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Main [FRENCH] Impossibles Adieux: A Tragic Yet Tender Journey Into the Depths of Winter It was ten years ago, in 2014, that the French public discovered Han Kang, with the translation of The Wind Is Blowing. The novelist was forty-four at the time. Next, we discovered The Vegetarian, the 2016 winner of the Man Booker International Prize, followed by Human Acts and Greek Lessons. However, it was only in 2023,

Magazine Vol. 65 Autumn 2024 We live in Seoul, yet we do not know Seoul. Each day we open our eyes, skip breakfast, rush to work with feet always pounding as if being pursued, compulsively check our subway maps, and plunge into a writhing crowd of uncaring, unfeeling strangers to become strangers ourselves. This is a day in Seoul. I am shocked when strangers to the city—perhaps deceived by the “Global Korea” slogan—claim to admire life here. “Seoul” as created by Hallyu in the proliferation of K-culture seems to be some completely alien space-time that shares our city’s name, a period and place we have never experienced. Are we really talking about the same city?

Featured Writer [Interview] Parallel Worlds, Not Knowing, and the Art of Gaping Bo-mi, I’ve long admired your work, both as a reader and translator. Your ability to create such singular stories has always astonished me, and I’m grateful for this opportunity to talk more in-depth with you. Your work often features parallel worlds and alternate realities. In your debut collection Bringing Them the Lindy Hop, a son dies in the opening story, “Blanket,” but survives and reappears in the last story. The young couple in “Blanket” become the protagonists in a story from a different collection. You’ve said that you “never forget that even characters who appear briefly have their own lives” and you’d like readers to approach your fiction as if they’re reading about real people. What draws you to parallel worlds and alternate realities?

Featured Writer [Fiction] The Substitute Teacher On sunny afternoons, when the child woke from his nap, Ms. P would take him by the hand and head outside. The neighborhood, which was filled with luxury condos, had a nice playground in the middle of the complex, but Ms. P always walked to the nearby park just beyond. As she neared the park, holding the hand of this boy, this five-year-old with a bowl haircut and big monolid eyes, she felt again the pure joy these moments gave her. In the center of the park, there was an open area with a manicured lawn where children could run and play. Ms. P spread out her mat on the edge of the grass and sat down with the boy. Nearby, young women had also brought their children to the park and were chatting in small groups or watching their children play. Ms. P exchanged polite nods with them but kept to herself. When the boy asked, “Can I go play?” she smiled and nodded. Once he dashed off, she took a book from her small canvas bag and began to read. Sometimes she would stop reading to watch the boy

Featured Writer [Review] Some Women Are Not Welcome In 2011, a bright new talent, Son Bo-mi, emerged on the Korean literary scene. That year, she published six impressive short stories, including “Blanket,” “Bringing Them the Lindy Hop,” and “Downpour.” Her work was so fresh and unique that it shook the aesthetic landscape of Korean fiction. What drew such attention and enthusiasm to a debut writer? Her writing seemed unrelated to the traditional belief in realism, which claims to fully understand how everything in the world is connected. It also didn’t align with works that dramatized personal experiences as psychological tales, nor did it define itself as historical realism or as depictions of inner worlds. Instead, her sentences, devoid of moral judgments and emotional flourishes, featured a dry, impersonal style with subtle wit and a blend of fact and fiction, signaling a neutral, minimalist approach. Korean literature had now gained a writer who boldly declared, “I have no qualms about writing what I don’t fully know,” as she wrote

Cover Feature [Cover Feature] Atop the Foot of the City I was born in Seoul. I have lived in Seoul all forty years of my life. I have dreamed of life outside the city on occasion, but never managed to take the leap. Part of it was probably a subconscious obsession with Seoul, which stemmed from watching my parents from the mountains and the seaside carve out a place here with great difficulty. But more influential was the fact that I didn’t have the confidence to live outside this city. I didn’t know much about life out there, and even after learning something of “not-Seoul” from books and YouTube, I was still too afraid. Finding work outside Seoul, too, was an obvious and significant challenge.

Cover Feature [Cover Feature] Becoming a Cog in the Emergency Room 1. I work at a university hospital in Seoul. In exchange for my labor, I am paid a salary that I use to cover my rent and living expenses as a Seoul resident. However, my job is somewhat peculiar—I work in the emergency room, the busiest part of a university hospital. My contract with this institution as an emergency medicine specialist and clinical professor requires me to spend thirty hours a week in the ER. While I have other additional duties, my primary responsibility is patient care. Upon fulfilling these terms of my contract, I receive a fixed salary.

