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.

The “academic” nature of the book is revealed several ways, including extensive history/biography and theoretical explication after each story. The history/biography is great – particularly the unbelievably unfortunate endgames for the first three authors, Kim Myeong-sun, Na Hye-seok, and Kim Weon-Ju; stories which must have made it a very daunting prospect indeed, for female authors to follow. All three were initially successful and then, for a variety of reasons, destroyed by society. As the editor dryly notes about Na, her “story proved a cautionary tale for generations of Korean women thereafter” (26).

The academic nature of the book also means it feels compelled to include stories from every era it can (while noting that nothing representative could be found between the 20s and 40s), and that means at least one clunker is included.

Still, as a kind of hybrid of a feminist and Korean literature textbook, this is one worth picking up, and unlike some other books discussed here, is easily available online.

The first story is A Girl Of Mystery (1917) by Kim Myeong-sun. This is a subtle story of a young girl of uncertain origin, unhappy and partially hidden, and eventually on the run. It is a bit ruined at the end when itdestroys it’s own air of mystery with a tacked on explanatory section.

Kyeonghui (1918) by the tragic Na Hye-seok, is not so much a short story as a lecture. The character Kyeonghui is straight out of North Korean literature. Always brave, noble, and ecstatically happy at the thought of additional work. The other characters are similarly simple – cutouts who only serve to further the didactics of the story. Kyonghuiconducts completely politically correct lectures in her own head. Those who disagree with her are gossips and whoremongers, though Kyeonghui’s mere presence at least semi-converts or temporarily convertsthem when they meet her.  It’s well written, including at least one clever narrative shift around page 45, but that can’t overcome its harpy (ooooh!) tone.

Kim Weon-ju’s Awakening (1926) has a clever double-epistolary structure. It is also much more ideologically varied than its predecessor, Kyeonghui. It begins with an apparently happily married woman (though when her husband leaves for Japan he shakes her hand!) who goes through a process of discovery that leads her from a life entirely dependent on him, to one entirely separated from him, even contemptuous of him. In fact, he creates this contempt, and when the narrator concludes with a bit of semi-moralizing about what she has learned, it is the knowledge earned by the story, not the empty lecturing of Kyeonghui.

Hahn Moo-sook (available here on Wikipedia because of the awesome Wikipedia Project! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Moo-sook)  is a canonical writer with a wide range of works. Hydrangeas (1949)is one of her lesser works.  The translation here, is also a bit clunky and the story is a bit obvious. Beginning with an obvious symbol of what is about to happen, Hydrangeas that stand for fickleness, a middle-aged wife learns that, maybe, her life with her husband is not what she thought it was. Out of Hahn’s work, it seems that this work was chosen for the book not for its literary quality, but instead for its message.

Kang Sin-jae’s The Mist (1950) is a good story of a creative wife shackled by a complete jerk of a husband. The husband is first uninterested in and destructive of his wife’s ability as a writer, and then becomes paternal and dismissive of her ability when it blossoms. In some ways the wife is a less well delineated character than the husband, but this works brilliantly as his nearly unbelievable chauvinism makes the story sparkle. This is aided by the fact that Kang includes a male character who is sympathetic, and when the narrator ends the story in a protracted scream, its genesis has already been well established.

Song Weon-Hye’s When Autumn Leaves Fall (1961) is a kind of mid-life crisis work, with a middle-aged painter facing up to her history and where it has led her. Unlike many of the other stories in this collection, it ends in a semi-optimistic way, and men and the social system are painted in shades of grey, rather than uniformly as opressors.

A Dish of Sliced Raw Fish (1979) by Yi Sun features a spectacularly judgmental narrator Chiyeong who is engaged to be married to a man from a far lower social station. Chiyeong is in some ways carrying out the message of Yi Kwang-su’s Heartless, as she marries for love, but all the way through the story she has doubts and comes across as quite snooty (at least until the end). It is interesting, in this case, to read the analysis of the story, which claims the story is “ a delightful picture scroll” and a “refreshing, uplifting perspective” (146). I think this didn’t come through at all in the translation, and so it reads quite differently, all the way up to it’s rather unexpected optimistic ending.  As in some of the other stories here, the translation can be a bit odd, the husband “unbosoms” himself (143).

Yi Seok-pong’s The Light at Dawn is a short story of a very traditionally unhappy older couple – they represent a certain kind of couple that lived through the Korean economic boom but never quite profited from it; instead staying together for children. To my mind it kind of waffles on its premise at the end – providing a semi-happy ending to a kind of marriage that almost never ends happily in reality. The theoretical analysis, also, seems a bit heavy under the burden of explaining the ending.^^

The last two stories are by two modern treasures of Korean literature, the incomparable fabulist Ch’oeYun and the stern diarist of modern unhappiness, Pak Wan-so.

