James L. Fleming: Essays on Korean & World Literature

Two anniversaries fall on the same Wednesday this year, and neither is the kind that earns a plaque. The first is a birthday. Yi Sang, the Korean writer whose pen name is usually explained as a box made of plum wood, though the story has more than one version, was born on 23 September 1910, or so most biographies agree, which makes today his hundred and sixteenth. The second is a publication. In the September 1936 issue of the monthly Chogwang , a short story called Nalgae appeared, known in English as The Wings . Ninety years is long enough for any book to have been misread in most of the ways available. Yi Sang trained as an architect and took a post in the architectural office of the Government-General of Korea, from which tuberculosis eventually removed him. He then ran a succession of cafés, none of which prospered. His poems, published in a Seoul newspaper in 1934 as Crow's Eye View , drew such a volume of complaint from readers that the serial was stopped at fifteen inst...

 Most people who know the phrase learnt it from television. Early in Squid Game , an enormous doll turns its head, a child's chant rings across a schoolyard, and the players caught moving are eliminated in the most permanent sense. The chant is Mugunghwa kkochi pieotseumnida , "the rose of Sharon has bloomed", and in Korea it belongs to every child who has ever played the freezing game that English speakers call Red Light, Green Light. Rather fewer viewers know that in 1993 the same words became the title of a novel. By the figures usually quoted, it sold some three million copies within about a year. It was not about a game.  I am asked from time to time whether the book is worth reading. My answer is a slightly awkward one. I would not urge anyone to reread it. I would urge everyone who has heard of it to remember it, and to remember it properly: as an artefact, a symptom and a warning, and not as a source of facts. The difference matters more in 2026 than it did in ...

 Behind a locked iron gate in Greyfriars Kirkyard, a few hundred yards from where I am writing this, lies a patch of ground with rather more to answer for than its modest size suggests. The plaque calls it the Covenanters' Prison. In the summer of 1679, following their defeat at Bothwell Bridge, something over a thousand Presbyterian rebels were herded into this open field and left there, under guard, for more than four months, each man allowed four ounces of bread a day. Two hundred and fifty-seven of them were eventually put aboard a ship bound for the American colonies as indentured labour; the ship went down off Orkney, and only forty-eight came ashore alive. Their crime, in the eyes of the Crown, had been to insist that no earthly king could sit as head of Christ's church. No king but Christ, as the slogan of the age had it. I walk past that gate most weeks. This year, for reasons that will become clear, I have started stopping.  The reason is a piece of research that ca...

  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 edi...

 Let me state the situation plainly, before any temptation towards nostalgia gets the better of me, as it so often does when a foreigner writes about another nation's cultural memory. In the space of eighteen months, a thirty-year-old Korean genre novel has acquired a new animated film, a fully re-edited seventeen-volume collector's edition, and, as of this June, an official sequel positioning itself as the opening act of a ten-volume saga. By any reasonable measure, the novel is back. What I am rather less certain of is what, precisely, "back" means in 2026 , and I intend to approach that question as a critic first and an enthusiast a distant second.  For readers unfamiliar with the title, some scaffolding is required. The novel is 퇴마록, romanised as Toemarok . It began not as a book at all, but as a serial posted to the horror and science-fiction board of Hitel, one of Korea's early PC communication networks, starting in 1993, under the username SUMMER. Its autho...

 I do not, as a rule, read revenge novels. There is something faintly embarrassing about them, I have always thought — the reader's appetite dressed up as the character's grievance. Give me a novel in which someone gets even, and I generally find myself rooting for the characters to simply let the matter drop; grudges, in my experience, make for poor company and worse literature. But I confess (the word feels appropriate here) that I picked up Kanae Minato's Confessions  again this week for reasons that had nothing to do with literature at first. I had been reading, over my morning coffee, about the argument now consuming Korean newsrooms: whether the age at which a child becomes criminally accountable ought to be lowered from fourteen to thirteen. It struck me, halfway through a rather dense editorial on the matter, that I had read this exact question before — not in a legal journal, but in a Japanese schoolroom, in a novel published in 2008 that sold three million copies ...