R. O. Kwon‘s debut novel explores angst, violence and the savagery of relationships

R. O. Kwon’s eagerly anticipated and ecstatically reviewed debut novel “The Incendiaries” is a classic love triangle set on a prestigious American university campus that ultimately ends with a violent act of extreme terrorism. Kwon’s novel may have shades and echoes of other American campus-set novels like Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History,” Bret Easton Ellis’s “Rules of Attraction” and Marisha Pessl’s “Special Topics in Calamity Physics,” but “The Incendiaries” is a truly zeitgeist-capturing novel for our current moment about millennial ennui, angst and disillusionment.

It tells the story of a trio of students — Korean, Korean American and American — rebounding off each other and dealing with love, lust, infatuation, grief and religious faith. Phoebe Lin is a former child prodigy and pianist dealing with the death of her mother and estranged from her pastor father. She abandons her dreams of being a pianist when she realizes she isn’t quite good enough to be among the best in the world. Now directionless she turns into something of a social butterfly and party animal and eventually becomes easy prey for a nascent cult leader. John Leal is a former activist who helped smuggle North Korean refugees through China until one day he was captured by soldiers from the North and thrown into a North Korean gulag. Leal’s experiences in the gulag turn him into a fundamentalist, and after his release he returns to America and starts recruiting. Will Kendall was raised as a fundamentalist Christian but lost his faith after his mother became ill and struggles to fill the void left by the absence of religion. During their first semester, Phoebe and Will meet and start a relationship in which Will’s infatuation with Pheobe takes the place of his former all-consuming religious belief. The novel explores how Phoebe and Will are drawn into John Leal’s cult of Jejah and where this leads them all.

The novel begins with an act of terrorism on American soil and then flashes back to unravel the strands that lead to this devastating attack and reveal which of the three main characters are involved and how this came to be. Kwon writes with a clarity and precision that captures the fragile inner lives of her characters. “The Incendiaries” is a novel about the intimate violence and inherent savagery of relationships from a brilliant new voice in fiction.

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‘The Incendiaries’

Riverhead Books, Jul 31, 2018

Written by R. O. Kwon

224 page

Written by Barry Welsh

Min Jin Lee’s “Pachinko” explores the lives of Japan’s Korean community

When New York based novelist Min Jin Lee’s debut novel “Free Food for Millionaires” was first published in 2008, it received a rapturous response. If Jane Austen or George Elliot had been alive to write about second-generation Korean immigrants dating, working and socializing in contemporary Manhattan, they might very well have written something like “Free Food for Millionaires.” It is a warm, rewarding and deeply engaging story about race, class, sex, STDs and beautiful hats. Apart from the beautiful hats, Lee’s new novel “Pachinko” finds room for all these things and much more, as well as being just as richly enjoyable and just as profoundly humane as her debut.

“Pachinko” is a sprawling historical epic and a multi-generational family saga with an expansive cast of characters set against the backdrop of Japan’s colonization of Korea, the impact of World War II on East Asia and post-war Japan. The narrative starts in 1910, the year Japan annexes Korea, in a small fishing village called Yeongdo on the far southern coast of the Korean Peninsula. Here, 27-year-old Hoonie, the disabled but hard-working son of a fisherman, is searching for a bride. A local matchmaker arranges a match with a 15-year-old girl called Yangjin from a poor family in a nearby village. The couple meet on their wedding day and set about starting a family. After their first three babies die all before their first birthdays, Yangjin gives birth to a girl they call Sunja. Hoonie dies from tuberculosis thirteen years later, leaving Sunja and Yangjin to run a boardinghouse for fishermen by themselves.

