Review 5v125u

Review – Early Spring, Mid-Summer Early Spring, Midsummer, may be the best book out of the Si-sa-yongo-sa Modern Korean Short Stories 10 book series. It contains couple of meditations on change, particularly Early Spring, Mid-Summer by Yi Munyol, a couple of historical/metaphorical tales of the cost of war, including Kim Won-il’s The Spirit of Darkness, and a couple of stories that mix their historical stories with great and sometimes shocking sadness, particularly, Pak Si-jong’s Two Minutes to Seven. The first of the historical/metaphorical stores is The Spirit of the Darkness by Kim Won-il is the story of a young boy in the time just before the Korean war. The narrator’s father is a Red, and lives in hiding. When the father is finally caught, it sends the boy on a journey about his village and in his mind in which he re flashes of time with his father, lashes out at his father for leaving the family, and oftentimes, is just plain hungry. The story has a sad ending, but is an excellent introduction to the collection and there’s some well placed explicitation in the story to help any readers unfamiliar with Korea at the time. Wings That Will Carry Us Both by Chon San-guk is the story of a lucky second birth in the family with a ‘seventh-generation-only-son.’ And, yet, this luck, as a Korean philosophical tradition suggests, leads not only to happiness, but also to anxiety and dread. In fact, in describing this mixed feeling, Son Sang-guk may have created the best and briefest literary introduction to the Korean notion of ‘han.’ Wings That Will Carry Us Both features one of the few ‘happy’ endings (although ambivalently so) in the collection, which can be read as a metaphor for the state of the “brother” countries of South and North Korea, or as the story of brotherly bonding. The Cave by Han Sung-won is perhaps the most difficult story in this collection to suss out, and it ends fairly abruptly and randomly. A little research indicates that the story is actually an excerpt from “Father and Son: A Novel,” which likely explains its appearing incomplete. In addition, the story literally translates Korean for relatives (i.e. an older uncle on a father’s side is called “Bigger Father”), which is pretty non-explanatory for readers not already well aware of Korean culture. The story is of two children “saved” by their father, who dooms himself in the process, and the unhappy lives they subsequently lead. The cave, the house of drunken Chu-man and his ive mother is clearly metaphorical, perhaps standing directly for war-time massacre (There were several awful cave-based massacres in modern Korean history, including the Goyang Geumjeong Cave Massacre or the Daranshi cave massacre on Jeju, and the Gok-Gye Cave Massacre)

There is some fairly clever writing involved as when the narrator’s father is confronted by the reds who claim him bourgeois. He responds with a logical argument and general claim that he hasn’t done anything wrong, to which the red semi-official responds, , and claims he hasn’t done anything. The red semi-official responds, “Nobody surrenders because he has done anything” (77) Even with that, however, this story made me wish I had the more complete version. Two stories in the collection are short tragedies. D.M.Z. by Yu Hyon-jong is the story of a charming little boy with a desire to travel. He picks up a stray cat and accidentally crosses under and over the DMZ by digging a hole, when he spots a deer on the other side of a fence. D.M.Z. is a brilliant little story, because even though the boy seems preternaturally lucky, the split in Korea as represented by the DMZ itself will not let him live. Readers familiar with Korean literature might think of it as a juvenile version of Lucky Day by Hyon Jin Gon. If D.M.Z. is a little bit of a downer, wait for Ten Minutes to Seven, the last story in the collection, which ends it with all the delicacy of a guillotine slamming down on a neck. Just a brutal story about two women, from very different generations, trying to get a last few minutes with their male relatives who are on a train that will ship them off to Vietnam. The remaining stories are, loosely, metaphors describing the price of non-war related change in Korea. The Relationshipby Yu Chae-yon is an awesome and different story about a man, a sort of idler, gets a job working as the arms and legs of a man paralyzed from the waist down. The idler even marries a wife and has a child for the millionaire. At the end, however, even permanently living

