James L. Fleming: Essays on Korean & World Literature

The last song of Winterreise ends, and the record goes on turning. What follows is the run-out groove, a soft and regular scrape, like a hand brushing snow from a sill. I had put the kettle on before the first song and forgotten the tea by the third, so that by the twenty-fourth the cup was as cold as the window, which had grown a fur of frost on the inside. Nothing in that final song is resolved. An old man turns the handle of a hurdy-gurdy on the ice behind the village, where nobody stops to listen and the dogs growl at him, and the young traveller who has walked through twenty-three songs of his own misery asks whether he might go along. The old man does not answer. The piano simply stops. I thought of that unanswered question when I finally read Choi In-ho's Winter Wanderer . It is a Korean novel that borrows its name from Schubert's cycle and, so I shall argue, spends its whole length replying to the old man's silence. It ran in the daily Dong-a Ilbo from Septemb...

Mr Rennie, who has kept the newsagent's at the end of my street for twenty-six years, shelves the paperbacks his customers leave with him by a single rule of his own devising. He does not ask who wrote them, or what the critics said, or whether they won anything. He asks whether the hero wins, and books in which he does go on the shelf beside the till. Books in which he merely comes to understand his feelings go into a box under the counter, and I have watched a prizewinner make that journey without ceremony. Last week he noticed what I was carrying and asked what it was. I said it was a Korean novel from 1981 about a law student who goes about his city putting right what the courts will not. Mr Rennie considered this for a while and then asked, "Does the lad get them?" I said that he got somebody every chapter. "Then it's a proper book," said Mr Rennie, and returned to his racing pages, having stated the terms of an entire genre without opening it. Th...

In the house where I grew up, the last of anything on the table was settled by a rule older than I was. One child cut, and the other chose. It governed the final slice of tart, the last finger of shortbread and, one memorable Christmas, an orange, and my mother enforced it with the calm of a magistrate who has never been overturned on appeal. I took it for kitchen policy until I was nearly grown. Only later did I see that she had built a small machine for making hungry people fair, since whoever holds the knife must care about the other's portion and has no say in who takes which. This month I thought of that machine again, rereading Park Wan-suh's novel of 1983. In it a hungry child is handed the knife and the choice together, and nobody is present to enforce anything. The novel is called Geuhae Gyeoureun Ttatteuthaenne in Korean, and English reference works give it as Warm Was the Winter That Year . I shall call it That Winter Was Warm , which is my own rendering and not...

By 1964 a telegram was already an old-fashioned way to give a man his orders, and that is the secret of its effect in the closing pages of Kim Seung-ok's story. It reaches the narrator at his aunt's house, in a provincial town where nothing much has happened to him for several days, and it comes from his wife in Seoul. It tells him to return at once, because a company meeting is approaching and his promotion with it. A telephone call would have given him something to argue with. A telegram gives him only a timetable. A telegram does not command a man; it removes his last excuse for staying. The rest of the story, some forty pages in English, has been a slow preparation for that small piece of paper. Kim was twenty-two when Sasanggye , a leading intellectual monthly, printed the story in October 1964. He had been born in Osaka in December 1941 and brought to Korea after liberation in 1945, and he grew up in Suncheon, in South Jeolla Province, which readers have generally take...

Two boys sweep the same chimney. One climbs down with a face black from the soot, and the other with a face as clean as when he went up. Which of them goes to wash? A mathematics teacher puts the question to his class in the opening story of Cho Se-hui's The Dwarf , and his pupils, who are clever and obliging, answer it twice and are wrong both times. The first answer is the obvious one, the dirty boy. The teacher explains, to murmurs of surprise, that the clean boy will wash instead, since each will read his own face from the other's. Asked again, the pupils hand the clever answer back to him, and he tells them that this is wrong too. Two boys who have swept the same chimney cannot come down in different conditions. The riddle was never about faces. It was about the quiet assumption that makes a riddle possible, that there is a clean side and a dirty side to begin with. The teacher then turns to the blackboard and writes Möbius strip . Take a strip of paper, give it a half t...

The king who authorised the most famous Bible in the English language also wrote a manual for detecting witches. James VI of Scotland published his Daemonologie in 1597, nearly seven years after he had sat in on the questioning of the people said to have raised storms against his bride's ship, and he wrote it in the manner of a man who has finally found his subject. Witches were real, he argued, they were dangerous, and the law was right to put them to death. It is a peculiar thing to grow up in a country whose sovereign once moonlighted as a demonology pamphleteer, and stranger still to be reminded of him by a slim volume of Korean horror stories. The trials that made him an authority began in 1590. The royal party, returning from Denmark with Anne, his new queen, ran into savage weather, and the blame settled on a supposed coven said to have met at North Berwick, a small town on the Firth of Forth. In time more than seventy people were implicated. Agnes Sampson, a respected he...