Sunja subsequently meets and falls in love with a married Japanese gangster and business man called Koh Hansu, who leaves her pregnant. To hide Sunja’s shame, a kindly young local pastor agrees to marry her and act as her child’s father. Together, the pastor and Sunja move to Japan to start a new life. From here the story follows Sunja and her descendants as they struggle to survive in Japan as members of an oppressed class. The novel explores the shame and guilt Sunja and her children feel as outsiders with divided identities and loyalties. Although epic in scope, “Pachinko” is intimate in detail, and Lee expertly weaves together the life stories of her fully realized characters. Lee’s second novel is ultimately a paean to the immigrant experience and a hymn to motherhood and female resilience.

“Pachinko”

Written by Min Jin Lee
Published by Grand Central Publishing, February 2017; Apollo, February 2017
Hardcover, softcover, Kindle version available at Amazon

Written by Barry Welsh

The latest English translation of a Korean best seller arrives on a wave of hype, stellar reviews and high expectations. Jeong You-jeong’s psychological-crime-horror-thriller “The Good Son” has seen the multi-million selling Korean novelist compared to everyone from Patricia Highsmith to Jo Nesbo and dubbed as Korea’s answer to Stephen King. If Western literary pundits are to be believed, “The Good Son,” in its English translation, is seemingly poised to become one of the break-out hits of the summer season.

Happily (?), Jeong’s disturbing dissection of the fraying mind of a man who might be a novice serial killer more than justifies the hype. Like Highsmith’s crime classic “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and Gillian Flynn’s recent mega-hit “Gone Girl,” the damaged young man at the heart of “The Good Son” is a decidedly unreliable narrator. You-jin is a stylish variant on this old literary trope and an ingenious creation.

You-jin, we quickly learn, has suffered from extreme, epileptic-like blackouts since he was a child. As a result, his domineering mother and strangely antagonistic psychologist aunt have heavily medicated him and strictly control every aspect of his life. His story begins in almost shamelessly gripping fashion; You-jin awakes from a black-out covered in blood to discover the body of his mother, throat slashed, on the floor. He has no memory of what transpired. Did he do it? If so, why did he do it? Is he being manipulated? Why is he being medicated? Jeong fully exploits You-jin’s unreliableness to create deviously sustained scenes of high-strung tension and almost unbearable skin-crawling, squirm-inducing dread. Add to this a family mystery surrounding the death of You-jin’s father, an adopted brother almost too well behaved to be true and a pair of local detectives investigating the murder of a local girl and you have a recipe for thrills and scares in equal measure.

With novels like this and J. M. Lee’s “The Boy Who Escaped Paradise,” as well as forthcoming titles such as “The Plotters” by Kim Un-su, maybe the predictions that Korean crime fiction would become the next big international trend in genre fiction are becoming true. Because, make no mistake, Jeong’s novel reveals a master at work expertly plying her craft. “The Good Son” is brutally well written, compulsively plotted and cleverly structured.

“The Good Son”
Written by Jeong You-jeon
Translated by Kim Chi-young
Published by Penguin Books
Paperback, 320 pages
Available at Amazon

Written by Barry Welsh

Korean novelist Han Kang became an international literary sensation after the English translation of her novel “The Vegetarian” was published in 2015. It was not the first of Han’s books to be translated into English. A short story/novella called “Convalescence” appeared in 2013, but had little impact. “The Vegetarian” was a different story altogether; strange, horrific, compelling and difficult to ignore. Han’s novel was showered with praise and garlanded with accolades. When it won the Man Booker International Prize in May 2016, it announced the arrival of both a novelist with a unique voice and a talented translator on the stage of world literature.

The novel, which had sold modestly before, suddenly found its way onto bestseller lists around the world. This success was followed by controversy over the quality and style of translation by Deborah Smith, the novel’s young British translator. Korean academics who looked at the English translation argued that it diverged from the original text too significantly to be considered a true translation. The controversy was widely reported and served to highlight contentious issues around the nature of literary translation.

