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 taken as the model for his fictional Mujin. By 1964 he was a French literature student at Seoul National University who had already won a newspaper prize for a first story and, with a handful of friends, founded a small magazine called The Age of Prose. I suspect that beginning life in one country and growing up in another left him unusually alert to the divisions inside a single man.
The plot is almost defiantly modest. Yun Hee-jung, thirty-three, works for a pharmaceutical firm owned by his wife's father, and a shareholders' meeting is about to make him a managing director. His wife and her father suggest that he take a few days' rest in his home town. He travels by bus, half-listening to two agricultural inspectors who are trying to decide what Mujin is known for, and who settle, as I read it, on the fog. In Mujin he meets Jo, a school friend who has become head of the local tax office, and Park, a younger man teaching at their old school. At a drinking party he meets Ha In-suk, a music teacher who sings a popular song where a classical aria is expected. They walk home together in the dark. She asks him to take her to Seoul, and he does not say no.
The supporting cast is drawn with the same dry economy. Jo has risen to a post of some authority. Park, who teaches at the old school, tells the narrator that the two of them are the most successful graduates the place has produced since liberation, a compliment that closes the net more tightly than any insult could. Park is also writing love letters to Ha In-suk, and the narrator, learning of it, finds himself pitying the man. Ha In-suk herself is the most interesting of the three. At her graduation recital, as I understand it, she sang an aria from Madama Butterfly. At Jo's house she sings 'Tears of Mokpo', a popular lament, and the narrator, watching a talent spent on the wrong audience, feels something close to tenderness. It is not hard to see that she is also a portrait of him.
Then the telegram comes. He writes her a letter, reads it over and tears it into pieces. On the bus out of town he sees a white signboard telling him that he is leaving Mujin, and the story ends on a single sentence: he felt a deep shame. That is, essentially, the whole affair. There is no murder, no revolution and no ghost beyond the metaphorical kind. A man goes home, is tempted by a better version of his own life, and leaves it where he found it.
The story is framed by two road signs. At the opening the bus rounds a bend and the narrator sees a milestone telling him that Mujin is ten kilometres away, jutting out of the roadside weeds exactly as it did in his boyhood. At the end, on the bus back, he sees a white signboard informing him that he is leaving the town. Between them lies the only stretch of his adult life in which nobody needs him for anything, and the milestone and the signboard are the only official acknowledgements that it took place. I admire the economy of this. A story needs no stated moral when the road itself keeps the accounts.
The fog is the real protagonist, and Kim signals as much in the name. Mujin is written with characters that mean something like a ford in the mist, and the narrator likens the fog to the breath of a vengeful woman's ghost. I would call that an exaggeration if it were not so exactly how a certain kind of memory behaves. He tells us that he comes home only when something has gone wrong in Seoul, or when he needs to begin again. The town also holds his worst memory, of being hidden in a back room by his mother during the war so that he would not be conscripted. Mujin is where he goes to be forgiven, and it is also where he is least likely to be.
Critics have a name for what Kim did, the revolution of sensibility, a phrase credited to the critic Yu Jong-ho and by now almost fixed to the author's name. His publisher, Minumsa, describes him as the first novelist of the Hangul generation, meaning the first to be schooled entirely in Korean rather than in Japanese. He entered university in 1960, the year of the April Revolution that brought down Syngman Rhee, and he belonged to the cohort that, as later critics tell it, turned from large national questions to private weather. The fiction he displaced was, by common account, solemn and ideological. Kim answered it with sensation, with fog that gets into the nose and shame that sits in the chest, rather than with symbols to be decoded. Minumsa now lists his collection as number 149 in its World Literature series, which is a fair indication of where Korean readers think it belongs.
