James L. Fleming: Essays on Korean & World Literature

  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 rather...

The Great Gatsby: An Old Friend Encountered in My Edinburgh Study   I t is a curious thing, is it not, how one’s literary companions shift as the years climb upon our shoulders? In my youth, amidst the damp, grey comfort of Edinburgh, I clung to the existential dread of the Russians. I found solace in Dostoevsky’s fevered, suffocating basements and Tolstoy’s agonizing search for the soul. To the uninitiated, the Russian canon is often mistaken for mere misery; in truth, it is the most honest interrogation of the human condition ever put to paper. Those writers understood that life is a collision between our infinite desires and our pitifully finite circumstances. They painted the "existential terror" not as a ghost in the dark, but as the crushing weight of morality, the terrifying freedom of the individual, and the God-shaped hole that no amount of secular progress could ever hope to fill.  Ah, but before I reached that level of gravitas, I had my own share of blunders. I re...