What better tool than literature to challenge stereotypes? For a Western reader, the South Korean island of Jeju might conjure up images of beaches and mandarin trees, charming seaside resorts – perhaps an idyllic honeymoon. But for the writer Hyun Ki Young, born in Jeju in 1941, the picture is rather different. In Uncle Suni and Other Stories, a collection of ten short stories published in 1979, the author’s homeland is above all synonymous with ‘acute depression and grinding poverty’. Or at least, that is the narrator’s impression when he arrives on the island after years of absence. Having taken two days off work to attend his grandfather’s remembrance rituals, he has no inkling that these few hours will change his life irrevocably.

In the course of a conversation, he happens to learn of the death of ‘Uncle’ Suni, in fact a woman he knew well. She had recently spent several months living with him in Seoul, helping with the cooking. Hypersensitive, depressed, she had certainly seemed an odd character, but there had been nothing to suggest she would take her own life when she returned to Jeju. What could have been going through her mind?

Hyun’s great skill, in this long and magnificent novella, lies in his orchestration of a slow and dramatic crescendo. By exposing the truth behind this single death, the author gradually shines a light on the history of the island as a whole. In the late 1940s, Jeju became the setting for a struggle between pro- and anti-communist forces which ended in bloodshed. Hyun was one of the first to write about the insurrection, its repression, and the ensuing massacres. We travel back and forth in time with him, reliving the fear of the persecuted inhabitants as they hide in the black caves of this volcanic island, at the foot of Hallasan. We bear helpless witness to the razing of their village. We experience the freezing winter, the constant fear, the appalling, gnawing hunger. And we piece together Suni’s forgotten fate, from her youth to her violent death in a field, a patch of land that is deeply symbolic because of the human blood and bones it has absorbed – including, we learn, those of her own children. 

Throughout his career, which began in 1975, Hyun has been striving to describe the psychological trauma wrought on the people of Jeju through history, and in so doing, to puncture the silence maintained by successive governments. In these stories, this burning topic returns as a leitmotif. Notably in ‘Father’, an extraordinarily powerful and evocative early text by the author, which describes a burnt village reduced to a pile of ashes together with a tiny white spot that has survived intact in the narrator’s memory: his school playground. And, a few metres away, ‘engraved like an iron seal on [his] retina’, the indelible image of a burned corpse, charred beyond recognition: that of his father. 

Not all the stories are set on Jeju, but the island is present even when it is absent. Thus in ‘Shamanistic Ceremonies for the Summoning of Souls’, Jinho – an army corporal who gives his new recruits the ironic advice: ‘Grit your teeth, unless you want them to break’ – cannot bear the thought of returning to the island upon demobilisation. ‘His heart was as heavy as if he had swallowed a stone from one of the black walls on his native island [. . .] He had the feeling of being snatched away, of disappearing into exile in some distant corner of the world, in the middle of winter, under the snow.’

Hyun is a gifted analyst of the human soul. The final story is narrated from inside the head of a condemned man who may be walking towards his death – ‘may be’ because, it seems, his lord has pardoned him. Did he really steal rice? And what does a petty offence like that mean compared to the rampant corruption of the officials? In his panic-stricken brain, everything collides: spasms of distress, ripples of hope, confidence and distrust in the master’s word. For a moment, a long and steady gaze seems to save him . . . until a sudden, unexpected fall.

When they close this book, European readers will not only have learned a great deal about South Korea; they will have done so through the emotions of Koreans themselves. Hyun’s characters are often described in simple, factual terms, but they impress with their liveliness, sensitivity and subtlety. They are fascinating in all their contradictions and complexities. Hyun is not only a master of the short story, but also a specialist in the torments of the soul – a moralist, in the truest sense.

Translated by Jesse Kirkwood

Florence Noiville

Writer and Literary Critic

Foreign Fiction Editor, Le Monde