With this year’s publication of the short story collection What Took Place No One… Russian readers have gained a great opportunity to discover the work of Kim Young-ha, a Korean writer with an outstanding modern sensibility. Usually when you decide to read a book by a foreign author from a completely different culture, you expect to find something exotic, and having assumed beforehand that the writer’s thinking and philosophy will be difficult to understand, you would probably be bracing yourself for some challenging reading. And although translators do bridge this gap, the descriptive style is often unfamiliar to foreign readers. With Kim Young-ha, however, that is not the case. If the names of the characters were changed you would find yourself in a very familiar reality, in the city where you live, surrounded by people you have known for years. Love, friendship, virtue, human vice and flaws, joy and sadness, the concepts in this collection are shared by all of humanity and not confined to geographical locations.

The thirteen short stories—thirteen sketches of urban life—are written at times with sadness, at other times with humor, and in some there is even a touch of mysticism. But underlying each of the works is something deeper. The author doesn’t describe these things directly, but rather carefully guides the reader to think about them for themselves. Almost all of us fall into situations like those that the characters in these short stories face, and each of us in our own way deals with the same problems. For example, the short story “Robot” features three rules robots must follow as laid out in science fiction: never harm humans; always obey the orders of humans, except if it violates the first rule; and finally, try to defend yourself, as long as this does not violate the first two rules. These rules also apply in the human world, or, to put it more precisely, they appear as rules that should apply. These rules are followed in romantic relationships also. People get caught in dilemmas. What can you do if, by accepting someone’s love, you gain the capacity to cause them to suffer?

“Sea Story” is a story where nothing happens; it’s just an episode, a short sketch about life. But if you think deeply about the narrative—a man who having been sitting alone by the sea takes part in shooting a film as the other extras go backwards and forwards along the beach countless times never looking towards the camera—it is in truth exactly like our everyday lives. When we rush around absent-mindedly, going about our work and failing to notice the gazes of those we face in the course of our lives, and even actively avoiding those gazes, we feel the sense of being lonely in a crowd, beings confined to small boxes.

Today people no longer trust each other or believe in honesty and being faithful. This is not entirely their fault, since it is a side effect of being surrounded by lies and deception. The short story “Promise” is about just this. The protagonist dismisses his doubts and lends money to a woman at a bus terminal whom he has never met before. He is then convinced that he has let himself be fooled and is full of self-reproach. But how else can we expect one to behave? If one can be fooled into kindness, perhaps all is not lost and we still have the capacity to do good deeds. After reading this story there is a need to mull this over.

We can only truly understand the value of love after we have lost it. And with this loss comes despair and the resolution to do whatever it takes to recover lost happiness. “Holiday” is about just that. The protagonist, having kidnapped his ex-girlfriend just before her wedding, doesn’t even know himself whether this love is actually something he needs. But selfishness, the fear that he is now losing his ex-girlfriend forever, and doubts as to whether he is able to start a new life, propel the protagonist to act in this way, and in the end he receives a mysterious kind of punishment.

In Kim Young-ha’s short stories fantasy and reality are closely woven together. Speaking about the topic of talent, it is said that we are “gifts from God.” And most of us hardly think about the meaning of that expression. A gift, however, is something that can be taken away. If a talent is not looked after to the full, or else for one of those well-known reasons, God will sometimes take talent away, as happens in the short story “Crocodile.” A famous singer’s voice has a life of its own and in an unfortunate moment it leaves his body and moves to a place it judges far more suitable.

Although romantic relationships may only come along rarely, when they do they can continue for a long time, for years and years in fact. But in the end there comes a moment when you need to make the effort to look impartially, from a third person perspective, at a relationship in order to understand what happened during that time. Is such a thing really possible? In the short story “Tryst” it is only possible in the next world. But really isn’t it something that should be done when one is still living? The lovers’ life was too short with just seven illicit meetings... On the other hand, there are also times when we have known someone our whole lives without ever managing to meet, like in the short story “Makoto,” where a single meeting changes everything.

The other stories in this collection also get you thinking. People living in large cities in all the various countries of the world are certainly diverse but at the same time very similar. Among the characters in this collection, you will definitely recognize people you know or people you are close to, although you may not find yourself. I think that with Kim Young-ha’s short stories, after you have read them once there is a need to set them on the bookcase for a while. As time passes you gather new life experiences, your awareness changes, and if you happen to read his stories again, I am certain you will discover new angles and ideas that you hadn’t noticed before. You will contemplate them anew, and all of these things will come to you. The writer himself wrote in his introduction to the book, “Perhaps it’s because most of the stories are things I wrote when something came to me, without being commissioned. There is a certain balance in reading them all together that’s more natural and free flowing than anything else. I hope that through these sentences, the same secret pleasure that fluttered quietly in my heart will be felt by those who read them.”

When reading What Took Place No One… I too felt a great pleasure. I am certain that other readers too, who turn the first page of this worthy book, will taste that same enjoyment and each in their own way come to love it. 

by Alexei Grishanov
Literary Critic