INTERVIEW

• Interview with Kim Kyung-uk: Fiction, It's Not Over Until It's Over Vol.58 Winter 2022

  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. [1] Refers to documentary-style reality shows where the action is not scripted or planned in advance. Cameras are set up inside celebrities’ homes or follow them as they go about their daily routines to offer viewers a glimpse into their personal lives, including their parenting and romantic pursuits. Other cast members or guests sit down together and discuss the scenes unfolding before them on screen.—Ed. [2] The first Western account of Korea, written by Hendrik Hamel, a Dutch sailor who was shipwrecked on Jeju Island in 1653.—Ed.   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)

• Hitting the Target Vol. 29 Autumn 2015

    What is baseball? Breaking free. Focusing on that one line reaching out across the field. Finishing when you arrive. Shouts that confirm what happened. Kim Kyung-uk’s novel What Is Baseball? asks this question.        Poetic. I have been a fan of Kim Kyung-uk’s novels for a long time. Since he has been writing for twenty-two years, I have been a fan for all those twenty-two years (and it has been seven years since we became friends). When a poet becomes a novelist’s fan, it means that their novels are highly poetic. At least that’s how it is in my case. To me, being poetic means that something hidden is there. Something that often slips. Something is there that does not finish when ended. What poetics might be found in his grandly structured novels and precise language? For a long time that elusive allure has made me seek his novels out.        Evolving mechanical fiction. This is a term coined by a literary critic some years ago. Many people have said that this term fits the work of Kim Kyung-uk perfectly. I have thought so as well. Little by little, he tries to become more mechanical. Continually writing. Little by little, he writes with ever more precision. Trying to show the center of the center. That place, however, is unknown. While thinking that it must be there, it remains unknown. After reading his works you are left with the feeling “he has yet to show the true center.” Instead, there’s a feeling that, “while precise, the precision does not reveal the target it has hit.” But my cheek burns; I have been struck by what I have read.        An artisan. He writes ever more precisely. His stories are conveyed in terribly interesting ways. However, the reader does not determine the pace of the story and this is the fault of the author’s exquisite craftsmanship. No matter into what language his works get translated, his stories will not give way. Kim has minutely planned everything from the initial diamond-in-the-rough stage. Since he has changed the very nature of the narrative’s path from the beginning, the detailed direction he takes is new, fun, and reaches the story’s true essence. But how far can he push his refinement? It is clear that, as an artisan, Kim will continue to refine as much as his eyes and hands will allow, and as he does so, his target will grow ever smaller. For the reader, Kim Kyung-uk is a meticulous player in a never-ending game, but he himself thinks only of his focus on exactitude.        Hybrid creator. Kim Kyung-uk is level-headed from start to finish. He has discovered a new way of capturing the unbalanced with balance, the large through the small, and our true nature through modernity. He is an ethicist who with the eye of a dispassionate inventor, discovers and employs marginalized and unjust places. When you read one of his works it’s as if there’s a scene that’s been frozen and slowly, exactingly, a single bullet is coming straight towards you. In order to continue writing fiction that is being “written somewhere in one’s body,” he needs a room for himself where the blinds are lowered with only a minimum of light. And empty hands.        “Steam rising from a heart made of ice.” He replied in an email to me after I wrote him about cognitive chill I felt when reading his works. He replied thus: “Focus on the internal, not the external.” It was then that I realized my friend Kim Kyung-uk was standing there in the center of the target.      by Yi Won Poet

