INTERVIEW

• Interview with Kim Yeonsu: He Who Writes and Rewrites Every Day Vol.59 Spring 2023

  Your latest short story collection titled A Future as Ordinary as This was noted “Novel of the Year” in survey of fifty Korean authors run by the largest bookstore chain in South Korea. In your opinion, what is it about the book that resonated so much with readers?  I’ve been doing a lot of walking around lately. I just walk wherever my feet take me. Although I look at the scenes unfolding on the streets and the people I walk past, I rarely think about anything. I just walk. I got into this new habit after the coronavirus pandemic broke out. I realized that my own thoughts didn’t hold any special power. In fact, many thoughts are crossing my mind this very instant, but I choose not to pay attention to them. That’s because there are other thoughts I’d rather focus on. This is the biggest change I’ve experienced lately, which is something my readers might’ve picked up on through my writing. But that, too, is just a thought I had right now. The truth is I don’t really know. You made your literary debut as a poet and later became famous as a fiction writer. You’ve also published numerous essay collections. How does writing essays differ from writing fiction? I used to write essays whenever I hit a wall with my fiction writing. This is a creative writing technique known among writers as “creative procrastination.” The logic behind it is that performing two difficult tasks at once makes the least difficult one feel like a breeze. A short story is easier to write than a novel, and an essay is easier to write than a short story. That’s why I would turn to essay writing whenever I would struggle with fiction writing. As a result, I’ve never really struggled when it comes to writing essays. However, essays are sensitive to lies. As I grew into more of a fiction writer over the course of my career and writing fiction became easier, the conventions of the essay genre began to feel increasingly stifling to me. That’s why most of what I write today is fiction, including things that I might’ve written in the form of essays back in the day. One of your earliest works, the short story “If I Take Another Month to Cross the Snowy Mountains,” features a character who writes as a means to come to terms with his girlfriend’s death. Your stories seem to be inspired by a will to overcome feelings of denial in the face of loss or frustration with reality through writing. What is it about writing that allows us to reconcile with reality?  I write something every day. Sometimes I’ll sit down at my desk to write, and other times I will pull out a notebook to hastily jot something down as I wait for the train at the station. I hardly ever write proper sentences. It’s as though I stick my arm into a manhole without knowing what lurks inside and pull out whatever I can get my hand on. It could be just a few words, or a handful of sentences. My mind is constantly attempting to fill the void left behind by each letter I pull out. Since I don’t know what lurks inside the manhole, I must rely on my imagination to string complete sentences together. Anything goes since it’s all a product of my imagination. I could end up with a trivial piece of writing or an idea that will flourish into a novel after decades of writing. Imagination knows no bounds. I also do a lot of rewriting, too, of course. A single idea could lead to multiple versions of the same story. Which one gets to see the light of day will depend on the story’s skeleton. What differentiates writing from speaking is that written words leave a visible skeleton behind. If the bones are too brittle, I go back and rewrite everything from the start. I then look at the story’s skeleton once more. If the bones still seem too frail, it’s back to square one again; but if they appear sturdy, I consider my job done. I often recommend writing as a tool to reflect on past events for this exact reason. It’s because writing holds the power to make a story’s skeleton stick out in plain sight. Losing a loved one or failing to obtain the object of one’s desires are some of the painful things we all experience in life, but the sense of loss or frustration we feel comes as a result of attachment, or love. There would be no loss or frustration if we didn’t feel emotionally attached to begin with. Given this, couldn’t we say that people who write as a means to come to terms with loss or frustration are in fact doing so in an attempt to continue protecting the very object of their love? Could writing be considered an act of love in this sense? Looking back on my youth, there were many instances where I confused violence with love, both in regards to myself and others. This led me to wonder—is that just the way love is? Perhaps so. I think the opposite of love is fear. We sometimes choose love because we loath fear, or vice-versa. My point is that we have a difficult time distinguishing between the two. This gives rise to misunderstandings which don’t reflect reality, the kind of situation which easily lends itself to being made into a story. Love and stories share different realities. The reality of a story lies in revealing our own misunderstandings. This is what I meant by the story’s “skeleton” in my previous answer. If you can convince yourself of your love through writing, then you are admitting this reality.  “Everyone gets one shot at love.” This sentence appears in your novel No Matter Who and How Lonely You Are. Everybody has their own experience with love, which may manifest itself in the form of mutual misunderstandings, or in some cases, violence. Among the various factors which may give rise to discord and conflicts between individuals, is there a reason why you chose to focus specifically on loneliness?  Everything in the world falls into one of two categories: things we can understand through the right amount of effort, and things we can’t understand despite all effort. When two or more individuals get together to agree on something, they’re likely to reach a common understanding if they try hard enough. On the other hand, no amount of effort may help one understand what someone else is going through. I believe this is where history and fiction differ. Each of our individual lives is closer to fiction than history. The reason we have a hard time making ourselves understood to others is because we each have different lives. If we look at loneliness simply for what it is, it doesn’t seem hard to understand. I recently read Oh William! (Random House, 2021) by author Elizabeth Strout, a novel which begins with a question and ends with an exclamation point. It’s similar to when we ask ourselves “What’s that?” only to reach the conclusion “That’s what it is!” When a question turns into an exclamation, loneliness simply becomes loneliness. I don’t think it strange at all that love may sometimes turn into violence, or that we treat loneliness as an old friend who is neither good nor bad. You’ve written that loneliness doesn’t come from a state of neediness, and that a doughnut’s hole isn’t a void where something used to be, but that it was just a hole to begin with. I found such thoughts to be comforting. However, loneliness is bound to replace an empty hole left behind by something that goes missing. Are we being misled by a false perception that there must have been something when there really wasn’t? What can stories do about physical memories?  I feel like this question has more to do with mourning than loneliness. Someone going through a loss will naturally feel sad. There are many ways of grieving, among which my own preferred one is stories. I’ve used characters going through a separation with their lover as the protagonists for a long time because they have a greater craving for stories than anyone else. The story someone tells after breaking up with a loved one will go through a number of revisions. The first version on the day following the breakup won’t be the same as the version a week or a year after. Through the process of revising the same story multiple times, one reaches a point where they decide not to bring any more changes to it. This is when the period of mourning comes to a close and they are left with a story about their loss. In a sense, mourning allows us to get a story out of what we’ve lost. To me, all stories are like reminders of the voids left behind by loss. In many of your works, events in modern Korean history are depicted as the driving factor behind violent acts of love, or as the direct source of loss and frustration. Whether it be the Japanese colonial period, the Korean War, or the student protests of the 1980s, you seem to have a particular interest in modern historical events. Do you think this has something to do with the fact that you grew up as a teenager in the turbulent period between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s in Korea? In other words, to what extent has history affected your own experiences with loss and frustration?  In my freshman year at university, I remember seeing the rallying cry “REVOLT” painted in big, red letters across the walls inside the bathrooms of the liberal arts building. The mood on the campus felt like we were on the eve of a revolution. Every day was extremely tense. I don’t remember any of the minor details—only how tense it was. The relentless tension came from our misled belief that we were perpetually in the midst of a decisive moment in history. Looking back on the events now, I realize that this couldn’t possibly have been the case. This means that we’d been wrong most of the time. Today, I feel like such misunderstandings were responsible for the loss of many lives. And this kind of tension wasn’t limited to my time in university—it resurfaced again when I worked an office job and when I had my first child. I think society is governed by big currents. It’s no easy task for a single individual to stand up to any of these currents. And there’s no way out for those who get caught in one. Those who are lucky might ride a current’s waves to success, but the majority of people will fail and fall into despair no matter what they do. Whether we’re looking back on history or what’s happening right now, people are and have always been pursuing some kind of current. When they actually get swept away, however, things hardly ever go as planned. One can always blame the current for the frustration and loss it leaves in its wake, but I think we ought not to let ourselves get swept away in the first place. Even if a story was to be written and read outside of a major social current, it would still have to be circulated and consumed within society. How do you think stories are able to influence social currents? In other words, what role do stories play within society? Although society presents us all with a formula for success, it’s really difficult for the majority of us to succeed using this exact formula. There must be a reason why we continue to believe in the formula even though it doesn’t work, but it’s really not something I’m interested in. I often find myself wondering whether or not I’m living in a dimension that falls outside of mainstream society. Since I’m not interested in the kind of life perceived as exemplary by societal standards, I just write stories dealing with other things. My stories may seem to challenge societal norms on the surface, but my intention isn’t to have them play any kind of role within society. In your novel Wonder Boy, you use “wonder” as a new solution to the issues you raise in your writing (as can be surmised from the work’s title). I’d like you to tell us more about wonder as a means of coming to terms with frustration and loss, and as a way of overcoming loneliness.  If someone finds themselves submerged in water, it most likely won’t occur to them that they are wet. They will only come to such a realization once they come out of the water. I think “wonder” works in a similar way. You need to be out of the water to experience what it’s like not to be wet. Only then can you know that being in water makes you wet. I don’t think one can arrive at this wondrous conclusion through the experience and insight gained from being in water. One needs to come out of the water to realize they aren’t lonely. All the stories and clichés ensnaring us are just like water. I advise readers not to believe all the stories they are told.  Keeping on topic, here is a line taken from Wonder Boy: “Understanding is to tell someone else's story for them, and to fall in love again with them through their story.” When I read this passage, I got the impression that your view of loneliness extended beyond your own condition to include the loneliness of others as well. As a fiction author, what is the significance of conveying other people’s stories for them?  I’ve lived a very narrow existence until now, both in terms of life experience and the kind of knowledge I’ve acquired. For me to pass judgement on the world around me with such limited life baggage would be akin to walking on the edge of a precipice with my eyes closed. I need more life experience in order to open my eyes. I’m always surprised when I have a conversation with someone. More than anything else, it has to do with the fact that the material environment in which others live is so different from my own. The same applies to the kind of lives they’ve lived—we might as well be living in completely different worlds. But whenever I accept these other worlds, they allow me to stretch the boundaries of my own existence a little further. That’s why I need to expose myself to more numerous and diverse stories.  Following the publication of Wonder Boy and If the Waves Belong to the Sea, eight years would go by before the release of your next title, The Last of Seven Years. Interestingly enough, the novel tells the story of a poet who becomes unable to write poems. In your case, what kind of situation would make you unable to write fiction? I asked myself the question: “If one day you were suddenly forced to write poems of worship [praising those in power], would you rather follow in Baek Seok’s1 footsteps and escape to the remote countryside instead?” I didn’t think so when I first began writing The Last of Seven Years. However, by the time I reached the last sentence of the novel, my answer had changed to a resounding “yes.” My perspective completely shifted through the process of writing the story. Many people think of Baek Seok as a poet who lost the freedom to write the kinds of poems he wanted, but I came to see him as a poet who made the deliberate choice not to write poems that he didn’t feel inclined to. I’m sure Baek Seok continued composing poems the way he liked but simply kept them for himself. I would do the same—I wouldn’t write any stories I didn’t want to write. I would only write the kinds of stories I felt inclined to, even though in the eyes of others it may appear like I’ve lost the freedom to write what I want. What kind of novel do you want to write at this point in your career?  I’ve always been interested in people who managed to survive in situations where the odds were stacked against them. For example, the Manchurian communists appearing in “The Night Sings,” or the Joseon-era Korean and Japanese Catholics appearing in “Three Steps Toward the Sea.” These people went through the worst imaginable kind of suffering and would’ve been better off dying, and yet they didn’t. I only recently found out why I felt drawn to these kinds of characters. It’s because what I thought of as the end of life is in fact only the start of something else, and there are things which only reveal themselves to us in such moments. I think I finally have an idea of what these things are, and I want to write about them. In your short story collection A Future as Ordinary as This published last year, the “ordinary” is presented in a positive light as something with the power to make loss and frustration bearable, an idea I found both refreshing and odd. Do you think the ordinary is really all it takes?  I think many of our problems in life stem from our level of satisfaction with things. There are times when frustration can feel satisfying, such as when we know we’ve done our best in a particular situation. We feel satisfied when we’re able to tell ourselves we did everything we could and have no regrets. Achievements can also be satisfying, of course, but it’s not always the case. The difference between feeling satisfied or not is semantic. It also depends on how we felt prior to reaching that state. In A Future as Ordinary as This, I opted for the word “ordinary” because the most amazing of futures will also be the most ordinary. We all wish to feel satisfied, and there’s nothing quite as amazing as being able to find satisfaction in the ordinary. While some people will despair in the face of the ordinary, others will manage to find satisfaction in it. What is responsible for such a difference in mindset? I’m someone who works with language. Although language reflects reality, language itself isn’t reality, which is why it’s bound to be misleading. This explains the constant need we have to correct our language. We can all think differently as long as language can be corrected. And if we’re able to change the way we think, we can all become different people. Despair can be turned into satisfaction through the act of rewriting. I think our mindset depends on the words we use. It’s a difference in language. This is why I recommend writing to everyone. Someone who can correct their own language will be able to tame their mind, and in turn, transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Many people I know who have read A Future as Ordinary as This told me that the book brought them comfort. What is it about stories in general that give them the power to comfort us—both for the writer who writes them and the readers who reads them? Back when I was in university, one way I would console friends going through a breakup was by drinking with them. I hardly did anything. I just listened to whatever they had to say. It was the same for me—I would also feel the urge to talk to someone whenever I went through a difficult time. Somebody once said that sorrow becomes bearable when it’s converted into a story. Stories undoubtedly hold this kind of power. But writing a story takes this one step further because it requires one to go back and revise what they wrote. The story might be the same, but the writer has to rework it. This could either make the story more elaborate or more abstract. Since it deals with language, the act of rewriting doesn’t make a story worse. Rewriting a story several times also allows the writer to make new discoveries. The message I was trying to convey in A Future as Ordinary as This is that we have the power to rewrite the story of our life multiple times. We can’t change things that have already happened, but we can rewrite our memories of those things. I think this is where the power of stories lies. You wrote the following in the author’s note of A Future as Ordinary as This: “One day, these stories will become the reality of our lives.” This line made me realize that writing isn’t just a means of reconciling with the past, but also a way of propelling the present into the future. Thirty years have elapsed since your literary debut, and you are now in your fifties. How can a change or a shift in perspective allow us to look in on the present from the future without remaining stuck in the past? I really enjoy getting older. When I was younger, I thought of every moment as a decisive one. In my mind, not getting what I wanted amounted to failure. But with age I’ve learned how silly that is. All of these moments I thought to be so important at the time were just part of a larger process. I also see this moment right now as part of a process. If we see every moment as part of something bigger, then it doesn’t matter what happens in this very moment because we know it will be followed by a next one which has yet to reveal itself to us. There’s no way of knowing what the next moment holds. The world abounds with stories I’ve yet to encounter, but each passing moment allows me to experience more of them. That’s why I’m constantly reading stories I’ve yet to understand. I might have an experience one day that makes all the pieces fit together. It’s also why I write stories I still don’t even understand myself. I think it’s all I can do given my own narrow life experience.  Although you write in your native language of Korean, you’ve written stories taking place all around the world including countries such as China, Japan, and Germany. As an author with an interest in world history, and who has been influenced by the cultural traditions of both the East and the West, I’d like to ask you about your thoughts on translation. Given that your works are being translated into foreign languages as we speak, please tell us what you think about the role of translation.    I was born in a small town in the south of Korea. Growing up, I was encouraged to become either a lawyer or a doctor by the elders in our neighborhood. I had been convinced that wealth and power would be my only ticket out of a miserable life. That is, until I read a copy of Demian I found lying around at home when I was in high school. The novel left me shaken to the core. I felt like I was reading my own story—I was Emil Sinclair. Each word uttered by Demian came as a shock. How come no adult ever told me this kind of story? I thought to myself. I wanted to read more of these stories, not be told that becoming a lawyer or a doctor was the only way I could live a dignified existence. I started making frequent visits to the bookstore and the library where I had the chance to read more stories. I believe in a community of stories spanning the world and whose purpose is to offer alternatives to the stories of those in power who control the global narratives. A story offering an alternative in one country is just as relevant in any other country. That’s why I believe in the need to actively translate stories that can serve as alternatives to dominant narratives.   Translated by Léo-Thomas Brylowski KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:• A Future as Ordinary as This (Munhak Dongne, 2022)『이토록 평범한 미래』 (문학동네, 2022)• The Last of Seven Years (Munhak Dongne, 2020)『일곱해의 마지막』 (문학동네, 2020)• If the Waves Belong to the Sea (Munhak Dongne, 2015)『파도가 바다의 일이라면』 (문학동네, 2015)• No Matter Who and How Lonely You Are (Munhak Dongne, 2014)『네가 누구든 얼마나 외롭든』 (문학동네, 2014)• Wonder Boy (Munhak Dongne, 2012)『원더보이』 (문학동네, 2012)• “If I Take Another Month to Cross the Snowy Mountains,” I am a Phantom Writer (Munhak Dongne, 2016)「다시 한 달을 가서 설산을 넘으면」, 『나는 유령작가입니다』 (문학동네, 2016) [1] Translator’s Note: Baek Seok was a Korean poet born in 1912 during the Japanese colonial era. Although he spent part of his life in present-day South Korea, he returned to his hometown in the North following the division of the country in 1945. He opted to retire from his writing career as a poet in 1962 to become a shepherd after facing criticism from the literary establishment in North Korea.