Ch’oe’s  Stone in Your Heart begins in her typical lyrical way, and typically poking at the idea of what reality might be. A married woman is called to the scene of her husband’s deadly accident and everything she believed to be solid melts away in a moment. In her moment of need an aged doctor takes her under his wing, and although she continues to obsessively peck away at the ‘real’ story of her husband’s death, she finds a bit of calmness at his house. The conclusion reveals a startling incident in the doctor’s history, the ‘stone’ of the title, and end is a touching consideration of the importance of letting go.

Pak Wan-so’s Dried Flowers is a reprint of a work which I have already reviewed here.  If you haven’t read it in that volume, though, it’s worth reading for its senescent and depressing view of romantic love.

A decent collection, easy to find, and brilliant for your class in Korean Feminism.^^

The Heavens, the Wind, The Stars and Poetry is an omnibus type book. It contains 120 poems, a short biogrphay, and excellent frontispiece photo, a 19 page analysis of his poetry, and an interesting bit of “research” into the religious basis of his work.
But also included in the book are four short stories, of which three are very short. Not surprising for a poet, the works are full of allusion and symbols, with nature taking a very high rank in that list of allusions and symbols. This can be pretty easily noted just by looking at the titles of his short stories. Yun is a complicated read as well, hopping from thing to thing with little notice and employing a writing style that is in some ways reminiscent of the surrealism of Yi Sang and the absurdity of Pak Min-gyu. That’s good territory to be in, if you don’t know the authors.^^

Shooting at the Moon begins with a typical rush of lyricism – the narrator arising, a partner sleeping, notices nature outside and the window that separates it from the inside. What is really inside, however, are the thoughts of a letter the narrator has received. The letter has a similar kind of lyricism based on nature, and it discusses a breakup between the two. The narrator finds himself outside, and wonders if he came out the window. More thought, and more nature is used in a metaphor of hope, hopelessness, or re-dedication. It is difficult to tell, which is likely what Yun wanted.
The structure is really that of a poem, with an introductory stanza, an explanatory one, and a cathartic one, and it might even read best if thought of that way.

The second work, Where the Falling Star Drops, is even briefer than the first. Its themes are similar, beginning with a contemplation of nature. Again, the narrator seems uncertain, even of existing. The narrator contemplates his relationship with a tree, and the uncertainty of life before seeing a signal which he takes as the indication of a path.

Flowers Bloom in the Flower Garden is short, difficult to read, but worth it. The story itself addresses the difficulty of writing, at least one word is missing, and there is at least one pretty obvious error in translation. Still, it is a touching meditation on life and nature set in the anodyne arenas of the classroom and garden.
There may also be a certain admission of why he is a poet when his character (him, really, as he formally addresses his ‘reader’) says. “I still come up with only a few lines of writing. So for me writing is not such an enjoyable task.”

Sijo calls.^^

At the end, the tone is reflective as the entire last paragraph is “By the fireside many things will realized.”

The End and the Beginning, by far the longest of Yun’s four stories here, continues the discussion of the previous story between studying, or learning, and simply being in the world. It is also Buddhist in a cyclical and sometimes Manichean kind of way. It is also the most difficult to read, as its length seems to exceeds Yun’s ability to keep a plot going – this, again, likely a function of his essential skill as a poet. It is best read as a kaleidoscopic and surreal mental landscape of a person on the bus. This, the notes in the book reveal, may be exactly what it is.^^

Pick this book up for the poetry, if you like translated Korean poetry, but also spare a moment to consider the short fiction as a noble, and often successful attempt to extend the poetic imagination to prose.

The “America” to which the title refers is in fact the soldiers and army base which lies adjacent to Tongduchon, the town in which the story takes place. It is worth noting something odd that Cho does with this book title, that is he spells out “America” in Hangul (아메리카), rather than giving it its ‘normal’ Korean name of 미국. I’m assuming this is done to further express the foreign nature of the US army base in its Korean setting. The main character comes to his uncle’s whorehouse and is quickly given the job of doorman. As the story progresses he struggles with his role, both in the brothel and town, while bedding an impressive number of the girls who work at the brothel. The town is chaotic, and so are the events in the story – suicide, murder, a drought followed by a flood, racism (from several quarters), and a key job offer if he returns to Seoul. Told dramatically, and with many plot moves later reprised in soap operas, the pace never slackens and this is an easy novella to read in one sitting.

