There is a particular grief reserved for books, and I do not mean the grief of closing a good one. I mean the grief of losing one entirely — not to fire or flood, but to the far more mundane violence of removal men and cardboard boxes. When I left my university lodgings for the last time, hauling the wreckage of an unfinished doctorate back to my mother's house, an entire shelf of my collection simply vanished somewhere between Edinburgh's Old Town and the outskirts I now call home. Among the casualties was my set of Park Kyung-ni's Toji: sixteen volumes, painstakingly assembled over three years of a student's meagre stipend. I have since replaced them, of course. But the replacement copies sit on my shelf with the slightly formal air of a stepfamily; they have never quite forgiven me for losing the originals, and I have never quite forgiven myself.
I mention this because Toji is, before it is anything else, a novel about precisely this kind of loss — the loss of land, of lineage, of the accumulated weight of things one assumed would simply remain. Park spent twenty-five years, from 1969 to 1994, constructing this five-part, sixteen-volume epic, and one does not read it so much as inhabit it. It begins in Pyeongsari, in the fields surrounding the Choi family's ancestral estate, and follows four generations of that family, most vividly the granddaughter Choi Seo-hee, through the collapse of the Joseon order and into the long humiliation of Japanese colonial rule. The land here is never merely scenery; it functions as inheritance, as obligation, and eventually as the very site of dispossession, as colonial policy strips ownership away from precisely the people who had bled into that soil for generations. By the novel's later volumes, Seo-hee herself marries Gilsang, once a servant within her own household — a match that would have been unthinkable under the old order, and one that Park allows to happen almost quietly, as though to suggest that empire dismantles class hierarchy with the same indifference it dismantles everything else.
What continues to unsettle me about the novel — in the best sense of that word — is the origin Park herself gave for it. She once recalled a story of a certain countryside where the harvest had ripened in full abundance, and yet cholera had swept through so thoroughly that, by her own account, no one remained to bring in the harvest. The image of golden, overripe grain standing in fields emptied of the living lodged itself in her, and from that single, terrible juxtaposition (plenty and death, land and its abandonment) the entire architecture of Toji eventually grew. I find this rather more moving than any grand statement of authorial intent could be. The best epics, I have come to believe, are rarely born from ambition. They are born from a single image a writer cannot put down.
It would be remiss of a man of my particular academic vintage (Asian Cultural History, for my sins) not to mention Pearl Buck's The Good Earth in the same breath, though I do so with considerably less enthusiasm and rather more brevity, for reasons that will become apparent. Buck's 1931 novel, which won her the Pulitzer the following year and contributed substantially to her Nobel Prize in 1938, follows the farmer Wang Lung across a single lifetime in Anhui province, his fortunes rising and falling with his relationship to his fields. It was, in fact, only the first instalment of a loose trilogy — Sons followed in 1932, A House Divided in 1935 — tracing the Wang family across three generations in total. Even stretched across three volumes, however, the saga never leaves the scale of the family portrait; it is, on its own modest terms, a perfectly respectable novel. But it is also, unmistakably, the work of an outsider looking in. Buck writes as a missionary's daughter observing Chinese peasant life with sympathy, certainly, but from beyond the glass. Wang Lung's arc is a moral fable about one man's private greed and eventual humility. It asks nothing of history, because it does not need to; it is content with the individual.
Toji, by contrast, could never be content with the individual, because Park was not writing from beyond any glass. She was writing from inside the wound. The land in her novel is not a private morality test but a national one, freighted with han — that peculiarly Korean sediment of grief and injustice that accumulates across generations and finds no tidy resolution. Where Wang Lung's land is simply his to lose through his own folly, the Choi family's land is stolen from them by forces entirely beyond their control, by an empire that arrived uninvited and made ownership itself a colonial instrument. One is a fable about a man. The other is an autopsy of a people.
I confess a certain sympathy for Buck, all the same, and not merely because she deserves credit for turning Western eyes toward Chinese rural life at a moment when few others bothered. It is rather that I recognise something of my own predicament in hers. I too approach Korean literature from beyond the glass — a Scotsman peering in, however devotedly, at a history that is not his own. The difference, I like to think, is that I have never mistaken my vantage point for authority. Buck's novel occasionally forgets it is a visitor's account and begins speaking as though it holds the keys to the house. Park's novel, being the house itself, has no such confusion to manage.
Sixteen volumes is, I will admit, a formidable commitment to ask of any reader, and I do not make it lightly. But there is something in the sheer accumulated weight of Toji — its refusal to compress four generations of dispossession into something tidier and more exportable — that feels, to me, like the truest thing Korean literature has to say about land, memory, and the debts the living owe the dead. I lost my first set of this novel somewhere on a removal van between one life and the next. I do not intend to lose the second.●
❋ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1906876045 ('Part I only')
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh