While I express my preferences between the books, it is worth considering that while some are better than others, for a little over $100 dollars these 25 volumes are  a very nice overview of modern Korean literature. This is partially a credit to LTI Korea / Jimoondang cleverly choosing author-based and novella-length books. This allows a lot of territory to be covered in a way that more formal “collections” can’t achieve.

With that said, and in order of publication, here are the books.

1. The Wings, by Yi Sang
   An absolutely necessary read by the spiritual predecessor to post-modern Korean writers, this short story hints at the disconnection caused by Japanese colonialism. Also includes the excellent short stories Encounters and Departures and Deathly Child.
2. A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball, by Cho Se-hui
   An absolutely necessary read detailing the human cost of Korea’s “miracle on the Han.” The longer version, The Dwarf, is even better.
3. The Cry of the Magpies, by Kim Dong-ni
   A  fair story of trauma caused by civil war. Also includes the short story Deungsin-bul.
4. The Wounded, by Yi Chongjun
   A good, but complicated, evocation of the trauma caused by civil war. Also includes An Assailant’s Face.
5. Deep Blue Night, by Choi In-ho
   An interesting story of Korean expatriates in California embarking on a road trip, and a journey through their own pasts.
6. The Ma Rok Biographies, by Seo Giwon
   Amusing but inconsequential stories of characters linked by name.
7. The Land of the Banished, by Cho Chong-Rae
   An absolutely necessary read. One of the best pundan munhak stories – Cho uses a bit of misdirection at the start of the story to add real flesh to a real villain.
8. Three Days in That Autumn, by Park Wan-suh
   A good but lesser work from a great author.
9. The Rainy Spell, by Yun Heung-gil
   A good but minor work that is more important to Koreans than it could ever be to overseas readers.
10. The Other Side of Dark Remembrance, by Lee Kyun-young
    An absolutely necessary read that neatly manages to describe a very modern Korea, but still tie it back to its tragic history.
    
11. With Her Oil Lamp on, That Night, by Lim Chul-Woo
    Decent, but obvious and a bit dated (even considering that it is from a particular historical era)
12. Between Heaven and Earth, by Yun Daenyoung
    One of the vaguest and least focused of the series
13. An Appointment with My Brother, by Yi Mun-Yol
    A good but lesser work from a brilliant author. This is a political lecture wrapped in a book (a new translation is due in Spring, from Azalea Press). There are far better books by Yi available online.
14. The Camellias, by Kim Yu-Jeong
    An absolutely necessary read set of stories about love. The Camellias is comic and light, The Scorching Heat is tragic, and A Wanderer in the Valley is hopeful, if cautious.
15. Rust, by Yang Gui-ja
    Two good but minor works (the second is Swamp) by a really great author
16. House of Idols, by Choi In-hoon
    A good but minor work.
17. My Innocent Uncle, by Ch’ae Man-shik
    An absolutely necessary read if just for the title story, which is a clever political satire. Also includes A Ready Made Life, which while a bit obvious is a Korean classic. Once Upon a Paddy is a one-note satire. partly because it is trying to make a difficult point.
18. Photo Shop Murder, by Kim Young-ha
    An absolutely necessary read which is one of only two books in the series (mainly due to when the series was published) hinting at some directions in post-modern Korean fiction. Both Photo Shop Murder and Whatever Happened to the Guy in the Elevator are brutally modern, and the latter is laugh-out-loud funny.
19. The Chronicle of Manchwidang, by Kim Moon Soo
    A  quite good story, and amusing. Situational comedy mixed with unfortunate situations engendered by Korean economic development.
20. A Toy City, by Lee Dong-ha
    A  good story, rendered minor by a much more complete version published later.
21. The Last of Hanako, by Ch’oe Yun
    An absolutely necessary read that lays bare the pressure for social conformity in Korea. Basically, anything Ch’oe writes is worth reading.
22. Chinatown, by Oh Jung Hee
    An interesting coming-of-age story, allied to a kind of “wheel of life” narrative that I found completely charming, if occasionally bleak. The other two stories, Wayfarer and The Release are also sharply told.
23. A Man, by Hwang Soon-won
    An adequate book. The title story has remarkably crass sexual politics and is difficult to read. The first story, The Dog of Crossover Village, remains opaque to me, though man other like it. Bibari is an interesting story of Jeju life. If you like this, be sure to chase down “Lost Souls” which has much more of his work, and better.
24. Human Decency, by Gong Ji young
    In competition with Between Heaven and Earth for least important in the series. Too obvious.
25. Hong Gildong, by Seo Hajin
    A light but entertaining semi-retelling of a Korean myth, it is paired with another re-telling of Korean myth, The Woodcutter and the Nymph. Like Kim Young-ha, a very modern writer.

So there you have it.. a clever collection of 26 novellas containing the work of some of the greatest writers of Korean modern fiction.

It's Possible This Will End Badly

An interesting combination of things involving Yun Heung-gil (who, lo and behold, has a Wikipedia entry) and particularly his short story Group Beating. Yun Heung-gil  is the author of Rainy Spell and The Man Who Was Left as 9 Pairs of Shoes.