HOWEVER, some of the language is extremely graphic, more or less in line with the graphic topics of the novella itself. If you are offended by the N-word or C-word (to pick two examples which are abundant in the novella), this may not be a book you want to pick up.

Which would be a shame, because America does address one of the classic themes of Modern Korean literature, diaspora and return, and also provides a gritty window into some of the realities of post-war (sited in 1969, it is actually quite post-war, but the war still remains as a character) Korea.

The novella concludes with a short two paragraphs that sum up the message of the story quite well. While the settingmay be an explosion of chaos, in the background the endlessly striving Koreans gather together to go off and begin the rebuilding process; a process that Korea has been undergoing, on and off, for nearly a century.

This is a short work.  The entire book is only 104 pages and that includes a peculiar section of criticism and an utterly hysterical autobiographical section in which Cho reveals himself to be self-abnegatory nearly to the point of disappearing. About his introduction to writing he says:

Joins the creative writing club. Decides to become a novelist. This decision serves as a major factor later contributing to make him graduate from high school with such lamentable achievements.

The translation can be a bit odd, and there or too many simple grammatical and spacing mistakes. But once reading starts, these flaws fade into the background and the book works towards its oddly satisfying conclusion.

Home-Coming is from the Modern Korean Short Stories series by UNESCO and Si-sa-yong-o-sa Publishers. Of the 10 books in that series it is among the most accessible, as many of its stories contain characters and plots that are comprehensible across culture. Even the stories that don’t quite work, with one exception, are good reads. The collection includes work by Kim Sung-ok, So Chong-in, Yi Chong-jun, Song Yong, and Hong Song-won; this number of authors is substantially larger than normal for this collection, and it may be that it is partly this diversity that explains how well this collection words compared to its brethren.

Kim Sung-ok’s Seoul-Winter 1964 is almost beyond the need to explain at this point as it has been recognized as one of Korea’s seminal works of post-pundan (for lack of a better name) literature. The story of three men meeting by chance, and randomly bouncing through Seoul, S-W 1964, and randomly bounced by society as well, it evocatively describes the new, anomic social relations of the city and economic development.

The Operation, by Kim, is the sad story of two peasant women, trekking to the abortionist because they fell for the lies of sophisticated colleges students on vacation. The relationship between the women is friendly and supportive, even in their dire circumstances, and the warmth of their friendship and nature of their shared predicament is well written and translated.

Good Bargain, again by Kim Sung-ok, is one of his two stories in this collection that don’t completely connect. It begins amusingly enough, with a college student identified only as K sitting, bored, on his campus while considering other students (a funny scene in which college students gear themselves out with newspaper stuffed backpacks, military boots, blue American denims, etc., in order to impress each other and onlookers) and scheming how to make his weekend eventful with only 20 won in hand. After this promising start, however, it degenerates into too many storylines for its length, and K’s central “trick” seems far too obvious to work. In the end, “K” might remind the reader a bit of Holden Caufield, and for me that’s a problem.^^

Record of a Journey to Mujin, is the least impressive of Kim’s work here, as the story is mundane, its writing style blank and its story oddly inconclusive. At 42 pages, it is also the longest story in the collection. Of course^^ because that’s what I believe, internet research indicates that not only is it fairly beloved in Korea, but has also been made into a successful movie. In any case, it is the story of a love triangle temporarily rendered a love quadrangle by the arrival of the narrator back at his home town, and the story is quite lyrical in places.

So Chong-in starts off modestly with Home-Coming. The narrator is in his last year of college and, while stranded at a bus-station, meets an old classmate named Tol-nam who seems to be successful. Tol-nam  claims to run a gas-station at Karingbong-dong but offers a free black-market ride in a private car to the narrator for rounding other passengers up. Why this is such a horrible crime is never explained, which makes reading a bit puzzling. At first the narrator hops right in, but then the sight of policeman washes him with guilt, until he meets a stranded female friend. This leads to an interminable discussion of which form of language he should use to address her and a decision to help her get into the friend’s car and get home.

But here, the story picks up. The two men semi-tussle over the attention of the woman and there is a very amusing conversation once they get in the car, in which Tol-nam cleverly outlines the gap in perception between the rich and the poor, and how quickly comfort can change attitudes.  The story ends up in a clever little summary of the differences between social classes that is played out in several aspects. A story that begins in a deceptively prosaic way ends up addressing major social issues in ways both amusing and profound.

The story is, however, riddled with annoying artifacts of translation. Translator Sol Sun-bong, who acquits himself adequately in other stories in the collection, drops a succession of howlers into this one:

• “Nine yeas” instead of “Nine years” (81)
• “Gentelmen” (85)
• An error in time (Narrator talks about Yong-ok as if she had already been introduced – though this could be a flaw in the story?
• “To tell with tickets” 87
• as well as some as some of the standard translation errors of the time (e.g. “from” meaning “since”).

