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.
The novel is Human Market (Ingansijang) by Kim Hong-shin, and its hero is Jang Chong-chan, a law student of twenty-two. LTI Korea, the national literary translation institute, lists him as taking on corrupt pastors, prosecutors, judges and gangs, and credits the book with an honest picture of injustice in the 1980s, while a nursing student called Dahye supplies the romance. The structure is episodic, with, as the publisher puts it, a fresh incident in each chapter, which suits Mr Rennie's rule very well. The hero can win on page thirty and be needed again on page thirty-one.
It began in 1981 in the weekly magazine Jugan Hanguk, under the title "The Autobiography of a Twenty-Two-Year-Old", and the first bound volume followed later that year. Within about two years it had become, by the usual account, the first Korean novel to sell a million copies. The publisher's present figure is more than five and a half million, which I would treat as a publisher's figure, though any sensible discount still leaves an enormous readership. The series ran for years and, according to the scholar Jung Eun-kyung, did not finish until 1989. Films began in 1983, a television drama followed on MBC before the decade was out, and SBS remade it in 2004. A book does not receive that treatment for being merely popular. It receives it for naming something that people wanted named.
Part of the appeal, Jung notes, was reportage, since many episodes were adapted from crime stories in the newspapers and the reader recognised the case before the hero arrived. That is the serial writer's oldest trick: let the audience know the villain a little ahead of the protagonist, and the pleasure becomes that of watching a rumour receive a verdict. Jung describes the book as a blend of reportage and martial-arts convention, with a hero who fights, in her account, with fists, throwing stars and trained skill. The result is closer to a martial-arts romance set on the pavement than to a detective story, because justice arrives as a physical feat.
The most instructive detail is the hero's name, which Kim first wrote as Kwon Chong-chan. Seoul Shinmun reported in 2004 that the military authorities' advance press censorship forced the change to Jang. The manuscript, in the paper's phrase, went past the censors like a man walking on thin ice. Kim has told the magazine itself, in a recollection it has published, that the editor of the day asked for the change. The new surname, he says, happened to match the owner's, which is the sort of coincidence that makes a request easier to grant. I cannot tell from here which reason weighed more, and both may be true. The given name carries the Korean word for a gun, and the same newspaper profile traces it to the hero's fictional father, a devotee of Westerns.
What matters is the climate. On 1 August 1980 the Christian Science Monitor reported that the military-backed government had closed 172 periodicals in a single order, citing social decay and juvenile delinquency. A novelist who named a hero in 1981 was entitled to wonder who might be reading the manuscript with a pencil in hand.
Korean critics have placed Jang in a long line of outlaw heroes. Jung traces him through Hong Gil-dong, Im Kkeok-jeong and Jang Gil-san. Jung also calls him a modern secret royal inspector, after those Joseon officials who went out in disguise to check on provincial magistrates. Hong Gil-dong is the figure foreign readers meet first: the son of a nobleman and a concubine, barred from office by his birth. He gathers a band to rob corrupt officials and feed the poor. The tale is traditionally credited to Heo Gyun, though the attribution is now disputed. The comparison with Robin Hood is irresistible and, I think, most instructive for what it leaves out.
The Robin Hood most of us carry in our heads is a loyalist. He robs the sheriff because the rightful king is abroad, and he kneels when the king comes home. That version is younger than the ballads, since, as I understand it, the Scottish historian John Major proposed the link to Richard the Lionheart only in 1521. Walter Scott then fixed it in Ivanhoe in 1819, where a cheerful and patriotic Robin helps in a rescue and later declares himself to the returned king. Hong Gil-dong ends the other way. Offered a token post, he rejects it as too little justice and sails off to found a kingdom where ability counts for more than birth. One outlaw serves a king who is absent, and the other withdraws from a realm that cannot be mended.
Jang Chong-chan can do neither, having no king to wait for and no island to sail to. He is a law student, which is to say he is preparing to enter the very system whose failures he spends his evenings correcting by hand. My reading is that he is a loyalist without a sovereign. He believes so completely in a code of justice that he will knock down anyone who ignores it. Each instalment is an act of faith in a law that, within its own limits, works. The genre is easiest to understand by subtraction: where the courts function, a vigilante story is a thrill, a holiday from procedure. Where readers have reason to doubt the courts, the same story becomes a consolation, and consolations, I suspect, sell in larger numbers than thrills.
