James L. Fleming: Essays on Korean & World Literature

 Seok-won turned up in Edinburgh without warning last month, as he generally does, bearing a paperback with a badly cracked spine and a look on his face that meant argument was not invited. "Read it before you say anything clever," he told me over pints of heavy at our usual corner on Rose Street, in the particular tone he reserves for instructing me on matters Korean. Twenty-odd years of friendship, first forged in a shared lecture theatre at the University of Edinburgh, have taught me not to argue with that tone. The book was Min Jin Lee's Pachinko .  Two Sundays later, having finished it in something close to one sitting, I understood exactly why he'd insisted.  I am, by disposition and by training, wary of the word "epic." Academic study of Asian history teaches one to distrust grand narrative the way a sailor distrusts a calm sea. Yet Pachinko earns the word, and does so by the least epic means imaginable: it tracks four generations of a Korean family ...

 There is a particular grief reserved for books, and I do not mean the grief of closing a good one. I mean the grief of losing one entirely — not to fire or flood, but to the far more mundane violence of removal men and cardboard boxes. When I left my university lodgings for the last time, hauling the wreckage of an unfinished doctorate back to my mother's house, an entire shelf of my collection simply vanished somewhere between Edinburgh's Old Town and the outskirts I now call home. Among the casualties was my set of Park Kyung-ni's Toji: sixteen volumes, painstakingly assembled over three years of a student's meagre stipend. I have since replaced them, of course. But the replacement copies sit on my shelf with the slightly formal air of a stepfamily; they have never quite forgiven me for losing the originals, and I have never quite forgiven myself.  I mention this because Toji is, before it is anything else, a novel about precisely this kind of loss — the loss of land...

 If there is one thing fifty years on this earth have taught me, it is that rain has a peculiar way of unlocking memories you thought you had safely archived away.  As I sit here in my Edinburgh study, listening to the relentless grey drizzle tapping against the windowpane, I find myself nursing a lukewarm cup of Earl Grey and contemplating a small literary miracle from halfway across the world. Outside, the cobblestones of Old Town glisten under the streetlamps; inside, my mind is miles away in the sun-dappled countryside of 1950s Korea.  Recently, during an afternoon spent fending off the chill with my good friend Seok-won, a passing question altered my reading queue for the week. Seok-won, who possesses that enviable Korean trait of taking literature with the same gravity others reserve for national elections, asked if I had ever read Hwang Sun-won's 1953 short story, Sonagi (The Shower).  This particular jewel, I had to admit — with the mild academic chagrin typi...

  The Detective Who Understood the Human Heart In Memory of Keigo Higashino (1958 – 2026)     I woke this morning to a grey, unremarkable Edinburgh sky and a phone screen that told me something rather less unremarkable: Keigo Higashino had died. Sixty-eight years old, taken by colorectal cancer on the twenty-third of July, though the world was not told until Kodansha's quiet, formal announcement four days later. There was a family funeral, already concluded, already private, already over before most of us had even learned to grieve. It struck me, reading it in my dressing gown with the kettle not yet boiled, how peculiarly fitting that was — a man who spent forty years constructing intricate puzzles for the reading public should exit so quietly, with the actual event of his death held back from us like the final chapter of one of his own novels. I confess I have rarely felt moved to write of an author's passing quite this way before. This morning, I find I owe him rat...