Cover Feature [Cover Feature] Let’s Meet in O Someone I know once made the following remark to me: “Don’t you think your stories are a bit. . . Seoul-centric?” At the time, I assumed that this acquaintance of mine had just recently learned about the concept of “Seoul-centricism” and was looking for a way to make use of this newfound knowledge when he came across my books. His comment seemed to stem from the fact that most of the characters in my novels were Seoulites who wander the streets of Jongno, Gwanghwamun, and the Mapo district, frequenting the hotels, cafes, and independent bookstores in those areas. I felt a momentary urge to argue with him but refrained. I didn’t want to spoil the mood and had an inkling that it would just lead to a pointless argument. I made an effort to change the subject with a string of jokes, and in hindsight, I think it was very wise to not speak my mind

Korean Literature Now

INTERVIEW Parallel Worlds, Not Knowing, and the Art of Gaping by Janet Hong

INTERVIEW Interview with Kim So Yeon: Continuing until We Become Our Outsides by Lee Jenny

INTERVIEW Face to Face with Choi Eunmi by Jung Yong-jun

COVER FEATURES [Cover Feature] Let’s Meet in ○ Someone I know once made the following remark to me:      “Don’t you think your stories are a bit. . . Seoul-centric?”      At the time, I assumed that this acquaintance of mine had just recently learned about the concept of “Seoul-centricism” and was looking for a way to make use of this newfound knowledge when he came across my books. His comment seemed to stem from the fact that most of the characters in my novels were Seoulites who wander the streets of Jongno, Gwanghwamun, and the Mapo district, frequenting the hotels, cafes, and independent bookstores in those areas.      I felt a momentary urge to argue with him but refrained. I didn’t want to spoil the mood and had an inkling that it would just lead to a pointless argument. I made an effort to change the subject with a string of jokes, and in hindsight, I think it was very wise to not speak my mind.       *My acquaintance’s remark has stayed with me for a long time.       It’s already been three years. . . My memory has become so clouded as of late that I can hardly recall what I had for lunch yesterday, and I’ve become so forgetful that when I go to my bedside table to get my glasses, I find myself putting on my earphones to listen to music instead. And yet, I somehow still haven’t forgotten that remark. Or rather, it seems like it refuses to be forgotten. I wonder why.     Perhaps my acquaintance’s words pricked something in me. It may have pricked so deeply that it stung, and I decided that I needed to be more careful in the future. Although I dismissed the ridiculous remark with a snort, perhaps I cared more about it than I was willing to admit.      Words hold that kind of power. They’re invisible, intangible, and seem to vanish into thin air the moment they are spoken, as though they were nothing. And yet, some words unexpectedly pry themselves into our minds where they linger and leave a long-lasting sting, like a needle in an acupuncture point.      Thanks to this, the more time goes by, the more I become aware of the fact that I was born in Seoul and lived here all my life, that I am a Seoulite through and through. I’ve come to realize that I’m connected to this city in so many ways, that perhaps we overlap, and that I am almost Seoul itself.       *Looking back, the beginning of my first short story, “In the Same Place,” really does seem to reflect the perspective of a Seoulite. My debut work features a character named Yeongji, who, after getting completely drunk, tells “me” the story of how she ended up losing touch with a friend in the past. She recalls how astonished she was one day after walking from Jongno 3-ga to Myeongdong to realize it had only taken her twelve minutes.      Yeongji previously thought the distance from Jongno 3-ga to Myeongdong to be thirty-seven minutes by foot. Ever since she was a child, Seoul had always been a world divided by subway lines in her mind, so the only way she could think of reaching her destination was by hopping on Line 3 at Jongno 3-ga Station and getting off at Chungmuro Station to transfer to Line 4 in the direction of Myeongdong Station.      That’s why Yeongji declined her friend’s request to come meet her at the Seoul Employment and Labor Office in Myeongdong. Her friend, who had gone there to apply for unemployment benefits, told Yeongji that she was shaking and feeling anxious for some reason and that she would appreciate her company. Even though Yeongji was reading a book inside a Starbucks in the vicinity of Nagwon Arcade—a short distance from there—she replied that it was “pretty far from where I am,” adding that even if she were to leave right away, it would take her between forty and fifty minutes, and that she didn’t want to keep her waiting for that long.       The two would never meet again after that conversation, ultimately bringing their eighteen-year friendship to an end.      Yeongji only realized the meaning of the long silence that preceded the end of the call, which was reminiscent of a theatrical blackout, much later. She then got into the habit of recalling this incident about how she fell out with her friend whenever she got drunk.       *This part of the story is mostly based on my own experience.       Rather than focusing on a friendship fallout, I chose to write about the astonishment I felt after walking from Jongno 3-ga to Myeongdong with my own two feet. If my memory serves me right, I was around twenty-three or twenty-four at the time. I was shocked to find out that Seoul was in reality much smaller than I had imagined it to be. It felt kind of absurd to me how such a small area had been divided into distinct zones as though each one was completely separated from the other.      Now, upon deeper reflection, I think that the astonishment I felt at the time did not merely stem from how small Seoul really was.      What came as an even bigger shock to me was the fact that I had been living in Seoul for over twenty years. I must’ve allowed myself to become complacent, thinking that I knew everything there was to know about Seoul. How could there be something that I didn’t know? And how could I not even be aware of that fact? My astonishment arose from having these assumptions I took for granted turned upside down. In other words, I was mostly shocked by my own ignorance.       *Since then, my ignorance of Seoul has revealed itself to me in all shapes and forms. I wonder when it was. . . I was once asked to provide a brief author bio to go along with a piece of writing by the editorial team at a publishing house. Since I had to include my place of birth, I wrote that I was “born in Seoul” without giving the matter much thought. However, the feeling I got when writing that sentence was actually closer to “born in ○.”      Not “Seoul,” but “○.”      Why did I feel this way? Seoul appeared to me to be something akin to an empty circle or a pair of parentheses with an empty space between them.       *Various factors surely contribute to why the place where I was born and raised feels like ○.      For one thing, I don’t feel like I own anything in Seoul. Regardless of what or how much I actually have, I always feel a certain emptiness. Why could that be? Perhaps it’s because I have a feeling that most of the things I’ve acquired in Seoul will not follow me when I leave the city. Those things will remain in Seoul. People might look at me with puzzled eyes or even think I’m pathetic when I leave. They might even see me as a loser or a runaway.      As such, I don’t feel like there’s anything that keeps me intimately connected to Seoul.       The Seoul I know is a city that collapses and is rebuilt every day. It’s like an amorphous organism which has never had a fixed shape of its own. Many of the places where I once lived, frequently visited, and created unforgettable memories have disappeared with the passage of time. They were erased without a trace and replaced with unfamiliar landscapes. This is the way things naturally unfold in Seoul. That seems to be the physiological cycle of a big city. That’s why I always get the feeling that I could be pushed out or expelled from Seoul at any time. One day, if I ever become physically unable to work, or fall ill and become poor, I think Seoul will spit me out.      If that ever happens, I’ll be completely broke.      Not just a poor person without money, but a poor soul stripped of the greater part of its existence. Something tells me that I can’t escape such a fate. Am I the only one? I find myself constantly overcome by this feeling which almost never leaves me.       Is this any different from depression?      Having been born and lived my whole life in Seoul, I might say that it has been no different from having to put up with an unresolvable sense of emptiness. Like living in a place where I could never put down roots, constantly floating some distance off the ground.       *Last weekend, I went to CGV Cine Library at Myeongdong Station to meet my boyfriend.       I took Line 5 and got off at Dongdaemun History & Culture Park Station where I transferred onto Line 4 to reach Myeongdong Station (now that I write this, I realize that I appear to be someone who goes to Myeongdong quite frequently). It was slightly past 2 P.M. on a Sunday, and since three different lines run through Dongdaemun History & Culture Park Station, it was packed with people of all ages and appearances. This includes many foreigners of varying skin tones using different languages. However, since I’m so used to squeezing my way through crowds of people in narrow places, this fact didn’t actually occur to me until writing the words “packed with people.” This particular scene merely flashed before me like a blurry, unfocused photo.      That’s because it’s natural for me when I go up the escalator from one subway platform to another, moving slowly toward the transfer corridor like an object on a conveyor belt, to absentmindedly look over at the other objects—or people’s faces—coming down from the opposite direction only to completely forget about them shortly after.        The city crowds fill me up in an instant only to be discarded at once.      I suck them up like a drain, then spew them back out and forget everything.       I leave no one behind. This sort of sequence repeats itself several times each day. I would have experienced the same thing on my way out of the cinema after watching a movie with my boyfriend and dozens of other spectators, while passing by the thousands of people crowding the streets of Myeongdong on my way to go eat dinner, and again in the subway on my way home.       Getting filled to the brim and then emptied out as though nothing had ever happened.       This phenomenon has repeated itself countless times within me while living in this city called Seoul. That’s why I think of it as being the same as ○. I believe that this Seoul-like ○ has also made me into something akin to ○ as well.       *      That’s why there is some truth when I say that when I write the words “born in Seoul,” I feel as though I were writing “born in ○.”       *When I was first asked to write this essay, I wanted to talk about the beauty of Seoul. However, after writing a few paragraphs, it occurred to me that I was probably not the right person for the task.      I could have written about the daily routine of a city dweller in detail, describing what a day in my life looks like—waking up, getting ready for work, spending a day at the office, and returning home only to relax and go to bed. However, I felt like I wasn’t the right person for this task either.      As I’ve already mentioned, having been born and lived my entire life in Seoul, I’m particularly unaware and ignorant about city life, especially when it comes to Seoul. Hence, it almost feels like ○ to me.      Perhaps that’s why I can’t help but refer to ○ as ○. In reality, it seems like the only way I can address the area inside ○, which is beyond the grasp of language, is through stories akin to thin and faint lines covering up ○.      One might be led to wonder about the point of this essay. . .      Through this piece of writing, I was hoping that someone else might also be able to relate—even just a little—to this feeling I have long harbored. I’m hoping it opens up the opportunity to have a discussion about ○, which is only possible among those of us who were born in a city and lived there for their entire lives. In so doing, we can perhaps cut through the void that surrounds language and, even if just for a brief moment, offer solace to each other. Translated by Léo-Thomas Brylowski       Korean Works Mentioned:•   Park Seon Woo, In the Same Place (Jaeum & Moeum, 2020)    박선우, 『우리는 같은 곳에서』 (자음과모음, 2020) 

