In Hangul, a wound and a song are spelled the same way. Gu Byeong-mo’s novel Jeolchang, issued by Munhakdongne in September 2025, takes its title from that coincidence, and several of the Korean reviews I have read reach for the same pair of Chinese characters to explain it. The first, 切創, means an incised wound, the clean cut that a blade leaves, as opposed to a tear or a bruise. The second, 絶唱, means a song so fine that nothing is thought to stand beside it, and sometimes a final one. A reader at a bookshop table sees a single word and must decide which of the two to hear. I take it that the author means us not to decide, and the novel behaves accordingly.
The premise, as the Korean reviews lay it out, can be stated in a breath. A girl raised in a children’s home discovers that she can read a person’s thoughts by touching the wound they carry. Grown up, she is referred to in the reviews simply as agassi, the young lady, and the publisher’s summary has her taken in by a businessman named Mun Oh-eon, who offers her shelter, a new life and a large house. Several reviewers suggest that his trade is darker than the word businessman allows. The story is told by a reading teacher who lives in that house and who supplies the only view we are given of the other two. She is no mere bystander, and several reviews agree that she arrives with an old grievance against her employer. I shall say no more than that, since the book depends partly on how slowly it lets such things out.
Edinburgh, where I live, has its own old habit of reading people through their wounds, and it was never gentle. William Burke was hanged on 28 January 1829 for the West Port murders. His body was then dissected in public by Alexander Monro tertius, the third of his family to hold the University’s chair of anatomy. The Monros had kept that chair for a hundred and twenty-six years when the third of them retired in 1846. It is easy to assume that Burke’s skeleton lives at Surgeons’ Hall, but it belongs to the University’s Anatomical Museum, and Surgeons’ Hall Museums hold a pocketbook bound with his skin. Public revulsion at the murders helped to carry the Anatomy Act of 1832. The Act allowed unclaimed bodies from hospitals, prisons and workhouses to be used for teaching, and made room for donation. No one would now need to be killed in order to be studied, and that was one answer to the question of how to know a person: open the body and read what it holds. Gu’s novel proposes another, and I find it the more alarming of the two.
The wordplay in the title goes a little further than the two readings. The second character of 切創 is 創, which also stands in the compound for creation, where it means to begin or to make. The dictionaries I have consulted give the wound as the original sense of that character. They treat the sense of founding as a later borrowing, so it would be wrong to say that creation literally grows out of the cut. The two meanings are pronounced differently in Mandarin, though a Korean reader says chang for both. Whatever the etymology, the Korean press has felt the connection: the Seoul Shinmun headed its review with a phrase about love squeezing out between the edges of a gaping wound. The paper adds that the book swings between romance and thriller, and it asks, as readers evidently do, whether the bond at the centre of the story is love or something that a psychiatrist would give another name.
The author has been plain about what she is after. In an interview published by Newsis in early October 2025, Gu said that reading another person is possible, but that a perfect interpretation almost never is. Misreading is therefore unavoidable, and it leaves ruptures behind it. People, she observed, tend to say only what they wish to say and to hear only what they wish to hear, and then to treat the result as fact. The publisher’s description makes the same point from the other side, presenting the novel as an inquiry into how understanding another person always carries some misinterpretation inside it. The design follows the thesis closely. The heroine reads by touch, the narrator reads for a living, and the man who owns the house wants above all to be read.
I have spent most of my adult life reading texts in languages that were not my own, and I know the vanity this book is aimed at. It is the quiet belief that enough study earns the right to be correct. The reviews describe a narrator who watches two people circle one another, draws conclusions and revises them, and she is never given the satisfaction of a final proof. Newsis reports that the novel became a bestseller soon after its release. The Seoul Shinmun praises its long, slightly old-fashioned sentences and notes that Shakespeare is quoted along the way, with Newsis naming King Lear among the plays. That seems a fitting companion for a book about people who cannot be told what is wrong with them, since Lear misreads his own daughters with magnificent confidence.
The refusal is the hinge of every summary I have found. After a betrayal that the publisher declines to specify, the young woman will not read Mun again, though he wants nothing so much as to be read. The Hankyung reviewer compresses the situation into a double prohibition: do not read him, and do not grant his wish. The formula strikes me as exact. Her gift is now the only thing that could give him what he asks for, and withholding it is the only power she has left. A reader might call that cruelty, but I am inclined to call it the single decision in the book that treats the other person as a person and not as a text.
