A few weeks ago, chasing a footnote about postwar Korean fiction, I came across a photograph of a low, ochre-walled hanok in Daegu's old pharmacy quarter, its sliding gate propped permanently open. It is not, strictly speaking, a house any longer. The city converted it some years back into a small memorial hall built around a single novel: Kim Won-il's Madang Gipeun Jip, known to English-language readers as The House with a Sunken Courtyard. Inside, by all accounts, there is a recreation of the cramped room where a boy named Gilnam once slept beside his mother and three siblings, a cabinet of the author's own donated belongings, and a wall of black-and-white photographs of Daegu in its most threadbare decade. I have never set foot in the place, and given my present arrangements in Edinburgh, I am unlikely to. But something in the description held my attention longer than a passing curiosity usually does: an entire museum, however modest, built around the plain fact of a shared courtyard.
Edinburgh has never felt the need to memorialise its own version of the arrangement, chiefly because it never stopped practising it. The tenements of the Old Town, those tall, soot-blackened stairs off the Royal Mile, housed exactly this sort of enforced intimacy for the better part of four centuries: a single stone stair shared by half a dozen households of wildly unequal fortune, a common privy, a courtyard, or "close", that served as kitchen garden, laundry, playground and battlefield in more or less equal measure. My own university lodgings, in a far less romantic twentieth-century version of the same idea, taught me that shared plumbing reveals a person's character more efficiently than any amount of polite conversation ever could. Kim Won-il, writing from a comfortable distance of thirty years, seems to have understood this instinctively. His sunken courtyard, home in 1954 to six households and twenty-two people, functions less as a setting than as an instrument: a device for measuring, room by room, exactly what a society under strain will and will not forgive in its neighbours.
The intensity behind that measuring instinct becomes clearer once one knows the outline of Kim's own life. Born in 1942 in Jinyeong, a small town in South Gyeongsang province, he was still a boy when the Korean War broke out and his father crossed north, never to return. The family left behind was plunged into the sort of ordinary, unglamorous poverty that rarely makes the history books: newspaper rounds before dawn, secondhand uniforms, meals stretched further than any meal ought reasonably to stretch. Across six decades of writing, in one guise or another, Kim has returned repeatedly to the long tail of that single wartime decision, and Madang Gipeun Jip, published in 1988, remains by most accounts his most directly autobiographical treatment of it. He is, today, an octogenarian chair professor of creative writing at Suncheon National University and a member of the National Academy of Arts, honours that sit oddly, almost apologetically, beside the newspaper boy he keeps returning to in his own fiction.
The novel itself opens in 1954, the year after the armistice, with twelve-year-old Gilnam arriving alone in Daegu to rejoin a mother he barely recognises, a sister, and two younger brothers, one of them disabled. They take a single rented room in the "upper house" of a sprawling old property whose deep, sunken courtyard gives the book its title, sharing the address with the landlord's own family and four other displaced households: a family from Gyeonggi, a wounded veteran and his dependants, a family from Pyongyang, and a widow from nearby Gimcheon raising her son alone. Twenty-two people, six distinct histories, one gate, one open drain running along the courtyard wall. The Gyeonggi family, for instance, included a son studying, almost incongruously, to become a dentist; the wounded veteran's household nursed a private grief no one else in the courtyard was ever quite permitted to ask about directly. Kim spares his reader almost nothing of the physical indignity of the arrangement: the smell of the improvised toilet, the scramble for hot water, the newspaper boys who occasionally steal food simply to survive. Yet he refuses just as firmly to let poverty flatten his characters into a single undifferentiated mass of suffering. Each family arrives at the courtyard by a different route and carries a different, closely guarded set of shames.
At the centre of it all stands Gilnam's mother, a seamstress hardened by circumstance into something closer to a general than a parent. The critic Woo Chan-je has described the novel, memorably, as a search for a lost mother rather than a lost father, and the description earns its place. With her husband gone north and no realistic prospect of his return, Gilnam's mother assembles a kind of improvised paternal authority out of sheer necessity, and passes a portion of it directly onto her eldest son, who is expected to behave as head of the household years before he has any business doing so. The father's absence is never sentimentalised into martyrdom; it is simply a fact the family must build its entire domestic architecture around, the way a tree grows oddly around an old fence post left standing too long. Gilnam's occasional flights from home, and his equally inevitable returns, read less as rebellion than as a boy repeatedly testing the load-bearing walls of an arrangement he never chose and cannot yet name.
