The girl dies in a sentence the boy was never meant to hear. It is late, he is lying in bed with his eyes closed, and his father has come back from the Yoon household with news for his mother. The family has lost nearly everything, he says; they could not even manage proper medicine; and now the child is gone. Then he adds a detail, in the tone of a man passing on village gossip. Before she died, the girl had asked to be buried in the clothes she had been wearing. With that, Hwang Sun-won's "The Shower" (Sonagi) simply stops. The boy says nothing. We are not told that he weeps, or that he is awake, or even that he has understood. The last voice in one of the best-loved stories in the Korean language belongs to a man who has no idea what he has just said.
That ending has been read by nearly every schoolchild in South Korea for decades, and I now think it is the real reason the story has lasted. The plot is slight enough to summarise in a paragraph, and the sentences are plain enough for a ten-year-old. What cannot be summarised is the thing the story declines to say. What follows is an attempt to trace that refusal to its source, which turns out to lie not only in Hwang's temperament but, quite literally, in an act of editing.
Hwang finished the story in about October 1952, when the Korean War still had most of a year to run, and wrote it, like much of his work in those years, while living with his family as a refugee. It first appeared in May 1953 in Sinmunhak, a literary magazine published in Gwangju. A revised text came out that November in another magazine under a different title, "Sonyeo" ("The Girl"), before the story settled into its familiar form in Hwang's 1956 collection Hak (Cranes). Brother Anthony of Taizé, the Cornish-born translator who has put it into English, has remarked on how striking it is that Korea's most beloved short story was published while the fighting was still going on. Not a single shell falls in it. The only violence in its countryside is weather.
The story itself can be told quickly. A country boy of about ten sees a girl playing at the edge of a stream and knows at once who she is: the great-granddaughter of old Yoon, from a family that has come down in the world and returned from Seoul. For days he watches her from a distance and dares not cross the stepping stones while she is sitting on them. When at last she acknowledges him, it is to fling a white pebble his way and call him a fool. He keeps the pebble. Before long the two of them set off across the fields towards a hill, gather flowers, are caught in a sudden downpour and crouch together in a shelter the boy has built for her out of sorghum sheaves. On the way home the stream has risen over the stepping stones, and he carries her across on his back.
Then she disappears. When she turns up at the stream again she is pale and has clearly been ill. She looks down at the front of her pink sweater, where there is a dark reddish stain, and asks him what he thinks it might be. Then she answers her own question: it came off his back, the day he carried her across. The boy flushes to the ears. In a story where no one says "I love you", or anything within a mile of it, this is the declaration, and it is made by mud.
Once you have noticed this, you begin to see that Hwang has handed almost every feeling in the story to an object. The boy cannot tell the girl that he misses her, so he turns the pebble over and over in his fingers. He cannot tell her that he does not want her family to move away, so he collects walnuts to give her before she goes, and on the last night he is dozing with them in his hand when his father comes in. The girl, for her part, never gets to tell him anything at all. What she does instead is ask to keep the stain. To be buried in the clothes she was wearing is to be buried with the mark of his back upon her. The father, retelling the request, takes it as proof that the child was old beyond her years. He is not wrong, exactly. He simply has no idea what the sweater means, and the boy, who does, is pretending to be asleep.
It came as a small shock, then, to discover that the story once went on. In 2013 two Korean scholars aired a disagreement about which printed text came first, and in the course of it a longer ending was brought to light. In that version, after the father's news, the mother wonders aloud whether the little one made her request because she knew the family could not afford anything better. The boy lets out a groan in spite of himself and turns over. The father asks whether he is still awake; the mother says no, he dropped off ages ago, and tells him to stop talking in his sleep. According to Kim Jong-hoe, a critic who studied under Hwang, the author once told him that his close friend Won Eung-seo had advised him to cut the boy's groan as a needless extra, and Hwang took the advice. The scholars still disagree about the order of the magazine texts, and I am in no position to settle it. What matters to me is simpler. There is a version of this story in which the boy makes a sound, and the version an entire country knows is the one in which he does not.
It is hard to overstate how much work that deletion does. In the longer version the boy's grief is audible, and the mother's guess gives the adults a tidy, practical explanation for the girl's wish. Take both away and you are left with a room in which the only person who understands the dead girl's last request cannot be seen to understand it. The reader becomes the boy's accomplice. We know about the stain; his parents do not; and nobody on the page is going to tell them. It is among the most economical pieces of editing I know of, and if Kim's recollection is right, it was done by a friend who thought one sentence was one too many.
