For the first time since I began writing these essays, I must open with a confession of failure — not mine, as it happens, but publishing's. The book under discussion this week has sold more than eight million copies in its home country, has been read by successive generations of Korean schoolchildren as something close to a civic education, and has been translated into Japanese and French. It cannot, however, be bought in English. Not out of print, mind you, nor languishing in some forgotten backlist; it has simply never been finished. In 2012, an independent publisher announced, with evident pride, that it had signed a contract to bring Jo Jung-rae's Taebaek Mountains into English and Russian. That announcement is now older than some universities' undergraduate cohorts, and still no complete translation has appeared. I have come across, in the online correspondence of frustrated readers, at least one soul who gave up waiting and taught herself to navigate a French edition instead — La chaîne des monts Taebaek, ten volumes deep, only the seventh of which had turned up on Kindle. The English-speaking world, by contrast, has had a promise, and precious little else.
So for the first time on this blog, I have had to abandon my usual perch — the comfortable armchair of someone else's translation — and go directly to Jo's own Korean, dictionary at my elbow, the Jeolla dialect grinding rather cruelly against my classroom Seoul standard. My doctorate went unfinished for reasons of family and health I have confessed elsewhere in these pages; wrestling this novel into some comprehensible shape felt, oddly, like a debt finally being serviced, in however modest an instalment. Whatever the state of my grammar, I emerged from the ten volumes with the unmistakable sense of having read something the West has simply not been permitted to hear properly. That absence, more than any critical judgement I might offer, is the story I want to tell you today.
Jo Jung-rae — born, as it happens, in a Buddhist temple in South Jeolla in 1943, the son of a monk-poet who had been obliged to marry under Japan's colonial religious policy — was already an established literary voice when he began serialising Taebaek Mountains in September 1983. The novel is set almost entirely in Beolgyo, a modest market town in the same province, across the five years between Japan's defeat in 1945 and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 — the so-called Liberation Period, when the peninsula's future was still, briefly and catastrophically, up for negotiation. Jo did not finish serialising until 1989; ten volumes, some 15,700 sheets of manuscript paper by one count, 16,500 by another, populated by more than sixty major characters. It is not a short evening's reading. It was never meant to be.
Beolgyo itself repays a visit, or so I am told by correspondents who have made the pilgrimage in my stead. Jo returned to the town some twenty-five times while writing, and the novel's map has since become, almost eerily, the town's own map: the landlord Hyeon's house still stands, as does a house built specifically to honour Sohwa, the shaman's daughter who has no real historical original — Beolgyo's only building constructed, as it were, backwards, from fiction into brick. The iron footbridge that was the site of one of Sang-gu's uglier duels still crosses the same stream. Most telling of all is the Jungdo levee — named, with a certain grim irony, after the Japanese engineer who oversaw it — a four-kilometre seawall built under colonial supervision by conscripted Korean labourers who were promised farmland in return and received not an inch of it. It is a wound considerably older than the civil war the novel otherwise concerns itself with, and Jo folds it into his story almost in passing, as though reminding his readers that Korea's griefs did not queue up politely, one ideology at a time.
At its emotional centre stand two brothers, Yeom Sang-jin and Yeom Sang-gu, and it is here that the novel earns its place beside the great fratricidal literature of the West — Cain standing over Abel, or the sons of Oedipus meeting each other's spears outside the gates of Thebes. Sang-jin, the elder, trained as a schoolteacher at a colonial-era normal school in Gwangju before abandoning the classroom to lead the local Workers' Party partisans into the mountains. His grandfather, we learn early, had been born into slavery; his father scraped a living peddling charcoal. Communism, for Sang-jin, is not an imported abstraction absorbed from some Moscow pamphlet — it is the only ideology that has ever promised to notice a man like his father. Sang-gu, his younger brother, takes the opposite path with equal conviction, rising through the ranks of the right-wing youth corps that polices Beolgyo on the government's behalf, his cruelty sharpened rather than softened by a lifetime of watching his elder brother claim the family's meagre share of dignity for himself.
Jo's own countrymen on the political right have long accused him — not without some justification, it must be said — of stacking his sympathies rather too visibly on the side of the left; several communist and partisan characters read as considerably more humane than their right-wing counterparts, Sang-gu chief among the latter. I shall return to that charge presently, because it is not merely a matter of aesthetics; it is, quite literally, what put Jo Jung-rae in a Korean courtroom for the better part of a decade. But whatever one concludes about the novel's political balance, the brothers themselves resist any tidy allegory. Neither is spared. Neither, in the end, is permitted to win.
