Kim Yeonsu is a man of habit. For an hour and a half every day he runs. He’s training. This fall he will be running the Chuncheon Marathon, all 42.195 kilometers of it. It’s his second marathon. For another hour or so he listens to music. He thinks it is lazy of classical music snobs to not take advantage of all the other good music out there. In high school he paid the DJ at the local bar and café for lessons on pop music. At one point in his career his byline carried the title of “popular music critic.” He spends an hour each day reading, sometimes he reads in print, sometimes on his iPad or Kindle. He checks out what his contemporaries in the English-speaking world have been writing, marveling at their carefree first-person narratives. Some say that Kim is the most serious and traditional among the young writers of his generation. They don’t know him at all. Kim Yeonsu, 41, has to be one of the most eager early adopters among his ilk. Whether it be writing, listening to music, reading, or running, Kim always gravitates to the latest and coolest. His job is to make writing cool.

Uh Soo-woong: When you and I were children, literature was still big but popular culture was just coming into its own. What’s the first book you remember from your childhood?

Kim Yeonsu: That would be a comic book. It was in our next-door neighbor’s bathroom that was just a hole in the ground, and the pages in the back were gone. They ripped out pages for toilet paper, you see. It was about these kids named Cheoli and Yeong-hee who shrank and went inside somebody’s body with this doctor, exploring. That’s the first memory I have of any book before I started school. I remember reading the Gyerim books and the Clover books and the Gyemongsa series books when I was in the third grade. They had these Sherlock Holmes books with black covers.

Uh: Did you read them as literature?

Kim: It was just for fun. The first book I remember reading as literature was a book of Hwang Ji-u’s poems when I was in the second year of high school. It was strange. I thought it must be poetry because he said it was, but I didn’t know what to make of it. How could a bunch of newspaper articles from the Gwangju Student Movement be called poetry? I was shocked. It didn’t look like poetry, but it left you with something afterwards.

Novelist Kim Yeonsu and reporter Uh Soo-woong

Uh: Was there any overlap between when you decided to become a writer and your Hwang Ji-u period?

Kim: No, not at all. I didn’t get started on the book for any of those reasons. I was on the science track in high school and I just wanted to have a go at Hwang Ji-u’s poems. It was only after university that I thought of writing poetry or novels. I never thought of writing before.

Uh: What about when you wrote that “conditional suicide agreement” and did 1,080 prostrations at a temple near your house? That was when you were in high school, right?

Kim: (embarrassed) Yes, it was. I was reading Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living and a lot of Jeon Hye-rin. I was very keen on living well, on making something of my life. You only live once, and that sort of thing. (laughs) I was young and self-important. I did the 1,080 prostrations with the rest of the Buddhist student club during summer vacation at a temple called Gsaeun-sa, which means “where the clouds roll back.” It was a nice experience—good exercise, too.

Uh: Sounds like you were a bit of a loner.

Kim: So is everyone, if you want to go down that path. You go to law school, med school, it’s still a lonely way. I think that my generation differs quite a bit from the generation in their 50s right now. A lot of the older generation thinks that anyone can write if they have the mind to. With my generation, though, it’s not easy being a full-time writer. It’s harder than it used to be, and people don’t read as much as they used to.

Uh: That’s the feeling I got when Park Bumshin retired from teaching recently. There were politicians like Jeong Se-kyun and Jeong Mong-jun, and partners from Kim & Chang, the law firm, at his retirement party. Novelists commanded a certain amount of respect with that generation. (laughter) Can you think of any politicians or social figures who might show up for you at a party when you’re 60?

Kim: (laughs) They wouldn’t even show up for Yun Dae-nyeong [who is older than I am], let alone me. Literature used to hold a special place in society but now its power is rapidly diminishing. There used to be a certain celebrity status to being a writer, and also a certain amount of power, like a politician. It was like being a lawyer or a judge, for example. But while the legal profession has kept its status, literature has not. That may not be such a bad thing, however—I think it might even be a good thing.

Uh: Let’s talk about that. Why is it a good thing?