The first thing  is  the PDF of Group Beating from the indispensable Korea Journal website (It is downloadable here as a scanned document, and only a tolerably readable one). The story is good on several levels. Yun can flat out write, and his cinema-verite/noir introduction to the building in which the story largely takes place is brilliant. Then, his cleverly plotted story,  clearly limns how social pressure can conspire to destroy individuality. Yun does this in parallel but intertwined plots. In the first plot  the stories’ protagonist loses his dream of ‘leaving’ and in the second a man is driven to suicide. The cleverness of the second plotline is that while society drives the man to suicide it is not by any formal method – the government is only slightly involved and even then merely as a trigger  – in fact it is ‘just’ the mere fact of society existing that allows it to bring its inexorable weight to bear. This is a sad story which packs quite a lot of meaning into not so many pages. The translation is only adequate, with at least one howler awaiting the attentive reader.

The second thing here is a short article entitled “Society’s Group Mentality and the Fate of Individuals” from Koreana magazine. This talks a bit about Yun and the story, and is a useful sidebar to the story itself. The article is sometimes a bit simple.

Finally, from the GwangJu (sic)  Blog, a review of  Rainy Spell by Elton LaClare. LaClare writes with a bit of tweed in his ink, but the review is a good (and, since LaClare evaluates Rainy Spell the same way I do, I’ll upgrade that “good” to “best.” ^^). LaClare’s  final point as to why Rainy Spell works is a key one – the drama of the story comes before the drama of “historical consciousness,” which often threatens to drown other translated Korean works.

Poking around the internet I came across this article on Yun in the Korea Times.

The article notes that, “Yun’s works are mostly based on the Korean War, depicting ordinary people and families torn apart by the ideologies of the North and South,” and yet he generally overcomes (a sort of contentious word here) that burden by personalizing his stories and giving them scope in relationships that are larger than the mere details of the social nightmares in which they are embedded.

Expressing a common theme in Korean literature, Yun explains his writing as something akin to escape, ““Through my imagination I could exact my revenge, overcome my obstacles and live out my desires,” he said. “Writing novels were the same as ‘leaving home’ to me.” He further goes on to tie this ‘leaving’ up in another common theme of Korean modern literature, the return home, ““Through my literature, I feel like I was able to bridge a gap between the two Koreas,” Yun said.”

Amusingly, the article can’t leave this relationship to be discovered by the reader, and makes it explicit:

One woman seemed to grasp his plight exactly, offering a statement summarizing the writer’s passion for written words. “It seems as if you are not only leaving home in your writing,” she said, “but also coming home.”

Still, there you have the diasporic/homeward arc of much Korean writing. It’s a decent article for fan and casual reader alike.

Semi-related, the meeting this article discusses happened in 2009 at  The Seoul Literary Society, which is a creation of the Swedish Ambassador to Korea (discussed here in the Times). Oddly, I can find no useful information on this group online. If anyone has contact info, or any further information, please feel free to drop it off to me, here.

The Rainy Spell

The story was written in 1978 and immediately became a Korean classic.  장마 (Jangma), or in a different  English translation Spell of the Monsoon Rain (To be honest, that seems ridiculous from the Korean) focuses on a post-war family with two grandmothers and their shared grandson in the 3^rd grade. The grandmothers agree to live together, but when the war comes the maternal grandmother’s son fights for the South while the maternal grandmother’s son fights for the Northern guerillas who continue to fight on in the South. This fraternal split also splits the grandmothers, although they continue to live under the same roof.

The family splits even farther when the “Southern” son is killed by North Korean soldiers. The young grandson, giving in to the lure of chocolate, reveals to secret police that the “Northern” son has been in his grandparents house, and at this point the entire family comes under state suspicion. The surviving (guerilla) brother is shortly captured.  This drives his mother nearly mad and after a visit to a shaman she comes to believe that he will return to the house on a day the shaman has predicted. Instead, a massive snake appears and the paternal grandmother passes out in shock. The maternal grandmother soothes the snake and persuades it to leave. This event fits a shamanistic narrative – that the snake is the spirit of the dead son – and the grandmothers re-unify over this event, although one of them shortly dies.

This plot is custom made for Korean readers, with the family bifurcated to directly resemble the national bifurcation, but Yun handles this subtly and you don’t have to know the particulars of Korean history to feel what is happening within the family.

Perhaps my brief summary demonstrated the translational problem. Korean families have quite complicated kinship systems based on patrilineal neo-Confucian social structure. To put it simply, almost every relative has a different name for their family position,

Younger Days

based on age, sex, and whose lineage the descend from. And generally, families live separately based on patrilineal lines (with wives being struck from their official family rosters when they marry and added into the new one). But Yen needs the two families to share one roof. In Korean this is not a narrative problem – each relative has a separate title within the complicated Korean taxonomy of families.

Not so in English, where we are forced to string awkward (to English eyes) strings of nouns and adjectives together to represent key relationships. It is a testament to the translator. The redoubtable Brother Anthony of Taize summarizes the problem:

(The problem) is exemplified in the maternal grandmother’s question to the boy-narrator: “Do you like your maternal uncle, or your paternal uncle?” In translation, the question sounds awkward, but that is about the only way to render it.

It does sound quite odd, and at the start of the novel it takes a few pages to get used to seeing these awkward nomenclatures, but translator Suh Ji-moon does her best to render these smooth within the larger story and if they are an irritation at the outset, that irritation quickly fades away as the story starts developing.

This is a good book and one that does a really nice job of outlining the split in Korean society while keeping a less knowledgeable reader interested in the family story (it was particularly clever of Yun, I think, to put in the subplot of the little boy being tricked into betraying his (paternal) uncle).

Following my other interests in these books:

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