My novel The Book Club Paper Folding Club started with a simple idea. I belonged to a book club when I was in middle school, and there was an incident in the school library involving a ghost. The memory is so intense that I couldn’t forget what happened for a long time, though I never thought I’d make a story out of it. I’m not sure why I decided all of a sudden to write about the incident of the ghost in the library that occurred so long ago. I’d intended to write a story about paper folding. A few years before I wrote the novel, an acquaintance gave me a book on paper folding, to my great delight; since then, I’d harbored the idea of writing a book about it. Then one day, the incident with the ghost from my middle school years merged with this idea, giving life to The Book Club Paper Folding Club.

        My own experience with the ghost in the library is a far cry from what takes place in the book. I toned it down quite a bit to integrate it into the story; what actually happened was more brutal. My original idea went like this: Seyeon, the main character, and her friends are folding paper in the library when they see a ghost outside the window. While chasing it, they run into a peculiar woman dressed in a hanbok. I expanded the story so that the woman asks Seyeon to make her a paper crane. Seyeon agrees and gives the woman the paper crane she makes, which the woman burns. Just then, Seyeon spots the ghost she had seen out the window, but both the woman and the ghost vanish without a trace. Even as I wrote it, I didn’t know what secrets lay hidden in this passage. I simply wrote what came to mind. After the strange woman and the ghost disappear, Seyeon attempts to return to the library, but succeeds only with the help of a paper panda she’s folded.

        I finished writing it as a short story and sent it to Changbi Publishers, who had asked me to write something. As I wrote the story, which later became the first chapter of The Book Club Paper Folding Club, I became attached to Seyeon and her friends Momo and Sora. I also wanted to untangle the mystery concealed in the story. Who was the girl that appeared outside the library window? Who was the suspicious woman in the hallway? And why did she ask Seyeon to fold a paper crane for her?

        Whenever a question comes to me while writing, I search the Internet. I looked up “paper cranes,” and came across something that held my attention. The origin of folding cranes and making wishes, it said, had something to do with war. During the Japanese occupation of Korea, the Japanese sent Korean boys to fight in the war as soldiers; at the same time, they established origami clubs in elementary schools, and had schoolchildren fold paper cranes that were sent to student soldiers, encouraging them to do their best to bring victory to Japan. I’m still not certain as to the authenticity of this tidbit of online information. But as soon as I read this unconfirmable story, I realized that the reason I started writing The Book Club Paper Folding Club was to write precisely that kind of story—a story about young people who lived during the Japanese occupation.

        But I still didn’t have the slightest idea what sorts of things I’d uncover through writing it. I tend to come up with a secret first, then write a novel in order to solve it. I don’t write stories whose endings I already know from the get-go. For me, the beginning of a story lies in a secret, and when the secret is unlocked, the story, too, comes to an end. A number of mysteries are intertwined in The Book Club Paper Folding Club. Together with Seyeon, Momo, and Sora, I took my time working out the mysteries.

        Of course, I knew more than the three girls did. First, I knew that their present-day school overlapped the school of the past. Seyeon’s was an old school, which had existed during Japanese rule. I’d decided that there was a paper folding club in the school in the past as well as in the present, and that the members of the club from both eras would meet in the second half of the novel. Even when I was about halfway through writing it, I’d planned on having Seyeon witness something shocking in the second half; the plot included the deaths of the club members who had been young at the time of the Japanese occupation.

        As I began to write the second half, however, something held me back from letting the plot unfold. I felt reluctant; I just couldn’t do it. I was unable to write a single sentence for months on end. So I went on looking for reference works about schoolgirls during the Japanese occupation. To write the novel, I had to know how the youth of the day—girls especially—spent their time, what they looked like, and what was on their minds.

        As I searched, I stumbled upon one surprise after another. I never would have thought I could write a historical novel before I started working on this one. My knowledge of history wasn’t deep enough, and I didn’t feel up to doing the research. I didn’t think I had any interest in history. But the novel kept pulling me toward the early twentieth century. Just as Seyeon came to meet girls from the past while unraveling the mystery of the paper crane, I became increasingly drawn into the past.

        The biggest shock was my own ignorance. The idea of independence activism by female students brought only the patriotic martyr Yu Gwansun to my mind. Why had I thought that the March First Movement was the only one of its kind? Reading through the materials I found, I learned that such movements had persisted throughout the Japanese occupation of Korea. In addition, I learned that women did not merely help male independence activists as their assistants but engaged in autonomous, self-directed activities, and led independence movements by girls as well.

        As oppression by the Japanese Empire intensified, educated women who had studied abroad in Japan returned to Korea and taught girls in schools. These women—once girls themselves—now became teachers passing on the spirit of resistance and independence to their students. It was a rare thing back then for women to attend school. So girls who did had a strong sense of duty or responsibility that they should use the knowledge they gained to give back to their nation.

        Writing The Book Club Paper Folding Club stamped out my prejudice and ignorance. I was more than aware of names such as An Junggeun and Yun Bonggil, but I hadn’t heard much about Kim Maria or Hwang Esther. I wasn’t familiar with the Society of Patriotic Women or the Pine and Bamboo Society, either. Before writing this book, I had no idea that there had been countless women independence activists and organizations, and that these women didn’t just support their activist husbands, but led their own efforts to contribute as much as they could.

        As I worked on the novel, I was able to form a more solid picture of girls who lived during the Japanese occupation. I couldn’t find much material on schoolgirls of the era, but one book was of great help to me: The Movements and Daily Lives of Schoolgirls in Gyeongseong During the Japanese Occupation. This compilation of essays by various researchers is based on newspaper and magazine articles of the time, helping the reader picture the lives of girls back then. This book taught me something else I hadn’t thought of—that there were hair accessories, shoes, and such that were popular among schoolgirls at the time. Before reading this book, I had considered only the idea of girls being oppressed. I had only been able to imagine Yu Gwansun, especially in the midst of suffering.