FICTION

• God Has No Grandchildren Vol. 29 Autumn 2015

  The man took the girl to a restaurant where pork was cooked on charcoal grills set into the tables. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been to a restaurant. He ate nothing and just drank soju, while the girl just ate meat. The man took a handful of cold charcoal and put it in a plastic bag. He slipped the empty soju bottles into his backpack. Then he took the girl home and went off by himself to reconnoiter the area. To avoid attracting attention, he left his scooter at home. This was the first time that he had ventured inside the So-and-so Palace apartment complex. There were two security checkpoints: one at the main entrance and the other at the back gate. The guards were all slouching at their desks, their heads slumped between their shoulders as if their only responsibility was to protect their own necks. There were two underground parking garages, but there was no security booth at the entrance to either one. The man went down into the parking garages. They felt like huge foxholes. The cold, dark air, the concrete columns standing at intervals, the security cameras in almost every corner of the ceiling. He checked the location and direction of all the cameras and made a note of them on a piece of paper. He also checked the location of two of his targets. One was parked in front of the apartment building, and the other was in the underground parking garage. The third hadn’t returned to its base yet.   Finally, judgment day dawned. That night, the man put the girl to sleep early. In fact, he didn’t have to do anything, as she was already sleepy, maybe it was the medicine that had put her to sleep. The man squatted on the kitchen floor and placed a funnel into the mouth of an empty soju bottle. He poured kerosene from a can. When he had filled one bottle the can was empty. He removed a saucepan from the kerosene stove and unscrewed the cap from the stove’s fuel tank. He picked up the stove, tilting it over the funnel. A mix of kerosene and dark red rust poured out. The man watched solemnly as the kerosene filled the remaining bottles. Lastly, he took off his undershirt, tore it into strips, and stuffed the rags into the necks of the bottles. The man stood the four bottles in a row and brought a cigarette to his lips. He had made a note of the three license plate numbers. The fourth bottle was there in case he needed to create a distraction. The man lit the cigarette using the welding torch his son had left in the corner of the kitchen. Blue flames danced in waves from the tip. He thought of it as a ceremonial torch in a pre-battle ritual. He dragged slowly on his cigarette. Continuing the ritual, he went inside and put on his old army uniform. It was loose. He pulled the belt tight and tucked the frayed hems of the pants into his socks. He put on his coat, grabbed his backpack, and went back out to the kitchen. The man crushed the pieces of charcoal into a powder and put it into a metal bowl. He added a few drops of honey, stirred it with his hand, and smeared the mixture onto his face. Looking at himself in the girl’s hand mirror, he made sure every inch of his face was blackened. His reflection looked back at him like a warrior from the dark underworld in a Scandinavian folk tale. A warrior who possessed a dark magic that no human weapons could defeat. The man put on a helmet and a face mask too. They were what his son used to wear when he worked with the welding torch. Now he looked less like a warrior from the dark underworld and more like a survivor of a post-apocalyptic battle. The man stuffed the bottles into his backpack and swung it onto his shoulders. It was heavy, as heavy as a flamethrower.   At 3:00 a.m.—the darkest time of night—the man approached the So-and-so Palace apartment complex. He turned off the engine of his scooter. The night was so quiet it felt as if all the stars in the sky had turned off their lights. Standing beside his scooter, he urinated against a wall of the apartment complex—just as he would have done in the jungle. When they were about to go into action, all the troops would stand in a row facing the direction of the enemy and open their flies, following an order from the staff sergeant. He said they must all empty their bladders unless they wanted to get shot in the head pissing on the battlefield. They agreed that whoever pissed the farthest would march in front. The sergeant’s urine went the farthest. Every time. Pushing his scooter, the man went into the apartment complex. The guard at the security post had dozed off at his desk. The man stopped near one of the apartment buildings and parked his scooter there before retracing his steps. To him, this was not just any building, it was the building where the boy who wanted to be a cosmetic surgeon lived. It was to be the location of his second operation. The man stopped walking when he got to the building where the other two boys lived—the one who wanted to be a professional gamer and the one who wanted to be a backup dancer. One of his targets was not visible in the parking lot in front of the apartments. It was the target he had been unable to verify the previous evening. There were two possibilities. Either the target vehicle had not returned yet, or it was in the underground garage. The man turned and approached the entrance to the parking garage. Nobody stopped him. It wasn’t a matter of luck, or even Providence. It was ninety-nine percent laziness, and one percent total carelessness. He ran rapidly and nimbly down the ramp into the garage. It seemed to him to be pitch dark, just like in a foxhole. The darkness fueled the dark flames of rage. The man switched on a flashlight. Focusing the beam on a piece of paper he took out of his pocket, he confirmed the location of the security cameras. He turned ninety degrees to his right and took ten swift, purposeful steps forward, pointing the flashlight at each car license plate, one by one. Then he stopped and turned to the right. Now he had his back to a security camera. He turned ninety degrees to his left and walked forward fifteen paces before stopping and turning to the left so that once again his back was to a security camera. The target he had been unable to verify during reconnaissance was nowhere to be seen. The man turned slightly to the left and took nine paces forward, then hid behind a concrete column. Behind the column, the man took out a lighter and lit the rag in the neck of one bottle. He hurled the bottle at his first target, hitting the windshield. The glass shattered, and flames flared up. There was a sudden, loud honking. It was a car alarm. The man hadn’t accounted for this noise so nothing had been marked on the map to suggest it. He couldn’t fight an enemy that wasn’t on the map. He swung round and retreated swiftly towards the entrance. The bottles in his backpack clinked against one another. He was panting when he reached ground level. Taking off his mask, he caught his breath and moved towards his second target. When he reached the building where the boy who wanted to be a cosmetic surgeon lived, the man looked around. Nothing was moving other than the breeze. He lit another bottle and threw it at the second target. The bottle exploded and flames burst out in concentric circles. The man looked around and then started to walk towards a car that had a strange sticker on its windshield. The sticker showed an image of a red-faced devil. Its mouth was open wide and it was baring its fangs. Below the picture of the devil there were some words in English—“Be the Reds!”1— but the man had no idea what that meant. Although it wasn’t his third target, he hurled the third bottle at the car and turned around. Behind him, the alarm was shrieking. Getting onto his scooter, the man slipped out through the back gate. “Now, Father,” he muttered, “I need to get some rest.”      