Still, the parts of the story that seem obscured by non-shared culture are more than balanced out by the clever way So has characters offhandedly and naturally discuss the bigger issues of the time.

So’s light touch is put to an almost macabre canvas in The Way To Kumsansa Temple. The story begins as a trifle and ends as an icicle, with a callous and con-man of a youth traveling with a more phlegmatic older man to a destination that.. well .. changes. The story ends with a punch line that is more like a punch in the stomach.

Based on these two stories, I’d be interested to find any other translations of So Chong-in’s work.

Target, by Yi Chong-jun suffers from being obvious – the title give it away as soon as a reader completes the third page of the story. Worse, the often narrator, Chu-ho, carries around an animus based on the fact that he is called yeonggam, yet what yeonggam means is never explained! (spoiler – it means “old man”). This animus is further animated by the fact that the real yeonggam can pummel him at baduk. So, he takes up archery. He is impetuous and the archery teacher is a kind of Zen-jerk who says vague things (“Vain words are not required in learning archery. Words are to be abandoned.” Oddly, the old man says that in words) that suggest he has been chewing laurel leaves. The archery instructor won’t send his “flag boy” (the boy who flashes flags to show where an arrow has missed the mark – this boy is also his son) over to the targets because poor archers threaten him. Chu-ho, who wants to demonstrate his mastery, wishes that the instructor would, as Chu-ho has brought the yeonggam to the range, to demonstrate his superiority to them.

There is also a semi-comprehensible plot about the instructor’s daughter (it should be said that both the daughter and son are adopted), and the whole thing ends in a lyrically described, yet entirely idiotic, tragedy.

The Dream of a Mask, also by Yi Chon-jun, is called “The Dream of a Mark” on several pages, which gives it an entirely different meaning^^. It also has a phrase that made me wonder how deeply Yi Sang has influenced Korean literature with his 날개 – Did He fall on the ground while trying to soar up into the moonbeam-floating sky” (155) – seems similar to lines in “The Dwarf” and other short stories.

LOL – I’m probably suffering from confirmation bias here, but it’s not a bad thought that Yi Sang continues to influence Korean fiction.

In any case, the story is a brilliant metaphor about the price one pays to adopt the face of society – and it literally involves adopting faces. Somewhere between the story of a crisis of identity narrated by a loved one, possibly a sexual schism, and a werewolf story, it is brief, intense, and affecting. In some ways it is a reverse-image story to Lee Oyoung’s, The General’s Beard (soon to be reviewed right here on KTLIT!). The wife here is a bit compliant, but that’s standard issue for Korean fiction and she is at least given a rationale.

As usual, in the stories I really love, I don’t have much to say other than, “read it!”

Cock-Fighting, by Song Yong is a decent, but quite obvious, comparison between human life and the kill-or-be-killed world of cockfighting. Well, with one kind of creepy addendum – the cock-fighting is not competitive in the normal gambling sense, rather a competition that a bully creates in his own yard, between his own cocks, the champion of which he loathes. It’s creepy as a psychological study, particularly given the relationship the bully has to the narrator, although the ending has a particularly odious religious tone to it that reveals the entire story as a kind of setup.

Overnight at Matthew’s, by the same author, reveals that reservations that might have been raised by his first story are deserved – This work is full of incompletely comprehensible symbols, at least in translation. Too much goes on in this story to understand outside of the culture, and when the narrator decides to leave town, the reader might heave a sigh of relief.

A Boy In Search of Rest, by Hong Song-won shows how to carry off a story whose ending is implicit in its title. As in The Way To Kumsansa, there will be a chilly ending, but Hong, even after he hints at the ending, teases the reader that there will be something else in store.

This is a brutal story about a brutal time, and between the initial and concluding lines

“Late in the night”

And

“I can’t stand it, sister. I want to die.”

Lies a world in which broken connections mean broken lives.

At some point I’m going to have to go back and re-read all the books from this series, but at this moment I think this is one of the best of them.

-------------------------
purely subjective things

PUNDAN MUNHAK RATING – some stories might separate you from your tears.

BUCKWHEAT SEASON POINTS – some culturally different things, and some totally incomprehensible, but generally in stories so understandable that this is insignificant.

The Shoes From Yang San Valley (available only on Amazon used, and quite expensive or, for the clever buyer, much more cheaply on Alibris) is suitable for children or adults. It is written by the criminally forgotten author Kim Yong-ik, who you can read more about here. It is a novella, really, and like our previous review (Evening Glow) it focuses on the son of a butcher (again, about as low as you can get in Korean society) who is named Sang Do.