Reading this as a Scotsman, I could not help but hear two very different, very domestic echoes. Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes performs a broadly similar trick with Limerick in the nineteen thirties and forties, its narrator likewise assembling dignity out of hunger and a father who is present in body but absent in every function that matters. Closer to home, and closer in time, Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain transplants much the same structural bones, an incapacitated father, a mother carrying more weight than any single person should, a boy watching and adapting, into the housing schemes of nineteen eighties Glasgow, and won its author the Booker Prize for the trouble in 2020. Both books, like Kim's, choose to stay within those close physical quarters rather than following their narrators out into any eventual, tidier escape. What distinguishes Kim's courtyard from both of these, and what an outsider is perhaps best placed to notice, is its sheer crowdedness. McCourt and Stuart write poverty as a largely private affair, endured behind one front door. Kim writes it as a semi-public performance, twenty-two people watching twenty-two versions of the same slow collapse and, crucially, still managing to lend one another salt, gossip, and the occasional kindness. The courtyard does not soften the poverty. It merely refuses to let anyone suffer it entirely alone.
This communal instinct sets the novel apart from a good deal of the division literature that surrounds it. Other Korean fictions built around a child's-eye view of the postwar years, Cho Se-hui's dwarf novels among them, tend to conclude that the adult world is fundamentally untrustworthy, a lesson learned early and never unlearned. Kim's courtyard households squabble, judge, and occasionally humiliate one another with real cruelty, yet the book's abiding argument is that mutual obligation somehow survives the worst of it, battered but intact. It is a harder, more interesting position to defend than simple despair, because it asks the reader to hold two facts at once: that the twentieth century did genuine, lasting damage to these people, and that they nonetheless built something resembling a society out of the wreckage, one open drain and one shared gate at a time.
By the novel's close, the physical courtyard itself has been swallowed by the bulldozers of Korea's postwar reconstruction, a fate that met a great many of Daegu's older houses and, for that matter, no small number of Edinburgh's own closes during the improvement schemes of earlier centuries. Kim, however, refuses to let the building's demolition stand in for the end of the relationships it once contained. His narrator, decades later and comfortably middle-class, makes a point of tracking down his old courtyard neighbours: some prospered, some did not, some emigrated, and a few simply vanished into the ordinary churn of Korean life. What survives is not the address but the accounting, a grown man's careful, almost obsessive record of who became what. It is a curiously bureaucratic form of tenderness, and it works.
English-language readers have had access to this particular tenderness since 2013, when Suh Ji-moon's translation appeared under Dalkey Archive Press's Library of Korean Literature, the sixth volume in a series produced with support from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Suh makes the deliberate, occasionally divisive choice to render Kim's prose in a slightly archaic English register, a decision more than one reviewer has compared, not unreasonably, to the nostalgic voiceover of an American television memoir. I understand the objection, and I do not entirely share it. Distance, handled honestly, is not the same thing as false comfort, and a narrator looking back three decades has every right to sound as though he is doing precisely that.
The story reached an even wider domestic audience two years after publication, when MBC adapted it into a weekday miniseries broadcast across January 1990, with Go Doo-shim and Kim Soo-mi anchoring the ensemble of tenants. Twenty-two characters do not transfer easily to a television schedule, and inevitably some of the courtyard's quieter cruelties were softened for prime time. What the adaptation did preserve, more faithfully than I had expected, was the sheer density of the cast: six households, none of them mere background scenery, each still competing for the viewer's sympathy exactly as they compete for water and floor space on the page. It is a minor point, but a telling one. A story built around communal crowding resists, almost by its own internal logic, the usual habit of adaptation, which is to thin a book down to one protagonist and a manageable handful of supporting players.
I think, in the end, of that converted hanok in Daegu again, its sliding gate propped open for visitors who never lived there. Edinburgh has no equivalent memorial for its own closes, no cabinet of donated belongings behind glass, only the stone stairs themselves, still standing, still occasionally shared. Perhaps that is the real difference between a culture that builds a museum for its poverty and one that simply keeps living on top of it, largely unremarked. Kim Won-il's courtyard, twenty-two people deep, asks a question neither city has fully answered: whether the accident of shared walls creates genuine obligation between strangers, or merely its appearance. Gilnam, and Kim after him, seem to have concluded that the obligation was real enough to spend a lifetime writing about. I am inclined, on the strength of one photograph of a hanok I shall probably never visit, to agree with him.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase the Original (Korean Edition): 마당 깊은 집, Aladin Bookstore
☞ For English-language readers: House with a Sunken Courtyard, translated by Suh Ji-moon (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013), available via 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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