Dr Isobel Moffat opened her Thursday seminar by observing that a rhinoceros horn cannot walk anywhere. She taught South Asian religions at Edinburgh, a small, brisk woman with a chipped blue mug that she set on the radiator and forgot, so that the tea went cold and the pipes knocked twice whenever a voice was raised. The handout that morning was a photocopied translation of the Pali refrain that urges the reader to go alone, as the rhinoceros does, with a pencilled query beside the key word. The ancient commentary, she told us, insisted that the word meant the horn alone, whereas some modern scholars pointed out that other early verses send animals and people wandering, never body parts. It was a pedant’s point, made with open enjoyment, and I wrote it down without any notion that it would outlast most of what I learned that year.
What she wanted us to see, once the pedantry was cleared away, was that the poem is no lament. It sits in the Sutta Nipata, which scholars generally count among the oldest layers of the Pali canon, and its verses were probably composed separately and gathered later under the shared refrain. The speaker is someone who has left household life by choice. Concern for a spouse or for children is likened to tangled bamboo, and the wanderer is advised to be the shoot that stands free of it. Three images recur: a lion that noises do not startle, a wind that no net can hold, a lotus that the water does not wet. Dr Moffat read them out in the flat voice she kept for things she admired. Then she drew attention to a verse the rest of us had skipped, which says, in the translator’s English, “We praise companionship”, and which sends the rhinoceros out alone only when no wise companion can be found.
Gong Ji-young’s novel reached me years later, and it reached me as a title before it was anything else. Museoui Ppulcheoreom Honjaseo Gara, which I render as Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros’s Horn, came out in the first half of 1993, according to the critic Kim Yang-sun. It was staged as a play before the year was out and filmed in 1995. The Korean press reached for a medical word and spoke of a Gong Ji-young “syndrome”, which I take to mean something between a craze and a symptom. By Korean accounts the book has sold well beyond half a million copies and has stayed on sale for decades. Kim notes, in a 2025 series for the weekly Kyunghyang, that readers have lately taken it up again as a feminist text, and reads that revival as a sign that the questions it raised are still unsettled.
The book opens with a telephone call. Hyewan, a novelist, hears from her university friend Kyung-hye that a third friend, Young-sun, has attempted to end her life and is in hospital. The three had been clever, bookish girls who expected the world to meet them halfway. Hyewan has since lost a child in an accident and divorced, and she earns her living by writing while meeting the prejudice that attends a divorced woman. Kyung-hye, the most worldly of the three, keeps up a marriage that her husband’s affairs have hollowed out. Young-sun handed her film-director husband the screenplay that launched his career and was repaid with depression and drink. Young-sun does not recover, and the novel ends at her funeral.
The title is where the book declares its quarrel. In the sutra the solitary walk is a renunciate’s choice, made from strength by someone who can afford to put the world down. In the novel it is what remains once marriage, career and friendship have failed to hold. Gong keeps the dignity of the old image and reverses its cause: the wanderer is no longer someone who has gone beyond attachment but someone from whom attachment has been taken away. Kim observes that the lion and wind lines are the passage the novel itself calls up for Hyewan, who prefers to go on alone than to take up with the men who were once her comrades. I understand that the publisher was uneasy about so strange a title and that the author, then a newcomer, held out for it. It was an odd thing to borrow from a canon of renunciates for a book about a middle-class marriage.
What the novel borrows, though, is only half of the poem. The sutra grants a wise companion if one turns up, and it is only in default of such a friend that the rhinoceros sets off by himself. Gong’s three women find no such companion among themselves, and Kim is blunt that the book offers no prospect of solidarity between suffering women. Compromise, like Kyung-hye’s, and self-erasure, like Young-sun’s, both end in failure, and the Cinderella who waits for a man carrying the banner of liberation is ruled out as well. Kim records the standing complaints against the book: a division of the world into virtuous women and faithless men, and a prose pitched too high. Both charges seem fair to me. Neither explains why the book has outlived them.
The argument is older than Seoul or the Pali canon. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening appeared in Chicago in 1899, and its first critics condemned it, as the Kate Chopin International Society puts it, as morbid, vulgar and disagreeable. According to the Newberry Library, the young Willa Cather was among those who judged it on moral grounds. Yet the book’s own sea has a voice that invites the soul “to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude”, and Edna Pontellier’s last swim into the Gulf, which I mention only as a clause of plot, has been read both as defeat and as the one place no husband or child could claim. I incline to the second reading, with reservations. A woman with no room in her own house goes where the house cannot follow, and the book never pretends that this is a victory.
