James L. Fleming: Essays on Korean & World Literature

I still have sand in the left boot that I wore to Culbin Forest in April, and I have decided to leave it there. It grits a little on the stairs. Each time it does, it reminds me that sand does not so much move as relocate, grain by grain, until what was a field is a dune and what was a dune is, at last, a wood. Culbin lies on the Moray coast, and the story told about it is that in 1694 a single storm buried a barony: a great house, a church, orchards, thousands of acres. As The Scotsman reports the matter, on the strength of archive research, the truth was smaller and slower. There were probably about five farms and some 735 acres under cultivation, and the sand had been advancing for generations, helped along by a careless laird, poor harvests and the habit of pulling up marram grass for thatch. The grass was what held the dunes. The storm finished a process that the inhabitants had been assisting for years. Legend preferred a card game with the Devil, which says something about how...

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the surest way to the communion table in a Scottish parish was a small piece of lead. The elders judged which of their members were qualified, by belief and by conduct, and handed each of those a token, round or square or oblong, stamped with the name of a parish, a verse or a symbol such as the burning bush. The token was the price of admission. Wikipedia reports that more than five thousand types have been recorded in Scotland, and museums still show them in cases, which is a curious afterlife for an object that once settled who belonged. I have been thinking about that arrangement, in which belonging is certified by something small enough to lose, since I finished a Korean novel last week and have not managed to put it away. The novel is Choi Jin-young's Hunger , which appeared in Seoul in 2015 under the title 구의 증명, Guui Jeungmyeong , usually rendered as Proof of Gu . Soje's English version reached British readers in 2025...

At a banquet at the Heian court in 1008, according to the usual accounts of a lady-in-waiting's diary, a courtier and poet named Fujiwara no Kintō joined the women's company and asked, in effect, whether Little Murasaki happened to be present. Little Murasaki is a girl in a story. The woman he was addressing had written it, and she had by then begun to be called after her own heroine. We know of the question because she wrote it down herself. The diarist reflects, drily, that nobody from the tale lived at that court, and the moment passes. More than a thousand years later it is still doing public work. It is the earliest recorded confirmation that The Tale of Genji existed. The entry belongs to the first day of the eleventh month by the court's calendar, and Japan keeps the date: 1 November, the day before these words appear, is a national Classics Day. A committee formed for the book's thousandth anniversary declared it in 2008, and, as the Japanese sources record, ...