Whether the story is about the failure of the April Revolution is a standard question in Korean classrooms. A common reading takes the fog as the emptiness that followed the hopes of 1960, and the narrator's retreat into ambition as the era's way of coping. I find the reading plausible, since Kim was a student in Seoul that spring, but I would not make it the whole account. A story that depended on its politics would have dated as quickly as the politics. This one survives because the politics are only the weather in which a more private failure takes place.
Kim's own career followed something like the shape of the story, in miniature. He wrote most of what made his name within five or six years, and won the Dong-in Literary Prize in 1965 for 'Seoul, Winter 1964'. Accounts differ in detail, but they agree that his energy for fiction ebbed after 1967 and that by 1979 he had stopped writing stories altogether. I find it hard not to hear an echo of Yun Hee-jung in that, a man of obvious gift who folds it away, although I do not wish to press the comparison further than the dates allow. What remains is a body of work small enough to carry in one hand and durable enough to outlast the argument about it.
The word on which the story ends, shame, is the one I keep returning to. Nobody has caught the narrator, so his shame cannot be the fear of being found out. He is ashamed because for three days he has been a more honest and more tender man than he is in Seoul, and he has chosen, with his eyes open, to put that man back in the drawer. At one point he wants to tell Ha In-suk that he loves her and cannot, because the word sounds awkward in his own language. A Scot recognises that difficulty at once. We have built a modest national economy on not saying the word, and we pay for it in the same coin as Yun Hee-jung.
This is why the story has outlived the Korea it describes. The firm, the father-in-law and the shareholders' meeting belong to the 1960s. The mechanism belongs to every decade. Anyone who has sent the professionally cautious email instead of the honest one, or accepted the comfortable compromise while remembering the person they might have been, has made the same journey with a smaller suitcase. The temptations in Kim's world rarely announce themselves, and the most dangerous of them arrive as logistics. Nobody forces Yun Hee-jung to betray Ha In-suk. A meeting has been scheduled, a bus leaves at a fixed hour, and a man who has spent three days rehearsing a different life discovers that the timetable has decided on his behalf.
The story was filmed in 1967 as Mist, directed by Kim Soo-yong from a screenplay by Kim Seung-ok himself, which is rare luck for a young author. Its afterlife has become stranger lately. The programme note of an Australian gallery that screened the film in 2022 calls it a major influence on Park Chan-wook's Decision to Leave, and observes that the old film's theme song is heard in Park's. Park has named a ballad called 'Mist' as his chief inspiration, and an academic article has set his film beside Kim's story, fog against fog. I would not call this a direct line of descent, since the evidence is circumstantial. But a fog-bound town, a man who is not quite free and a woman who stands for another life are three notes that a reader of Kim will recognise at once.
English readers have been less sure of it. The version I know best is Kevin O'Rourke's translation in the bilingual series issued by Asia Publishers, with the Korean and the English printed in parallel, a format that exposes every choice a translator makes. One English-language reviewer of that edition found the plot mundane, the prose flat and the ending oddly inconclusive. He then did something that few reviewers trouble to do, and looked up how the story had fared at home. He found that Korean readers love it and that it had been made into a successful film, and he said so. That strikes me as more persuasive than any defence I could write, for a story built on withheld statements ought to disappoint a reader who wants a verdict.
So I come back to the telegram. Everything else in the story can be argued with, the fog and the town and the half-promise to a woman who wants to leave, but a piece of paper from Seoul asks for nothing that the narrator would have to defend. Yun Hee-jung tears up the letter and obeys the telegram, and the whole meaning of the story lies in the difference between those two documents. One was written by a man who might have stayed, the other by the man he has decided to be.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase the Original (Korean Edition): Mujin Gihaeng, Kim Seung-ok, Aladin Bookstore
☞ English translation: Record of a Journey to Mujin, trans. Kevin O'Rourke (Asia Publishers, bilingual edition), Amazon
'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
- Kim Seungok, author profile, Korean Literature Now (LTI Korea).
- Mist (1967), programme note, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.
- Review of Record of a Journey to Mujin, KTLIT.