• A Writer’s Back Vol.27 Spring 2015

    I know his back quite well. In our early twenties we were roommates, and I’m sure I saw his back more often than his face (to exaggerate ever so slightly). He sat in front of his desk, facing the wall, and wrote all the time. When I got home drunk, there he would be at his desk, tapping away at something under the light of a small lamp. When I woke up he would still be writing. Had he been up all night? He very well may have. No surprise when he became a novelist, that one.      Recently he published a collection of essays called, The Work of the Novelist. Out of all the sentences I enjoyed from that collection, my favorite has to be this: “The only important thing for a writer is the verb, ‘to write.’ ‘To write well’ and ‘to write poorly’ all come down to the same verb in the end.” Now I wonder if he was thinking that already in his twenties. In any event, he kept writing, for better or for worse.      He made his debut as a writer in 1994, and I in 2000. We met when we were 12, so we’ve known each other for more than 30 years now. So I feel like I should know Kim Yeonsu better than anyone, but I actually don’t. I do know his favorite foods (tteokbokki, noodles, and seafood). I also know his go-to coffee order (he likes cappuccinos), his past girlfriends (not that I would ever name names), and what kind of person he dislikes (again, no names). Our collective drinks together would fill a swimming pool (mostly because I drink a lot of beer), and we used to play tennis together in the daytime (usually won by me). I know what kind of music he listens to when running marathons (not at all my type). I know all these things about him, but I still don’t feel like I know him that well.      It must be because of his writing. When I read Kim Yeonsu the novelist, it doesn’t feel like I know him at all. Every sentence is an enigma. Why did he choose to write sentences this way, and why did he choose to create these kinds of characters? It must be another person inside of him that I don’t know. In The Work of the Novelist he writes, “They say, why not write [novels] better from the beginning? But how could I possibly without knowing the end? It’s the same with life. The story of my life is not over yet, so how could I live it well from the beginning? . . . Nobody lives well from the beginning. The same applies to fiction. The novel begins only after all the stories have run their course.”      Novelists are like actors in that they live the lives of multiple characters. Actually, actors only live their roles, but novelists live all of their characters. That’s what fiction is about. We empathize with the lives of strangers through the power of fiction. Who knows how many more mistakes we would make without it? Writing fiction is an inherently painful process, but one through which we strive to understand others. Mostly, I can’t get over how both of us, two childhood friends, turned out to be writers. We still live near each other so when I’m stuck I call him up for a drink. We don’t talk about writing at all, but I always feel that he gets me, at least a little bit. Afterwards, on the way home, I turn to look at his back. It’s a familiar back that looks like it’s writing even when it’s walking.      by Kim Junghyuk Novelist