Smith and Han have continued their collaboration with two more English translations of Han’s novels. “Human Acts,” published in 2016, tells a series of interconnected stories centered around the Gwangju massacre and its aftermath in Korea in the early 1980s. Like “The Vegetarian” before it, “Human Acts” earned rave reviews and further solidified Han’s reputation as a vital voice in world literature. The success of Smith and Han’s most recent collaboration, “The White Book,” has once again pushed them back towards the center of world literature.

It was announced in April that “The White Book” was on the short list for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize alongside novels from France, Hungary, Spain, Iraq and Poland. Han’s novel, just called “White” in Korean, is absolutely deserving of its place on the shortlist. It is a singular work from a unique writer pitched somewhere between poetry and memoir. Written and set in Poland’s capital Warsaw and inspired by the brief life of an older sister who died shortly after birth, “The White Book” is many things at once — an act of literary restoration for a sibling who never had a chance to live, an homage to a city, and a rumination on the theme of “white.” Han’s novel asks a similar question to Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” — can literature, storytelling and imagination recuperate real-life tragedy? Readers may find the answer in “The White Book.”

“The White Book”

Written by Han Kang
Translated by Deborah Smith
Published by Portobello Books Ltd
Hardcover: 128 pages
Available at Amazon

Written by Barry Welsh

Choi Eunyoung’s “The Summer” is equal parts coming of age tale, relationship drama and exploration of lesbian life and dating culture in contemporary Korean society. It’s also a story that taps into the current zeitgeist in its depiction of casual male violence, sexual and otherwise, towards women.

Part of the excellent Asia Publishers series of books, Choi’s novella, translated by Jamie Chang, is a rarity in translated Korean fiction in that it investigates queer themes and sensitively depicts same-sex relationships. It tells the story of Suyi and Yi-gyeong, two high school students living in the same small town who cross paths for the first time when they are 18. They first meet when Suyi accidentally kicks a soccer ball into Yi-gyeong’s face, breaking her glasses and giving her a bloody nose. Their attraction to one another is instant and life changing, a revelation that for Yi-gyeong at least quickly and completely changes her way of looking at the world. It’s a great depiction of the lightning-bolt feeling of first love and emerging sexuality.

Many readers will recognize the consuming emotions both girls experience even if they deal with them in markedly different ways. Many readers will also empathize with the sense of burgeoning discovery of one’s own nascent sexuality. As their romance develops, Choi highlights the feelings of fear and isolation that Yi-gyeong and Suyi experience as young gay women trying to navigate their relationship in a small conservative town. A constant atmosphere of paranoia hangs over them as they try to arrange clandestine dates and meetings. They worry about sitting too close together or walking too close together and at one point are bullied by a classmate who guesses the nature of their relationship.

The story follows them from high school and into young adulthood. They graduate, leave their hometown and move to Seoul, where Yi-gyeong enters university and Suyi joins a vocational college. It’s here that their relationship is tested by difficult decisions and pretty strangers. Yi-gyeong is drawn to Seoul’s lesbian scene, finding a world she didn’t know existed, while Suyi throws herself into a job as a mechanic. Their story ultimately ends some thirteen years later back where it started in the girls’ hometown. It’s an effective, engaging and touching portrayal of young love, love over time and same sex relationships.

Written in the summer of 2016, it also chimes with trends in Korean and international culture. Around the edges of the central story are examples of male violence towards women – the schoolboys who grope the female soccer players, the male family members who beat a young woman when she is “outed” as gay at a family gathering. In her writer’s note for the story, Choi states that her intention was to challenge the discriminatory attitude towards minority groups that frequently seem prevalent in Korea. With “The Summer,”’ she has written a story that is both universal and specific in its themes and a fascinating introduction to queer Korean literature.

Written by Barry Welsh

“Halloween” is a great short story with plot to spare, characters with real (and competing) motivations, and brilliant writing (and therefore translation). It is also one of the many novella-length works translated by Asia Publishers. These novellas are works of Korean modern fiction, presented in bilingual translation, with critical analysis, author biographies, and the social and historical background surrounding the works. This means they are an excellent way for readers to dip into Korean literature with much of the context needed for explanation provided in the superstructure of the book.