The next morning, the first thing the man did when he got out of bed was try to turn on the TV. It didn’t work. The electricity had been cut off. He switched on a battery-powered radio and listened solemnly to the morning news. There was no mention of the So-and-so Palace apartments. The man’s face crumpled. Turning off the radio, he made two calls. The first was to the girl’s school. He said she had to stay home one more day because she was still sick. He wasn’t lying. The girl was burning up with a fever. The electric blanket was cold, so cold it felt like a sheet of chilled metal. The person at the other end of the line said that the girl had to attend school tomorrow no matter what, because it was the last day before winter break. The second call was to his office. The man said he was afraid he couldn’t go to work that day because he still wasn’t feeling well. That was not a lie. His feet had swollen up and his vision was blurred. He had a fever too. There was no response from the person at the other end of the line. “Hello?” “Stay home and rest. Forever.” The line went dead. The man grunted and went into the kitchen. He rinsed some rice and put it into a saucepan. He added enough water to make a thin rice porridge and put the saucepan on the kerosene stove. He lit the burner and turned it up to the highest setting, but the flames flickered. He was low on kerosene. He was low on everything. When the day that even the water was cut off came, they wouldn’t be able to manage any more. The girl was so weak she couldn’t even hold her chopsticks. She wouldn’t eat any rice porridge, even with dried seaweed sprinkled on top. The man felt her forehead. It was burning hot. Perhaps because his hand was burning hot. “Have to go to the doctor, no matter what,” the man said to no one in particular. There was no response, of course. But he hadn’t expected a response.   The man had three doctors’ offices in mind that morning, just as he’d had three license plates in mind the previous night. Two of the three targets had been burnt, and two burning hot bodies would go to the three doctors. Lifting the girl and carrying her on his back, the man groped his way down the steep alley. His first stop was a pediatrician’s office. Their regular pediatrician was nearby, at the entrance to the local market, but he deliberately went to the clinic in the shopping center attached to the So-and-so Palace apartment complex. As he entered the shopping center, he glanced in the direction of the apartments. Two women in fur coats were chatting in the waiting room of the pediatrician’s office. The man strained to hear what they were talking about. He didn’t hear anything that sounded like “fire,” but he heard the word “gift” frequently. The girl was given a shot, and there were pills she would need to take. As the nurse handed him the bottle of pills, the man asked if everything was all right; she gave him a perplexed look as if she were wondering whether he was all right. She gave him enough pills for three days and said the doctor’s office would be closed until after Christmas. It would be Christmas in two days’ time. The man hadn’t had a call from his son recently. He couldn’t remember exactly where his son was staying; he wasn’t sure whether it was Dongtan or Sintanjin, or perhaps Yongin or Uijeongbu. Apparently his son hadn’t been drinking lately, because he hadn’t called. The man left the shopping center and stared at the apartment complex for a while, as if to check that it was the same one he had been to during the night. The second clinic they headed for was the one where the doctor had talked about trauma or something. They took a bus and got off thirty minutes later. With the girl on his back the man went down some steps that led to an underground passage. At the bottom step, the man froze. He could see nothing but darkness in front of his eyes. He stood still and waited for the darkness to dissipate. Just as it had done in the past. But even time, which eventually dispels everything, couldn’t easily dispel the darkness now. The man’s legs shook with fear; fear that he would never again be able to see the light. When it is time for darkness to descend on a man—a creature that cannot generate its own light—does it ever lift? For the man, who had no inner light of his own, darkness was not something that came and went. It was always with him. Light was what came and went, and came back again. Perhaps this time he would have to wait a long, long time for the light to return. Like a tree, like a solitary tree, carrying on his back the girl who had long ago lost her speech. A throng of noises burst through the darkness, which now seemed solid as iron: footsteps, a Salvation Army bell, Christmas carols, the clinking of coins, the sound of someone gulping, trying to catch their breath, exhaling a long breath, eyes blinking, heart racing, the menacing roll of dice, time passing by like a crowd bursting out of the subway and bumping into him, and then, from over his shoulder, a weak voice like the voice of an infant. “Grandpa.” “Yes.” “Are you all right?” “I’m all right.” “Are you waiting for someone, Grandpa?” “Yes.” “Who?” “Someone.” “Are you tired?” “I’m all right.” “May I sing for you?” “Go ahead.” “You better watch out, you better not cry, better not pout, I’m telling you why, Santa Claus is coming—to town; He’s making a list, and checking it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty and nice, Santa Claus is coming—to town.”     1 The slogan of the Korean national soccer team during the 2002 World Cup. (Translators’ note)

REVIEWS

• [Vietnamese] On the Mercurial Nature of Identity Vol. 49 Autumn 2020

• Notes on a Roebuck’s Ear: The Hour between Dog and Wolf by Kim Kyung-uk Vol.47 Spring 2020

• A Series of Interconnected Islands: Risky Reading by Kim Kyung-uk Vol.44 Summer 2019

• Navigating Korea’s Modern Mazes Vol.31 Spring 2016

• Coming Home: What Is Baseball? by Kim Kyung-uk Vol.22 Winter 2013

BOOKS