In this case the Sang Do lives next door to a traditional shoemaker, particularly a maker of wedding shoes. Sang Do’s family provides the shoemaker with leather for his shoes, and Sang Do is in love with the shoemaker’s daughter, Soo. As the economy changes, and old-fashioned shoes fall out of favor, the shoemaker becomes poorer and poorer. His daughter, Soo, is forced to go to work as a housegirl. Sang Do, commissions the shoemaker to create shoes for Soo, but the shoemaker is too poor to purchase the silk necessary to create them. Sang Do also provides this. In a fit of drunken bitterness, the shoemaker says some horrible things about the butcher and his family, and Sang Do overhears it.

At that point, the war intervenes, and Sang Do barely escapes to Busan, unfortunately leaving his parents behind. In Busan as a beggar, Sang Do comes across the old shoemaker, selling his shoes from a crate in an open market. Sang Do is too bitter to talk to the old man, but finds himself compelled to revisit his stall.

Coincidentally, Sang Do locates Soo, still working as a housegirl in Busan, but is too embarrassed to identify himself to her. Finally, Sang Do stops visiting the shoeseller. When the snow comes, he visits one more time, seeing only one pair of shoes left, and the shoesellers wife manning the crate. Sang Do steps in to buy the pair of shoes and he and the shoeseller’s wife talk to each other, with the wife revealing that the last pair of shoes was FOR Sang Do and the shoe-seller kept coming out every day, hoping that either Sang Do or Soo would come by and recognize them.

This sends Sang Do into a frenzy of activity that…. Well.. it would be a spoiler, but lets just say that this story does not end the way most of these Korean love stories end.

Kim actually wrote in English, so there is no translator here.

This is a great story, easy to read, full of history, and charming. Someone in charge of something should take a look back at the work that Kim Yong Ik did, because it is amazing, as is his personal story.

-------------------------
purely subjective things

HOW MANY BUCKWHEAT BLOSSOMS? None. Kim Yong Ik lived in the United States for a time and understood it well. Thus, when he wrote, he made his cultural points quite clear and it takes no special knowledge of history to enjoy his stories.

IT MUST BE DUSTY IN HERE, BECAUSE…. Something got in my eye and I’m misting up just a bit.^^

NOT SO VERY STORYENTALIZED – well, the story isn’t, but the illustrations by Park Minja are a bit on the childish/oriental side.

Evening Glow Cover

Kim Won-Il’s Evening Glow, translated by Agnita Tennant (who just also translated three volumes of Park Kyung-ni’s Land), is the story of a businessman, Kim Kapsu, returning to his countryside home for a funeral and re-connecting with and re-assessing the complicated strands of his previous life, one lived in the turbulent period of Korean civil war.

Kapsu is the son of a butcher (a problematic social status at that time, something akin to being an untouchable in the Indian caste system) who becomes a strong North Korean partisan and leads a local, and doomed, rebellion against the post-war status in his village. Kapsu is a sickly and clever lad; half the story is told from his vantage point as a child, and the other half told from his adult perspective as a successful businessman.

This is a useful narrative structure for a non-native reader, as the modern timeline gives a frame of reference for a reader who is not well aware of the political situation that partially determines the narrative of the flash-backs. Like Kim In-sook’s The Long Road this is an extremely tightly structured book, and that structure makes its sometimes complicated plot(s) easier to comprehend.

As the title suggests, the story begins and ends with two sunsets (“evening glow”), although sunsets that are described entirely differently. The first sunset is blood-red, emblematic of the blood that flows freely in this novel, and undifferentiated:

The color of dry blood, the evening glow picked up the end of the thread of flickering memories. (3)

The final sunset is much more complicated:

You could not say the sunset was simply red. Close examination would reveal an exquisite mixture of colours, but people say an evening glow is red. Dark yellow, pale blue, even gray were mixed with it. Was it because people liked to lump things together that they called it “red?” (258)

This symbolic change, of course, is meant to represent a change in Kapsu’s understanding of his own history and how it impacts his present; a message, obviously, that Kim intends/hopes to apply to the greater Korean society.

Kim does himself and the reader a great service by rarely actually showing violence, rather having it occur off-stage. Kapsu’s father is presented as a brute of a man in his family and interpersonal relationships and yet Kim delicately outlines the structure of the family loyalties that tenuously survive the butcher’s immolation of his family and attempted immolation of his community. Very little is portrayed in black and white in this novel and that’s a testament to Kim’s writing and Tennant’s translation.