• A Man of All Interests: Novelist Kim Yeonsu

  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   1. World's End Girlfriend (Kim Yeonsu, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp.2009, 318pp., ISBN 9788954608824)2. I’m a Ghostwriter (Kim Yeonsu, Changbi Publishers, Inc.2005, 266pp., ISBN 9788936436858)3. Whoever You Are, No Matter How Lonely (Kim Yeonsu, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp.2007, 392pp., ISBN 9788954603980)

• The Indefinable Boundary of Fact and Fiction: Novelist Kim Yeonsu Vol.7 Spring 2010

  Kim Yeonsu is a prolific writer, a recipient of many significant literary awards, with a number of faithful readers. His book, World’s End Girlfriend sold 40,000 copies within three months of its publication. JoongAng Ilbo reporter Shin Junebong, met with him.   Kim Yeonsu is at present overshadowed by big literary names such as Hwang Sok-yong, Yi Mun-yol, and Ko Un, but he certainly is at the top of the list for the subsequent generation of prominent writers in Korean literature. He was born in 1970, in Gimcheon, a medium-sized city located halfway between the capital city Seoul and Korea’s second largest city Busan. He was an English major in college and worked for a short time as a reporter for a woman’s magazine. He made his literary debut as a poet in 1993, and he published a novel the following year. He was initially a poet, but it is difficult to conclude what kind of influence this had on him. At any rate, in 2001, he began to garner recognition with a contentious full-length novel Goodbye, Mr. Yi Sang, for which he received the Dongsuh Literary Award. In fact, Kim went on to win all the major Korean literary prizes in the first decade of the 21st century. He received the Dongin Literary Award with his evidently autobiographical novel, When Still a Child, and the Daesan Literary Award in 2005 with I Am a Ghostwriter, which has come to characterize Kim’s writing style. In 2007, he was the recipient of Hwang Sun-won Literary Award for “The Comedian Who Went to the Moon,” and in 2009 he won the Yi Sang Literary Prize for his short story “Five Pleasures for Those Who Take Walks.” In spite of his splendid literary accomplishments, it looked as though Kim could not overcome the common fate of an artist; that is to say, notwithstanding lavish critical praise, he was viewed as a writer whose books sold in relatively small numbers. Then last year something major happened to him. World’s End Girlfriend, published in September, sold 40,000 copies within a short period of its publication. The number sold is significant, given the relatively short time period, but it also showed that Kim Yeonsu definitely had a steadfast readership. In light of the size of the literary market of Korea, it is not an easy feat for a work of fiction to sell 40 to 50,000 copies. As one literary critic pointed out, if a writer can make a living solely from the royalties, it means the writer is no longer pressed to write for literary magazines, and the like, under great time pressure, thereby draining his creative energy. With these thoughts on my mind, I met with Kim Yeonsu last December around a time of heavy snowfall. He came to the interview near Seoul City Hall with an expression ready to fend off all authority and conventions, looking like a warrior for whom the pen is his weapon against the world.   It turned out that Kim Yeonsu himself was deeply moved by the success of his short story collection, World’s End Girlfriend. He said, “They say that Koreans don’t read works of literature anymore but that doesn’t seem to be the case.” I asked him if Korean literature was in for another heyday, like in the 1980s, after a long stagnation. He replied by saying he wasn’t sure, but finds it remarkable that serious literature sells so well in Korea as compared to other countries. In effect, this way of thinking differs somewhat from most writers’ views of the Korean literary market. Many writers, whose first editions barely sell two or three thousand copies, would say that the system of “the poor get poorer, and the rich get richer” has gotten worse. Moreover, Kim Yeonsu added that the reading patterns of Korean readers are changing. He has many readers who are in their 30s, but unlike in the 1980s to 90s when people turned to books and through a vicarious reading experience tried to find an answer to important questions of life, they now read books like any other kind of cultural activity. To paraphrase the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, one of the things that could happen when the commodity aspect of literary works comes to the force is that the reader’s taste is indication of the individual’s socioeconomic class, level of education, and cultural background. So then the reader’s taste will become more diverse, and the most important thing will ultimately be how refined is the reader’s choice of books. Kim Yeonsu seemed to think that such a change is taking place in the Korean literary market. He said the standard of the Korean readers has gotten much higher than in the past; the 1.2 million copies sold of Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look After Mom as well as his novels, both which are by no means easy reading, can be taken as evidence that readers comprehend the methodology and the historical tradition of Korean literature. Kim Yeonsu believes he has a sophisticated class of readers. He said they have grown older and more mature, reading his books for over 10 years. One reader, whom he met at a book reading, told the writer that he started dating when the full-length novel Whoever You are, No Matter How Lonely came out in 2007, and broke up when Song of the Night was published a year later. For this particular reader, the writings of Kim Yeonsu will remain entwined with his private memories. It is time to scrutinize Kim Yeonsu’s literature. What is it that keeps drawing readers to his books? Kim said he felt he had no sense of identity as a writer until the time when Twenty, his anthology of stories, was published in 2000: “I just didn’t know what to write or how.” Working as a reporter for a woman’s magazine in 1997 was a catalyst. “I realized it’s not an easy life out there after experiencing the harsh reality of the workplace. It was then that I decided to write seriously.” The working hours of Korean laborers are notorious in the world for being among the longest. The profession of a reporter is considered the epitome of the “3Ds” [dirty, dangerous, and difficult]. The onerous act of earning his daily bread is what compelled him to turn to writing novels. “I perused the entire dictionary inside out until I found the right word, and changed my sentences several hundred times until I found it to my liking, not to mention doing thorough research. I tried my utmost to write an impeccable novel.”   Reportor Shin Junebong and novelist Kim Yeonsu   This change in writing style was also a consequence of the writer’s dissatisfaction with his previous novels. “My writing at that time could be described as a not fully understood Postmodernism. In order to come up with something new I tried many new approaches but I didn’t like them. I then made up my mind to write something that everyone could call a novel.” When Still a Child, an autobiographical book that was published in 2002, was a work that reflected the writer’s aforementioned change. The short stories in this book, which are about his childhood experience, read like unfiltered essays. The sentences are straightforward with clear-cut meanings. An intricate plot, his specialty, is nowhere to be found. “The New York Bakery,” one of the short stories in this autobiographical book, offers his characteristic literary device that runs through his writing. It is a story about the declining business of a New York bakery, which was run by the protagonist’s parents. The narrator is a novelist from Gimcheon; in fact, it is Kim Yeonsu, himself. He makes his appearance in the story under his real name. It is as if the writer is saying, “Even if real names and events Moreover, Kim Yeonsu added that the reading patterns of Korean readers are changing. He has many readers who are in their 30s, but unlike in the 1980s to 90s when people turned to books and through a vicarious reading experience tried to find an answer to important questions of life, they now read books like any other kind of cultural activity. To paraphrase the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, one of the things that could happen when the commodity aspect of literary works comes to the fore are used, people will still read it as a novel.” If facts can become fiction, then conversely, it is possible that fiction can be read as “facts.” Goodbye, Mr. Yi Sang is a full-length novel about a search for the death mask and a single poem by the first modernist writer and poet in Korean literature. It shows Kim’s characteristic style of interrogating the problematic, indefinable boundary of fact versus fiction, and truth versus lies. The novel was written on the basis of extensive research done on Yi’s entire works, perusing all kinds of records, investigative materials, and written records to pose the question of who really made the death mask of Yi Sang. The answer proffered by the novel is that each person who was at the making of the death mask remembers it differently. The message of the novel skirts around the literal question of whether or not the death mask really exists in order to say that the problem is not whether it is real or unreal, but that believing in its existence is what makes it real. Kim Yeonsu fills in the gaps of the official history with his imagination, which markedly differentiates him from those who formulate stories by augmenting the historical facts into what is called “faction” (half fact, half fiction). His writing about modern history raises the issue that official textbooks do not record all history. He asserts, too, that through the selection and arrangement of facts, the actual reality can be fabricated into any form. To get the optimum effect closest to reality, he says, one needs to do a wide range of research. Three of his works pose the question about the potentiality of truth being able to be disseminated from the boundary of fact and fiction. His full-length novel Song of the Night, about the internal strife of the Minsaengdan faction in the Joseon group, is set against the Manchurian backdrop during the Korean colonial period of the 1930s; Whoever You Are, No Matter How Lonely delves into 1990s Korea through a character who is sent to Berlin by the leaders of the student movement but fails to meet with his North Korean counterpart as a result of the dissolution of the South Korean student leadership; the short story “If I Can Traverse the Snow-covered Mountain After One More Month” focuses in on the final moments of the Mount Nanga Parbat expedition. Kim’s constructed literary world has much to do with the socio-political reality of the 1980s and 90s that he witnessed. He said, “Around 1992, I felt as though we [student activists] had been completely defeated.” It was at the final leg of the era when the hitherto intense student movement of the 1980s had lost its momentum following the collapse of the socialist countries, and there was a series of student self-immolations, in the so-called age of the self-immolating Korean political state. He began to question his belief that there must somewhere exist a truthful world, after witnessing how the same death could be rendered totally senseless on one hand, or, on the other hand, could have a significant historical meaning. As a result, he began to think, “We are meant to lose. Everyone gets defeated. We cannot know the Truth. But mere recording of it can be a way of communication and means of solace.” It is a passage revealing the roots of his novels. Let’s put it all together. Kim Yeonsu is a writer who takes a Borges-like approach to the dichotomy of fact and fiction, in the space-time of modern Korea. He also does an incredible amount of research and writes in a f luid style. That is why, to know contemporary Korean literature, one must read the novels of Kim Yeonsu. Not an insignificant number of sophisticated Korean readers are already “consuming” his books.   By Shin Junebong(reporter for the JoongAng Ilbo) 1. Goodbye, Mr. Yi Sang Kim Yeonsu, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2001, 277p, ISBN 89-8281-358-6   2. When Still a Child Kim Yeonsu, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2002, 287p, ISBN 89-8281-593-7   3. Five Pleasures of Those Who Take Walks Kim Yeonsu, Munhak Sasang Inc. 2009, 361p, ISBN 978-89-701-2835-1   4. Song of the Night Kim Yeonsu, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2008, 345p, ISBN 978-89-320-1900-0   5. Whoever You Are, No Matter How Lonely Kim Yeonsu, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2007, 391p, ISBN 978-89-546-0398-0   6. I Am a Ghostwriter Kim Yeonsu, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2005, 268p, ISBN 978-89-364-3685-8

