi
^ Good People, Heinemann Publishing, 1986 p.xxi
^ Good People, Heinemann Publishing, 1986 p.xxii
^ Good People, Heinemann Publishing, 1986 p.xiii
^ Good People, Heinemann Publishing, 1986 p.xvi
^ Good People, Heinemann Publishing, 1986 p.xxi
^ Good People, Heinemann Publishing, 1986 p.xv
^ http://www.ktlit.com/korean-literature/review-the-good-people-by-oh-yong-su

[edit] External links

Review of Good People with links to individual stories online.

The Good People: Korean Stories

So, as I work through this excellent book of naturalistic stories, I will also link the stories in it, if and when they exist online or in other books.

Nami and the Taffyman is a sad story about requited love that is not fulfilled. Told with lovely little details, a maid named Nami accidentally meets a traveling taffyman and through two semi-chance occurrences, one including the children she cares for and the other a buzzing bee, they fall in love. In 1949, however, when the story was published, despite the colonial-era literary mandate for modernism and “free love” (not in the western sense), the average Korean was still an a very Confucian environment, and the story ends on a note of semi-understood pathos.

An online version of Nami and Taffyman can be found at the Korea Journal, here: http://www.ekoreajournal.net/issue/view_pop.htm?Idx=737 and in several collections of Korean short storied including Loess Valley, but these collections seem to be out of print.

Korean colleagues tell me that The Woman from Hwasan may be Oh’s most famous story for Korean readers. A brief story, it is a reasonably good representation of the kind of gap that Korea’s lightning-quick economic development could open between mother and son, with an old village-dwelling mother making an unexpected visit to her son and his family. There is also a typo in the page header which calls the work The Woman from Hwsan.^^

Uncle (called Uncle Soldier in other translations) is another short, sad story, of a young boy, Hyong,  who comes to idolize a soldier who guards what used to be the boy’s school. The soldier and the boy come to be friends, but when the soldier is called away to active duty the friendship is threatened. The soldier continues, however, to write Hyong, in hopes that they will one day reunite.

This story is available in Loess Valley and online here: http://www.ekoreajournal.net/issue/view_pop.htm?Idx=391

The Seaside Village is an interesting story with a convoluted plot and what can only be described (in a modern voice) as horrific sexual politics. A war-widow falls in love with a new man, who really kind of sexually attacks her into it. When the new relationship begins to follow the path of the old (her new husband is drafted) she returns to her hometown and its welcoming community.

This story is also in Loess Valley and Modern Korean Short Stories and Plays - Seoul: Korean Centre, International P.E.N., 1970,or can be found online: http://www.ekoreajournal.net/issue/view_pop.htm?Idx=275

The Seaside was also made into a movie, which can be watched in 20 segments, with English subtitles, on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH1ylEyKWyw

A Death At The Mill is a tragi-comic story of a boy who grows up with out love, and so transfers that love to money, and becomes a money-lending miser. There are at least two comic set-pieces in this sad story, and at the end the reader will likely agree with its sentiment that life is to be enjoyed while it can be lived. This story does not seem to be available anywhere else, which is a pity as it is one of Oh’s finest.

Spring’s Awakening is a short and clever double-entendre of a title, for a short and amusing story (and again, Oh fills his pages with clever vignettes) of a young maid, her charge, and her new love. Oh does a really great job of capturing two different ages, the fickleness  and inattention of childhood, and the blossoming of love in spring.

Migratory Birds is charming, optimistic and depressing all in one packet. A shoeshine boy from Busan re-unites with his teacher in Seoul. Kuchil, the shoeshine boy, is a classic Korean character; he works extremely hard at his plan for success and occasionally even achieves a bit of it. Twined in with that story is the fact that he is repeatedly forced to be on the move, and the stories’ metaphor, of non-seasonal migration applies to Kuchil and all the Korean refugees. This story, and Uncle are the only two vaguely political stories in the book, a topic to which we will shortly return.

This story can be found online: http://www.ekoreajournal.net/issue/view_pop.htm?Idx=904

The Girl from an Island is the story of Wollye, a one-time haenyo  who now works as a maid in a family that eventually moves to Seoul. When she sees, in a dream, a vision of her lost lover, she returns to her island. This is a lovely story full of affection of all sorts, and the concluding paragraph, a dream of a second sort, is a gem.