Virginia Woolf supplied the practical version thirty years on. A Room of One’s Own grew out of two papers read at Newnham and Girton in October 1928 and was published the following year. Her narrator invites the audience to call her Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or any name they please, and as I understand it the names come from the Scots ballad of the queen’s four Marys. One of the real ladies-in-waiting to Mary, Queen of Scots, was Mary Fleming, a coincidence of surname that I record without claiming the kinship. The narrator’s conclusion is plain: it takes “five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door” to write fiction or poetry. On what I have read, Gong has said that she wrote her book in a rented room while bringing up her daughter alone, on an advance from a publisher. Woolf would have recognised the arithmetic.
Gong’s distinction among these predecessors is anger. Chopin gives her heroine the sea, and Woolf gives her narrator a lecture and a legacy. Gong’s women are furious, and Kim names the dominant feelings as humiliation and shame, which the novel catalogues with something close to bookkeeping: careers broken by childbirth, harassment from colleagues, violence at home and on dates. Shame that has nowhere to go turns outward, and the result on the page is rage. I read the book first in my thirties, slowly and in Korean, and what struck me was how little the sentences cared to be liked. They did not invite. They gave no quarter to any comfortable assumption within reach.
The woman who wrote it had begun in a cell. As I understand it from Korean accounts, Gong spent a short spell in custody after a 1987 protest against vote-rigging, and LTI Korea, the state translation institute, says her 1988 debut story was conceived while she was held. Her first novel, No More Beautiful Wandering, followed in 1989. In 1994 Mackerel and the story collection Human Decency sat in the bestseller lists beside the rhinoceros. Those early books look back on the student movement of the 1980s and ask what became of the comrades, and of the women among them in particular. In the main, the verdict is the same: leave, and keep your dignity by yourself.
In 2005 came Our Happy Time, and the direction reversed. Yujeong, a wealthy former pop star, wakes in hospital after her third attempt on her life, and her aunt, a nun, offers her a choice: treatment, or a weekly visit to the death row of the Seoul detention centre. She goes, and meets Yunsu, a convicted murderer who grew up in severe poverty. Over their hour-long meetings the two move towards forgiveness, with the aunt nudging them gently towards the Christian faith. Sora Kim-Russell’s English translation appeared from Short Books in Britain in early 2014 and from Atria in the United States that July. Publishers Weekly thought it melodramatic and sometimes preachy, though it allowed that the author’s sincerity breaks through. A film, Maundy Thursday, followed in 2006.
In 2013 the setting changed again, this time to a Benedictine abbey. Tall Blue Ladder follows a young friar on the eve of his ordination, who falls in love and loses friends, and it draws on the real Captain Leonard LaRue, who brought more than fourteen thousand refugees out of Hungnam during the Korean War and later entered a Benedictine house in New Jersey as Brother Marinus. The abbey of the story is drawn, according to the Korean publisher’s notes, from the Benedictine community at Waegwan. The author has said that the question she put to God most often, and the one that drives the book, was a bare “why on earth?”. What the novel offers is not so much silence as company: friars, refugees and a young man’s griefs shared out among the people nearest him. She also published a two-volume travelogue of European monasteries, the second volume in 2014.
If the course from 1993 to 2013 had to go into one sentence, mine would read: in the first book she tells her women to go alone, and from 2005 on she writes of people who take hold of a hand and endure together. That is my own summary and not hers, and Dr Moffat would have asked for the evidence. It is not a retraction, in my view. It is closer to a reading of the whole verse, in which the solitary road and the praise of companionship were never rivals. A novelist who reverses her own emphasis in public, in front of the readers who loved the first version, is doing something harder than staying consistent.
I will not pretend the change costs me nothing. The early sentences snapped, and the later ones steady; a reader who came for the snap may feel the loss, as I do on certain evenings. But missing a quality is a poor reason to withhold respect from the writer who traded it for something harder to write. The later books are more forgiving and sometimes more sentimental, and the sentimentality is the price. Still, I prefer a writer who changes her mind in public to one who defends a pose for thirty years.
Dr Moffat’s pencilled query about the horn is still on my copy of the handout, and under it, in the same hand, is a shorter note that I did not take in at the time: the verse about the friend. She had underlined nothing else on the page. The mug, as I remember it, stayed on the radiator until the tea was cold, and she never drank it, and I never saw her mind.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): Museoui Ppulcheoreom Honjaseo Gara (무소의 뿔처럼 혼자서 가라), Gong Ji-young, Aladin Bookstore
☞ English Edition (a later novel): Our Happy Time, Gong Ji-young (translated by Sora Kim-Russell), 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.
Sources
- Kim Yang-sun, “A Feminist Manifesto of the ’87 Regime Women” (in Korean), Weekly Kyunghyang, 27 June 2025.
- Thanissaro Bhikkhu (trans.), “Khaggavisana Sutta: A Rhinoceros” (Sutta Nipata 1.3), Access to Insight, 1997.
- Publishers Weekly, review of Gong Ji-young, Our Happy Time, trans. Sora Kim-Russell, 26 May 2014.