FICTION

• A Future as Ordinary as This Vol.59 Spring 2023

  1 Every time I hear someone say that the world has ended, I think of 1999, of the things that happened that year and the things that didn’t. Since elementary school, I’d always been interested in mysterious abilities and supernatural phenomena—astral projections, doppelgängers, prophetic dreams, spontaneous human combustion, levitation. While I’m sure reading articles about such fantastical topics had something to do with it (children’s magazines back then published articles like that at least once a month), the truth of the matter was that divination, fortune telling, and Dahnhak’s Brain & Body meditation were everywhere in society. Times were unpredictable and everyone was having financial troubles. The country was still in shock from the Seongsu Bridge collapse, and the IMF crisis was bringing about mass layoffs. So it was natural to look to the supernatural for reassurance.     The prophecies that everyone was talking about back then were grim, although perhaps that’s more a reflection of what people were drawn to than it was a sign of the times. Case in point, Nostradamus. His most famous prophecy, that the world would end in 1999, naturally gained more and more attention as the end of the century drew nearer. And then, when it turned out the world was in fact not going to end in 1999, Nostradamus was all but forgotten—until he reappeared in 2012. This time, another one of his prophecies had entered the public eye: “From the calm morning, the end will come when of the dancing horse the number of circles will be nine.” Claiming that the prophecy referred to Psy’s “Gangnam Style” hitting one billion views on YouTube, people were yet again signaling Armageddon. There is perhaps no better example of the questionable symbol searching and backwards reasoning that plagues people and their prophecies than this.     Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that in Korean, the word for “horse” and the word for “end” are homonyms. But I’m not trying to make puns here. As a novelist, I’m less interested in the content of prophecies than the fact that they must be formulated with language. Even if some prophet sees the future in a vision, they have no choice but to express that vision in their own vocabulary, which might be limited by their intellect. That wouldn’t be the case if they could physically show people their vision, but as long as the prophecy is being transmitted via language, the true meaning can never be completely conveyed. Translation only makes matters worse, inevitably leading to further distortions. In the end, there are a million opportunities for form to obscure the meaning of a prophecy. In that sense, the “sleeping prophet” Edgar Cayce is unique. It is said that Cayce would enter a trance as though he were sleeping, lying down with his eyes closed. He would then deliver his prophecies as if he were reading a book placed in his mind’s eye. This might be the reason why his prophecies are not hard to understand. He left behind a legacy of prophecies about great movements of land and water; among these was the prediction that the western coast of the United States and the Japanese archipelago would eventually be consumed by the sea. But you don’t need to enter a trance to know this. Just open any book on geology. The only difference between him and us is that we can only read books that everyone can see, whereas he could read books that no one else could see.     The fact that prophecies are a product of form is telling. Kwon Tae-hun was a famous Korean clairvoyant. A teacher of Dahnhak, he once said that in 1999, North and South Korea would be reunited, and the civilization of white people would end, bringing about a new world paradigm led by the “yellow” race—Korea, China, India, etc. The so-called White-Yellow turning point. Because prophecies are formalized by language, they change based on one’s point of view. In other words, whereas 1999 might have seemed like Armageddon to Caucasians, to a Korean prophet that year could be interpreted as the beginning of a new epoch.      Just like prophets of different personal backgrounds and intellect interpreted the year 1999 differently, we all experienced our own version of 1999. As for me, 1999 was an unforgettable year. In the summer of that year, I was on my way to meet my uncle on my mother’s side when I stopped at Kyobo Bookstore and discovered a piece of paper. As usual, I was in the religion section and looking at books with meditation or enlightenment in their titles when something that looked like a bookmark fell out from one of the books. When I opened the piece of paper, I realized it was a flyer: “Welcome! THE MOMENT in Seoul Center – The spirit medium Julia comes to Seoul this July. Come ask life’s deepest questions. The spirit will give you answers. For further information, call the number below.”     The reason why I remember this so vividly is because of the girl I started dating that summer. After a semester of unrequited love, I finally confessed my feelings to her, but instead of accepting me, she made an unexpected suggestion. It was spring of my second year in college, and we were at the semester-end party; I discovered the flyer that following week.      I put the flyer in my pocket, found the girl—Jimin was her name—and we left the bookstore together. In the distant future, I would come to remember that summer as the summer of the fire tragedy at Sealand, as the summer that I saw The Matrix for the first time, as the summer a spirit answered my life’s deepest question, as the summer that sparked a long and beautiful relationship with a girl. But at the time, it was just another ordinary summer, no different from any other.      The publishing office my uncle worked at was located in an alley just behind the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts. I heard that a long time ago, the building was home to a famous cram school. Other than that, it was just another ordinary office situated in just another ordinary building. Walking down the epoxy coated hallway, I opened the door with the publisher’s sign hanging on it and found a small room on the right where my uncle worked. He sat at his desk with a compression sleeve on each arm, editing a manuscript as if he were some master horologist looking at a broken watch through a loupe. He told us to sit at the table in front of his desk, which we did.     “How’s school these days?” he asked as he took a cup of instant coffee from a yellow plastic tray and placed it on his desk. Jimin was sitting next to me, and my uncle looked like he was trying his best not to ask what kind of relationship we had.     “The semester ended last Friday.”     “Already? Time sure flies. Have you made plans for summer break?”     “Not really. I don’t have any special plans aside from continuing my part-time job at the library.”     “Did you say you two are classmates? I’m sorry, I forgot your name. Oh right, Jimin. Do you have any summer plans?”     I was nervous that she might say something like, “Your nephew and I are planning to do something together.” But thankfully, Jimin gave an ordinary answer. Unlike when she and I were alone, Jimin didn’t like to reveal herself in front of others.     “Enjoy it while it lasts. You can have all the money in the world, but nothing will buy you the freedom of a college vacation. Even better if you can spend it with someone in love. Speaking of which, you two seem like—”     I cut my uncle off. I didn’t like revealing myself in front of people either, even if they knew all about me.     “My friend had a question that I thought you might be able to answer,” I said. “That’s why I brought her here.”     “Well, what do you want to know?”     My uncle took a sip of coffee, and so did I. The taste of that coffee still remains pungent in my mind, as though I’d sipped it only yesterday. With liquid coffee beans in my mouth, I motioned with my head toward Jimin.     “Joon told me you’ve held, if not read, every book that has been published in Korea since Liberation. I was wondering if you knew about a book I’m looking for.”     “What’s the title?”     “Ash and Dust by Ji Young-han.”     My uncle stirred his coffee with a teaspoon. It was already well mixed, so there was no need to stir it any further. The superfluous gesture meant my uncle—a man still in his forties whose glasses looked like thick white eggshells when viewed from the side, a man who’d been a poor bookworm his entire life, who, despite being a famously meticulous copy editor, had seen his usefulness disappear along with the twentieth century because of the popularization of internet searches—was searching his vast memory for an answer.     “The one that won first place in the category of fiction for Modern Woman’s inaugural writing competition in 1974? Or was it 1975? I can’t remember.”     “I think that’s the one. I heard that she became a star overnight because she won that competition.”     “Then that must be the one. Why are you interested in that book?”     “Her mother wrote it,” I said. “But she can’t read it. She doesn’t have a copy at her home, and she can’t find it at the library.” My uncle nodded in a knowing manner.     “I’m not surprised. The book was banned as soon as it was put into print and disappeared from bookstores.”     “I never knew. None of my family told me. Why was it banned?”     “Well, the main idea of the novel was that October 1972 was the end of time. Kids these days must know about October Yushin, right? After Park Chung-hee dissolved the National Assembly and gave himself emergency powers, he enacted the Yushin Constitution. Even the universities were closed. It’s impossible for such events not to seep into the literature of the time. I’ve always been interested in publishing books based on history, so I’ll go out of my way and pay a fortune just to buy them. For that one, I had to call the publisher to get a copy. I still remember the first sentence: ‘We called October 1972 the end of time.’ The censorship office probably didn’t like that sentence.”     “A book could really get banned for just one sentence like that?”     “When a military dictatorship bans a book, they don’t need to give a detailed explanation. The book just disappears one day. That’s what a dictatorship is, after all. We’re left figuring out the reason why the government didn’t like it ourselves. That’s why people living in a dictatorship make their own internal censorship office. People are often shocked when they finally get their hands on banned books and read them. Ash and Dust is a perfect example. You said your name was Jimin? Your mother was ahead of her time. If the book had been written now, we would have called it science fiction or fantasy because it dealt with time travel and the end of time. It was a really peculiar novel for the age, so I remember the whole plot.”     When my uncle told us the plot, we couldn’t help but be surprised. In the novel, there were two lovers without a future. They realized that their time together was coming to an end. So, in that sense, the “end of time” wasn’t the end of the world but the end of their love. It was just a coincidence that it happened to take place at the same time as October Yushin. That coincidence got the book banned. Anyway, because the lovers in the novel realized that life without each other was pointless, they decided to commit suicide together. Just before they died, their lives flashed before their eyes. But the flashback wasn’t simply visual; they felt like they were reliving their whole life, as though they were experiencing a long vivid dream. The only difference was that time was running in reverse. The day they decided to kill themselves became the first day of their new life, and now when they went to sleep, they woke up not the next day but the day before. Only when they figured this out did they realize they must be getting younger by the day.      “No way. I can’t believe it. It’s almost like the novel predicted the future,” I said.     “Predicted what future?”     Before I could say anything, Jimin spoke up.     “Joon and I were planning to commit suicide together this summer vacation.”     My uncle and I both stared at Jimin. 2 When I finally read the book for myself, it was in autumn of 2019, twenty years after that day in Gwanghwamun. Perhaps influenced by my uncle, I had transformed myself from a student who just liked reading books to a serious novelist over the course of those twenty years. I came to know many editors from various publishing houses, and I would receive books from them that they’d edited. Among them was the collection of essays, Free Heart. The book started in a bold manner with the line: “I’m an enlightened person.”     