The scene that comes to mind is the best known account of touching a wound in Western literature, the one in the Gospel of John. Thomas declares that unless he can see the mark of the nails and place his finger there, and his hand in the side, he will not believe. Eight days later Jesus offers him exactly that, and then comes the odd part, which most paintings conceal: the text never says that Thomas accepted. Charles Stang, writing in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, points out that the Greek verb introducing Thomas’s answer follows straight on from the offer. He concludes that the invitation, and not the contact, draws out the confession. A paper from Tilburg University reaches a similar view and calls the silence a gap for readers to fill. The line that follows, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”, reads differently once one notices that Thomas may not have needed to touch at all.
Agassi stands on the other side of that scene. She can touch any wound in the room, and she knows exactly what the contact would yield. To decline it, for this one man, is to give up the certainty that Thomas demanded and to live on something closer to trust. A wound is the place where a person can be reached, and also the place where the reading may have to be refused if the person is to stay whole. The anatomy theatre had no use for that distinction, and I doubt it would have wanted one.
Scotland once had an institution for the wound that will not close, and it was a song. The Gaelic word is caoineadh, keening, and coronach is the form of it that English and Scots speakers took over. According to the lecturer Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart, the Highland custom was led by old widows. They wore torn clothes, let their hair stream in the wind, and took the relatives and friends of the dead through chanted verses of praise and curses against enemies, broken by wailing. He describes it as a skilled, choreographed and demanding task, not a spasm of feeling. The custom ran for centuries and faded across the nineteenth century, so far as the sources show. Stiùbhart attributes its decline to new standards of respectability and self-control. A younger generation came to find it hypocritical, old-fashioned and even primitive. A culture had decided that it would sooner be quiet about its cuts than sing them.
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In the funerals of my boyhood, the nearest thing to keening was the sound of a tea urn coming to the boil, and nobody was ever praised for the quality of the grief. I mention it only because Gu’s title seems to ask what the keening women answered with their whole bodies. What can be done with a cut that stays open? The novel, as I understand it, does not claim that it heals. It suggests that if someone is willing to put a hand to the wound and stay there, the wound may produce something that sounds, for a moment, like 絶唱. The reading may be wrong, and it will still be a sound.
Gu has played this game with titles before. Her earlier novel Pagwa, first published in Korea in 2013, carries a Sino-Korean title that can mean either bruised fruit or the prime of one’s youth. That is the account given in an interview that the translator Chi-Young Kim conducted with Gu for Korea’s Literature Translation Institute. Gu says in it that the American edition was given a more intuitive title, which is why English readers know the book as The Old Woman with the Knife. It follows an ageing contract killer, and the English edition appeared in 2022 from Hanover Square in the United States and from Canongate in Britain, and the New York Times listed it among its notable books of that year. A film version directed by Min Kyu-dong, with Lee Hye-young in the lead, had its premiere at the Berlin festival in February 2025 and reached Korean cinemas on 30 April. Since it was adapted from the Korean novel, the translation did not so much carry her name to the screen as run alongside it.
For readers without Korean, the position of Jeolchang itself is simple. So far as I can find, no English translation exists, and none has been announced. The catalogue of LTI Korea lists the book under the English title Incised Wound and records no translation rights at the time of writing, which is the nearest thing to an official statement. The author’s English-language introduction is therefore The Old Woman with the Knife. It will not give a reader the particular ache of this book, since the two novels differ in nearly everything except the intelligence of the prose. It will show how Gu likes to build a plot on a pun, and why a Scotsman with an unfinished doctorate would sooner read her slowly than quickly.
The reviews I have read disagree about whether the bond at the heart of the book is love or captivity. The author, in her interview, does not offer to settle it. She offers a theory of misreading instead, which has the advantage of excusing every reader in advance. In Hangul the wound and the song are still spelled the same, and no amount of reading has persuaded the spelling to take a side.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): Jeolchang (절창), Gu Byeong-mo, Aladin Bookstore
☞ English introduction to the author: The Old Woman with the Knife, Gu Byeong-mo (translated by Chi-Young Kim), 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.
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