Korean teachers often set "The Shower" beside Alphonse Daudet's "The Stars", from Letters from My Windmill (1869), and the pairing is closer than it first looks. In each, a country lad spends a few hours alone with a girl from a family above his own, and in each the turning point is a river swollen by a storm. Daudet's Stephanette tries to cross the flooded Sorgue, fails, and comes back up to the shepherd's pasture soaked and frightened, obliged to spend the night beside his fire. She falls asleep with her head on his shoulder, and the shepherd, who tells the story himself, lets us know precisely what he felt: troubled in his soul, kept innocent by the clear night, half imagining that the finest star in the sky had lost its way and come down to rest on him. The ending is lovely. It is also a young man talking. Daudet gives his shepherd the last word and a metaphor to go with it. Hwang gives his boy neither. His narration stays at the boy's side from the first sentence to the last, yet at the one moment that matters most it declines to enter his head.
Reading Hwang as a Scot, I found the method less foreign than I had expected, because our own oldest poems work in much the same way. The ballad of "Sir Patrick Spens", one of the Child ballads and among the most anthologised poems in these islands, concerns a ship lost at sea, and it never shows anyone drowning. It shows the Scots lords, who had been loath to wet their fine cork-heeled shoes, and then tells us, in two lines I have known since boyhood: "Bot lang owre a' the play wer playd, / Thair hats they swam aboone." After that the ladies wait on shore with their fans and their gold combs for husbands who will not come home. The whole disaster is carried by hats, shoes and combs. "The Twa Corbies" goes further still: a dead knight's fate is learned by a passer-by who overhears two crows discussing where they might dine. Grief handed to objects, and news delivered by eavesdropping. I had not expected to find both in a Korean story written in wartime, and it gave me the odd sensation of recognising a stranger's handwriting.
I am struck by how often the people who love this story have tried to put the sound back. Go Yeong-nam's 1978 film, as the critic Colin Marshall has described it, ends on the morning after the news with the boy letting out a scream that sounds almost joyful and running off into the hills. Kwak Jae-young's comedy My Sassy Girl (2001) goes another way: its heroine, dissatisfied with Hwang's ending, rewrites the dying girl's request so that she asks for the boy who carried her to be buried alive beside her. Both are affectionate, and the second is very funny. Yet both, in their different ways, return the groan that Won Eung-seo took out. The parody in particular only works because everyone watching already knows the silence it is breaking. One cannot make a joke of a hush unless the whole audience has heard it.
British readers had an early chance to hear that hush. According to the standard Korean encyclopaedia, a translation by Yu Eui-sang won a prize in a short-story competition run by Encounter, the London monthly, and was printed there in 1959. I have never seen that issue, so I cannot say what an English reader of the day made of it. My guess is that he admired it for the wrong reason. It is tempting to file Hwang's restraint alongside what the English call the stiff upper lip and we Scots tend to call not making a fuss. The two are not the same. The stiff upper lip is a refusal to show a feeling in company. Hwang's method is closer to relocation: the feeling is shown in full, only it has been moved out of the boy's mouth and into a pebble, a pocketful of walnuts and a stain on a sweater. Nothing is suppressed. It has simply been put somewhere the adults will not think to look.
I now read the story in Korean, looking up the country words as I go, far more slowly than any schoolchild would. Each time I reach the end I find myself waiting for the groan that is no longer there, and each time the page gives me the father's voice and then white space. That white space is the most crowded part of the story. It holds the boy's grief, the mother's discarded theory, an argument over two magazines from 1953, and a friend's advice that one sentence was one too many. Hwang could have let the boy be heard. He chose, or was persuaded, to let him keep his secret, and so the stain went into the ground with the girl, and its meaning stayed with the only person in the room who was pretending to sleep.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase the Original (Korean Edition): Sonagi · The Cloudburst (소나기), Hwang Sun-won, Aladin Bookstore
This bilingual edition (ASIA Publishers, 2015) sets the Korean text beside Edward Poitras's English translation.
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
Sources
- "Hwang Sun-won's Sonagi: was its original title Sonyeo?" (in Korean), Newsis, 2013.
- Colin Marshall, "A Beloved Children's Story Turned Psychedelic Rural Reverie: Go Yeong-nam's The Shower (1978)", Los Angeles Review of Books, 2021.
- Alphonse Daudet, "The Stars", in Letters from My Windmill (1869), trans. Mireille Harmelin and Keith Adams, Project Gutenberg.
- "The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence", text from Percy's Reliques (1765), Williams College Sir Patrick Spens project.