Modern Korean Literature, Peter H. Lee

Translations of contemporary (up to 1990) Korean writings include poetry, fiction, essays, and drama, predominantly focus on the difficult, tragic and resilient history of Korea during the  twentieth-century. 

My Innocent Uncle, by Ch'ae Man-sik

Ch'ae Man-shik (or Man-sik), who wrote stories and novels during the colonial period, is considered one of the greats of Korean modern literature. Like his other work, these three stories hone in on individuals who face the dilemmas of their times, those dilemmas of culture and historical circumstance which offer a tragi-comedy of errors. His renown rises from targeting the common man, not the upper class, and by using the common vernacular and dialect in satirical portrayals of life under the Japanese and shortly after liberation. "My Innocent Uncle" is told from the point of view of the uneducated nephew who works for a Japanese businessman. He thinks his intellectual uncle is the fool, having been arrested for socialist ideals, and his aunt even more of a fool, since she has cared for him despite the uncle's affair and lack of "real work." It's a biting commentary both on the intellectual idealists of the era, and on those who collaborate and believe the promises of the Japanese. Looking at the life of the student intellectual, "A Ready-Made Life" follows a young man who, educated by the Japanese like all his contemporaries, remains jobless, broke and aimless. "Once Upon a Paddy" feels Chekhovian in its portrayal of a hapless farmer who tries to take advantage of an opportunity to sell his land to a high-paying Japanese speculator, but ends up owning nothing, even after liberation, which he had counted on to have his property returned to him. The stories are remarkable in their intimacy with character, historical and political outlook and use of detail about the period.

An Appointment with My Brother, by Yi Mun-Yol

The famed South Korean writer imagines meeting his North Korean brother after the death of his father--a defector to the North in the narrator's youth (a fact that parallels the author's life). The narrator, a professor of history who has suffered as a result of his father's defection, joins a tour group to Yenji, a chinese border town from which groups are allowed to see the famed Mt. Baektu and other North Korean sights. In this town, he meets his brother while at the same time encountering members of his group, who have their own agenda, political and economic. The narrative encompasses much discussion of unification along with many poignant episodes of cultural misunderstandings between the two brothers, who have an undeniable bond of brotherhood, despite years of resentment toward one another. Included in this story is an interesting explanation of the genealogical traditions of family namings, provided with a clarity and thoroughness I haven't seen before. Written in 1994, the novella is a snapshot of the politics of unification (prior to the Sunshine Policy) at that time.

Twofold Song, by Yi Mun-Yol

In a beautifully illustrated and bound bilingual edition, famed writer Yi Mun-yol's story of the last encounter of an affair presents as allegory of ancients and modern mixed together, with a coda that changes all that primordial prehistoric metaphor into something altogether different. The title of the story and its writing parallel each other with a constant shifting of sides and views, past and present, contrasts and similarities, profound with mundane. At times, the story has the flavor of Korean drama (melodrama) on its surface, but the thought and structure of this story are subtle, complex and interwoven without answer, much like how life is. Translated by Kwon Kyong-Mi, illustrated by Kwak Sun-young. Hollym, 2004.

There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch’oe Yun, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton

[From the book jacket.] Elegantly crafted and quietly moving, Ch’oe Yun’s stories are among the most incisive portrayals of the psychological and spiritual reality of post-WWII Korea. Her fiction, which began to appear in the 1980s, represents a turn toward a more experimental, deconstructionist and postmodern Korean style of writing, and offers a new focus on the role of gender in the making of Korean history.  Ch’oe is a Korean author known for her breathtaking versatility, subversion of authority, and bold exploration of the inner life. Readers celebrate her creative play with fantasy and admire her deep engagement with trauma, history, and the vagaries of remembrance.

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin

The story begins, “It’s been one week since Mom went missing.” What follows are narratives of or by each of the family members: two daughters, eldest son (there's a younger son who isn't given a voice), husband, and one other voice, beginning with the daughter who is a writer. Each narration covers the search efforts for Mom, and also reveals history between that narrator and Mom, showing more and more about this family, and also explaining how it is possible that Mom could go missing. It is both a winding and unwinding tale of modern Korean life, the delicate and sometimes disturbing intricacies in the relationships of this family, and of a mother's love.

At times, the persistent use of second person felt problematic, especially toward the end. Its use makes sense because of its inherent accusatory tone, and also because on the surface it avoids the “I” narrator, which could be perceived as a more egocentric presentation of character. But in most instances, second person here is easily interchanged with first person.

