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 is not seen again. The family prints missing-person flyers, hands them out and pins them up around town, and the eldest son places an advertisement in a newspaper. What follows is less a search than an audit. The book has four parts and an epilogue, spoken in turn by the daughter, the eldest son, the husband and the mother herself. Several of the sections address their subject as you, so that each member of the family is told the truth about himself or herself by a voice that seems to know. It appeared from Changbi in 2008. Chi-Young Kim’s English translation followed in 2011.
The scale of its success is part of its story. In March 2012 the Man Asian Literary Prize, announced in Hong Kong on the 15th, went to Shin for this book, making her the first woman and the first South Korean writer to win it, with US$30,000 for the author and US$5,000 for her translator. The prize’s release said the novel had sold 1.93 million copies in South Korea and was due to appear in thirty-two countries. The chair of the judges, Razia Iqbal, praised it as a moving portrait of motherhood and of the tension between family tradition and modernity in South Korea. I mention the figures because they are unusual, in my experience of translated fiction, and because the book has to be judged as one that was read in the millions by people who do not generally read novels.
A Scotsman may be forgiven a small complaint about the title. We say Mum. The English edition says Mom, and the choice tells the reader which market the book was built to enter. I raise it not to be petty but because the word carries the whole problem. Mum or Mom, the noun is a role, and the novel is an account of what happens when a family looks for the person inside the role and finds that nobody has the address. The Korean word on the original cover is eomma, which as far as I understand it is simply what one calls her at four and at forty. The English reader is handed a label. The Korean reader is handed a habit, and a habit is much harder to examine. The full Korean title is Eomma-reul butakhae, and its verb ending is the informal one that a person uses to a sibling, a spouse or a child, not the polite form a stranger would receive. The request is made in the language of the household, by someone who has no need to explain who the mother is. That is why the family’s failure to answer it reads so painfully. The English title cannot carry the intimacy, but it keeps the shape of the plea.
The second person is the book’s great risk and its great device. The Complete Review, which collects the English-language notices, observes that it heightens the guilt on which the novel is built, and the critic Janet Maslin, writing for the Times of New York, took it as a personal scolding. Both are right, and neither is a complaint. A novel that tells a daughter what she did, in a voice that appears to know, is playing a game with its reader, who is made to occupy the chair of the accused. By the second section it has become hard to remain an observer. The narration shifts between first, second and third person and moves constantly between the present search and the past it uncovers. The reader’s sense of who is speaking to whom is never allowed to settle. I take that instability to be the method, not an accident. It shows that in a family nobody is ever quite sure who is being addressed.
What the family finds is modest and devastating. The mother could not read, according to the Complete Review. She had illnesses she did not mention, and the daughter, a novelist, learns of a stroke and its headaches that nobody had been told about. She had a friendship outside the family that none of them suspected, and a habit of quiet generosity, including cleaning and giving money at an orphanage, that none of them had noticed. Each child has a debt to her: the daughter has treated her as a role rather than a person, the eldest son has broken his promise to meet her at the station, and the husband, who lost her in the crowd there, has the longest account to settle. None of this is melodramatic in itself. The effect is cumulative, the way a coat on a hook keeps the shape of its wearer, and it is only when the wearer is gone that anyone sees how much of the shape was hers.
The mother’s own section, the last of the four, is the one that justifies the rest. She speaks at last, and what she says has little to do with what the family has imagined. A study-guide summary notes that she is shown watching her youngest daughter repeat her own pattern of self-sacrifice, and that the section reveals a friendship with a man whom none of her family knew. I do not wish to give the whole of it away, and I notice that the most affecting thing about the section is how ordinary its revelations are. A woman with an unremarkable life turns out to have had a life. The book’s entire argument can be stated in a sentence, and the mother’s voice is where it is finally proved rather than asserted.
The reception in English was divided, and the division is instructive. Maslin found its tearful realisations manipulative and the Rome ending hard to credit. In the New York Times Book Review, Mythili G. Rao praised its spare, intimate prose and argued that it was less about emotional manipulation than about the gaps between people, while conceding that some passages might make adult children cringe. Pico Iyer, in the Wall Street Journal, went further, calling it the most moving and accomplished translated novel he had read in years. The Complete Review’s own verdict is a B, with a warning that the book leans heavily on sentiment. I side with neither camp entirely. The sentiment is real, and so is the risk. But the book is not asking the reader to love the mother. It is asking the reader to notice that he did not know her, which is a harder request, and a fairer one.
The epilogue takes the daughter to Rome, some nine months after the disappearance. She buys a rosary that her mother had asked her to fetch, and kneels before Michelangelo’s Pietà in the Vatican to ask Mary to look after her. That, as I read it, is where the English title turns from an instruction into a prayer, an order given to a family becoming at the last a request addressed to someone else’s mother. Maslin thought the scene strained belief, and I see why. A reader raised in Scotland’s reformed tradition, which distrusted images, may find the gesture foreign twice over. Yet I cannot say the book is wrong to end where it does. Only a daughter who had treated her mother as a role would think of handing the role to a larger one.
An honest essay on this author has to mention June 2015, and I shall confine myself to what has been reported. The novelist Lee Eung-jun wrote in the Korean edition of the Huffington Post that a passage in Shin’s 1996 story “Legend” matched Mishima Yukio’s “Patriotism” as rendered in Kim Hu-ran’s Korean translation of 1983. Shin first said she had never read the Mishima story. About a week later, in an interview with a Korean daily, she said that after comparing the passages several times she thought the complaint might be right, that she could no longer trust her memory of whether she had read it, and that everything was her fault, and she apologised to readers. The Korea Herald added that other suspected cases had been raised, among them a passage in Please Look After Mom said to echo Luise Rinser’s Mitte des Lebens. A Korean news report at the time described it as a single sentence about mothers and daughters that an online reader had set beside the German novel’s opening line. On those she neither confirmed nor denied anything. As the Seoul Shinmun later summarised the aftermath, a complaint to prosecutors ended without charges, and she returned to print in 2019 with a novella in a quarterly.
I am not equipped to settle any of this, and the reports I have read leave a good deal undecided. Two observations seem fair. The first is that the comparison reported for this novel concerns a single sentence, one Korean sentence set beside another that is itself a translator’s rendering of a German original, and a reader should be slow to build more on it than the evidence will bear. The second is that the controversy began with a story from 1996, and the book before us was published twelve years later and has to be read as what it is. A novel’s value does not rest on its sentences taken one at a time. It rests on its design, and here the design, with four voices, an unstable second person, and a slow inversion in which the searchers become the subject of the search, is what makes the book recognisably itself.
I return to my four minutes in the January sales. My mother had not moved, and that is why the story could be told for years as a comedy. In Shin Kyung-sook’s novel the comedy is withheld, because the mother has gone and the only thing left to do is the thing the family never did, which is to ask who she was. I could still walk to the rail where my mother stood. I could not tell you what she was thinking, and it took this novel to make me see that I never asked.
Recommended Resources
☞ English Edition: Please Look After Mom, Kyung-sook Shin (translated by Chi-Young Kim), Amazon
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): Eomma-reul butakhae (엄마를 부탁해, Remastered Edition), Shin Kyung-sook, Aladin Bookstore
'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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