        Girls living in the Japanese colonial era participated in anti-Japanese movements with a yearning for independence, actively protesting. But they were also greatly interested in things like hairpins and shoes—just like girls today. At last, I was able to picture an ordinary middle school girl, not only a victim of oppression. It was around that time that I made a visit to the former Jennie Speer Memorial School for Girls in Gwangju, where a girls’ independence movement actually took place. The memorial hall, a building remodeled based on the school that existed during the Japanese occupation, displayed materials on girls who took part in independence movements. I went into a classroom and found pictures of students from that era on the walls. Some were taken during school trips, and others during classes, like one with students huddling around a science experiment. I saw a group picture of students who had been released from jail, where they had been imprisoned for engaging in activism, but most of the photographs depicted students at school, carrying on their daily activities. Those faces—the moment I laid my eyes on them, the second half of my novel underwent a major change. I realized I couldn’t write a scene in which students with such faces were killed. That would take the novel in the wrong direction. The students didn’t die. They survived, and they must have gone on to endure difficult times.

        Some, of course, did not make it back. I wrote the second half of my novel thinking of both the students who made it back, and those who didn’t—both in the present day and in the past. I didn’t know how to pay tribute to them. As I wrote The Book Club Paper Folding Club, I was finally able to pay them a tribute in my own way, small as it was. Each time Seyeon made a paper crane and burned it at the shrine, I was there with her.

        Less than a week after I got back from Gwangju, I was on a train, where I came upon something I would never have expected. There was news on the TV, saying a woman named Kim Deokhwa was to receive an honorary high school diploma from Gwangju Speer Girls’ Middle and High School, her alma mater, eighty-five years after the year she was supposed to graduate. The scene from the news remains vivid in my mind. In 1937, when Korea was still under Japanese rule, Kim Deokhwa refused to take part in Japanese shrine worship and was unable to graduate. A group of students had withdrawn from participation, as a result of which the school closed down. The refusal was their way of protesting Japanese rule. The timeline coincided with that of my novel. Those were the students I was writing about.

        I was concerned that ending the novel with “girls who returned” would make it too much of a fantasy novel. But when I saw the news, I was able to find confidence in the ending. They came back, I thought. They really came back. All the girls who returned, and those who didn’t—history no longer seemed like just the bygone past. In writing my novel, I had a powerful realization that the present and past are intimately connected: that the people of the past have never been severed from me, not for a moment, but have always been with me.

        Customer, my third full-length novel, was a turning point for me. I began writing more stories centered on young people than on adults. Before, I’d always failed to write young adult novels because I’d see the teenage protagonist as someone separate from me. But in that book, something changed. For the first time, instead of thinking of it as a young adult novel, I simply let a teenager tell the story. Now I write with myself as a teenager in mind, because my own teenage self still has a big place in me.

        If you write a young adult novel that objectifies young people, the novel risks becoming a container for a moral message. A young adult novel can deal with ethics, but I don’t want to write one whose purpose is to preach my own ethical ideas to young readers. Likewise, I don’t want to write about the youth “as they should be.” Though I’m grown up on the outside, my teenage self still lives inside me, with issues and concerns yet unresolved; writing a novel is my way of doing my utmost to work them out. They may be either ethical or emotional in nature. It typically takes several years to resolve an issue, and the result is a book.

        It’s impossible, I think, to peg down the traits of Korean youth. When I was young, whenever I heard grownups trying to figure out my generation, I felt that everything they said was off the mark. I don’t, of course, think an attempt at academic analysis of a certain generation is entirely meaningless. But that isn’t what I want to accomplish with a novel. I always think of one person: the one inside of me. And the kids who were with me in the classroom during my school days. I recall the faces of the youth I ran into on the street. I don’t want to flatten them because I lack imagination. I think of their desires. I think of the desires, dreams, thoughts, beliefs, and concerns I had as a youth. Culture changes with time, but I’m interested in the human aspects that do not change. We sympathize with, and are moved by, even letters or stories penned by foreigners centuries ago—because certain elements that make us human remain unchanged even now, centuries later. The same is true for myself, both as a youth and as an adult. I have undoubtedly matured in some ways, but many things haven’t changed. In some ways, my younger self was better than I am today. What I consider most important in writing a young adult novel is not to alienate the youth. The moment you do, the character becomes flat. I have a similar approach to themes: a story whose ending I already know doesn’t hold my interest at all. I enjoy the process of unfurling a story centered around a character I have yet to become familiar with, a problem to which I have yet to find an answer. I like to draw unresolved issues from a well of the past, and figure them out along with my past self. That is probably why I keep on writing novels with young protagonists.

Translated by Jung Yewon

Lee Jongsan received Munhakdongne’s Fiction Prize for College Students  in 2012. Her works include the novels Customer, Mud, The Book Club Paper Folding Club, The Cat and I, and the horror story collection What’s in the Empty Shopping Bag.

Korean Works Mentioned:

Lee Jongsan, The Book Club Paper Folding Club (Changbi Publishers, 2023)

이종산, 『도서부 종이접기 클럽』 (창비, 2023)

Lee Jongsan, Customer (Munhakdongne, 2017)

이종산, 『커스터머』 (문학동네, 2017)

Seoul Historiography Institute, The Movements and Daily Lives of Schoolgirls in Gyeongseong During the Japanese Occupation (Seoul Bookstore, 2020)

서울역사편찬원, 『일제강점기 경성지역 여학생의 운동과 생활』 (서울책방, 2020)