REVIEWS [RUSSIAN] Love Brings Hope in This Post-Apocalyptic Story Choi Jin-Young’s novel To the Warm Horizon, translated by Alina Kolbiagina, presents a storyline in which a group of people is forced to flee their homes by a deadly virus. It is a familiar type of story to Russian readers not only because of Stephen King and other widely translated Western writers who produce such novels, but also thanks to the success of Russian writer Yana Vagner’s To the Lake in 2011. But this Korean post-apocalyptic story is a different cup of tea: while King’s and Vagner’s narratives are more fast-paced, this book requires a much slower reading. This story serves as a reflection, almost a diary, of the characters’ attempts to analyse their pasts at a moment of tragedy; a soul-searching tale of what their lives could have been like, had they made different choices.     The book consists of a series of monologues where Dori, Jina, Ryu, and Gunji invite us into their inner worlds as they escape from their native Korea to Russia  while the pandemic is taking over the world. In the foreword of the book, Choi says that she deliberately wanted to place the characters in “the most enormous country on the planet,” and that she wanted them “to hold a flag, so even from the sky it would signal that ‘a human being is right here, in this place!’” It seems Choi wants us to study and observe the individual at a time of crisis—and the landscape here plays the part of a vast space that helps bring out the feeling of loneliness. She moves characters from a densely populated place into this huge “sandbox” to have a closer look at what they would do, and to reflect on existential identity and the consequences of life choices.      At first glance, the focus in the book is on the pandemic and its aftermath—poverty, famine, crime, and chaos—but these actually serve as the backdrop for the internal transition the characters go through. Each of them analyses their past and realises how loveless their lives have been. Ryu reflects on how she used to neglect her own needs (“I always wore thin jackets into the winter until I got ill, because I never had time to take my warm winter coat to the dry cleaners.”). Having never looked after herself and having never felt loved (“Do we actually know anything about love?”), she regrets marrying a man who doesn’t show any affection or interest towards her.      The voices in Choi’s book are predominantly female, and her heroines are courageous and self-sacrificing, valuing the lives of their loved ones over their own. Men, on the other hand, are often either indecisive or violent: Dan, Ryu’s husband, cries and asks her to return to Korea because he is scared; Dori’s father joins a gang of marauders and bandits to survive, explaining that this is the only way he can save Dori’s life; Jina’s father hits Dori, blaming her for the deaths of several family members, and Jina’s uncle sexually assaults her. The only exception is Gunji, an orphaned boy from Jina’s village who later becomes a compassionate young man. He protects Dori from Jina’s family but ends up being disowned.     The characters that have a chance at being saved are the ones who care about others and who protect their loved ones. Their desire to keep running further away from the disaster—“there, over the horizon, where the sun sets”—is fuelled by their ability to love. Jina, Dori, Ryu, Gunji, and even Miso, Dori’s little sister, dream of making their loved ones happy. Ryu, having told her husband that she doesn’t love him, realises that his survival is more important to her than the words she said, which actually held no meaning. Gunji, having survived losses and hardship at such a young age, simply dreams of catching fish, collecting fruit, and giving them to the person he loves. Wanting to make someone happy is present even at a subconscious level. Without knowing its meaning, Dori keeps humming a song that she heard on the radio—“Ma rendi pur contento” which means “Only make her happy.” Choi Jin-Young offers us the hope that love will prevail and humanity will survive, despite the disasters. Otherwise, why would she end the novel with the words, “I love you”?   Maria WiltshireTranslator and Russian language tutor

Book for You

READINGS A Novel Reading by Son Bo-mi "The Substitute Teacher"

READINGS A Poetry Reading by Poet Kim So Yeon "Second Floor Guest Lounge"

READINGS A Novel Reading by Lim Chulwoo

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