There is a Scottish version of that faith, and it goes on foot. In The Heart of Midlothian, published in 1818, Jeanie Deans walks to London to petition the queen for her sister's life. She has refused, in court, to tell the one small lie that might have saved her. Scott took the story, I understand, from the true case of a woman called Helen Walker, who made the same walk. Scott's heroine strikes no one, and her whole method is truthfulness and perseverance. The novel rewards her, though with the help of a duke, a detail Scott is honest enough to supply. Scotland had lost its parliament by then but kept its own law and courts. A Scottish heroine could therefore still believe that justice lay somewhere she could reach by walking. Kim's readers, a year after the press had been cut back so drastically, had less reason for that belief. Jang approaches the law from the other side, by fetching it with his fists.
The English comparison that suggests itself is Dickens, and it is useful because it fails in an informative place. Oliver Twist appeared in monthly parts in Bentley's Miscellany from February 1837 to April 1839, in a magazine of which Dickens was the first editor. Like Kim's novel, it began as something smaller and grew under its author's hands. Both books were written under the eye of their first readers. A serial writer learns quickly what his public will bear, and Kim's readers, by the publisher's account, responded enthusiastically enough to justify a bound volume within the year. The book's target was specific enough to be looked up: the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, with its workhouses. Critics did object, but to the company the book kept, its thieves and its low life, rather than to its aim. Oliver never strikes a blow and is rescued instead by luck and a kindly gentleman, while the institution Dickens wants us to hate is drawn in the person of a pompous beadle.
Kim's villains are of another kind, being pastors, procurers, forgers and gang bosses, each with a face and a chapter, and not one of them a statute. Jung argues that the justice Jang enforces stays at the level of "backstreet security", covering trafficking and petty crime, and so serves as a harmless release valve that leaves the state untouched. I take the point, and I think it largely right. Dickens could aim at an Act of Parliament because an Act of Parliament could be argued with in public. Kim could not aim at its equivalent, and the censor's pencil on his hero's surname shows how near the surface that boundary lay.
Yet Jung's reading is a little too severe to account for the book's hold. A reader in 1981 was being given something to be grateful for: a fictional court in which wrongs were named, punished and finished within a chapter. A release valve is also, seen from the inside, a window. The book did not change a single statute, but it kept alive, among millions of buyers, the idea that a wrong could be called a wrong in print. I doubt that a regime which closed magazines by order thought that idea trivial.
Two other comparisons float around the book: Jung likens Jang to Don Quixote, and the publisher's blurb calls him a Korean Lupin. The first needs a correction, since Quixote's giants turn out to be windmills, whereas Jang's, inside the fiction, are exactly as large as advertised. The second is marketing, but it points in the right direction, towards the French gentleman thief and the long European affection for the charming outlaw.
A Japanese translation appeared in 1986, but I can find no English one, and the institute's catalogue, which lists the Japanese editions, lists none. That is a pity for reasons beyond completeness. English readers have tended to meet modern Korean fiction through its interior, haunted books. I suspect the loud serial that a whole country followed in a weekly magazine would tell us something different about what that country was hungry for.
I told Mr Rennie on Friday that, so far as I can establish, no English edition exists for his shelf. He took it well and then asked, as he always does, whether the hero wins in the end. I said that his question was a good one but that Kim's book makes a better one. The hero always wins, and what changes from one age to the next is who is allowed to be the villain. Mr Rennie nodded, remarked that it sounded like a great deal of trouble for a paperback, and counted my change onto the counter.
Recommended Resources
☞ The English Translation: To my knowledge there is no 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
- Jung Eun-kyung, "The 'Macho' Hero of Social Fiction: Chang Chong-chan in Human Market", Journal of Popular Narrative 28(3), 2022
- "172 periodicals closed in South Korean drive", The Christian Science Monitor, 1 August 1980
- The Heart of Midlothian, Walter Scott Digital Archive, University of Edinburgh