in the grand house of the millionaire, the narrator feels empty and alone. A well told story of psychological dispossession that can clearly be read as a comment on the cost of ‘merely’ economic advancement. The same kind of reading can be applied to The Sound Of The Gong, by Mun Sun-tae. Main character Ho Chil-bok has had his home erased by a dam, so he moves to the city, where he doesn’t fit in and also loses his life. Driven slightly mad, he gets a gong and returns to his old home, now surviving precariously as a fishing destination. Ho’s ‘gonging’ scares the fish and he is chased off by locals who see him as a threat to their livelihood. Strangely, even when he is chased off, he continues to be heard. Early Spring, Mid-Summer, by Yi Munyol is a collection of short snippets that are meant to be minimorality-plays, sometimes bordering on lectures, all featuring the character Paek-Po. Paek-po, introduced as the idea of an everyman. The little snippets lay out his life and beliefs in a way that would take much longer in “straight” narrative. The ending reminded me in some ways of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce, except no one dies.^^ It is clever how Yi uses two of Korea’s seasons, perhaps the best and the worst, as symbols.

Review: Wayfarer: New Fiction By Korean Women Wayfarer: New Fiction by Korean Women is edited by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, which is typically an indication that the contents will be of high value and quality. The introduction, which is uncredited but sounds like the work of the Fultons, is a quick gloss of the historical position that women writers inhabited; to put it in a short phrase, a very bad position. It also discusses the introduction of hangul, and how that introduction created a small opening for female authors and how, then, modernization and colonialization, that began to pry that small opening wide open. This was by no means an easy process, as women were intentionally defined as “yoryu chakka,” or women writers (there were even sub-categories to this taxonomy, and the early history of even slightly successful female writers was not good (A good book that looks more closely at this period is the collection “Questioning Minds” which traces the arc of female writers from 1917 to the present). In the 1970s the damn finally collapsed, and it is from that era that this collection begins. The theme in Wayfarer is alienation, and the theme is hammered on. Almaden, by Kim Chiweon s that short list of Korean fiction sited overseas, telling the story of an unhappy married woman who clerks at her families’ liquor store. She engages in an imaginary affair with a customer who is quite, quite distant from her husband. The routine of marriage has driven love from the couple’s relationship, but an imaginary relationship brings no relief in the end. Ch’oe Yun’s The Last of Hanako is a great story, which has been translated elsewhere in a Jimoondang / LTI Korea (and is being translated yet again in the ASIA Modern Fiction Bilingual Edition – I often wonder why the compulsion to translate and retranslate the same works; to me it makes the literature seem small?). A middle-aged man (known only as “he”), unhappy with his life, is in Venice partly in search of Jang Jin-ja, who had once served as something like muse to ‘him’ and his group of male friends. Jang was nicknamed “Hanako” (“one nose”) only after she had been expelled from the group of friends, and her real name was never spoken by them again. Hanako is an outsider who works her way in, and while her differences are cherished for a while, eventually the (male) society kicks back with cruel force. There are some extremely well written scenes including the expulsion scene, which well portrays the some-times forced nature of the Korean drinking scene (often inextricable from the larger Korean social scene). There is a big “reveal” about Hanako’s life (which I will not spoil), which the average western reader will probably figure out after 10 pages of reading. But this is a really good story. Human Decency by Gong Ji Young is one of the smaller works in the book as it is parochially Korean, pitting a facilely “international” character against a “true Korean hero” who has stayed inside the grinder of Korean politics. The narrator is self-tortured by her own history and has a quite obvious loathing for all things foreign. All this adds up to a work highlighting han and Korean exceptionalism of the simplest kind. Human Decency is also relentlessly nostalgic. In the present all the “true” rebels are dead or sold out – a convenient Manicheism that is often used in literature; kill a few rebels so they can never be seen turning into businessmen or spaghetti salespeople.

