Twofold Song, by Yi Mun-yol, features a kaleidoscopic style that it quite unlike the two other pieces of his that I have read (Our Tortured Hero and An Appointment With My Brother). Yi’s style in this piece, something like the painting of Salvador Dali, combines absolute realism with passages of lovely surrealism. It is the…
The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 20 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul Lee Dong-Ha’s “A Toy City” tells the story of family moving to the city (having been kicked out of their small town by unnamed political pressures). In the course of this move the narrator’s father, a respected and loved…
From Powder to Powder by Kim HunLand of ExileEast GateArmonk, New York Many Korean short stories are about cycles. Sometimes this is the traditional (historical) Korean cycle of separation, diaspora and return, and sometimes the cycle is a far less optimistic one. Such is the case in Kim Hun’s “From Powder to Powder” which hammers…
The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 16 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul Choi In-Hoon’s “House of Idols” begins with an unnamed narrator and the sentence, “The war was over, the capital back in Seoul.” Despite the apparent “return to normalcy” of the first line, the story describes a world in which…