There is a great deal of Han in these pages, though I hesitate to lean on that word too heavily, having reached for it before in this column. Here it wears a more communal face than the private, wounded solitude of works I have discussed previously — it is the Han of an entire province, caught between two occupying certainties and permitted to embrace neither without cost.
If the novel's sympathies were merely a matter of literary taste, I doubt I should trouble you with them. But in 1994, five years after the final volume appeared, eight anti-communist organisations — nine individuals, formally — filed a criminal complaint against Jo under South Korea's National Security Law, alleging something in the region of five hundred separate offences. It remains, by most Korean legal accounts I have consulted, the longest indictment lodged in the country's judicial history up to that point. Among the nine complainants was Lee In-su, a professor at Myongji University and the adopted son of Syngman Rhee, South Korea's first president — a detail I find almost too neat for fiction, and yet there it is, a matter of public record.
Prosecutors eventually pared the original five hundred-odd allegations down to somewhere in the region of one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty, depending on which account one credits, and then made a demand of Jo that reads, even now, like something out of Kafka rather than any Korean court: for each surviving charge, he was required to produce "objective" documentary evidence — parliamentary testimony, government publications, works that had themselves already passed state censorship — or the charge would stand proven by default. He was, in effect, asked to prove the innocence of a work of fiction using only sources the state itself had already approved. The case dragged on, was investigated, was shelved, was reopened, for eleven years, before concluding in 2005 with no indictment brought at all.
An Englishman's mind reaches, inevitably, for the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial, or for the obscenity proceedings that once threatened Joyce's Ulysses on both sides of the Atlantic. But the comparison only goes so far, and I think it worth pausing on where it breaks down. Lawrence and Joyce were prosecuted for offending public decency; the worst that could reasonably be said of them was that they had written something indecorous. Jo Jung-rae was accused of treason — of writing something that materially benefited a hostile foreign power, in a country that, formally, remains at war with its northern half to this day. The stakes, in other words, were never merely aesthetic. They were, on paper at least, capital.
Two years before that indictment was filed, in 1992, the Supreme Public Prosecutors' Office had already examined the novel and reached a verdict so peculiar that I record it here largely for its dry, unintentional comedy: the book, they concluded, was not worth prosecuting, given that some three and a half million copies had already been sold — but they added the caveat that an ordinary reader might enjoy it freely, whereas a university student or a labourer who read it risked prosecution for consuming "enemy-benefiting material." One wonders which category a schoolteacher's son from Beolgyo, reading by candlelight, was meant to fall into.
Here is the irony I promised you, and it is the sort that only history, rather than any novelist, could have arranged. The very book accused of serving Pyongyang's interests became, by the account of many Korean readers of my acquaintance, the first text that made unambiguously clear how the war had actually begun — not as some symmetrical tragedy of mutual aggression, as certain textbooks of the period preferred to suggest, but as a Northern invasion, its consequences worked out in exhaustive, unsparing, novelistic detail. A book charged with treason taught a nation its own history more plainly than its own government had troubled to.
I have spent a career, such as it is, studying the literature the Koreans call division literature, and I confess I know of no Western equivalent quite adequate to it. We have our own literatures of partition, God knows: Ireland's, India's, Germany's own wall running through Berlin like a scar down a face. But the Korean case retains a peculiarity the others largely lack, which is that the division is not yet, in any sense, a settled historical fact one can mourn from a safe distance. It remains, as I write this in 2026, an open and active wound — a family, quite literally, that has not finished quarrelling.
That, I think, is the deeper reason no English publisher has yet finished the labour Knowledge Pen promised in 2012. It is not merely a matter of length, though ten volumes and more than sixty major characters would test any translator's patience and any publisher's ledger. It is that the wound Jo Jung-rae describes has not closed, and unclosed wounds make for uncomfortable commercial propositions. I abandoned my own doctorate, some years ago now, for reasons that had nothing to do with courage and everything to do with circumstance; I recognise, perhaps more than I should admit, the particular ache of a thing left unfinished not for want of will but for want of the world's cooperation. Jo Jung-rae's brothers, Sang-jin and Sang-gu, never did finish quarrelling either. Neither, it would seem, has the peninsula that made them.
I cannot, this week, send you off with my usual bookshop link, because there is, for the moment, nowhere in the English-speaking world to send you. I can only tell you that the book exists, that it has been waiting rather patiently for thirteen years for a promise to be kept, and that I hope, when it finally arrives, you will remember reading about it here first. For those who read Korean, or who simply wish to hold the source itself, the definitive fiftieth-anniversary edition is linked below.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase the Original (Korean Edition, 10-Volume Definitive Set): Aladin Bookstore.
☞ No complete English translation of this novel exists at the time of writing.
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.