“Halloween” tells the story of young Sehee, who is unexpectedly the recipient of her recently deceased grandmother’s clothing shop, which brings her back into direct contact with her family. Sehee is also living with the recent memory of her relationship with the married and older Gun, which has failed and resulted in his returning to his own family. This strand of the story touches on some traditional modern literature issues of precarity in Korean society, with Gun and Sehee struggling to create a life on the economic edge.

Acquiring the clothes shop requires Sehee to reunite with her family to sort out the remaining codicils of the will, including mention of a mysterious, additional sister. The family response to all of this is summed up, “That crone always did whatever she wanted.”

When the additional sister, Danielle, flies in from the United States, the family is completely negative (“What if she’s a crook?” one aunt asks) and Sehee becomes the point of contact. The two develop a relationship that might be called friendly. Danielle has grown up in the United States, but adopted a career similar to that of a Shaman – suggesting that roots cannot fully be escaped.

The grandmother’s will has reached through space to all the characters and brought them back into mutual orbit.

At the same time, Sehee establishes a relationship with a local woman, Miae, who the grandmother had supported and whom worked as the grandmother’s helper. They reduce the stock in the store and a real-estate agent contacts Sehee about a sale. Danielle must return to the United States in time for Halloween, as this is her most remunerative time of year. Before she does, she reads the tarot for Sehee, touching on her past relationship mistakes, and suggesting that by letting go of the past, a successful future might be in store.

This causes Sehee to physically revisit her failed relationship with Gun and see it for the dead end it always was. In the aftermath of this realization, Sehee attempts to forge a new partnership, with Miae, offering her a position in the store, suggesting that it should not be sold or closed. Miae’s response is ambivalent, and the book ends here, with Sehee inside the store, contemplating an uncertain future.

Still, by the end of the book a reader might feel a touch of optimism not always found in Korean fiction and will surely have enjoyed the clever story-telling and well written characters. “Halloween” is a very nice novella, from an excellent collection that continues to grow. Many of the individual books can also be purchased in boxed collections of varying lengths, although an online search will be necessary. These works are definitely worth a look for any fan of Korean modern fiction.

Written by Charles Montgomery

A wave of modern and post-modern Korean fiction, much of it written by women, has been translated since the turn of the century, replacing the male-dominated traditional Korean fiction of the 20th century. Which is why it is of some note that Honford Star Press has just released “Sweet Potato: Collected Short Stories by Kim Tongin.” Kim is not just one of the original, male authors of Korean modern fiction, he is also one of the authors, along with Yi Kwangsu and others, who consciously defined Korean modern fiction. In fact, Kim founded the first literary magazine in Korea, Creation.
The somewhat dueling introductions between critic Kim Youngmin and translator Grace Jung do a good job of placing Kim Tongin as a “naturalist” in Korean fiction; that is to say, one who focused tightly on the traumas of Korean life as opposed to dreams of the future, as found in the work of Yi Kwangsu (“The Soil” or “Heartless”). Readers looking for the easy optimism of the future will not find it in Kim’s work. What they will find is surprisingly modern and well-written works.