SPOILER ALERT: THIS PARAGRAPH ADDRESSES CONCERNS IN THE LAST TWO CHAPTERS. I appreciated finally giving Mom a voice at the end of this book, as she roams ghostlike to check in on her family members and the house she raised them in. It helped to draw a full circle of this family, and show the richness of her character, the honest selflessness and love she offered (suffered for) her children. I wish the book had ended there. The lengthy Epilogue is voiced again by the writer-daughter as she goes to Rome and, regarding Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” finds at last the spirit of her mother as she prays to the statue to “please look after Mom.” This section felt melodramatic to me in the way that much of Korean cinema and television can be over the top, bearing down on points already made, bleeding them for their last ounce of emotionalism in a much-beating-of-breath manner familiar to Korean drama. With its obvious Christian icons, it also felt somewhat pasted in, or too easy a resolution. Arguing that restraint expresses more than exposure, like modesty versus porn, I would have preferred no Epilogue.

But this family is richly characterized, its dynamic pace and its members unforgettable, the smallest details of their everyday lives mined to express the depth of the complexity, contradiction and mystery with which families evolve.

The Wings by Yi Sang

This slender volume of stories is by a famed Korean author from the colonial period, who died at age 27 with TB in Japan. He came to fame because his writing incorporated influences from French existentialism and Dadaism. As such, the stories are redolent of Cocteau and even Kafka, with an unreliable, not necessarily likable narrator, who merely reacts to the moment and lacks the traditions of male ambition and desire. Despite a few awkward instances in the translation, the deadpan yet richly descriptive voice of this unique modernist writer shines through.

Unspoken Voices: Selected Short Stories by Korean Women Writers, by Jin-Young Choi

An important anthology of stories (in translation) by twelve women writers, divided by those who lived through the Japanese Occupation and those who experienced the Korean War. Includes writers who are award-winners in Korean literature.

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, by Young-ha Kim

[Publisher's synopsis] In the fast-paced, high-urban landscape of Seoul, C and K are brothers who have fallen in love with the same woman—Se-yeon—who tears at both of them as they all try desperately to find real connection in an atomized world. A spectral, nameless narrator haunts the edges of their lives as he tells of his work helping the lost and hurting find escape through suicide. Dreamlike and beautiful, the South Korea brought forth in this novel is cinematic in its urgency and its reflection of contemporary life everywhere—far beyond the boundaries of the Korean peninsula. Recalling the emotional tension of Milan Kundera and the existential anguish of Bret Easton Ellis, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself achieves its author’s greatest wish—to show Korean literature as part of an international tradition. Young-ha Kim is a young master, the leading literary voice of his generation.

Early Korean Literature, by David McCann

This anthology, published by Columbia University Press, is reviewed by Robert Fouser on the Korean Studies Internet Discussion List.

Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction, by Marshall R. Pihl

An anthology of 12 post-1945 Korean fiction, in translation, includes brief biographies of each author. Expanded in 2007.

Surfacing Sadness: A Centennial of Korean-American Literature 1903-2003, by Yearn Hong Choi PhD

Poems, essays and stories of Korean American immigrants in the period noted. In translation.

Everlasting Empire, by Yi In-Hwa

Translated by Yu Young-nan (2002 Daesan Prize for Outstanding Literary Translation), with an Introduction by Don Baker.

An historical fiction that examines the last years of King Chongjo (r. 1777-1800), the grandson of King Yongjo, and more notably, the son of Crown Prince Sado, who was killed by his father, King Yongjo, who asked him to step into a rice chest and sealed it, whereupon he died of starvation. For more on that compelling story, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyeong (wife of Crown Prince Sado) by Jahyun Kim Haboush is vital reading. Told from the point of view of the royal librarian, a fictional character named Yi In-Mong, the story opens with the discovery of a dead Royal Library clerk. It is later revealed that the clerk was murdered by the burning of coal— a newly discovered element at that time in Korea—in the ondol (floor heating) firepit of the library room where the clerk was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. A complicated plot of a missing book, notes on that missing book, and an elusive story of a metal bound coffer, said to contain policy changing thoughts of King Yongjo, is also alluded to be a fictional account created by King Chongjo to reinstate the honor and integrity of his murdered father. The messy and complicated factional politics of the era, the Northern and Southerner camps, including the incursion of the Catholics, is fully explored. The librarian’s dear friend is Tasan, Chong Yag-yong (1762-1836), among the greatest Sirhak scholars of the period who was later persecuted as a Catholic. For more about Tasan, Encounters, by Hahn Moo-Sook, is a must-read. This book isn’t easy reading, especially for those not familiar with Korean ancient history or customs. The characters are many, the politics and governmental structure are complex and hard to follow, and the cultural history dense and laden with an expectation of general understanding that most Westerners don’t have. Yet it’s also a page-turning mystery, a story of enduring and lost love, of honor and loyalty, of immense sacrifice for love of one’s country and king, and how one era in the Choson Dynasty’s long life might have changed the outcome of history had the King been successful with his reforms.