The butcher, both because of his doubly low social status (peasant and butcher) and his rage, is deeply involved in a partisan plot to take over the village and punish landowners and other bourgeoisie. We watch, through Kapsu’s eyes, as the plot unfolds, is temporarily successful, and then unravels completely. During the course of this plot arc, the father is revealed to be a butcher in pretty much all senses of the word.

A sub-plot deals with Kapsu’s tangled relationship with Pae Josu, one of the original village partisans, and through this plot Kim deftly shows how complicated personal and political relationships can become in times of civil trauma.

Other sub-plots and themes loop in and out of the story, coming and going with a quiet deftness. Kim handles these threads neatly and they often tie together in unexpected but pleasant (from a technical standpoint) ways. Several times during the concluding chapters of the novel I found myself involuntarily nodding my head and thinking, “aha, that’s why!…..” a certain character had said or done something in preceding chapters.

The translation is quite good, with occasional oddities that jar slightly. “Loose” is occasionally used for “lose.” There are some UK vocabulary choices that are a bit eccentric: “Berk” for instance relies on a Cockney rhyme that several friends from the UK couldn’t explain and “skive” is a weird way (to US ears) to say avoid responsibility. The phrase “as they say” is repetitively used, unfortunately both to indicate someone who is wisely reciting Chinese maxims and also  to indicate someone reciting simple folk sayings – for me, this meant I had to stop at each usage and figure out if wisdom was being imparted, or thoughtless memes were being passed along. Still, half of this complaint is based on the fact I’m from the US^^ and in general the translation is literate and free-flowing.

This is a moving story, clearly translated and although it is kind of a pundan munhak piece, it is also a story about family, friends, relationships, healed wounds, forgiveness and the way life conspires to entangle us all.

-------------------------
purely subjective things

YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN WARNING! For the occasional odd translation choices and ridiculous cover price ($25!!) – Dear Academic Presses, cut out the insane prices if you want anyone to read your books!

HOW MANY BUCKWHEAT BLOSSOMS? Only one Buckwheat Blossom – While the flashback sections are full of deep-culture that historians of the period will enjoy, Kim does a brilliant job giving them ‘in the moment” meaning that carries the story.

The Long Road

The story is of two brothers, Han-yeong and Han-rim, reuniting for a boat trip triggered by their mutual interest in a very unusual Korean,  Myeong-U, who has managed to wrangle Political Refugee (PR) status in Australia. Han-yeong is also pondering the results of his recent attempt to re-establish connection with Seo-yeon an ex-lover who he left in Korea seven years ago.  These three expats, are of quite different types. Han-rim left Korea under a nearly literal cloud of marijuana smoke and political suspicion. Han-yeong is escaping his own complicity in the failure of his relationship and desires to become a ‘cog’ in something. Myeong-U is a kind of “accidental tourist” who achieved his expat status through a grimly amusing series of intentional accidents.

Together they tear at each other, poking for weak spots and exposing all they have left behind, what they still long for, and re-establishing some senses of community. Though the bulk of the action is on that boat, three family-related subplots are revealed in flashbacks (if anything, the plot is so finely balanced in these triangles that it occasionally seems a bit contrived) that give additional motivation to each character.

It is interesting to compare this book to Choe In-ho’s Deep Blue Night (in fact I will make this comparison in a later post because, to be polite, The Long Road seems strongly based on it), because it covers the same sort of territory – how unrooted Koreans lose meaning and turn on each other and themselves. This is expressed in a subplot featuring Han-rim’s most successful song in Korea, the name of the book, The Long Road, the lyrics of which are:

You’re going far away, don’t say it’s lonely.
You please don’t be scared
You will have everything someday
You’re leaving on a long road,
don’t say you’re lonely,
don’t’ say you’re afraid,
someday you’ll have everything,
the day you want,
in that land.

Han-rim has taught this song to Joseph, the Australian pilot of the boat, but when Joseph sings it Myeong-U freaks out and yells that Han-rim has sold his soul, apparently by translating it into English and teaching it to a ‘foreigner.’

Similarly, Han-yeong gives an interesting description of the alienation that comes with being an expat, even an assimilated one, “Ultimately they were Australians, and he was an immigrant. But that did not explain it adequately. The issues were trivial, almost inexplicable.  …. But his desperation was trivial. What if the reasons for his alienation had been more serious? (29-30)

Finally, the book explores the separations between expats, “If your country and my country are different, then where in the world is our country” (90-91).

So, some predictable themes, but told solidly and in an entirely different context from most translated Korean fiction.

