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 fiction to remain not merely in print, but in argument — cited in doctoral theses, adapted into new audiobooks, invoked in film criticism, still assigned to students who were not alive when its author was already an old man. As a scholar of Asian Cultural History by training, if not by finished credential, I find myself asking the question that ought to be asked of any work that survives this long: not "is it good?" — that argument was settled decades ago — but "why does it refuse to become merely historical?"
The plot itself is almost defiantly modest. Yun Hee-jung, a pharmaceutical company executive on the cusp of a further promotion secured through his wife's family connections, returns briefly to his fog-bound hometown of Mujin — a fictional coastal town that Kim modelled on his own boyhood home of Suncheon, in South Jeolla Province. There, over the course of some two or three days, he drinks with an old schoolfriend now serving as tax office chief, meets a younger schoolteacher who was once his junior at the same school, and idles away long afternoons half-listening to two visiting agricultural officials argue about crop yields, a scene of such studied inconsequence that it somehow says more about his own drift than any of the dialogue that follows. He also falls into a brief, doomed entanglement with a lonely music teacher named Ha In-suk, who begs him to take her back to Seoul. He half-promises. A telegram arrives summoning him back to the city and to his impending promotion. He tears up the letter he had begun writing to her, and returns to Seoul, and to himself. That is, essentially, the entire story. No murder, no revolution, no metaphysical apparition. Merely a man going home, and then leaving again, having briefly glimpsed who he might have been.
There is a small irony worth pausing on, one I rather like for its quiet symmetry. Kim Seung-ok himself was born not in Korea at all, but in Osaka, in 1941, into a family living through the last years of Japanese colonial rule; he returned to the peninsula only after liberation in 1945, and was raised in Suncheon — the very town he would later disguise as Mujin. A writer whose earliest childhood was spent displaced across a colonial border went on to write, with such precision, about a man displaced between two versions of his own country: the provincial one he cannot quite leave behind, and the metropolitan one he cannot quite belong to. I doubt this was calculated. The best autobiographical residues in fiction rarely are.
And yet this unassuming little narrative changed the direction of Korean prose. The critic Yoo Jong-ho, writing in 1969, coined a phrase that has followed Kim Seung-ok ever since: the revolution of sensibility. Kim was, as Minumsa's own literary historians note, the first major Korean writer of the so-called Hangul generation. He was the first to receive his entire education in the Korean script, rather than under the Japanese colonial system that had shaped every writer before him. He entered university in 1960, the same year as the April Revolution that toppled Syngman Rhee's government. He belonged to that particular cohort of young Koreans who, as later scholars have observed, turned inward following that political awakening — trading the grand historical and national narratives of the previous generation for something closer to the private interior weather of a single, uncertain man. He shared this generational moment with contemporaries such as Choi In-hun, whose 1961 novel The Square wrestled with comparable questions of individual conscience against inherited ideology, though where Choi wrote allegory on a national scale, Kim narrowed his lens to a single, shabby weekend. It is not too much to say that Korean prose fiction is now conventionally divided into a before and after Kim Seung-ok.
I confess a certain fellow-feeling here, as a man who studied history rather than lived through revolution, and who understands the appeal of retreating from the grand narrative into the merely personal. But there is something more universally instructive in what Kim achieved. The literary establishment of the 1950s, still gripped by the sobriety and moral solemnity of postwar reconstruction, had produced fiction that was, by most honest accounts, rather grim and structurally rigid — concerned with ideology, with the nation, with history as a battlefield of abstractions. Kim Seung-ok, and the small coterie of writers he founded the journal The Age of Prose with in 1962 — a group that included the critic Kim Hyun, whose theoretical writing would later give the movement its intellectual scaffolding — insisted instead on sensation: the specific, sensory, almost embarrassingly intimate texture of a man's inner weather. Fog as a smell in the nostrils rather than a symbol requiring decoding. Shame as a physical heat in the chest rather than a moral position to be argued.
