Congratulations on your latest short story collection, When Someone Talks About Me (Moonji, 2022). The title work features a protagonist who feels paralyzed and struggles to breathe whenever someone talks about him. Could you tell us the way you feel when you hear others talk about you?

My mother called me to express her concern after she received a copy of my previous short story collection, My Girlfriends’ Fathers (Munhak Dongne, 2019). She was worried critics had stopped reading my books. I wasn’t sure what she meant at first, but it was due to the fact there was no critical commentary at the end of the book, as is customary in Korea. Just as the title of my latest collection suggests, I feel embarrassed when other people talk about me, so for that one time, I opted not to include a literary critic’s take on my stories. But I didn’t expect such a reaction from my mother. This is why I proactively told my editor that I wanted to include a review in my latest book. From some point on, my books didn’t seem to elicit any overt response from readers, so I thought it would be beneficial to receive at least one person’s feedback. It would also allow my mother to put her mind at ease.

Your prolificacy as a writer has earned you the nickname “Story-Machine.” Could you tell us which authors or works have most influenced your writing throughout the years?

When I was younger, I was particularly drawn to authors such as Albert Camus and Osamu Dazai whose lives came to an abrupt end right at the height of their prime. However, as I passed the peak of my youth, I became more interested in the works of authors such as Philip Roth, John le Carré, and Doris Lessing, who all continued writing well into their old age. When asked why he had quit writing, Philip Roth said, “I did what I did and it’s done.” Like him, I want to continue investing my heart and soul into writing and put my pen down once I’ve decided that I’ve written enough.

Your debut story, “Outsider,” is about someone who tries to keep himself at a distance from the center. I think this provides us with an important insight into your work. Could you tell us how you define the center, and where do you find the strength or awareness to keep your distance from it?

I wonder if my first story would’ve been more popular with the “in-crowd” had I gone with the title “Insider” instead. To tell you the truth, I chose “Insider” as the title for one of my other serial works that was published online last year, but it doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference.

       I’d always been shy in the presence of others ever since I was a little boy, so I’d look in on the action from some distance away. I was a delicate child, and since I easily got carsick, I often stayed home by myself instead of taking part in family outings. Even today, I spend the majority of my time alone inside a small room. I think my own introversion has made me more curious about interactions between people.

       I still think of the “center” as something that exists between people. The middle of a wheel is bound to be empty. Otherwise, how else would you mount an axle? What you can’t see when you spin with the wheel becomes visible only when you stand firm in the center of the rotation. In a sense, we could say that the most central thing is also the outermost, and the outermost thing is also the most central.

In a 2013 interview for World Literature Review, you said that you tend to choose the title of a work before you even begin writing the story. I thought that was really interesting. I was wondering: what is the process you go through to come up with a new title, and how do you go about writing the story from there?

To tell you the truth, I got the idea for the title “Outsider” from a movie I’d seen at the time. From what I remember, it was a film depicting young people who’d lost their direction in life. As you can see with my early works like “There is No Coffee at the Bagdad Café,” I would often get inspiration for titles from movies.

       One thing that hasn’t changed over my career is the fact that I can’t begin writing a story until I’ve decided on a title. To me, a title is like the story’s seed in that it contains the work’s entire DNA, from the flowers to the fruit. If I can’t come up with a title for a new story, it’s a sign that it needs more time to mature inside my mind. The title is what gives birth to the first sentence of a story, and it’s that first sentence which gives rise to the second. A plant will only grow after its seed has sprouted.

Your writing style has often been described as “hard-boiled,” something that is reflected in the characters and worlds you create. However, your most recent works seem to display a warmer, more compassionate view toward your characters. Why the change in attitude?

It might be a sign that the “Story-Machine”is growing rusty and that the screws are starting to come loose. I’m now fonder of characters who struggle to find where they belong than I was back when my screws were still tight. If you feel my works exude more warmth and compassion toward my characters now, it’s probably because I’ve realized that there are a lot more layers to the truth than I thought. I’ve been having an increasingly difficult time getting closer to the truth that lies beyond the present condition before us. The larger truth often gets obscured by an excess of fragmentary truths. If an author wants to cut through the maze of fragmentary truths in order to reach the bigger truth, doesn’t he need to adopt a more hard-boiled gaze? I don’t think of hard-boiled as cold—rather, it’s just as an attitude that cuts straight through the extraneous. The clearer an author’s perspective, the more likely he is to show compassion for characters faced with a dilemma.