The translation here is good, despite the fact that Han-yeong has two different names in the first few pages. The good translation is no surprise as Stephen Epstein has done this kind of translation before, in Who Ate Up All The Shinga? by Park Wan-suh and Contradictions, by Yang Gui-ja.

Worth picking up if you see it, though I’d try and grab it used for $10 (on Amazon) instead of paying nearly $23 for a book that is a bit on the brief side.

-------------------------
purely subjective things

YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN WARNING! If you’ve read Deep Blue Night, you’ve really already read this book.

HOW MANY BUCKWHEAT BLOSSOMS? .5 Buckwheat Blossoms, the cultural content in this will be completely understandable to any reader.

NOT SO VERY STORYENTALIZED credit for a decent cover.

RESPECT YOUR ELDERS! Well, points (or not?) again for glossing Deep Blue Night, but also a call out to Cho Se-hui’s “Spinyfish” chapter of The Dwarf.

Cover of Hwang Sunwon's "Lost Souls"

Lost Souls is a collection of three smaller collections of Hwang Sunwon. Brilliantly translated by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton it is comprised of Pond, a collection Hwang wrote in the 1930s while in college; The Dog of Crossover Village published in 1948, and; Lost Souls published in 1958.

This is eventually a great collection, but one that is initially difficult to get into for two reasons having to do with the chronological order of the three included collections. First Hwang was not at his strongest as a writer at the outset of his career, and second because his work was initially constrained by political exigencies of his time. Some of this is explained in the afterword, by which time it is too late for most readers, who will have plowed through the first section to the really good stuff, or put the book down. Suffice it to say that the Japanese colonialists were not all about stories of social reality and Hwang had to work under that restriction.

The afterword also notes that Hwang was judged harshly because he was seen as too lyrical (he does get a bit purple, even in translation) and not possessing a “historical consciousness.”  Which is certainly true of his first collection here, Pond – as I read it I was pretty well bored with everything but its style, which I should note was enough to keep me reading. By the second collection, however, Hwang is churning along at full speed and to a Western eye the accusation that Hwang is insufficiently historically conscious seems ludicrous  as the stories seem to teem with social and political comment.

The stories in Pond lack any real gravity. They are vividly told, but often lack characterization, are relatively plotless, frequently lack conclusion, and meander.  I read them wondering why there was no center to them, a question I began to ask more stridently as I moved into The Dog of Crossover Village and Lost Souls, which were both tightly plotted and focused.

This is not to say that the stories in Pond are completely without charm, in fact the vivid style is quite impressive, it just seems to be in the service of very little.  Couples lazily circle each other and never quite connect (The Pond, Trumpet Shells) while Hwang spends long, elliptical passages describing insects, vegetation, and the fall of shadows. It’s all very moody, with an elegant structure of words hung on slightly off-kilter scenes that just don’t connect with a reader. I think it is emblematic that the editors, in the afterword, don’t bother to discuss any of these stories individually.

In the The Dog of Crossover Village portion of the book, this turns around rather sharply and if a reader finds the Pond stories a bit confusing or bizarre, skipping ahead to Lost Souls will provide an immediate tonic. The first story, Booze, is amusing as a man ‘reclaiming’ his house from the Japanese slowly turns it, and his life, into a kind of doppleganger of the Japanese colonialism. The characters are sharply drawn, and sharply opposed and the story ends (unlike many of the previous stories!) in a scene of tragic comedy.

Toad is the story of two old friends who use each to victimize and old lady in the midst of a terrible housing shortage, while House is a brilliant story demonstrating that not only is there more than one way to skin a cat (in this case accumulation of land by the new landowning class), but that gambling is baaad^^. Bulls follows a young man through a rite of passage, and To Smoke a Cigarette is a neatly plotted vignette in which the time it takes to smoke a hand-rolled cigarette is the time it takes to forget. Finally, My Father tells a sad but noble story about the cost of surviving the Japanese, while The Dog of Crossover Village (which I disliked the first time I read) tells the amusing (the villagers, at least, are all amusingly self serving) tale of a dog and partial redemption.

The Lost Souls section does not include one story, Mountains, for reasons not explained in the afterword. The afterword likes it as the best section of the book, but I have it as a close second as it occasionally dabbles in the apparent randomness of the first section.

Deathless is one of these stories. Although the plot is tight, it also spends some time wandering around in a bucolic haze. In Deathless a very evil traveling salesman attempts one last scam whose success depends on a rather arbitrary trick at the end.

Lost Souls, unaccountably a favorite of Korean and editors, is the weakest story in the last third of the book, featuring one of those “poor citizens adrift in currents beyond their control” stories.  This may be representative of reality at the time, or sensible in the relatively agency-less world of Korean fiction, but it reads as inevitable and dour to a Western sensibility. Further, it relies on an initial plot twist that seems somewhere between arbitrary and stupid from a Western perspective.