Kim’s writing is good. As the introductions note, he was a bit of a trailblazer in narrative style, regularly using the past tense, third person and “story within a story” structures. This is also to say that Grace Jung’s translation is readable and only rarely intrusive.
The centerpiece story is, of course, “Sweet Potato.” “Sweet Potato” begins with one of the best opening lines in Korean fiction, “Fighting, adultery, murder, begging, imprisonment – the slums outside the Ch’ilssŏng Gate were the point of origin for all of life’s tragedies and conflicts.” The story follows young Pongnyo, a principled young woman, after she is sold into marriage to a worthless older man. After a fruitless struggle to survive by her principles, she slowly discards her morality, gaining money and confidence. Her successes are temporary, however, and she ends up killed in a confrontation she has caused.
In the thematically related “Barely Opened His Eyes,” “The Old Taet’angji Lady,” and “Mother Bear,” Kim explores similarly grim life-arcs for women of different backgrounds. “Like Father, Like Son” gives the same treatment to a philandering man.
“Flogging” shares this dark tone. Based on Kim’s own experience, the narrator describes a nearly unbearable existence in a prison cell, and the sounds of a fellow prisoner being beaten outside.
Not all the stories are grim in quite this way, though none are exactly cheery. In “Fire Sonata” and “The Mad Painter,” Kim explores the roots, inspirations and relationships between art and insanity. In “The Traitor,” Kim takes a swipe at authors like Yi Kwangsu, who was a fairly enthusiastic Japanese collaborator. Two other stories worth mention are “The Life in One’s Hands,” an interestingly structured philosophical treatment of the precarity of life, and “Notes on Darkness and Loss,” a story of a mother’s protracted death.
All the stories here are good, and  relationships are real and come with comprehensible motivation, not a little thing in Korean literature of this era. With their modern themes, structures and characters, all the stories are a pleasure to read, and the collection is a good introduction to early Korean modern fiction, its concerns, and evolving style.

Written by Charles Montgomery

Columbia University Press

‘Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader’ profiles a writer as he grapples with his past

One of the often unspoken issues in Korean modern literature is that of authors who lived through the colonial era and the work they did during it. Some authors remained fiercely independent of the Japanese colonial structure, and some, to one extent or another, worked with Korea’s Japanese rulers. These latter authors represent what translator and author of the introduction to Ch’ae Manshik’s recently published “Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader” Bruce Fulton calls the “elephant in the room.”

Better understanding of these “elephants” is one reason “Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader” is a valuable addition to the translated canon. Brilliantly translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, it contains works written from 1924 to 1960, including short fiction plays, roundtables, sketches, a fable and a memorial. Ch’ae’s navigation of the considerable political tensions of the time is played out across these works, and a reader can watch as he changes from a young writer, to a writer grappling with his role in colonial Korea and, in the post-colonial era, to an intertextual writer who has considerable tools of humor and understanding wielded in the service of social analysis and critique.

The most problematic piece in the collection is “My ‘Flower and Soldier’” (1940), which reveals Ch’ae in his most submissive stance, writing an ode to the Japanese war effort. The tone of this work is represented in the rather shocking words of one Korean soldier about to go off to fight for Japan, “Hurry up, you can skip ‘Arirang.’” This must be a difficult story for modern Koreans to read.

That Ch’ae was far more complex than that single work suggests becomes clear in two included roundtable discussions. In the first roundtable, Ch’ae reveals himself to be laconic and, other than a brief description of his love affair with a certain type of paper, extremely unsentimental about writing. In the second roundtable on literature, Ch’ae grapples with the responsibility of the Korean author within the context of a government controlled by Japanese invaders.

Above the interesting political issues, Ch’ae is a great writer, capable of mixing tones and themes, with a gimlet eye for absurdities created by social, economic and political structures.

“Sunset” is a representative piece, featuring the amusing battle between the narrator’s father and the obese Hwangju Auntie. Containing dollops of satire, it also demonstrates the tragedy of normal Koreans attempting to deal with the vicissitudes of political and military realities that they cannot control or plan for. “Sunset” is populated with Ch’ae’s stock characters, including the ineffectual intellectual, the hard-headed middle-aged woman and social inferiors buffeted about by their superiors.

All these stories sparkle. “In Three Directions” and “Juvenesenility” are clever studies of social and sexual relationships. “Ungrateful Wretch” is a surprisingly relevant and bleak portrayal of opiod-addiction. The other stories are similarly clever and revealing. Several short sketches show how few words Ch’ae needed to fully reveal the essence of his society and characters.

