James L. Fleming: Essays on Korean & World Literature

I still have sand in the left boot that I wore to Culbin Forest in April, and I have decided to leave it there. It grits a little on the stairs. Each time it does, it reminds me that sand does not so much move as relocate, grain by grain, until what was a field is a dune and what was a dune is, at last, a wood. Culbin lies on the Moray coast, and the story told about it is that in 1694 a single storm buried a barony: a great house, a church, orchards, thousands of acres. As The Scotsman reports the matter, on the strength of archive research, the truth was smaller and slower. There were probably about five farms and some 735 acres under cultivation, and the sand had been advancing for generations, helped along by a careless laird, poor harvests and the habit of pulling up marram grass for thatch. The grass was what held the dunes. The storm finished a process that the inhabitants had been assisting for years. Legend preferred a card game with the Devil, which says something about how...

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the surest way to the communion table in a Scottish parish was a small piece of lead. The elders judged which of their members were qualified, by belief and by conduct, and handed each of those a token, round or square or oblong, stamped with the name of a parish, a verse or a symbol such as the burning bush. The token was the price of admission. Wikipedia reports that more than five thousand types have been recorded in Scotland, and museums still show them in cases, which is a curious afterlife for an object that once settled who belonged. I have been thinking about that arrangement, in which belonging is certified by something small enough to lose, since I finished a Korean novel last week and have not managed to put it away. The novel is Choi Jin-young's Hunger , which appeared in Seoul in 2015 under the title 구의 증명, Guui Jeungmyeong , usually rendered as Proof of Gu . Soje's English version reached British readers in 2025...

At a banquet at the Heian court in 1008, according to the usual accounts of a lady-in-waiting's diary, a courtier and poet named Fujiwara no Kintō joined the women's company and asked, in effect, whether Little Murasaki happened to be present. Little Murasaki is a girl in a story. The woman he was addressing had written it, and she had by then begun to be called after her own heroine. We know of the question because she wrote it down herself. The diarist reflects, drily, that nobody from the tale lived at that court, and the moment passes. More than a thousand years later it is still doing public work. It is the earliest recorded confirmation that The Tale of Genji existed. The entry belongs to the first day of the eleventh month by the court's calendar, and Japan keeps the date: 1 November, the day before these words appear, is a national Classics Day. A committee formed for the book's thousandth anniversary declared it in 2008, and, as the Japanese sources record, ...

I was lost for four minutes in the January sales when I was six years old, and I have not been so thoroughly lost since. The shop was a department store in the middle of Edinburgh, the aisles were a forest of adult legs, and the noise had the quality of a verdict. My mother was standing exactly where she had told me to stand, beside a rail of coats on the second floor, and she was not alarmed. I was. The story was told in our family for years, and the moral drawn was always the same: she had not moved. I thought of it again while reading Please Look After Mom by Shin Kyung-sook, because her novel is that story with one condition reversed. The mother moves. Nobody can say where. A family that has always known where to find her discovers, over the length of a short novel, that it never knew where she was. The premise can be told in a sentence. A sixty-nine-year-old woman, Park So-nyo, is separated from her husband in the crowd at a Seoul subway station on a visit to the city, and she...

My flatmate in second year at Edinburgh was a Germanist from Perth who read Hesse in the original and regarded translations as a mild form of insurance fraud. He lent me Demian with a warning: it was a book for sixteen, he said, and anyone who came to it later was merely being polite. I was twenty, I was not polite, and I handed it back with a verdict I shall not reproduce here, because it was unkind to the novel and, I now think, unkind to me. Nothing in that exchange prepared me for what I found when I began reading Korean literary history in earnest. In Seoul, Hesse is not an author for sixteen-year-olds who will grow out of him. He is a permanent resident of the bestseller lists, and Demian is his most faithful tenant. In the first week of 2026 two different editions of it stood within the top twenty at one of the country’s largest online booksellers, as a Korean newspaper reported. The book itself first appeared in 1919 from S. Fischer, under the name Emil Sinclair, which was...

In a fortnight, at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning, the traffic on my street will stop, a dog two doors down will go on barking regardless, and a few dozen of us will stand on the cold pavement for two minutes without a word. Nobody has to be taught how. The form was handed down along with the names cut into the stone, and its great virtue is that grief arrives already organised: a time, a place, a length, a signal that it is over. Someone near the front will cough, a car door will close, and the street will remember what it was doing. I have stood through that silence more times than I can count, and I have never once had to wonder what I was permitted to feel. I begin there because Han Kang’s Human Acts is a novel about the opposite condition. Its dead were handed no such form. The book is the form that was built for them afterwards, by one writer, out of testimony, patience and a pronoun. The facts are these, so far as I can state them with confidence. On 18 May 1980 protest...