Kim: I can tell you why it’s good for me. When I went to university in the late 1980s, there were only three kinds of ways you could write a novel [in Korea]. You could write a political novel based on the labor movement, in collaboration with actual laborers, or an art for art’s sake kind of novel like Yi In-seong, or a commercial novel. That’s why I couldn’t imagine writing one. I didn’t like any of the choices, and to choose one of the three was to make a statement in itself. It wasn’t like that with poetry, though. There were political poets, but it was understood that you still had to have an innate appreciation of beauty. That’s why I got into poetry first. And then I read Haruki Murakami for the first time in my second year of college and was bowled over. It wasn’t like anything written in Korea. The book was Hear the Wind Sing, and it wasn’t a commercial novel, it wasn’t experimental, and it certainly wasn’t about the labor movement. He was in his own niche and I liked that. It got me thinking, “I could do this.” Now people talk about how high literature and popular literature are crossing over, but this kind of novel simply didn’t exist back then. The older generation of writers in Korea enjoyed a certain social status practicing their art; they were writers and activists or writers and professors. But people whose whole identity is based on being a writer don’t have this kind of status. Now being a full-time writer is more like being a technician. That’s where the trouble starts, though, because writing is supposed to be an art, there are readers who take issue with the idea of writing being a profession like anything else. They think that writers are born. That’s very romantic. We writers know, however, that writers are not born but created over a long period of time. That’s why you have to be even more professional, even more disciplined about writing. There’s a reason why I rebelled against poetry when I was young. I just couldn’t stand the poets I met when I first started out. They acted like writing poetry excused them from everything else. I don’t know where they got that attitude, but it was so widespread. They could be unethical and immoral and still believe it was all right because it was for literature. The funny thing is, though, that some of those selfish pigs still wrote good poetry. It wasn’t fair. But with novels it’s about how good you are on average. It’s the entire career of a novelist that matters when they give the Nobel Prize, not a certain work. You don’t achieve a respectable average by being a pig. That’s what I liked about novels. It’s part of the reason why I chose to write them. I have tried my hand at both, and I can say with authority that novelists are much nicer people than poets. (laughs)

Uh: Let’s talk about popular culture. Do you consider yourself as part of a generation that was baptized by popular culture?

Kim: I can’t put this very eloquently, but I think that the generation born in 1968 that went to university in 1987, two years before me, was the first to depart radically from the generation before them. People who went to university after 1987 were the generation that was able to see something new and get all excited about it. I think that’s when we saw the first wave of early adopters. Popular culture is about always taking an interest in what’s new. Take people who went to university as late as 1985 and some of them are still listening to Jeong Tae-chun, Park Eun-ok, Nochatsa. I don’t, ever. There’s so much good stuff out there with good technique, too. I don’t understand people weeping over the music of their youth. I guess you could say there is that kind of difference.

Uh: Isn’t Kim Yeonsu, the writer, a traditionalist as far as novelists go? I would think that among your generation you would be better accused of writing classically rather than jumping on the latest thing.

Kim: That’s where you’ve got me wrong. The writers I’m most interested in are American and European writers born in the 1970s. Writers in the English-speaking world born after the 1970s are very different from their predecessors. Usually you have a very positive first-person narrator who has almost no emotional baggage. And you have a very strong story. This is all in the tradition of Marquez or Rushdie. That is, you have a very versatile narrator. More story than fact. I think Nicole Krauss is one of the best writers of her generation. The History of Love, of course. I also like Junot Diaz and Daniel Kehlmann.

Uh: Here’s another thing. You are one of the early adopters of technology among writers your age. You were one of the first to use a Kindle or an iPad. What do you think literature can do in the world of the iPad?

Kim: I don’t think literature is simply text. The iPad turns everything into text. The context is gone. You only have the sentences. But you don’t always read just the text. For example, your father might toss you a book you wouldn’t have read otherwise. “You might want to take a look at this, it has all my notes.” Can literature be consumed on the iPad or Kindle? It could, in a redacted form. Film scripts, for example, with only dialogue and stage directions. I don’t think the entire experience can be replaced, though, not for my generation or even our children’s generation. At the very least, the generation over 30 will not find the iPad or Kindle capable of replacing print. So that leaves me where I’m not jumping on the E-book bandwagon, I’m going down with print books along with the people in their 30s. I guess we’re lucky, in a way.

Uh: If I may repeat myself, what does a writer do in that kind of world?

Kim: If I may repeat myself, you write every day. (laughs)

Uh: You said you follow American and European writers born in the 1970s, I imagine you must be equally aware of the possibility of your work being read abroad. Let’s talk about translation. What do you think is most important when you’re trying to bring Korean literature to a wider audience?

Kim: I mentioned this before, but you have to have an upbeat, positive narrator. The problem with Korean novels is that the narrators are very down. We had a tragic history. But if you only write about the pain and tragedy no one is going to listen. Western novels did have that kind of narrator in the past. Not anymore, though. You can’t get away with writing these tragic, historical novels like you’re speaking before the United Nations anymore. You can write about tragedy but you need to be humorous about it. And you need figures of speech. Creative figures of speech are a must. And your story should be a real page-turner.

By Uh Soo-woong