Although the author Kim Won introduced himself as a farmer, he originally had managed an investment consulting firm just a few years prior to the book’s publication. But, when he turned fifty, he realized there was something he absolutely had to do. He left the company and retired to the mountains in Gyeongsang-do province where he had no family or friends. The thing he absolutely had to do was achieve enlightenment; when I entered my forties, I was surprised to find out that there were a lot of people around me who wanted to achieve enlightenment. I guess it’s because life is hard and most people realize they’re too old to start something new. Anyway, life in the countryside wasn’t as easy as he thought, and he spent three years without any free time to look at the books he’d brought with him.     Then one day after finally managing to get settled in his village, he finally had time to look at some of his books. He opened some of the Buddhist scriptures and writings of the sages he’d brought with him, and when he realized he understood everything he was reading, he knew he had already reached enlightenment.  Free Heart’s introduction went like this: People say that life is a sea of hardship, but the essence of our existence is happiness. Life is in fact a sea of happiness. But waves emerge on the sea to hide its true appearance. Waves may originate from the sea, but they are not the sea itself, and they eventually hide its true nature. Likewise, language comes from reality, but it is not reality itself; it obscures it. We have all experienced the unease that appears the moment we say to ourselves, “I’m truly happy.” But why? We say we’re happy because we’re happy, right? So why would we feel uneasy? The reason is because the word “happiness” isn’t happiness itself; it is nothing more than language, a substitute for the real thing. The meaning of language can change immensely depending on how we express it. Humans create their identity through the stories they tell. And stories are formulated through language. Therefore, a person’s identity will change depending on how that identity is formulated in words. In this way, our identity is an illusion. But even this requires language to express it. This only furthers the illusion. This is why life is so painful. Even if we gain a million insights, they are nothing but an illusion of language. This last section pierced my heart. This is why life is so painful. Even if we gain a million insights, they are nothing but an illusion of language. Now that I think about it, the summer of 2019, which I’d spent engrossed in Free Heart, was the last summer before COVID-19. While I read the book, I became interested in the author, and I would often visit Kim Won’s Facebook page, which I found linked to Heo Jinho’s account, the editor who’d sent me the book. For a person who wrote a book about personal enlightenment, he was surprisingly interested in politics and often posted his opinions on current issues on his Facebook wall. The postings were a bit inflammatory, so much so that I wondered if he wasn’t doing it on purpose to incite reactions in the comments. And then I looked at his other postings. Among them was a picture of an old book. The title was printed in jagged font: Ash and Dust. When I clicked on it, I was confronted by a post that recounted how Kim Won came across the book.     One summer twenty years ago, Kim Won, who was a graduate student at the time, was waiting at Gohan Station in Gangwon-do province for a train to Cheongnyangni. There was an hour left before the departure time, and the sun was just beginning to set over the mountains. Normally, he would use the time to eat dinner at one of the restaurants in front of the station, but that day, he decided to venture into an alley he’d never been to before. He passed restaurants, hardware shops, and clothes stores until he discovered a used bookstore at the end of the street. The store didn’t seem as if it received many customers. When Won entered and picked up a book, the owner of the shop, who looked to be about Won’s age, gave him barely more than a perfunctory nod. Won idled away his time by pulling random books off the shelf and reading them under the dim light of the bookstore. But no matter what book he picked out, he couldn’t focus on anything he was reading. There was this fire raging up from deep inside his heart, a fire that threatened to ignite his entire body.     At the time, he had been into casinos. He only played games with 50/50 odds. And he had a rule to only join a game when he’d seen one side win five times in a row. He’d enter the game and bet on the losing side. Why? Well, the odds that a coin will turn up heads six times in a row is one in sixty-four, or about 1.5 percent. Conversely, the chances of the opposite happening (not getting heads six times in a row), is 98.5 percent. But in gambling, anything is possible and sometimes, even 98.5 to 1.5 odds will end up losing you money. In fact, it happens quite often. But for Won as a graduate student, that was fine. Because next time, all he had to do was stick to his guns and double his bet. After all, the chances that a coin won’t turn up heads seven times in a row is more than ninety-nine percent. And yet, it’s still possible to lose. That’s gambling for you. But it’s fine. All you need to do is keep at and double your bet one more time. There’s no way you can lose this time. There are a lot of factors at work at the casino, but this was Won’s basic strategy.     That day, however, against all his expectations, he’d lost five times in a row and was down 310,000 won. He’d joined a game of dice. The rules were simple. Roll three dice. If the sum of the dice was ten or less, the result was called so. If the sum of the dice was more than ten, the result was called dae. The reason Won decided to join this particular game that day was because he had just seen the dice on the table come out so five times in a row. But after he bet dae, the dice came out so five more times, making that ten times in a row. That was when the trouble started. He had three options. He could keep betting dae, he could bet so, or he could stop. According to his own rule, the best option would have been to stop. He would need to bet at least 310,000 won to win back what he’d lost, but that was about all that he had left. The next best option was sticking to his guns and betting dae. But there was one other man who kept betting so. That man was betting with the same conviction that Won had when he’d entered the game. Because the man kept winning money every game, one by one the other people at the table started copying him. After thinking about it for a while, Won also changed and bet dae on his sixth bet. He lost all his money.     On the train back to Cheongnyangni, Won read the book he’d bought from the used bookstore for 1,000 won and thought hard about what he’d done wrong. His biggest mistake was losing all his money; he didn’t even have enough left to buy himself dinner. If you want to win money at the casino, you must discern between the things you can control and the things you can’t. Although you can’t determine how much money you’ll make through gambling, you can set a limit on how much you’re willing to lose. It’s never a good idea to lose all the money you bring with you. When Won’s thoughts reached an impasse, he turned his attention to the book. The lights of the train were dim, his eyes were blurry, and his mind was a mess. Likewise, the paper was rough to the touch, the sentences alien, and the plot bizarre. And then he realized something. The past doesn’t determine the present. The future determines the present. If he kept losing, the chances of him winning on the next turn approached one hundred percent. As long as he didn’t give up on the future, he would eventually win. The only problem was he didn’t have enough money to make another bet.      In the novel he read on the train, there was a couple that attempted to commit suicide together. Miraculously, they got sent backwards in time and were made to relive their lives. As they went further back in time, they realized that they were converging on the moment of their first meeting. They remembered the year, month, and day, how excited and thrilled they were to meet. As they lived their second lives in reverse, barreling toward their first meeting, they were able first to experience all the things that happened because they met. They could actively imagine their future or, as we would think of it, their past. And then they realized how imagining the best thing coming at the end changes the present. This gave the two hope: hope that they could live again; hope that when they converged at the moment of their first meeting, time would start to flow in its original direction again; hope that at the end of time, when the world looks like it’s about to end, they would be able to imagine the best future. Time continued to run in reverse until the time of their first encounter, and they were able to experience that moment again. They couldn’t believe it. They had been so surprised, thrilled, and excited to meet. As soon as they realized this, the two of them looked at each other as though they were meeting for the first time all over again. And then time started to flow in its original direction, and then their third life began. 3 After reading Kim Won’s post, I emailed Heo Jinho asking if I could borrow Kim Won’s copy of Ash and Dust. He responded that he would look into it. A few days later, I got a response saying that Kim Won didn’t need the book anymore and was willing to give it to me. Feeling bad that I was always asking him for favors like this, I wanted to at least buy Jinho a meal. I thought about where to take him when I remembered the old Korean barbeque restaurant in an alley next to Gwanghwamun. I’d gone there a couple times with my uncle.     I had no idea that Jimin would tell my uncle about our plans to commit suicide together that day. Then again, it was her contradictory attitude toward life, which was at once bold and pessimistic, that drew me to her in the first place. After hearing this, my uncle just stirred his coffee with his teaspoon.     “Jimin, do you have any memories of your mother?” my uncle finally asked after a long while.     Jimin shook her head.     “I was fascinated by your mother’s works, so I remember feeling sad when I saw on the news that she died a few years after the book was banned. There were probably lots of reasons for her death, but the banning of her book must have hurt her greatly. There’s nothing more demoralizing for an author than to have their book erased like that.”     Until then, I had no idea that Jimin’s mother had distributed flyers in the middle of Jongno street criticizing the Yushin Constitution, or that she had been sent off and locked away, or that she had killed herself.     “I can’t forgive my father and the rest of my family for what they did. They drove her to insanity.”     “I’m not suggesting that you forgive them, but can we talk a little bit more about this? I’m almost done with work. We can talk over dinner.”     Jimin nodded. She was trembling. I extended my hand and held hers. She didn’t take her hand from me. That was the beginning.     Just as I had done twenty years ago that summer, I was now headed to Gwanghwamun to meet an editor in his forties. When I got off the bus, Gwanghwamun was packed with two groups of protesters, one condemning the newly appointed Minister of Justice, and the other defending him. I stopped by Kyobo Bookstore; the time on the clock was about the same as when I’d visited the store twenty years earlier. Back then, Kyobo Bookstore had a lower hanging ceiling, was less well lit, and had more variety of books. It had felt like every book printed in Korea was on the shelves of Kyobo Bookstore. I went to the religion section, just like I had all those years ago, and picked out whatever book caught my eye, but nothing fell out of the bookshelf like before. Suddenly, I wondered to myself, what was that American named Julia, who had grey hair even back then, doing now? And where were those other people, the ones who had listened to the spirit’s voice through Julia that night?      The Korean barbeque place in the alley behind Sejong Center for the Performing Arts was just as I remembered it. I had another memory of the restaurant other than the one with my uncle and Jimin. I’d come here with my mother to meet my uncle. I think I was in junior high at the time. My mom and I were there to “see Seoul,” but she went back to the province the next day, and I stayed for three or four more days. We had shown up at the publishing office without warning, and my uncle, as always, was furiously stirring his coffee as he sat in front of us. Now that I think about it, that was the first time I’d gone on a train trip with my mother. Many years after that, I realized that my mother had made up her mind to divorce my father on that trip. At the time, I was too focused on the food to listen in on the conversation my uncle and mother were having. Because of this, I have no way of knowing how my uncle persuaded my mom. And yet, I have a hunch about how he did it. He probably told her the same thing he told Jimin.     