Which brings me to mention the excellent translation here – everything in this slight volume is extremely literary; it reads as though it were originally written in English by a highly skilled writer. Marshall R. Pihl was one of the first reliable translators of Korean fiction, and this may be some of his best work, perhaps because the stories are relatively short, full of lively vignettes, well-drawn characters and clever symbols.

The Girl From an Island can be found online at: http://www.ekoreajournal.net/issue/view_pop.htm?Idx=1159

Back to the stories, we come to Wine.  And, perhaps because I am missing my good drinking buddy back home, this line pops out at me to represent the quality of the translation:

Although there are those who enjoy fine wine with their meals, the real lover of good drink will argue that one doesn’t know the soul of wine until he shares it with a close friend over bubbling bowls of pot stew in a roadside stall on a sleet-cut winter’s night.

This is confessional, intimate and nearly poetic, with the second half of the sentence boiling over with alliteratives and the whole thing generally in single syllables with the occasional double-syllable and even then normally compound words. It nicely captures the romanticism of drinking with friends and the simple focus that the narrator will soon reveal.

After this introduction, the story proper begins, with a clever but hung-over salaryman, Kim,  getting a reprieve from office-work in the form of a visit to a client. Once that business is concluded,  Kim’s real work begins, using flattery to cadge free drinks from a hideous bar owner. Oh does a nice job in this story by keeping it light, just outlining the nature of the problem.

Afterglow is the final story, apparently written just before the quite ill Oh died. It begins with an aged and very ill narrator and is a ghostly shade of an actual story; a meditation on losses of the past and the losses yet to come. It’s a nice coda to Oh’s career, if that’s what it was.

Interestingly, The Columbia Companion to modern East Asian (p. 693) literature notes that:

O’s critical reputation has not flourished in recent years. Like Hwang Sunwon, he has sometimes been labeled an outdated, escapist writer who lacks ‘historical consciousness.

As mentioned above, Oh is rarely overtly political or economic (poverty, of course laces through his stories, but only The Woman from Hwasan attempts to draw any large conclusion from this), but to me this is not anodyne, rather it is a nice contrast to the bulk of Korean fiction from this time. And the stories, of striving people doing the best they can, relying on each other in one way or another?  Well, that represents another side of Korea; the Korea that pulled through a civil war; the Korea that, at great cost, performed the miracle on the Han, and; the Korea that melted down its gold jewelry en masse to escape the IMF crisis of the last century. Little theory, cant, or met issues of the real world invades these stories, but life, in all its manifestations, pervades them.

————————-
purely subjective things

HOW MANY BUCKWHEAT BLOSSOMS?  None – this is comprehensible to any reader, and while Korean culture permeates it at no point does this interfere with understanding.

YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN WARNING! May be a bit saccharine or sentimental for super-tough-guys (but they don’t read anyway^^)

ILLUSTRATING A POINT: The cover, which looks like a jumble of wrecked fishing boats, and is in a palette that covers the entire spectrum from burnt sienna to burnt wood, really doesn’t suit the work inside. On the positive side, but also largely out of the context of the stories, there are 10 illustrations in this book that are rather nice.

Found on the Web

A couple more things found on the web that don’t merit a full post, but deserve being noted.

First, an excellent interview with Yi Mun-yol, possibly Korea’s greatest translated man of fiction (partly because he’s had a relatively large number of works translated, partly because he’s just that good^^). The interview is part of a series with international pioneers among Korean artists that marks the 61st anniversary of The Korea Times.

Among other things the interview reveals that his 문학관 does exist and is open for business, which means that KTLIT will shortly have to take a trip out to it with the camera. There is a bit of orientalized hocus-pocus in the text, but in general it is worth reading and sums Yi up quite well, when it says:

Yi proves to be a most astute student of human psychology, history and sociology, and moreover, a master of transcending self and culture to evoke profound emotions and imagination. His 30-plus books, in the vastness of their genre, style and structure, defy categorization – the more works of his one reads the more impossible it becomes to define his oeuvre.

Announcement of the winners of the LTI Korea/Knopf 5-state Please Look After Mom essay contest. Residents of Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey,  New York and Pennsylvania were eligible to enter, and a quick look at the winners indicates that either ethnically Asian writers are better writers^^, or more ethnically Asian writers entered the contest.  Sadly, although the contest says the essays will be available on the Korean Cultural Service New York website, they don’t seem to be available to read, which seems to defeat part of the purpose of the contest (though some pictures of the winners can be found here).