Wayfarer: New Fiction by Korean Women, edited and translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton

A collection of postwar short stories ranging from the 50s to now. All deal with the isolation and stultified domestic place within which South Korean women still struggle for identity, enrichment and meaning. The introduction puts much of this writing in context, and informs about certain classifications of Korean modern literature, including pundan munhak, a body of work that deals with the territorial division of Korea and divided families, the anti-Communist campaigns for which the "sins of the father" ruined the careers and hopes of two generations. Out of this theme came one of the two strongest stories in this collection (which may seem strong due to this Westernized reader): Kim Min-suk's "Scarlet Fingernails," about a daughter who visits her father given a day's furlough to celebrate his hwang-ap from a life prison sentence--a man whom she never met who refuses to recant his visit to the north. What's fascinating is that the story turns out to be less concerned with the daughter than with the mother, his wife, who though she doesn't visit him, prepares special soup and then has her own private party at home with the old ladies in the complex. The other compelling tale was a NYC immigrant story by Kim Chi-won, "Almaden," about a liquor store owner, the disaffected wife of a cold husband, who fantasizes about a man who buys the same wine every day for years. This collection speaks to the internal lives of modern Korean women and how they struggle for dignity in a culture that sees women best as martyrs, wives and mothers.

The Waves, by Kang Shin-jae

Young-sil is a ten-year-old girl in the village of Wonjin during the Japanese occupation. She isn’t terribly likable: her character is described as selfish, sometimes grasping, stubborn, confused and petulant. Her passionate emotions are drawn with fire and ice, nearly bipolar in extremes. The story follows Young-sil and village life for a year, throughout the seasons, covering her sister’s wedding, her own burgeoning crush on a handsome ne’er-do-well who plays the harmonica, the sudden disappearance of two youths, death of a doctor, madness in the fire chief, and school days and a church play. The characters are many and various, from the town prostitute, to the old storytelling man, to her many schoolmates, their parents, the rich man in town, the simpleton, the long-suffering women, etc. It is less a story than an experience of the village and all its various people and the drama and gossip they live day to day. Affairs, suicides, mistaken identities, miscommunications, missed opportunities, laziness, thrift, poverty, betrayal, brutality, abuse—sorrows upon sorrows abound. A revelation comes at the end which merely compounds the confusion and sorry. The narrative is somewhat hard to follow in the Western tradition of readability, as it is structurally more associative, free-wheeling, than linear, and the translation seems to belabor the allusive quality further. While some of the descriptions of nature and passion are rich and varied, much of the writing is expository, making it hard to keep track of the numerous characters who we are told about rather than experiencing them in a setting. To see this adult world mostly through the child’s eyes gives a distant to emotional impact of the constant and multiple misfortunes that befell this village—all tragically the normal course of village life. The jacket says the author is one of Korea’s most distinguished women writers, winning literary and cultural prizes in 1967 and 1984. I cannot find out when the original text was written. Translated 1989 by Tina L. Sallee.

Three Generations by Yom Sang-seop, transl. by Yu Young-nan

A Korean literary classic, this novel was originally serialized in the CHOSUN ILBO beginning in 1931 and was translated in 2005. An epic tale of a family during the Japanese occupation, the story follows the Jo grandfather, father and son in the waning days of the grandfather's life, detailing the complex inner workings of those three relationships and the many intertwined relationships that they pursue, in the context of life during the occupation. It presents a rare view into the daily stresses and disenfranchisement of the characters who are torn between the ancient age and the modern world. Money, unspoken feelings and thoughts, class issues, subterfuge, desire, disappointment and hopelessness are predominant themes. The wealthy Grandfather Jo has basically purchased an ancestral background of a lineage somewhat more elevated than his genealogy would attest. Consumed by his status and wealth, he lives with both his wife of many years and a recent concubine, an opportunist woman from Suwon of lesser class who has ties with several unsavory hangers-on and sycophants who have gained favor with Grandfather. Father Jo (Sang-hun) lives separately with his own wife, and also has a daughter that he refuses to recognize by a former mistress, Gyeong-ae, a young modern woman who has become a bar hostess in order to support her daughter and mother. Grandfather Jo despises this son, Sang-hun, because he professes to be a Christian and refuses to follow the ancestral rites that Grandfather believes will honor his glory (and his class and wealth) after death. Sang-hun proves to be a hypocritical Christian, and in the impossible and humiliating position of being loathed by his own father, while his son is favored, descends into tawdriness with another young concubine, gambling and drinking. The son, Deok-gi, becomes involved with two old childhood friends, Byeong-hwa, a Marxist youth, and Gyeong-ae, with whom he lost touch after his father began having an affair with her. Ideological battles play hand-in-hand with class and wealth issues, all leading to events that bring all the major players to the attention of the police, culminating in torture, beatings and jail.