I also remember you saying in another interview that you’ve started to reflect more on human dignity. I think what defines a breach of humanity depends a lot on the historical period. At this time in history, what types of dignity violations do you find yourself reflecting on the most?

That’s right. Two words I try to always bear in mind are “survival” and “dignity.” How much longer can humans survive without changing their current way of living? That’s the question I ask myself whenever I hear that our days are numbered. If I were to meet my end in an unexpected way, how would I maintain my own dignity in the face of death? I imagine a situation in which ensuring my own survival would require me to forgo not only my dignity but also the survival of others. A situation in which the only way for me to maintain my dignity would be to give up on my own life. These are the kinds of things I’ve been constantly thinking about these days while writing.

Your short story “Leslie Cheung is Dead?” does such a good job of vividly capturing the mood of the early 2000s. From some point on, however, you stopped making active use of popular culture references. Could you tell us why? I’m also curious if there are any aspects of pop culture today that stand out to you.

I don’t watch movies or listen to music as much as I used to. Even back when I watched movies on a nearly daily basis and had music plugged into my ears wherever I went, I still thought of fiction as questions about the time in which we live. Pop culture references were just a means for me to explore some of those questions. That’s because pop culture is by far the best indicator of an era’s mood and aspirations.

       One of the things I find especially intriguing nowadays is this new form of reality TV we call “observational entertainment.”^[1] It could be a show featuring a group of panelists who watch and comment on people being filmed doing something for the benefit of viewers who tune in to chat with other viewers in real time. I’ve also seen a show where a panel of guests was invited to watch other people who were themselves watching others doing something. These shows have completely blurred the distinction between the observer and the observed, and I find it strange that this doesn’t make us feel more uncomfortable. I’ve been thinking about why that could be.

There has been a huge increase in observational reality shows in recent years. What do you find intriguing about them?

I find it interesting to see we’ve reached a point where it’s no longer relevant to ask whether what we see on such shows is real or scripted. There’s a popular show in Korea called “Omniscient Interfering View” in which, as the name suggests, the focus isn’t so much on what’s happening on the screen, but on what people who are watching the footage have to say about it. It’s a bit like quantum physics, isn’t it? Whether a piece of matter appears as a particle or a wave depends on how one looks at it.

The story “Here He Comes” from your latest work stands out from your previous works in that it’s a story about a fiction writer. Could you tell us why it took nearly thirty years to write a story inspired by your own occupation?

Back in the day I felt ashamed to write“writer” in the box designated for “occupation” on customs declaration forms, but I don’t think much of it anymore. I’ve come to accept that writing is both my occupation and my own way of getting through life. That might explain why I was finally able to write a few stories featuring characters who are fiction writers. It might also have to do with the fact that I’ve grown a thicker skin with age. I really wrote “Here He Comes” hoping that “he” would come. I told myself—so what if a house has a dark past as long as it allows a writer to come up with a good story?

You then wrote a sequel titled “I Didn’t Write This Story,” which is about a fiction writer who denies having written “Here He Comes,” making it your second work about a writer. Was “Here He Comes” meant to open a door to this new type of story, and was “I Didn’t Write This Story” meant to go back and shut it closed? Or are these two stories just a taste of what you have in store for us moving forward?

I don’t think I could just decide one day to write a story about a writer and simply go ahead and write one. The occupation “writer” just occurred naturally to me in the process of thinking about a way to turn a novelistic question that had sprouted in my head into a story. My concern wasn’t whether or not to include a writer in the story, but what this character would say and do. Who else other than a fiction writer running low on inspiration would be willing to go and sit inside a house with a dark past? Who else other than a fiction writer with writer’s block would rejoice at the thought of moving into a house known to have witnessed a tragic incident, hoping it will help him rekindle his imagination? If I happen to come up with a good story that requires the main character to be a writer, I no longer try to find a way around it like I might have done in the past. I don’t think I have the luxury of being so picky about what I write given that good ideas don’t come easily and I’m constantly racking my brain for new ones.

Could you briefly introduce us to your short story “A Sheepish History” that is featured in this issue of KLN? I think anyone who’s ever encountered a chatty taxi driver will have a lot of fun reading this work.