Finally, a short piece on Chinese publisher Yilin Press, which has just released translations of Korean fiction:

The last issue, for example, is dedicated to Korean literature. Author Ku Hyo-seo’s novella, Rhapsody in Berlin, forms the centerpiece. Others featured are Young Kong-Ji (The Correct Way of Getting Along with People) and Kim Young-ha (Moving Home).

See you next time, on the web!

http://en.ce.cn/Life/book/201201/06/t20120106_22979590.shtml

In the final installment of KTLIT’s interview with Gabriel Sylvian, we discuss existing gay translations, the Korea Gay Literature Project, and suggested future translations.

Q: Other than “Last of Hanako” are you aware of any translations of gay/lesbian literature into English?

A: Well, before I answer that, I agree that the relationship in “Last of Hanako” was probably intended to imply a same-sex relationship, but Koreans have sometimes dodged that implication by objecting that Choe Yun did not use the word “baeuja” (partner) but rather “friend”. Choe is a serious writer and “Hanako” is not without meaning for feminism and perhaps lesbian politics; but frankly speaking, thematizing same-sex love has always been more of an attention-getting device for mainstream writers with no commitment or sense of serious responsibility to sexual minorities. The exceptions are the two “fellow travelers” I mentioned, and maybe Bae Su-a, who has always written forcefully against patriarchy and social conservatism. For same-sex themes, I’m thinking of her “Essayist’s Desk” and a short story called “To Majjan”, and perhaps the amorphous novel “Ivanna” which might be a side-ways nod to amorphous Ivan (gay) subjectivity. But you asked about translations. Well. most existing ones I know of, I did myself in 2005-6 with support from the KLTI: Shin Gyeong-suk’s “Strawberry Field”; Song Gyeong-a’s “Trout and Sweetfish”; Yun Dae-nyeong’s “Playing with Stag Monument”, Choe In-seok’s “Well of My Soul” and some others. I’ve translated them but all except the first are unpublished. I also translated Yi Nam-hui’s “Plastic Sex” trilogy and put Part 1 up recently on the Three Wise Monkeys website with help from one of its editors John Rodgers, who is a supporter of Korea’s LGBTs. As for works by actual LGBT writers, there’s “Coming Out” by Jeon Myeong-an, which I mentioned. The author later revised and re-titled it “A Mother’s Horrible Son”. It’s among the best LGBT works written to date. I updated my original translation and posted it with the others on my old Korea Gay Literature Project Myspace page. For poetry, I’ve translated some poems by Choe Seung-ja and all of Gi Hyeong-do’s poems, a dozen or so are online.

Q: Tell us something about the Korea Gay Literature Project.

A: Well, the project proposed to “use literature as a tool for change” because it seemed it was the one strategy remaining that had not been tried, and which possessed high potential for success given that literature conveys ideas in aesthetic and more subtly persuasive ways than do sociological discourses, for example. Project goals are researching Korean “LGBT” history and literary history, and translating same-sex works by Koreans. The Gi Hyeong-do project has, I think, potential to make some impact if Gi’s life story and the English translations of his poetry touch the hearts of the international LGBT communities. Gi’s complete poems are also coming out in French translation by a professor at Chungnam University, according to Gi’s sister. If the global community accepts Gi, I think Korea will also come to accept him as their national same-sex poet and be rightfully proud of him as such.

Q:  Anything else you’d like to mention or discuss?

A: Since your journal is devoted to translations of Korean literature, maybe I should mention a few other titles  possibly worth consideration for translation into English. Yi Nam-hui’s Ecstacy (Hwanghol ), She’s Mine by Gweon So-yeon, Ugly Transgender (Mossaenggin  teuraenseugendeo) by Gim Bi, and just about anything by Jeon Myeong-an, who is wonderful.

A couple of final notes on this excellent series.

In this post Gabriel refers to his excellent work at The Three Wise Monkeys, and if you missed that link above, it is worth checking out, as it has a detailed exploration of Yi Nam-hui’s ‘Plastic Sex’ in the context of the larger social reality, as well as discussion of some other  lesbian fiction.

Finally, and it’s for me to chase down, Oh Jung-hee (mentioned in this series) has been described to me elsewhere as a writer who wrote about lesbian love, although I don’t find a lot of comment supporting this on the internet, and what I have read of hers doesn’t seem to strongly support this interpretation.

NOTE: I edited the previous paragraph to eliminate the false (and lazy on my part) claim that Oh was a “lesbian” writer (the changes words are in italics). Thanks to Marzena!

Anyone out there know anything about this?