James L. Fleming: Essays on Korean & World Literature

 A letter arrived last week from an old friend of mine: Korean, my own age now, someone I have known since our student days, who has asked, for reasons entirely his own, not to appear under his own name in these pages. I shall simply call him my correspondent, and trust the reader will forgive the discretion; some friendships are worth rather more than a byline.  His letters are rarely about anything in particular. This one ran the usual course: his knees, his daughter's exam results, a complaint about the price of good kimchi in the town where he now lives, a joke at my expense about Scottish weather. I read it, as I always do, with the mild and contented distraction one reserves for news from home, until I reached the final paragraph, tucked in almost as an afterthought. "I picked up my old copy of 무소의 뿔처럼 혼자서 가라 last month, don't ask me why. God knows I have no business feeling anything about a book I first read as a student. But it undid me rather, reading it now. I am...

 There is a particular vanity in believing one has struck a "balance" in life — as though existence were a ledger one might reasonably keep tidy, debits and credits settling neatly by December. Writing on Yang Gwi-ja's Mosun last week, I found myself circling the novel's analytical bones and never quite touching the marrow: Jin-jin, weighing her aunt's comfortable monotony against her mother's exhausting chaos, as if a life might be assembled from the better halves of two others.  I confess I did the same, once. I drew up my own private ledger — the disciplined years of research against the reckless ones of love — and convinced myself the sum would eventually balance. It never has. If anything, the years have only widened the columns.  Perhaps this is where the Korean sensibility outpaces the English one. We were raised to believe imbalance is a fault to be corrected — a matter for a firmer diary, a longer walk, a stricter Sunday. Jin-jin's world sugges...

 There is a room in the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, Surgeons' Hall on Nicolson Street, a stone's throw from where I am typing this, where the body itself becomes a kind of manuscript. Cabinets of preserved specimens line the walls; skulls, tissue, the long taxonomy of human frailty, catalogued and glassed since 1699. Among the exhibits sits the skeleton of William Burke, hanged in 1829 for the murders he and William Hare committed to keep the anatomist Robert Knox supplied with fresh cadavers for his overcrowded dissection classes. Burke's own body, in a grim symmetry the presiding judge more or less ordered from the bench, was publicly dissected by Alexander Monro tertius. He was the third and final Monro of a family that held Edinburgh's Chair of Anatomy for a hundred and twenty-six unbroken years, three generations reading the same text over and over, refining their grammar of the body with each new corpse. It was Burke and Hare's crimes, more than an...

 There is a particular pleasure, known chiefly to the secondhand bookseller and the mildly obsessive collector, in reading the small print at the back of a book — not the blurb, but the unglamorous ledger of its printings. Along West Port, in the huddle of secondhand shops that trade in the shadow of the Castle, I spent a recent Saturday morning doing precisely that: turning over battered paperbacks to see how many times each had gone back to press. It is a duller measure of a book's worth than any prize committee's shortlist, and a rather more honest one. A prize tells you what a handful of judges thought of a book in a single season. A thirtieth printing tells you that strangers, decade after decade, kept quietly deciding they wanted a copy.  I mention this because a Korean novel now sitting rather insistently on my desk has forced the comparison. Yang Gwi-ja's Mosun  — Contradictions , in its rare English rendering — first went to press in the summer of 1998. By the cl...

 Letters arrive at this address from an improbably wide range of places, and I confess I read every one. It was a message from a reader in Seoul last week, though, that put the question more bluntly than most. She was a woman in her thirties, an office worker by trade, and she confessed — with a candour I rather admired — that she used to finish a book a month until sometime in her fourth year at the company, when the habit simply died of neglect. She wanted to know whether it was worth resurrecting. Was reading, in this particular year of our Lord, still a defensible use of a scarce and exhausted hour, when the phone offers so very much for so very little effort?  It is a fair question, and I have never had much patience for the sort of answer that meets it with a superior smile, as though the value of literature were too rarefied to explain to the uninitiated. That is the answer of a bore. So let me try instead to give her — and whoever else finds their way to this page, in ...

  There is a particular kind of walking that has no destination, and I confess I did rather a lot of it once, in an Edinburgh winter I would rather not describe in any greater detail than this.  I have been rereading Choi In-ho's Winter Wanderer  this week — a novel that, like the Schubert song cycle it borrows its title from, refuses on principle to arrive anywhere. Min-woo walks through the snow with nowhere in particular to be, and for years I mistook this, in my own case, for simple weakness. It has taken the better part of thirty years to see it differently.  Walking nowhere, I now suspect, is a kind of discipline — perhaps the only one grief permits. One cannot fix an ending onto sorrow any more than onto a river. Yet we now dispose of disappointment briskly: an unkind message, deleted; a match, unmatched. Grief today is seldom allowed to wander — it is filed, closed, swiped past, on the theory that speed and healing are the same thing. I remain unconvinced. ...

  Seok-won rang me last week from London, sounding faintly bewildered, as fathers of teenage daughters often do. His girls, he reported, had spent the better part of a fortnight matching and unmatching with boys on some application whose name he'd already forgotten, and one of them had come to him in tears over a young man who had, in her words, simply "gone quiet" after four days of what she'd taken to be genuine promise. Seok-won, who is not by temperament a sentimental man, found himself telling her about a novel he'd read as a schoolboy in Seoul — one his own mother had wept over, he confessed, quite unashamedly, at the kitchen table. He couldn't remember the title. He remembered only that someone in it loved someone else without any expectation of being loved back, and that this had seemed, even to a teenage boy, like the most serious thing in the world.  It took me two days of half-hearted digging to work out that he meant Choi In-ho's Winter Wandere...

 There is a square not five minutes from where I sit, worn smooth by five centuries of trading. Edinburgh's Grassmarket sells vegetables and second-hand books on a Saturday morning now, tourists photographing the cliff face of the Castle Rock above it, but for over a hundred years — from the 1660s until the last public hanging there in 1784 — it was also where the city hanged its criminals, within sight of the cattle and grain it had traded continuously since the square was chartered in 1477. The gallows and the grocer shared the same cobbles. I have always found something bracingly honest in that arrangement — a marketplace, after all, is simply where a society decides what things are worth, and it has never much minded whether the commodity in question is turnips or human lives.  I mention this because a Korean novel has been sitting on my desk this week that takes the same unflinching arithmetic as its very title: 인간시장 , rendered into English as Human Market . It is not, on...