“A Sheepish History” tells the story of a man who finds himself listening to a stranger revealing a secret he has kept buried deep in his heart for a very long time. I got the inspiration while I was on a trip to Japan. I got into a taxi and the driver began speaking to me in Japanese. Although he knew I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying, he kept speaking to me in Japanese until we arrived at my destination. After I got out of the taxi, I kept wondering what he could possibly have been talking about. That’s when another question popped into my mind. Why did he keep talking even though he knew I couldn’t understand him? Was it because he was telling me a story that he was only willing to share with someone he didn’t have to ever see again and so wouldn’t understand him? Did he tell me something he couldn’t tell anyone around him, including the people he was closest to? These are the types of questions that eventually led me to write this short story.

The story was included in a Spanish-language anthology [titled Por fin ha comenzadoel fin: cuentos y poemas coreanos—Ed.]. What made you choose this particular work to be included in KLN after it had already been introduced to Spanish readers?

This short story is about a taxi driver who picks up a Korean client at the Incheon International Airport and mistakes him for a Japanese person. The client decides to play along by pretending he is indeed Japanese, and this results in this strange situation where two Koreans find themselves talking to each other in a foreign language. As the story progresses, the taxi driver unwittingly reveals a lifelong secret in Korean, wrongly thinking that his client won’t understand him. As a result, the client who had pretended to be Japanese finds himself having to bear the weight of being told the closely guarded secret of a stranger he will likely never cross paths with again. One day it struck me that no matter where we come from, everyone has a mother tongue, and that the kinds of things one can’t tell even to those closest to us are also the kinds of things which can only be told in one’s first language. I thought such stories can’t see the light of day until someonewilling to listen and interpret them appears. Some people say writers are people who tell the stories of those who can’t tell it themselves, but I have a slightly different take. I’d like to think fiction writers are people who interpret the stories of those who mumble them in their mother tongue. That’s the reason why I wanted to share this story with as many foreign readers as possible.

You also participated in the Bogotá International Book Fair this year. What was it like meeting with Colombian readers?

The Bogotá International Book Fair is one of the most long-standing book fairs in Latin America along with the Guadalajara International Book Fair in Mexico. Since this year’s guest of honor was South Korea, I had the privilege of taking part in the festivities and meeting with Colombian readers. Although we needed interpreters to understand one another, I was able to feel their great enthusiasm for Korea and Korean literature. Perhaps due to the fact Colombia was Gabriel García Márquez’s home country, I was also able to get a real taste of magical realism. One of the stories I wrote features a character from Colombia, and I came across someone who shared the same name as the Korean protagonist in that story. I went to get tested for COVID-19 the day before my return flight to Korea and the test site worker suddenly said he was Korean and told me his name. We didn’t get to have a real conversation, though, because I was worried about my test result. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I would do if it came back positive and I had to miss my flight and spend the next ten days quarantining in this country whose language I couldn’t speak. Thinking back on it now, I feel sorry and regret not having asked that person about his story. That’s how I was driven to write “I’m an Writer from the South,” which tells the story of a character inspired by my own situation had my fears come true and I was made to quarantine in Colombia all by myself. The protagonist in the story convinces himself that the greatest works come from complete isolation and total solitude, setting his creative spirit ablaze. I don’t want to spoil it for potential readers, so if anyone is curious to find out what happens, I invite them to look for the story in the 2022 October issue of Hyundae Munhak magazine.

You’ve previously said that instead of basing your stories on real life experiences, you prefer using your own imagination to inspire you. You’ve also said that you get more inspiration from the blank spaces in books, from what isn’t written on the pages, than from what is. Could you tell us how imagination and real-life experiences differ when you write?

I’m sure it’s different for every writer, but in my case, I feel like the more I rely on real experiences, the more I struggle to make full use of my imagination. Not to mention I don’t get any fun out of it. I don’t mind getting inspiration from real-life events, but I like to write stories that are grounded in my own imagination rather than actual memories. That’s because I don’t know where my own writing will take me. In the case of “A Sheepish History,” I wouldn’t have been able to write an entire story had I gotten stuck trying to recall what I had once been told by a Japanese taxi driver. The same applies to “I’m a Writer from the South,” which was inspired by a COVID-19 test site worker whom I took the liberty of changing into an imaginary immigration officer.

