James L. Fleming: Essays on Korean & World Literature

  Seok-won rang me last week from London, sounding faintly bewildered, as fathers of teenage daughters often do. His girls, he reported, had spent the better part of a fortnight matching and unmatching with boys on some application whose name he'd already forgotten, and one of them had come to him in tears over a young man who had, in her words, simply "gone quiet" after four days of what she'd taken to be genuine promise. Seok-won, who is not by temperament a sentimental man, found himself telling her about a novel he'd read as a schoolboy in Seoul — one his own mother had wept over, he confessed, quite unashamedly, at the kitchen table. He couldn't remember the title. He remembered only that someone in it loved someone else without any expectation of being loved back, and that this had seemed, even to a teenage boy, like the most serious thing in the world.  It took me two days of half-hearted digging to work out that he meant Choi In-ho's Winter Wandere...

 There is a square not five minutes from where I sit, worn smooth by five centuries of trading. Edinburgh's Grassmarket sells vegetables and second-hand books on a Saturday morning now, tourists photographing the cliff face of the Castle Rock above it, but for over a hundred years — from the 1660s until the last public hanging there in 1784 — it was also where the city hanged its criminals, within sight of the cattle and grain it had traded continuously since the square was chartered in 1477. The gallows and the grocer shared the same cobbles. I have always found something bracingly honest in that arrangement — a marketplace, after all, is simply where a society decides what things are worth, and it has never much minded whether the commodity in question is turnips or human lives.  I mention this because a Korean novel has been sitting on my desk this week that takes the same unflinching arithmetic as its very title: 인간시장 , rendered into English as Human Market . It is not, on...

 There is a street in Edinburgh's Old Town, tucked behind the dental hospital, that most visitors never stumble upon unless they are looking for it. West Port has been the city's second-hand book quarter for longer than I have been alive, a row of narrow shopfronts where the stock spills from shelf to floor to pavement, and where the smell of old paper is thick enough to taste. The street had a rougher reputation once, and older Edinburgh hands will tell you so with a certain relish, but these days it is mostly booksellers, a cheesemonger, and the occasional lost tourist wondering how they ended up here rather than on the Royal Mile. I go there when I ought to be doing something else entirely, which is, I suspect, the precise function of a second-hand bookshop. Last week, wedged between a water-stained Who Ate Up All the Shinga?  and a Penguin Classics Silas Marner  nobody will ever buy, I found myself thinking, not for the first time, about a Park Wan-suh novel that was ...

 I found it, of all places, wedged between a water-damaged Trollope and a first edition of something forgettable, on the bottom shelf of a second-hand bookshop off the Grassmarket — a slim, red-jacketed paperback with Korean characters running down one side and English down the other. Record of a Journey to Mujin . Kevin O'Rourke's translation, the Asia Publishers bilingual edition, evidently donated by some former student of Korean Studies whose marginalia still ran faintly along the margins in pencil. I bought it for two pounds fifty and did not sleep properly that night, which, at my age, says either something flattering about the prose or something less flattering about my digestion. I suspect it was the former.  It has been over sixty years since Kim Seung-ok, a twenty-three-year-old student of French literature at Seoul National University, published this short story in the October 1964 issue of the magazine Sasanggye . Sixty years is a long time for a piece of short fic...

 There is a particular kind of demolition I remember rather too vividly from my twenties, and it had nothing to do with Korea. Along the docks of Leith, not half a mile from where I am now sitting, the old bonded warehouses were coming down — their blackened sandstone peeled back to expose a century of tar, herring salt, and quiet ruin — to make way for the glass-fronted flats that would eventually swallow the whole waterfront. I remember a retired stevedore standing at the cordon, hands in his pockets, watching the wrecking ball as though it were performing a funeral rite he hadn't been invited to grieve at. Nobody had asked him whether the docks should become luxury apartments. Nobody ever does.  I was reminded of that man rather forcefully this week, upon returning, after some years, to Cho Se-hui's The Dwarf  (난장이가 쏘아올린 작은 공), a work that occupies in Korean letters roughly the position Dickens occupies in ours, if Dickens had written with the clipped, unsentimental ec...

 There is a fountain on Castlehill, wedged discreetly into the stone wall opposite the entrance to Edinburgh Castle, that most visitors walk straight past. It no longer runs. Its bronze relief shows two entwined heads, one fair, one hag-like, bound by a serpent. Above them, a plaque explains, in the careful language of the guilty conscience, that this is the Witches' Well. It is a memorial to the several hundred souls, overwhelmingly women, tried and executed for witchcraft at this very spot between the late fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries. I pass it perhaps once a fortnight, on my way to nowhere in particular, and I confess I had never given it much sustained thought until a fortnight ago, when I finally sat down with Bora Chung's Cursed Bunny .  The specific episode worth dwelling on happened almost within sight of where I was standing. In 1590, King James VI, sailing home with his new bride, Anne of Denmark, was struck by ferocious storms and became convinced that ...

 I ought to explain, before I go any further, how a semi-retired essayist in Edinburgh came to know a Korean television drama from 1991 at all. It began, rather unglamorously, with a fifteen-second video that an algorithm served me one night whilst I was meant to be reading about something else entirely. I had let a Korean War research thread go cold for a fortnight, and this is what filled the silence instead. Two figures, a stretch of barbed wire between them, a kiss conducted almost entirely with the eyes. I did not know their names. I only knew I would not sleep until I understood what I had just watched. What I had watched, I later learned, was a fragment of Eyes of Dawn , Kim Seong-jong's ten-volume novel. It was serialised through the Ilgan Sports  newspaper between 1975 and 1981, and later adapted by MBC into a thirty-six-part epic that held nearly half the nation in front of its televisions each week. There is no English edition of the novel — not a partial translatio...