Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the detective story as a genre, born under the sign of deduction and intellectual play, has progressively embraced different periods and different geographies by developing complex literary systems: elegant British charades, sensual American crime novels, popular French or Italian atmospheric novellas. Some countries—like Iceland, the United States, Sweden, or South Korea—have even turned the detective story into a national genre in its own right. But the ingredients are always the same, always simple: an investigator who confuses, outwits or accompanies the reader, an enigma that sounds as complex to solve as an impossible mathematical problem, a dark part of society to explore.

  The same is true of the novels by Do Jinki, recently published in French by Éditions Matin Calme, which specializes in Korean literature. The character of Judge Gojin is in a way very typical: he takes on a Koreanised version of a figure similar to that of the great European detectives at the turn of the twentieth century, the policeman who is not quite a policeman. Like Sherlock Holmes, he’s a great psychologist. Like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, he’s also a man who inspires confidence, a reassuring figure who keeps his distance from the dramas he explores. A former judge, Judge Gojin is a member of law enforcement, but he’s also an outsider. He’s a maverick, who first seeks to unravel a mystery by the book and doesn’t play the vigilante.

  But that’s where the classicism of Do’s novels ends. This quickly becomes clear on reading Mental Suicide, the second novel to be published by Éditions Matin Calme. From the very first page, the writer seeks to lead his reader astray. The narrative alternates between different, sometimes contradictory, points of view, each of which cultivates a different enigmatic area, giving the story a syncopated, jolting rhythm where chiaroscuros are constant. This is true, for example, in the depiction of the character Kil Yeong-in: we don't know whether he’s a victim, a witness, an executioner, or a bit of all of these until the very last pages. The same goes for Yi Tak-o, a doctor with ambiguous morals, whose role could be that of Dr. Frankenstein, or of Judge Gojin’s nemesis; or he could be a false lead, a false culprit. The reader is quickly lost. Do’s talent is to leave the reader wondering, keeping us on the edge of our seats for more than 300 pages. In this context, Dr. Yi Tak-o’s consulting room, where he offers his patients “mental suicide,” is a literary invention of great importance. His aim is to kill part of his patients’ minds to push them into dissociative disorders. In fact, the characters lose touch with reality—particularly Kil Yeong-in, who goes to Yi Tak-o to cure himself of his melancholy following the sudden departure of his wife, whom he discovers had a lover.

  The drama of Mental Suicide, as we shall discover at the end, lies in the desire to reinvent oneself, to disappear by changing one’s life, personality and identity. It plays with the multiplication of personalities made possible by contemporary life, the internet and social networks—to the point of absurdity, even murder. In doing so, the novel, which is deeply rooted in a reality that is both Korean and universal, becomes almost fantastic. It comes close to a tale, a horror story, in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the great pioneers of the detective story. In the end, Gojin is clearly closer to Poe’s protagonist C. Auguste Dupin than to the detectives of Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle. He succeeds in finding the logic, the reason, behind the madness. A madness that turns out to be perfectly contemporary, perfectly credible and realistic—unlike the plots of Poe, which bordered on the unreal.

  Perhaps the most important lesson of Do’s beautiful second novel translated into French is this: today’s world, in Korea as elsewhere, has made Poe’s horrific narrative architecture possible and credible. Two centuries later, Do Jinki has turned Edgar Allan Poe into a realistic novelist.



Nils C. Ahl

Writer, Editor, Literary Critic for Le Monde