After eating with Jinho, he and I came out onto Gwanghwamun intersection to find the streets still bustling with protestors.     “How long is it going to be like this?” I asked.     “If there’s no reason for change, these scenes probably won’t change either,” Jinho answered. “Not next year, nor the year after that.”     “If there’s no reason for change?”     “A long time ago when I read that sentence from Wittgenstein’s book—you know the one: ‘But you do not really see the eye’—I was completely blown away by the insight. We can see whatever we want. But we can’t see the eye that we use to see. Our invisible eye decides what we see and what we don’t. In other words, we like to say that we see everything, but in reality, we only see the limits of our eyes. While editing books, I’ve come to think the same thing about writing. Every sentence of a book can only exist within the limits of the extent of the author’s thoughts. Every book is its author. In other words, you must first change the author to change the sentences inside their book.”     “So, what you’re trying to say is that I have to change for these sights to change?”     “That’s how you change the world in front of you. Try doing something different. Or try doing something you don’t usually do. Like learning to surf or volunteering. Or just make up your mind to do something different. Like deciding one day for no reason at all that you’re going to start loving classical music. As long as you make up your mind to live differently from how you’ve been living, no matter how small the change, the sights in front of your eyes will start to change.”     Jinho’s words shocked me. 4 After meeting with Jinho, I came home and showed my wife Ash and Dust; her reaction was calmer than I had expected. She had escaped somewhat from the childhood trauma of her mother’s suicide, I guess. In fact, she was more interested in Kim Won’s losing all his money at the casino than she was in the book. With the book lying on the kitchen table, we enjoyed cold beers as we talked about that summer in 1999, when we’d met with my uncle. We filled in the holes of each other’s memories, and slowly I began to vividly remember the way I looked all those years ago, so flustered by the way Jimin told me, “I’m going to die soon. Don’t get close to me if you’re not prepared to die with me.” My uncle, who was still in his forties at the time, sat across from Jimin at the restaurant table and spoke to her:     “The novel your mother wrote ends with the two lovers living out their third life. Because time in their third life flows in the same direction as their first life, it appears as if they’re living their life once again. But there’s a difference. They’re living life thinking the same way they did when they lived their second life in reverse. In other words, their whole awareness pattern changes, and they start to think that it is the events in the future, not the events of the past, that are the causes of the events in the present. What kind of things would happen if you thought like that? Jimin, let’s say that you and Joon get married in the future. If we think that the two of you sitting in front of me like this is the cause of your future marriage, how would that change us?” When I heard this, I tried telling him we weren’t dating. My uncle told me this was just a thought experiment.     “And if not that,” he continued, “then what if you thought that your sitting here was a result of your mother’s unfortunate suicide in the past? What then?”     “They’re both just thoughts in the end,” Jimin answered.     “I wonder, is that really true? If I said that both of you are here right now because you’ll get married in the future, you’d laugh at me and tell me I’m crazy. But if I said that your mother’s unfortunate death was what caused you two to decide on committing suicide together this summer, would you still laugh at me and call me crazy? They’re both just thoughts, but there’s a clear difference.”     “The past is something that I definitely experienced, but our marrying each other is just a probability.”     I don’t quite remember Jimin saying this, but she says she did.     “You can easily imagine the past because you’ve already experienced it, but because the future only exists in probabilities, you can’t imagine what it might be. It’s this thought that bears human tragedy. What we must remember isn’t the past, but the future.”     “Remember the future? What does that mean?”     “That’s what your mother said in her book. By traveling through time, the couple in the book realize there’s no such thing as time. And because time doesn’t exist, neither does the past or the future. Only the present moment exists. And yet, humans only put significance on time that has passed; they only look for the causes of the present in the past. It doesn’t matter whether time flows from the twentieth century to the twenty-first century or backwards into the nineteenth century. The regrettable thing is that even after writing such an amazing novel, your mother wasn’t able to remember the you from twenty years in the future. If in her most painful moment, she could have remembered her daughter as a mature young woman, she might have changed her mind. Forgiveness is only possible when we remember the future, not the past. I hope that by remembering the future, you can forgive your father and your family for driving your mother to despair like that.”     A few days after meeting with my uncle, Jimin and I went to meet Julia and get one final opinion from the spirit-medim. It was my idea to ask Julia about our committing suicide together. I didn’t expect much when I pulled out the flyer and showed it to Jimin on our way back from the barbeque restaurant, but she agreed to the idea.     A few days later, we were outside Grand Hyatt Seoul, just in front of Namsan Mountain. We met late in the evening and got on a bus; by the time we entered Sowolgil Rood, the sun had already set. It was a summer evening, so we opened the bus window. It wasn’t like we were on our way to get into trouble, but we were still a bit excited when we thought about how we were going to meet an American spirit medium. Looking out the bus window, I could see Yongsan district, the Han River, and the lights across the water that sparkled like scattered jewels. As I did this, I thought to myself that the world had never been so clear.     Taxis were lined up in front of the hotel, and there were suspiciously dressed women smoking near the public payphones. We called the number on the flyer and gave them our names and where we were. They told us if we walked down the hill to the side of the hotel, they would send a person out to meet us. Holding hands, we started walking down the street. Most words disappear without a trace after you hear them, but some words are like seeds, taking root in our minds. My uncle’s hypothetical statement about Jimin and my getting married was one set of such words. After hearing them, we acted like people who really believed what he said. We missed each other when we weren’t together, and when we were together, we didn’t want to say goodbye. Every day, we embraced and touched one another. At the bus stop, at the corner table of a partitioned café, at an empty double-feature movie theatre—wherever it was, we were always in contact that summer, unable to bear a single moment of separation. If she were to kill herself, I was prepared to follow her.     Jimin laughed at this statement of mine just as she had twenty years ago.     “Really?” she asked.     “Of course. But you remember what Julia said to us. She told us we can’t die.”     “I can’t believe we went all the way up to the top of Namsan Mountain that night just to hear that.”     “But those were the words of the spirit.”     “There’s a possibility it wasn’t actually the words of a spirit.”     “Then whose do you think they were?”     Jimin answered by reminding me of something else from that night.     After we walked down that hill for a while, we saw a man waving to us from below. We followed him to a two-story, stand-alone house with a large front yard. He said the house was the Korean branch of THE MOMENT. Originally it had been the residence of an American who’d worked at the Seoul branch of a foreign bank, but he’d agreed to only use the second floor for himself and let THE MOMENT use the entire first floor. Seeing how much this man knew about the place, Jimin thought he must work for THE MOMENT, but like Jimin and me, he was just another person who had come here to get an answer from the spirit after seeing the flyer.     “Remember that story you told me about Kim Won? In a game in which you can only pick one of two choices, the more you lose, the closer your chance of winning on the next turn converges to one hundred percent. That man said a similar thing. He looked at us with a look of regret on his face and said, ‘The people in the house right now are all people for whom nothing is going right. The two of you both look like college students. I don’t know how the two of you got here, but there’s this major league pitcher who’s quoted as saying, You can learn a little bit from winning and everything from losing. A life in which you only lose isn’t a bad life. As long as you don’t change your choice in the middle.’ ”     “He said that?” I asked, not remembering this part.     “The man said one other thing. He said it was a quote from Paul Valéry. ‘We enter the future backwards.’ The man said he was a graduate student, too. For all we know, he might have been Kim Won. Anyway, when we entered the room, the people asking Julia questions really were all failures. But do you remember? What the spirit that entered Julia’s body referred to itself as?”     “No.”     “It said it wasn’t a spirit. That was just what they called themselves. It said they were from the future, a collective consciousness without physical form.”     “Right, right. I remember now. The spirit said it wasn’t a spirit. It wanted us to call it an ‘integrated mind’ from the future.”     “It claimed that some mysterious being, neither ghost nor spirit, had entered Julia’s body. I almost believed this, but then I realized it might not be true.”     “What do you mean?” I asked.     “Do you remember what we asked the spirit? We asked two questions. Will the world end? This was your question. And is there a reason for me to keep living? That was my question. And this is what the spirit told us. The world will not end. And the two of you will get married. You can’t die.”     “I’ll never forget that moment.”     “Did you believe the spirit?” Jimin asked me.      “Of course I did.”     “I didn’t.”     Jimin stared at me in silence for a while. Looking into her eyes, I eventually confessed.     “Actually, I didn’t believe it either. How could I believe something so surprising?”     We both laughed.     “Right? But after all these years, I realized it wasn’t so surprising. That prophecy was so ordinary. The world didn’t end and we didn’t die. We got married and are now drinking beer together. It’s these ordinary, unremarkable facts that Julia said to us. The only extraordinary thing was that she’d said them to us twenty years before they happened. It was the time difference that made it sound like something supernatural. My mother said to remember the future in her novel. So, why did she die? I’ve always wondered about that. But now I think I know. If only my mom could have remembered such a future as ordinary as this.”     In summer of 1999, when Jimin told me at the semester-end party that she was going to die soon, I never would have imagined this future. The future I imagined as a kid was either filled with terrible things—the end of the world, cataclysmic earthquakes, a pandemic caused by a mutant virus, World War III. Or it was filled with wonderful things—space travel, magnetic levitation trains, artificial intelligence. But now I know. I know that even if we keep losing, the thing we must choose is this ordinary future. And as long as we don’t give up, the probability of that future coming true will converge to one hundred percent. In 1999, there were things that happened to me and things that didn’t happen to me. But if I hadn’t remembered the future, the things that happened to me wouldn’t have happened to me, and the things that didn’t happen to me would have happened. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert

• World’s End Girlfriend Vol.27 Spring 2015

  Some things tell of what is to come. A moon halo seen out the window after packing for a mountain trek the next day, heart brimming with anticipation; an interviewer you wait two hours to meet, but who just sits with a constipated expression without asking a single question; an empty classroom you wake up to after sleeping for a full hour when you were just planning to briefly rest your head down on the desk, exhausted from working through the night but finally completing the project you were given only a week to finish. Be it the round moon halo, the constipated expression, or the hour that just slipped by, it is through these things you discover a reason why you should not call life a mystery. Memory being what it is, you lose sight of many of the wheels in between, but life is like a set of cogwheels turning and meshing with each other. All events leave some kind of mark, and after a while this makes it possible for us to realize what the first cogwheel was. It was the busy work of a volunteer at the library that served as the first cogwheel leading up to my story of love. Noticing an empty spot on the bulletin board where new acquisitions and announcements were posted, the volunteer had gained permission to print out and tack a new poem every week. Then it took three seasons—fall, winter, and spring—to pass before the next cogwheel began to turn. Early May, the worker had to quit work to follow her husband out of town, and for a while it was a poem by Ra Heeduk that remained on the board. Then someone, most likely some soul who was concerned about the Poem of the Week being mistaken for the Poem of the Weak or whatnot, or perhaps a library user who wanted to demonstrate what it really means to volunteer, started posting poems by Shin Kyeong-nim. Thereafter followed a number of people eagerly contributing their own papers and tacks to attest to the wealth of the superb poets the country was blessed with, and as their efforts soon began cluttering up the bulletin board, someone came up with the idea to hold a weekly meeting at which interested parties could gather and select the next poem to be posted. And thus the Poetry Reading Club, or the PRC for short, was born. As for myself, I was the third person to post a favorite poem (one by Choi Ha-rim) on the board. Starting with “When I was six or seven years old seagulls flew on the sea,” the poem1 ended with the words “Thus it will likely be when we grow old. There will lay an evening shadow quietly casting a shade like the sorrows of men.” However, while I had contributed my poem, it never occurred to me to join the newly-formed group of people who had begun to gather each Wednesday to read their selections and decide upon the next poem to go up on the board. Then one day—after the heavy summer rains had ended for good, and the hot and hot, oh so hot summer began in earnest—I was at the library to borrow a book when I came upon the poem “World’s End Girlfriend” posted on the bulletin board. According to the poet, there is a Metasequoia tree at the end of the path he is walking, and this is the very end of the world where he and his girlfriend will someday sit together, leaning with their backs against the rough trunk of the tree, “as fire and tears seep into each other, or as the moon and a rainbow would.” Meanwhile, the poet says, love will “belatedly fade away / at a touch, a very touch / without a trace, not a mark // just as snow in March.” As I stood pondering the poem and the poet’s name for a long while, the line about “a Metasequoia standing facing the lake” struck a chord in me and I searched on the library computer, eventually finding a book called Metasequoia, the Living Fossil. In a way it was no wonder I decided to borrow the book, which had been shelved in the seldom-visited Botany section and looked as if it had never been checked out before.   Early evening, among falling leaves, I pass through a mountain with many graves. Before I know it, I am walking with a lowered head. A part of the sky flows in clear and is swept into the inhabited mountain. Into the inhabited mountain, water flows and flows to join me on the tranquil floor. I feel myself warming up. I wish for a chance encounter with a familiar face. A middle-aged man began reading a poem with a slightly sheepish expression on his face. The summer rains had ended for good and the burning heat of the day still lingered on a Wednesday evening. I sat with about twelve other people in the basement meeting room, carefully looking at everyone’s face and wondering who had been the one to choose “World’s End Girlfriend.” Before coming to the meeting I had thought the PRC would be a group of literature buffs who dreamed of making a late start of their literary careers, and who, together with a teacher who had debuted in some mediocre literary magazine, gathered to read text poems and give group feedback about their practice poems. But after attending the meeting I could see the PRC differed from any ordinary literature programs hosted by the library. As I later learned, the PRC had a total of twenty-one members, among which around fifteen people usually made it to the Wednesday meetings, depending on their schedules. Many were young housewives living in new town communities, but the members hailed from a broad range of professions, including military men, school teachers, lawyers, and nurses, and their ages ranged from middle school students to senior citizens. The middle-aged man continued. “. . . Dear Nameless / you whom I could never call / in the tongue of my land . . . . ”2 Then, after finishing, he paused briefly and cleared his throat, “A few days ago, a street vendor committed suicide during a demonstration against the city for clearing away street stalls. So the vendors held another street demonstration yesterday, which caused a traffic jam on the Riverside North Expressway starting from Seongsan Bridge. Everyone hear about this?” There came a few answers from the seated people. Yes. For three hours. Such a tragedy. As for myself, I hadn’t had an inkling. “I was heading back from a business meeting with one of my female employees, and after an hour stuck going nowhere we decided to just pull over at a corner store next to a gas station. They were selling coffee. So the two of us sat and had a cup under the store’s awning, looking at the sky hanging over the Han River. Looking back at the jam-packed road, I was suddenly struck by the thought that this must be the most relaxing time of my life. I said to her. ‘Do you know why the road is jammed?’ ‘Yes, it was on the radio that street vendors were holding a demonstration, wasn’t it?’ ‘No, it’s because of tedium,’ I said. I read a piece about the vendor who killed himself. Forty-three years old. Same age as I am. Being forty-three is like this. You’ve passed the halfway-point and are still churning along for a while—like you always have—when it hits you. You’ve already seen this part of the road. And you will have to run the same distance before it all ends. The man probably killed himself because he was sick of that. And there the conversation stopped. The two of us kept still for a moment, and then we both took another drink of our coffee. That was when the poem came to my mind. You see, back when I was a college freshman there was this guy I would often come upon at this bar, and whenever he was drunk he would recite it with tears dropping from his eyes. I thought he must be some kind of mystery man, but turns out he was in the same year, even the same department, as me. What a surprise. . . Well, anyway that was back in the day.” “You didn’t have any designs on your employee, did you?” A girl around my age asked him in a teasing voice. “Designs? What am I, an architect? But anyway, once you pass forty all that’s left is parting with people. I parted with her too.” “Then you did go out with her?” This, by an old woman with speckled white hair. “Well it’s not like you have to go out with someone to part with them. We part with each other every day. Meet in the morning and part in the evening. Meet your wife in the evening, part with her in the morning. . . .” “That’s so sad.” I found myself blurting out. I had been louder than I had intended and everyone was looking at me. “This is your first time here, isn’t it? Did you bring a poem by any chance? You’ve seen us taking turns, so you probably understand what to do, no? Read a poem and just tell us why you chose it. Want to give it a try?” The elderly woman asked me in her somewhat curt voice. Well, this was how the story went. It was spring, and upon graduating from college I had spent a month or so holed up at home. Right around when the cherry blossoms began to fall I started part-timing at a downtown mall coffee shop from ten in the morning to four in the afternoon. In the evening I jogged around the lake listening to Bae Chul-Soo’s music program on the radio, and I sent inconsequential text messages to a girl named Nan-Ah only about once every three times I thought of her. When she sent back a reply—again not every time but about once every three times I texted her—the name “Nana” would appear on the screen of my cell phone. For example: “just faking sick 2 get ur attention lol JUN 15 10:48am Nana.” She had asked me spell her name that way because she had been unhappy with the original version—a gift from her grandfather who had been a middle school teacher his whole life—all through school. Thus reminded of Emile Zola’s novel more than ten times a day, I went so far as to scout out and flip through a copy at the library, but learned little more than about the promiscuity of the female protagonist Nana, as I did not finish the out-dated translation of the realistic novel to the end. Like this. The second season of my twenty-fifth year passed by like the pages of a nineteenth century Naturalism novel. And then the summer rains began, and as the weather prevented me from running I read books borrowed from the library and waited for the rainy season to pass. It was because of the rains that I ended up calling her, if not I would have perhaps just sent another text message to Nana. We talked for a while about the weather. About how it would at least be more satisfying if it poured instead of just drizzling without end, about the uniform blanket of grey that filled the sky, about the instinctive longing for the hot and hot, oh so hot summer sun. I told her how the rains prevented me from running, and she replied that she had never imagined me to be a runner. And then she said to me. “Yes, it was good. We were really good together. But even so, we can never go back to those times.” These words made me happy, and also made me sad. First because of the word “Yes,” and then because of the “but even so.” Yes. But even so. Yes. But even so. After hanging up I repeated the words to myself from time to time, for instance as I lined up pieces of bread on the kitchen table to make a sandwich, or while smoking a cigarette in the library lounge, looking out to scenery that seemed unsure and grey as my own future. Then a few days later, as the rains began to dry up, I thought to myself, “Yes, these rains may last forever. But even so, I will start running.” I put on yellow shorts and a t-shirt and, after a look up at the drizzling sky, I began to run. In my neighborhood of detached houses in the new town community, the rainy season was passing through its last few days. Through the narrow alleys where cars were parked 24 hours a day, the rainwater flowed toward the sewer like a crowd of grade schoolers bustling home, between the uniform rows of multi-unit houses and modest villas. Days passed without a single bird flying over the cherry and zelkova trees in the small park that had once been a paper mulberry field, as a notice informed visitors; in a corner, a lone swing and slide set was rapidly going to rust. In the morning news, a weather forecaster had been wearing a yellow rain slicker as she pointed out a low pressure trough passing through the peninsula and predicted the heat to start the next day—it was a Friday, it was the evening, and I ran toward the lake. Exactly as much as the rain seeped into my clothes, as much as rust collected on the swings and slides, just as the low pressure trough passed through the peninsula, so did my twenty-fifth year fly by. The trouble with being twenty-five is that your troubles only amount to so much. No matter what you may think, things matter only so much and not a bit more. After perhaps thirty minutes of running I was halfway around the lake, my body soaked through and water seeping into my shoes, but the rain had begun to taper off. Turning my head toward the west, from where a breeze was blowing in, I noticed the sky was getting brighter. Towards the west the sky was black, then blue in some ways, and then again white in others, which impressed me so much I stopped to stand looking at the sight for a while, panting to catch my breath. The clouds covering the sky were quickly becoming bright, and puffy clouds sprouted just off from the horizon and said that the day was clearing up. First it was the rain clouds, then the wind, then the evening, the season—just like that, a whole era was passing by. Any emotion I could imagine was already visible in front of me in the passing scenery, so instead of moving on I just stood still and let my breathing return to normal. The wind chilled my wet body and raindrops grew fatter and splattered off the leaves, and then a blue-hued sky finally poked through the clouds. I could see this was the last day of the rainy season. It was clear to me as I looked at the west sky, the puffy clouds, and the tall Metasequoia which stood alone with its uneven trunk and drops of water clinging to its leaves.     Translated by Cho Yoonna   1 Choi Ha-rim, "Evening Shadow."2 Shin Dae-Chul, "Missing Anyone Today 1."