Scarlett Fingernails by Kim Min-suk, is a touching and interesting story of a wife who wants to temporarily leave her family to go see her father on the occasion of his 61 st birthday, which will also be the date of his release from prison. This is complicated by the fact that her husband is unhappy that she will go, and her mother is quite upset and has basically given up on her husband. When the mother tells the story of the father she basically says he wasn’t a spy – he returned to see his family, but when captured wouldn’t confess and recant his redness – the mother also says she won’t divorce him so he can keep his family up North safe, in essence, he can’t recant his Redness for fear of repercussions to them. The mother sends down some food and clothing for the dad. The family guilt by association may seem strange to a western reader, but of course it is a Korean tradition of long provenance (as the life of Kim Satkat, the “Rainhat Poet” demonstrates). The story has dual surprise endings, and although it deals with alienation, it also demonstrates a remarkably resilient family. Dear Distant Love by Seo Yeong-eun begins with Mun-ja, an “old maid” in a publishing firm where younger employees come and go and despise/pity her. For no immediately apparent reason, she seems content, above it, even thinking she has fooled her co-workers. She is confident she can live through anything, but on this day she must raise money from her aunt. She has a rather feckless lover with whom she share a long and tangled history, and she seems willing to put up with almost any slight or difficulty with an air of brave optimism, in a way reminiscent of Na Hyeseok’s Kyeonghui. This is an interesting take on one approach to life and love. Identical Apartments, by Pak Wan-so tells the tale, through the eyes of a married daughter, of an extremely extended family living in one large apartment. Somehow the wife has focused on the indignity of having to listen for her husband ringing the doorbell. Finally, they move into their own apateu. The wife befriends the woman across the way and apes her style and learns to cook from her. Soon, the narrator is unhappy again, for a long list of things, and to my eye this story is more about someone who is perpetually unhappy (the hatred of doorbell, for instance, conveniently morphs into a hatred of the peephole at the new apartment). Pak’s point appears to be commodification and progress create clones; however, really, in the villages, who was the iconoclast? As the narrator comes to hate everything for which there is a duplicate her attitude seems to be a form of clinical depression or klonosphobia (a word I just created from Greek roots!), and that substantially dulls Pak’s point. There is some clever writing, and a rather nifty plot turn at the end, but this was still a bit draggy for me. The Flowering of Our Lives by Kong Seon-ok is written in interior monologue and the narrator comes off as super-hyper or slightly schizophrenic. This is not doubt intentional, but it makes reading the text something like sitting next to the crazy dude on the bus who rambles on about various conspiracies. The story is also stuffed with rhetorical questions, a familiar rhetorical approach in Korea speech, but difficult to navigate on the page. The story wanders between the narrator’s relationship with her mother, and the narrator’s relationship with her own daughter, as well as two female friends, one of the past and one of the present. The narrator describes herself as a “rebel” (although her rebellions seem quite quotidian) due to her “distress.” The whole point of it is the narrator’s essential question about herself, “What is it that distresses me?” But answers are never forthcoming, and the story ends on a random note. This may be a failing of my gender, as the introduction notes, the story is: Striking. The narrator of that story is perhaps the most complex character in this anthology. In turns indignant, despairing, sad, brazen and sympathetic, she has begun to come to with her contradictory impulses. Here is a vivid example of the sensibility of Korean women writers of the 1990s. More than any of the other stories in this volume, this one is for and about women. For me, there was never any indication of “coming to ” with anything, and the moodshifts seemed random. Wayfarer by O Chong-hui is the wonderful/horrific story of Hye-ja, a recently divorced woman left alone in a house. Told semi-surrealistically (compare to the previous story this works really well) it begins in a way that reminds me a bit of The Wings, with a confused narrator living in a semi-dream state. The reasons for this state are unpeeled like an onion. The storytelling is delicate and Hye-ja’s psychology is well explored and although her mental states change, the changes seem organic throughout. With several brutal twists, the story winds to an end with the essential unfairness of Hyeja’s plight revealed and Hye-ja returned, with quite different meaning, to the image that opened the story. This is a brilliant story of the burdens place on women by Korean society, and worth the price of the book alone.