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).

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.

"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.