James L. Fleming: Essays on Korean & World Literature

 I was rummaging through a box of unsorted stock in one of the second-hand bookshops that still cling to the West Port, the kind of place where the proprietor knows you by your coat rather than your name, when I found it: a boxed set of the Iliad  and the Odyssey , matching spines, the faint smell of somebody else's attic clinging to the cloth. I opened the Odyssey  first, out of habit, and the spine did something no honest paperback ought to do after fifty years on a shelf. It cracked. Cleanly, audibly, like a knuckle. Nobody, in five decades, had ever bent that book open past its first few pages.  I was still turning this over — a complete stranger's abandoned classical education, sitting in my hands for four pounds — when my phone buzzed. Seok-won, characteristically economical with his greetings, got straight to it: he was putting together an extracurricular talk for his sixth-formers on Homer, timed to catch the wave of interest stirred up by Christopher Nolan's...

 There is a small stone mound in Kyoto that most tourists walk straight past. It sits in a scruffy little park across from the grand Toyokuni Shrine, crowned with a modest stone stupa, and unless you already know what it is, you would take it for nothing more than an odd bit of garden furniture. I found it almost by accident, years ago, on a research trip that had nothing whatsoever to do with it. The plaque, when I finally located it, explained the matter with a bureaucratic flatness that somehow made the horror worse rather than better: beneath this mound lie the noses, and in the war's earlier phase the ears, of some 126,000 Korean soldiers and civilians, salted, crated, and shipped home to Japan as proof of a job well done.  I mention it now, a good many years later, because I have been reading a rather different sort of book. Not one written by the victors who built that mound, but by a man on the losing side of the same catastrophe, trying, in his own retirement, to wo...

 I found it, as one finds most things worth keeping, entirely by accident. Tucked between a chipped hardback of Gibbon and a water-stained atlas, on a shelf in one of those narrow, book-crammed shops that still cling to the West Port here in Edinburgh, sat a single volume with no dust jacket and a title in gilt lettering so worn I had to tilt it towards the window to read it: Romance of the Three Kingdoms . The bookseller, a taciturn man who has sold me more regrettable purchases than I care to admit, glanced up and said only, "Ah. That one takes a fortnight." He was, as it turned out, being generous.  What he did not say — what almost nobody outside a handful of specialists ever bothers to say — is that the book in my hands had two fathers, and they disagreed rather violently about what sort of book it ought to be.  The first father was Chen Shou, a third-century court historian who compiled the Sanguozhi , a dry, careful, admirably unglamorous chronicle of the period. T...

 Seok-won turned up in Edinburgh without warning last month, as he generally does, bearing a paperback with a badly cracked spine and a look on his face that meant argument was not invited. "Read it before you say anything clever," he told me over pints of heavy at our usual corner on Rose Street, in the particular tone he reserves for instructing me on matters Korean. Twenty-odd years of friendship, first forged in a shared lecture theatre at the University of Edinburgh, have taught me not to argue with that tone. The book was Min Jin Lee's Pachinko .  Two Sundays later, having finished it in something close to one sitting, I understood exactly why he'd insisted.  I am, by disposition and by training, wary of the word "epic." Academic study of Asian history teaches one to distrust grand narrative the way a sailor distrusts a calm sea. Yet Pachinko earns the word, and does so by the least epic means imaginable: it tracks four generations of a Korean family ...

 There is a particular grief reserved for books, and I do not mean the grief of closing a good one. I mean the grief of losing one entirely — not to fire or flood, but to the far more mundane violence of removal men and cardboard boxes. When I left my university lodgings for the last time, hauling the wreckage of an unfinished doctorate back to my mother's house, an entire shelf of my collection simply vanished somewhere between Edinburgh's Old Town and the outskirts I now call home. Among the casualties was my set of Park Kyung-ni's Toji: sixteen volumes, painstakingly assembled over three years of a student's meagre stipend. I have since replaced them, of course. But the replacement copies sit on my shelf with the slightly formal air of a stepfamily; they have never quite forgiven me for losing the originals, and I have never quite forgiven myself.  I mention this because Toji is, before it is anything else, a novel about precisely this kind of loss — the loss of land...

 If there is one thing fifty years on this earth have taught me, it is that rain has a peculiar way of unlocking memories you thought you had safely archived away.  As I sit here in my Edinburgh study, listening to the relentless grey drizzle tapping against the windowpane, I find myself nursing a lukewarm cup of Earl Grey and contemplating a small literary miracle from halfway across the world. Outside, the cobblestones of Old Town glisten under the streetlamps; inside, my mind is miles away in the sun-dappled countryside of 1950s Korea.  Recently, during an afternoon spent fending off the chill with my good friend Seok-won, a passing question altered my reading queue for the week. Seok-won, who possesses that enviable Korean trait of taking literature with the same gravity others reserve for national elections, asked if I had ever read Hwang Sun-won's 1953 short story, Sonagi (The Shower).  This particular jewel, I had to admit — with the mild academic chagrin typi...