No matter where one begins, every tale, every story, and above all, every novel, comes to an end. This end, even in the case of death, is also a new beginning. The stories “multiplied” through those who listen or who read always flow away from their point of origin, and though we may be uncertain about a story’s beginning or its middle, we know that its end is the end. This is why Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Storyteller,” says that “the storyteller has borrowed his authority from death,” reminding us that our own stories also have an end. 

     Following in the footsteps of those who came before him, the masterful storyteller Cheon Myeong-kwan uses allegorical language to narrate a brief history of the country in which he lives. 

     In his novel Whale, we are offered a playful take on that staple of magical realist novels: the foolishness of people living a traditional village life, unaware of technological developments, as they encounter the tools, machines, and lifestyles of the modern world. This change in the town begins when the gukbap restaurant run by an ugly, spiteful old woman passes into the hands of the enterprising young woman, Geumbok. With the arrival of the train to Pyeongdae in the second part of the novel, we bear witness to the transition from rural life to modern life and capitalism; yet it is the American lifestyle, learned from the movies, that represents the modern world. When a brick factory opens in Pyeongdae offering job opportunities, scoundrels and vagabonds flock to the city like the “gold rush” in Hollywood films, and Pyeongdae becomes a “city,” complete with workers, politicians, and a mafia. An economy like this is indeed no different than a gold rush, but when the old woman’s spirit appears in the movie theatre, the town meets its end. 

     Cheon places women at the center of his novel. Chunhui, whose name means “girl of spring” even though she is likened to a monster because of her large body; Geumbok, Chunhui’s mother, seduces men with a fragrance from her genitals but becomes increasingly masculine as she ages; the ugly, spiteful old crone who runs the gukbap restaurant; the one-eyed woman, blinded in one eye by her mother, the old crone, and sold off to a beekeeper, who insists on behaving like a spoiled whore even though she rises out of prostitution to ladyhood: these are the women whose stories we follow in Whale.

     The novel’s women are passionate, productive entrepreneurs who rely on their wits and their will to get up when they fall, who avail themselves of opportunities, who are able to sell their bodies if they have to, and whom we cannot subject to harsh judgment. 

     The novel opens with Chunhui, the hundred-and-twenty-pound Queen of Red Bricks nicknamed “Berkshire” by the guards, emerging from prison in her uniform and arriving on foot to the brick factory, but we only learn her back story in the third section of the book. Chunhui copes with human cruelty thanks to the genes she received from Geokjeong, who is implied to be her father. She is strong but, like her father, she is mute, and has a simple mind that does not develop.

     After a ten-year prison sentence for allegedly burning down the movie theatre, Chunhui returns to the brick factory and struggles to survive on her own, finding meaning in life by making bricks once again. She is briefly saved from her isolation when the son of a trucker, whom she used to arm wrestle as a child, returns to the brick factory. But when the free-spirited son of the trucker realizes that Chunhui is pregnant, he abandons her. 

     One of the most significant “laws” that determines the quality of a modern novel is doubtless the author’s skill with language. Forging turns of phrase unique to this novel, Cheon has elevated the slang of a sub-culture to the status of another character in the text. Occasionally speaking to the reader like the narrator of One Thousand and One Nights, he reminds us constantly that the novel we are reading is composed of hearsay.

     Through his narrative style and the world of his novel, Cheon extends his greetings to works by the masters of magical realism in Latin America, such as Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, Jorge Amado’s Sea of Death, and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It also stands side by side with the postmodern flourishes of Jorge Luis Borges. 

     The originality of Cheon’s Whale no doubt lies in his narrative mastery connecting the stories to one another and in his agile use of language, through which he draws on the specificities of Korean culture to trace a powerful relationship between the universal and the local. 

     Whale is like a sister to the works of many women writers from around the world. Like Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers, Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson, and especially Virginia Woolf’s Orlando with its gender-bending title character, Whale tells a fabular story of extraordinary, resilient women who exist by sheer force of will.

Translated by Nicholas Glastonbury

Rıza Kıraç

Writer, Screenwriter, Director