James L. Fleming: Essays on Korean & World Literature

The figures arrived on 29 July, in the level prose of a bookseller's press release. Kyobo Book Centre, the largest bookshop chain in Korea, had gone back through ten years of fiction sales, from the summer of 2016 to the last week of July 2026, and ranked every novelist on its shelves. Han Kang came first, which surprised nobody who has followed Korean letters since Stockholm. Second, by a narrow margin and comfortably ahead of every other foreign writer, was Keigo Higashino, a former automotive engineer from Osaka who had died six days earlier. I have written about Han Kang on this blog before, and the pairing at the top of that list struck me as a small puzzle worth sitting with. One is a Nobel laureate whose novels read like bruises. The other wrote paperbacks that commuters finish on the train and pass on to their sisters. And yet Korean readers, voting with their wallets for a decade, placed the two side by side. My suspicion, which this essay sets out to test, is that they...

Last August, in a newly opened theatre in Seoul’s Gangnam district, a spotlight found a man in evening dress staring across dark water towards a small green light. He spoke in English, trained for Broadway and tempered for the West End, while a line of Korean surtitles ran above his head, translating a dream that had begun on paper a full century before he was born. I did not see the production myself. Edinburgh sits at some remove from the Han River. But I have thought about that image more than almost anything else in the theatre pages this year, because The Great Gatsby, having already conquered New York and London, had at last reached Seoul, and it had done so under a producer who understands the novel a good deal better than most Americans I have met. That producer, Chunsoo Shin of the Seoul company OD Company, became in 2024 the first Asian ever to serve as sole lead producer of a Broadway musical, a fact reported with understandable pride across the Korean press. By August of ...

The first sentence of Han Kang's The Vegetarian belongs to a husband, and in Korean it is little more than a shrug. Before his wife stopped eating meat, he says, he had never thought of her as anyone special. In Deborah Smith's English the same man remembers her as "completely unremarkable in every way", which is a harder thing to say about the person you chose to marry. I have read the two openings side by side more often than I would care to admit, and the gap between them has occupied me for years. It is not a large gap. It is the width of an adverb or two. Yet the novel is about nothing so much as the distance between what a woman is and what the people around her say she is, and on the very first page the English edition has already widened it by a notch. That English edition has had an extraordinary life. It shared the Man Booker International Prize with its author in 2016, the first year the award went to a single book and was divided equally between writer ...

The novel opens in a taxi stuck on an elevated expressway in Tokyo, with the radio playing Janáček's Sinfonietta , and the narrator observes, with a dryness I have always admired, that this is hardly the ideal music for a traffic jam. He is right. The piece begins with a fanfare of such brazen, bright brass that it sounds less like the start of a concert than a regiment arriving to liberate a town. To hear it while trapped between lorries, going nowhere, is to be told that something tremendous is about to happen at the exact moment nothing can. Murakami chose it, he later explained to Sam Anderson of The New York Times Magazine , precisely because it was strange. He had heard it performed live only once, with a small army of trumpeters ranged behind the orchestra, and the oddity stayed with him. He listened to it over and over while writing the opening scene. Then something happened that no novelist can plan for. The book came out in Japan in 2009, and the Sinfonietta , a work mo...