Pibari seems a return to that kind of well-described but poky rural reverie with which the book began. But this is a feint that is shockingly broken by the behavior of the title character and her motives as revealed at the story’s conclusion.

Voices is a hallucinatory story of war and death which features, well, hallucinations and misunderstandings which unravel a life. It’s a short story, but full of vivid images and by its end you feel the complete destruction of the narrator, although he is continuing with his life.

A great collection (hey, did I just upgrade it) with a great translation.

YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN! Note: The print in this volume is excruciatingly small, even for an old dude with reading glasses.

HOW MANY BUCKWHEAT BLOSSOMS? The three sections vary, with the first being very culture-specific in both content and meandering style, something like 3.75 blossoms out of 5. The next two have plenty of culture specific information, but it is presented in plots that are easily accessible. So, overall, I’m giving this only 3 Buckwheat blossoms out of 5. This is a very readable book for someone with no background in Korean culture, particularly as it goes on.

The Cruel City Cover

The Cruel City is one of those anthologies that might have made sense in Korean language and culture, but which seem illy conceived and unfocused in English-language practice. Hints that this might be the case are present even in the introduction, which not only completely neglects to address one of the stories in the book, but also at least twice notes the likelihood that “Koreanness” has been lost in translation including the alarming:

His dialogues are distinguished by a rare quality of concentration and compactness which may not have been satisfactorily carried over in translation. I believe, however, that this is merely one of the many losses that accompany translation of literary works.

and:

We do not know if the works presented here will be able to give the feel of what can only be called “Koreanness” to our foreign readers.  Part of the characteristic quality in Korean language necessare for an inside look into the knowledge and image Korean people have of the world has inevitable been lost through translation and this loss may well have weakened the impression of Koreanness in the works.

Certainly, among its brethren in the Si-sa-yong-o-sa  “The Best Korean Short Stories” collections, it is not among the best.

Thematically the anthology is meant to be loosely tied to the concept of the city, but with two exceptions, doesn’t really seem to deal with the city all that much.

The first story, Chong-in’s A Journey actually tells the story of a small town well outside the city and the experiences of an unlucky woman passing through. The characters all seem overdrawn, caricatures of rubes, and everyone acts hysterical at every opportunity. By the time the unlikely plot has unspooled, and our hero is back on her way to the big city.

Choe Il-nam’s The Tottering Castle is the story of a country man who educates himself and marries a very rich woman in the city. He feels a bit put upon by relatives who hit him up for money, and when his mother moves in from the South, marital woes ensue. The story seems to be more about Korean inter-generational stress (which the story overlooks pointing out, perhaps because this would obvious to any Korea reader) and a marriage that was based on shaky foundations from the outset.

The Mobius Band, by Sho Se-hui, is part of the much larger novel The Dwarf which I have reviewed here. It’s a good story, with a nice structure and a brief, violent interregnum which does a nice job of expressing the tension, even hatred, between the dispossessed and the powerful. If you want to read this, however, it’s worth purchasing the whole book, in which all the other stories are equally powerful and blend into a coherent whole.

A Small Experience is by Pak Wan-suh, but it lacks her typical punch. The story is sad, a hapless man caught in a very small crime and the layers of corruption his wife must navigate to extricate him. But nothing really happens (perhaps that is part of the point – the banality of it) and the ending is restrained to the point of nearly fading out.

Yi Jong-chun’s Cruel City is an opaque (the introduction calls it Kafka-esqu, but I was hard pressed to find that) allegory about..well.. freedom somehow, but how it relates to the city is difficult for a reader to determine. I didn’t mind reading it much – it is well written – but I was unclear on what I was supposed to feel at its conclusion.

A Torch-light for the Magpie Nest by So Tong-hun is a sad story of illiterate peasants who vainly hope the some very old technology, acupuncture, can cure the horribly deformed feet of their son. It is a touching story, but has no apparent connection to the city, or industrialization.

Windfall by Hwang Dok-yong  hits marginally closer to target, though it is sometimes difficult to navigate its tangled multiple plots. It is the story of a small village that has, for now, escaped, redevelopment and a day on which many things tangle up, but in the end, refreshingly, everything somehow turns out. It seems to be a meditation on the ways in which a small community can, despite schisms, support itself. So it is about some kind of “city” though scarcely a cruel one.

All in all, the lack of focus of this anthology and many of the stories, makes it one of the anthologies to give a pass on; at least until you have read your way through the many other, and better, collections that have been reviewed at KTLIT and elsewhere.