       It’s the same with reading. The blank spaces between the lines feed my imagination more than the sentences themselves. Once, I was reading Hamel’s Journal and a Description of the Kingdom of Korea^[2] and I came across a passage stating that a government official had been dispatched to Jeju Island to investigate Hendrick Hamel and his crew who were shipwrecked there. The official in question was a fellow Dutchman who’d gone adrift on his way to Japan and had washed up on the shores of the Korean peninsula and settled there much earlier. I was curious to learn more about the man, but he didn’t appear in any historical records. All I could find on him was a single line stating that he’d served as a military adviser for the King, married a local woman, and went on to live the rest of his life in Joseon Korea. I began imagining a character starting out on a completely new life in an unknown land, and that’s what allowed me to come up with the story for Kingdom of a Thousand Years (Moonji, 2007). Since I didn’t have historical sources to fall back on, I had to create the character from the inside out. Perhaps it’s precisely this lack of source material that allowed me to write an entire novel based on him. I was also inspired to write about Hamel, but given the abundance of information we have about him, I wasn’t able to produce more than a single short story.

Your stories have now been translated into many languages. You’ve said that fiction is like a question about the community in which it was written at that particular point in time. How does it feel to see your works being translated for communities other than the ones they were originally intended for?

I see translation as a second act of creation. I think it is nearly impossible to translate an original text as it is, due to all the linguistic and cultural differences inherent within it. Trying to complete such an impossible mission must be painful work for a translator, but it’s been an eye-opening experience for me. For example, while one of my works was being translated into Chinese, I found myself having to think up Chinese characters for the names of characters that appeared in the story. In one instance, I came up with the term “Heavenly Gate” to refer to an acupuncture point which allows people to die a painless death only to be told by my translator that such an acupuncture point already existed in Chinese. I was completely taken aback. I also wrote a work featuring a character who gets married to the same person three times and was convinced such a story wouldn’t exist outside the pages of my novel Like a Fairy Tale (Minumsa, 2010), but this all changed when the book was translated into Spanish. A journalist from South America who was interviewing me told me that he knew a couple in real life who had married three times just like the characters in the story. These incidents made me look at fiction in a new light. I stopped claiming that my job as a writer was to pull up stories that didn’t exist out in the real world from the depths of my mind, like someone who draws buckets of water from the depths of a well. I no longer try to come up with stories that don’t already exist. I tell myself that I write stories that might reflect something happening somewhere out in the vast world in which we live.

I’m also curious to learn more about your life as a creative writing professor. The following is a quote from you in another interview: “I don’t really think of myself as a teacher. I just read with my students and share my love of reading with them. I think that helps with their writing.” Have your students taught you anything recently?

My students are like colleagues with whom I’m able to share the pains and joys of reading and writing. Sometimes I think of them as teachers disguised as students. They’ll ask me questions that leave me speechless or give me perplexing answers that force me to introspect. As my brain gets slower and my heart begins to show signs of aging, they’re the ones who make it possible for me to keep up with the changing times.

I don’t remember seeing your name appear among the list of judges for any literary award or prize. I also don’t recall ever seeing a blurb written by you in another author’s book. Is there a reason why you stay away from judging committees and testimonials?

It’s because I want to still be able to enjoy the works of fellow authors purely through the eyes of a reader rather than as a judge or a commentator.

I once asked you the following question in an interview we did at the launch of your novel What is Baseball? in 2013, which was also the twentieth anniversary of your debut: “In the end, baseball is about coming back home. The aim is to go through all the bases in order to make it back to home plate. Given this, how far along the diamond have you come at this stage in your life?” You replied that you probably still hadn’t left the batter’s box. This was almost ten years ago, so where are you now?

I’m still in the batter’s box. I feel like I’m just barely holding on, hitting one foul ball after another to avoid striking out. Given that I’ve been writing for over thirty years now, you’d think I’d have at least made it to second base. That being said, I don’t mind the batter’s box because it allows me to face the pitcher head-on instead of looking at him from behind, even if I don’t make it to first base before being sent back to the dugout. Baseball does require players to make it back home without being tagged out, but it’s also a game that isn’t over until it’s really over. Not to mention it’s one of the only ball sports in which games are played for a number of consecutive days at a time.

Translated by Léo-Thomas Brylowski

 KOREAN WORKS MENTIONE
• When Someone Talks About Me (Moonji, 2022)
『누군가 나에 대해 말할 때』 (문학과지성사, 2022)
• My Girlfriends’ Fathers (Munhak Dongne, 2019)
『내 여자친구들의 아버지』 (문학동네, 2019)
• Kingdom of a Thousand Years (Moonji, 2007)
『천년의 왕국』 (문학과지성사, 2007)
• Like a Fairy Tale (Minumsa, 2010)
『동화처럼』 (민음사, 2010)
• What is Baseball? (Munhak Dongne, 2013)
『야구란 무엇인가』 (문학동네, 2013)