The writing deftly captures the complexity of Korean culture and thought in a difficult period of transition. Shifting points of view reveal deeply buried passions that occasionally erupt with embarrassing or shameful results. Much misunderstanding and incorrect assuming leads to situational antics that hearken soap opera drama. Detailed description of poverty and wealth, and frequent directions given from one Seoul neighborhood to another, lend a journalistic quality to the setting that is unparalleled in contemporary Korean fiction which tries to recapture that lost era. It is a vivid snapshot of one winter in a family's life, that changes each character, while around them the world is changing and will ultimately change in ways they could never have anticipated. Our modern insight into history makes this a fascinating read: and Yom compels the story forward while revealing complicated interwoven relationships and an intricate plot.

The Shaman Sorceress by Kim Dong-ni

Translated into English in 2002, this early 20th century story of village life presents a conflict between modernism, exemplified by Christianity, and folk traditions of the mudang (sorceress or priestess) and the ancient shaman beliefs of the country that precede Buddhism. The young daughter of an impoverished village widow becomes pregnant by the neighbor boy, and with this shame is forced to leave the village where the two have barely eked out a living of lowly housekeeping work. In the new village, Eulwha is spiritually called by the eponymous goddess and learns the trade of exorcism from an older mudang; she also falls in love with one of the mudang’s helpers, and then has a daughter. Wolhie is a talented artist and paints pictures of the spirits, but loses the ability to speak clearly. When her son is ten, Eulwha seeks an education for him and delivers him to a monastery; the son eventually ends up in Pyongyang and becomes a Christian. He returns as an adult to find his mother and sister, to convert them, but Eulwha and he find each other at odds, believing each other’s god is a demon. He is convinced that with Jesus and his Christian God, he can cure Wolhie’s speech disability. The beautiful child becomes the foil between which the two powers grow increasingly conflicted, to tragic results. This book is by a famed Korean author, and was originally serialized in a newspaper. I cannot locate additional information about its original publication date.

Postwar Korean Short Stories: An Anthology, edited and translated by Chong-un Kim

This collection of 17 short stories by Korean writers covers the nihilism, inhumanity and hopelessness that marked the decade during and after the divisive Korean War. It is a remarkable collection (in translation) that clearly shows the darkness covering the soul of the people and the alienating effects of the war on culture, society, identity and family. Some stories are stronger than others; one is by the famed author Hahn Musuk [sic]; and most end without a definitive conclusion. The stories are less plot-driven than are snapshots of a moment in hardship, yearning, dismay, failure in relationships, death and sacrifice. Beneath it all lies the Korean concept of HAN, the sorrow of the soul that permeates Korean culture. Speaking with the voice of the times, this book is a rare window into the literary output of a difficult and complex time in Korea.

Peace Under Heaven by Ch'ae Man-Sik

Considered a Korean masterpiece by a renowned author, this translation of a 1936 serialized narrative appeared in 1993, and won a translation award. The story occurs within two days, and is a tragicomedy of greed, ambition, egoism and miserliness of the protagonist, Master Yun, and how his family circle augments and exacerbates those pitiable characteristics. Surrounded in his home by five widows, including the two "grass widows" of his sons, who have moved on to concubines and live elsewhere, plus servants and his own personal finance man, himself a servant, Master Yun epitomizes the bewilderment of a culture under Japanese occupation. He is lowerclass yet strives through his sons to achieve aristocracy, in a world in which class has been effectively outlawed. His appetites are huge, his purse strings tighter than shrunken sinew, his abuse of his family and the women he desires is biting. And yet he is a simple man, pitiably bound by his father's violent death by bandits, and by the limitations of his mind and his greed. The narrative is mostly expository, making it sometimes difficult to retain the stamp of each character, for there are several, all riotous and despicable, including a disabled grandson. It is a profoundly absurdist darkly satirical work, but its window into the hidden lives and culture of regular Koreans during the Japanese occupation is fascinating--provided one can read between the lines of the black humor.

Weathered Blossom, by Wan-Suh Park

A 60-year-old widow finds companionship with an eligible widower, and until her daughter and his daughter-in-law meddle in their relationship, she begins to rediscover feelings from youth. This famed Korean short story writer weaves a realization about love and passion into a simple yet compelling and beautifully rendered narrative. Short read, detailed and uniquely true points of view from the perspective of age.