• The Comedian Who Went to the Moon Vol.7 Spring 2010

  “The Comedian Who Went to the Moon” is a novella about a woman’s search for her father, a comedian who vanished at the height of his popularity. It won the 2007 Hwang Sun-won Literary Award, and was included in Kim’s short story collection, World’s End Girlfriend, which was published in September of 2009. Below is an excerpt from the beginning of the book.   It was December 24, 2000, eighteen years after a man made his journey into the desert. I was invited to a party by an older alumnus friend in celebration of his recent appointment as full-time professor. There, I saw a woman with a perm, which brought to mind those Cabbage Patch dolls in America that had been such a sensation when I was little. Naturally, I ended up mentioning the Cabbage Patch dolls, which reminded me of ugly American girls, and our conversation led to various events of the early 1980s (when the dolls had been popular), and I ended up recalling a story about a boxer who’d fought desperately for the title of Lightweight World Champion in that city of delights in Nevada, only to end up brain-dead. It was Mike Tyson who said, in something like hip-hop rhyme, “Other than boxing, everything is so boring,” I drunkenly imitated him, in something like hip-hop rhyme. “Other than boooxing, everything is so boooring.” I was a bit dubious of my own behavior, since it wasn’t like me at all to joke around like that in front of strangers. Soon after, the woman with the cabbage head said, “Do you think you could turn that into a novel?” Only then did I realize that she was the reason for my unusual behavior. “What do you mean?” “That boxer. The guy who died in Las Vegas. Could you turn his suffering into a novel?” “Novels don’t deal with expressing suffering directly. Essays do that. Writing a novel is an act of taking the suffering that the author knows and turning it into story. If I can understand the suffering of the boxer who senses his impending death, then I can write it into a novel.” “Let me ask it another way then. Do you understand suffering?” “A novelist’s suffering is when he can’t sell his books because readers can’t understand them.” People around us burst into laughter. “It’s no laughing matter.” “Hey, then you’re sufficiently qualified to write about that boxer,” my alumni friend butted in to say. “No, no. I’m one of those novelists who don’t know the meaning of suffering,” I said, tongue-in-cheek. The lady with the cabbage head said to me, “I have a feeling that sooner or later, you’re going to end up writing about that boxer.” “Well, are you saying I’m going to understand suffering sooner or later? Or that you’ll show me?” We exchanged meaningful looks. I didn’t know what kind of time frame she had in mind when she said “sooner or later,” but as you can see, I’m writing a novel about a boxer, so perhaps I’ve learned a little something about suffering by now? It was the Heavyweight World Champion Floyd Patterson who said, “It’s a little like falling in love with a woman.” He added, “It doesn’t matter if the woman is untrustworthy, mean, or savage. If she keeps hurting you in every imaginable way, but you still love her and want her, what can you do about it? That’s my relationship with boxing.” It’s possible that everything started from this. No more than 10 minutes after it became obvious that she knew I was a novelist, I became aware of a strange warmth every time I looked in her direction. Every time I collected more information about her, through what other people said or what she said herself, the heat became a little more intense. She was a high school classmate of my alumni friend’s wife, and a producer at a radio station. We were the same age. As midnight approached and flakes of snow fell with indescribable beauty, my face was glowing red like the full moon on the 15th day of the new year, tinged with the afterimage of children playing with rings of flame. Part of it was my drunkenness. Part of it the warmth.    * Translated by Jae Won Chung.

REVIEWS

• In Loneliness Begin Responsibilities: World’s End Girlfriend by Kim Yeonsu Vol.45 Autumn 2019

• Five Tips to Escape Romantic Love: So You Love Me, Sonyong? by Kim Yeonsu Vol.37 Autumn 2017

• We Are Not Alone: Wonderboy by Kim Yeonsu Vol.34 Winter 2016

• Kim Yeonsu Reaches Japanese Shores: World’s End Girlfriend by Kim Yeonsu Vol.27 Spring 2015

• Revising the Unwritten: Mi of April, Sol of July by Kim Yeonsu Vol.23 Spring 2014

• A Novel of Youth Rewritten: Route 7 Revisited by Kim Yeonsu Vol.12 Summer 2011

• Finding Meaning on the Road: The Right to Travel by Kim Yeonsu Vol.4 Summer 2009

• Six Degrees of Separation: Whoever You Are, However Lonely You Are by Kim Yeonsu Vol.1 Autumn 2008

• Living on the Edge: The Night is Singing by Kim Yeonsu Vol.2 Winter 2008

BOOKS