The collection includes two short plays. “Whatever Possessed Me?” is a comic rumination on Catholicism and Shamanism, while “Blind Man Shim” is a re-contextualization of the classical “Tale of Shim Ch’ōng.”

This collection shows Ch’ae doing what he does best, confidently swerving between broad comedy, penetrating character analysis and unblinking examinations of what the great sways of history can do to the littler people of which that history is constructed. “Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader” is essential for students of Korean literature and history – eighteen pieces of nearly flawless social description and critique.

Written by Charles Montgomery

© White Pine Press

Jeon Sungtae’s ‘Wolves’ is Korean literature in a non-Korean setting

As Korean modern literature developed across the previous century it featured, often for very practical reasons, a strong tendency to focus on internal Korean issues. Even if a story was to stray across the ocean to Japan, or above the border to Mongolia, the journey was always taken in order to point out something related to internal Korean development and regional politics.

In the last 25 years, moving from Kim In-Suk’s “The Long Road” (Australia) to Cho Chongnae’s “The Human Jungle” (China, but with a completely multicultural cast of characters), this horizon has expanded considerably. Characters of all sorts and in all places have begun to inhabit Korean fiction.  The latest translated contribution to this expansion is Jeon Sungtae’s “Wolves,” a collection of ten short stories. “Wolves” centers on Mongolia, in the liminal area between city and steppe, modernity and anti-modernity, national and international, socialist and capitalist. In fact, six of the stories take place in Mongolia. Even more expansively, the well-portrayed characters include Koreans, Mongolians and other nationalities, most of whom struggle with issues of self-identity, meaning, and work.

The first story is named “The Magnolia.” The Magnolia is a Korean restaurant in Ulaanbaatar, seemingly modeled on the famous chain of North Korean “Pyongyang” restaurants scattered across Asia. Here characters discuss life, philosophy, politics and occasionally even Korean literary figures. Drunken Korean tourists, high on alcohol or God, are introduced and dissected. In relatively few words, Jeon manages to portray entire sub-cultures.

Most of these stories have, as one of their motors, economic survival. In “The Magnolia,” the narrator talks of both his and the restaurant business.

In “Wolves,” the narrator finds he “can feel my soul slowly falling apart,” as a Korean customer begins to wear him down. “Wolves” is recounted by multiple narrators, and one, “The Monk,” summarizes Jeon’s take on getting by in a liminal land, “I have realized that the dharma is a compromise…” As “Wolves” ends, the plot tightens and in increasingly short segments builds tension to nearly unbearable.

The other stories are excellent. “Southern Plants” explores South Korean worry around defection. “Korean Soldier” neatly outlines the otherness and impotence a “foreigner” can feel in another country. The narrator of “The Second Waltz,” a Mongolian woman named Nyami, is hobbled by romanticized and controlling images of women that date back to Mongolia’s socialism. “Chinese Fireworks” presents a Korean pastor’s on-the-ground interaction with Mongolia’s modernization, as he accidentally becomes an important part in the economic life of local homeless children. “River Crossers” is a tragic defection story. “Has Anyone Seen My Shoes?” shows bawdy overdrinking, a kind of bigamy and two shoes. “Kids Need Money Too” is obviously autobiographical, and “Imitayshun” begins as an amusing story about the dance between a mother, principal, and foreign hagwon teacher. What begins in a humorous pas de trois resolves in issues of self-meaning, ethnic identification and, of course, work.

Sora Kim-Russell does her typically excellent translation. Considering a school principal, a character reports, “All the employees said working there was easy as long as you could dodge her fastballs.” You can’t describe it much better than that, and all of the translation is literary and accessible.

“Wolves” is intricately and carefully plotted. Jeon uses his microscope, zeroing in on very particular characters and events, to create an impressionistic and impressing overview of Koreans, Korean-Mongolian relations and even international trends, in a series of very well-constructed, well translated and entertaining stories.

Written by Charles Montgomery