James L. Fleming: Essays on Korean & World Literature

I was lost for four minutes in the January sales when I was six years old, and I have not been so thoroughly lost since. The shop was a department store in the middle of Edinburgh, the aisles were a forest of adult legs, and the noise had the quality of a verdict. My mother was standing exactly where she had told me to stand, beside a rail of coats on the second floor, and she was not alarmed. I was. The story was told in our family for years, and the moral drawn was always the same: she had not moved. I thought of it again while reading Please Look After Mom by Shin Kyung-sook, because her novel is that story with one condition reversed. The mother moves. Nobody can say where. A family that has always known where to find her discovers, over the length of a short novel, that it never knew where she was. The premise can be told in a sentence. A sixty-nine-year-old woman, Park So-nyo, is separated from her husband in the crowd at a Seoul subway station on a visit to the city, and she...

My flatmate in second year at Edinburgh was a Germanist from Perth who read Hesse in the original and regarded translations as a mild form of insurance fraud. He lent me Demian with a warning: it was a book for sixteen, he said, and anyone who came to it later was merely being polite. I was twenty, I was not polite, and I handed it back with a verdict I shall not reproduce here, because it was unkind to the novel and, I now think, unkind to me. Nothing in that exchange prepared me for what I found when I began reading Korean literary history in earnest. In Seoul, Hesse is not an author for sixteen-year-olds who will grow out of him. He is a permanent resident of the bestseller lists, and Demian is his most faithful tenant. In the first week of 2026 two different editions of it stood within the top twenty at one of the country’s largest online booksellers, as a Korean newspaper reported. The book itself first appeared in 1919 from S. Fischer, under the name Emil Sinclair, which was...

In a fortnight, at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning, the traffic on my street will stop, a dog two doors down will go on barking regardless, and a few dozen of us will stand on the cold pavement for two minutes without a word. Nobody has to be taught how. The form was handed down along with the names cut into the stone, and its great virtue is that grief arrives already organised: a time, a place, a length, a signal that it is over. Someone near the front will cough, a car door will close, and the street will remember what it was doing. I have stood through that silence more times than I can count, and I have never once had to wonder what I was permitted to feel. I begin there because Han Kang’s Human Acts is a novel about the opposite condition. Its dead were handed no such form. The book is the form that was built for them afterwards, by one writer, out of testimony, patience and a pronoun. The facts are these, so far as I can state them with confidence. On 18 May 1980 protest...

The word is built from Greek, and it is not a pretty one: alexithymia , from a , without, lexis , word, and thymos , feeling. It means, roughly, no words for emotion, and I understand that it was coined in the early 1970s to describe patients who could not say what they felt and who often could not tell. I met the word first in a psychiatry textbook belonging to a friend, and I did not meet it again for thirty years. Then I read Sohn Won-pyung's Almond , in which a teenage boy has the condition, and the word came back to me as something very close to a character. Almond was first published in Korea in 2017 and won the tenth Changbi Prize for Young Adult Fiction. Its hero, Yunjae, was diagnosed with alexithymia as a child, and he also finds it hard to recognise fear. The title is anatomical: the almond is the amygdala, the almond-shaped region of the brain associated with emotion, and Yunjae's, in the novel's account, is underdeveloped. His mother and grandmother have spe...

A letter reached me in September from a retired teacher in Fife, and it contained a single sentence I have been unable to leave alone. She had read Yu Hua's To Live on a train, she wrote, and could not decide whether she had been comforted or flattened. I replied that I had been putting the same question to that book for a good many years, and that I no longer thought it a muddle. I thought it was the book itself, stated by a reader who had paid attention. For those who have not met the novel, it is the life story of Xu Fugui, told by Fugui himself to a collector of folk songs who comes upon him in a field, talking to the ox he is ploughing with. Fugui begins as the idle son of a landowning family, a gambler who treats his wife with cruelty and his inheritance with contempt. He loses everything at the tables, and his father does not survive the loss. That is the first chapter of his ruin. The remaining chapters, which cover roughly the middle decades of the twentieth century in...

The two women at the next table of a garden-centre café on the edge of Edinburgh were sisters, and they were deciding whether to sell their late mother's house. I had not meant to listen. The café was almost empty, and neither of them raised her voice, which in Scotland is the surest way of making an argument impossible to ignore. The elder wanted to keep the house for one more winter. It was, she said, a matter of not being the people who gave it up. The younger had a folder of letters from a surveyor and an estate agent on the table, squared at the corners. We are not giving anything up, she said. We are keeping the roof on. Then she asked, quite gently, whether anyone had ever been shamed by a roof. I thought of them again that evening, because they had acted out, in miniature, the quarrel at the centre of the book I had been rereading all week. Kim Hoon's Namhansanseong , published in April 2007, is set between the fourteenth day of the twelfth lunar month of 1636 and the...