Which brings me to the matter of shame — 부끄러움, in the original, a word that resists tidy translation, sitting somewhere between shame, embarrassment, and a specific self-directed contempt. There exists, in certain older anthropological writing on East Asian societies, a rather blunt distinction drawn between so-called "guilt cultures" and "shame cultures" — the former oriented around an internalised moral law violated in private, the latter around the social gaze and the fear of exposure. I have never found this binary particularly convincing; it flattens what is, in Kim Seung-ok's hands, something far more psychologically precise. Yun Hee-jung's shame in the story's final pages is not merely the fear of being seen doing wrong. It is the shame of glimpsing, briefly and vividly, an authentic and undefended version of himself — one capable of genuine tenderness toward Ha In-suk — and then choosing, with his eyes open, to fold that self away and re-don the armour of ambition. Korean scholarship on the story, drawing on psychoanalytic readings of the "maternal superego," has argued precisely this: that the terror at the heart of the tale is not social exposure but the unbearable weight of encountering one's own capacity for sincerity, and finding oneself unwilling to bear its cost.
I find something rather touching, and instructive, in the response of one American reviewer who first encountered the story through the Asia Publishers edition and dismissed it outright — the plot mundane, he wrote, the prose flat, the ending oddly inconclusive. He then did what depressingly few critics bother to do: he went looking for how the story had actually been received in its own country, discovered it was beloved there and had inspired a celebrated film, and revised his judgement in print, admitting the reversal openly. It is a small, honest correction, and I confess I find it more persuasive than any purely textual defence of the story could be. Sometimes the surest sign that a work has succeeded on its own terms is that it fails, quite badly, on someone else's.
It is, I would argue, this precise mechanism — shame as the residue of a self one has deliberately abandoned — that keeps the story alive for readers in 2026 who have never queued for rationed rice or worried about being conscripted into a war their fathers barely survived. The particulars of 1960s industrialising Korea are gone. The particular shame of choosing the promotion over the woman in the fog remains entirely legible to anyone who has ever sent the professionally cautious email instead of the honest one, or accepted the comfortable compromise while quietly aware of the person they might have been had they refused it. It is there in the specific, private flinch of rereading one's own carefully diplomatic reply to a friend in need, weeks later, and recognising it for what it was. Kim Seung-ok did not write a period piece about Korean modernisation. He wrote, with uncomfortable precision, about the specific mechanics of self-betrayal — which is, regrettably, not a technology that has ever gone out of date.
There is a further reason the story has refused to settle into mere literary history, and it is rather more visible to Western eyes than the scholarly debates I have just rehearsed. In 2025, a scholarly paper appeared comparing Mujin directly with Park Chan-wook's Decision to Leave — the film that introduced a great many Western audiences to Korean cinema's particular mastery of longing, obliquity, and coastal fog. The comparison is not fanciful. Park's fictional town of Ipo, its persistent mist, and the doomed near-affair between its two central characters trace, whether consciously or not, the exact narrative topography Kim laid down sixty years earlier: a man of compromised integrity, a woman who represents an escape route he cannot take, and a fog that refuses either to fully conceal or fully reveal the truth of what passed between them. Kim Seung-ok also wrote the story's own 1967 film adaptation, Mist, directed by Kim Soo-yong — meaning the man who invented this narrative architecture in prose also built its first cinematic version with his own hands. That the same architecture resurfaces, evidently without direct citation, in one of the most acclaimed Korean films of the past decade suggests something closer to a national grammar than a mere influence.
So, why does Mujin endure? Not, I think, because of the fog, elegant as that device remains, nor because of its tidy status as a syllabus staple, now bound handsomely as volume 149 of a World Literature series that began with Ovid's Metamorphoses and has, over nearly three decades, made steady room for Korean classics alongside the Western canon. It endures because Kim Seung-ok identified, at twenty-three, with a clarity that eluded writers twice his age, that the most dangerous fog a person navigates is never meteorological. It is the fog we generate ourselves, in the moment we decide which version of our own character to keep, and which to fold quietly into an envelope, and tear up before anyone can read it.
I shall be keeping my two-pound-fifty paperback rather closer to hand than most of what sits on my shelves. There is, after all, a particular kind of Scottish thrawnness in a story that refuses, across six decades and two languages, to let its reader off quite so easily.
Recommended Resources
☞ English Edition: Record of a Journey to Mujin (Asia Publishers, Bi-lingual 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.