Korean Literature Now - KLN Features > Cover Features (2024)

[Cover Feature] Korean SF is Always Korean

A while back, I received a request from an American magazine to write an essay on the topic of “works that influenced me as an SF writer.” The first works that came to mind were Herman Hesse’s Demian, Korean manhwaga Go Yoo Sung’s Robot King, manhwaga Kim Jin’s Blue Phoenixand Kingdom of the Winds, Japanese mangaka Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy. However, the scholar who translated my essay said that it would be better if I chose works that American readers would be familiar with. I said that if that was the case, I would introduce “works that I like” rather than “works that influenced me,” and, with only Hesse’s Demian remaining from my initial list, I selected Tezuka Osamu’s Phoenix, Roger Zelazny’s Eye of Cat, Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, and Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. However, during the translation process, what I said about these being “not works that influenced me, but works I like” was removed and the list was ultimately labeled as books that influenced me. (A strange line was published saying that “these are all books I like, apart from Damien” which ended up making me look like a weirdo who was recommending Demian without even liking it!) Somehow, out of all the authors I mentioned, there seemed to be a strange fixation on Octavia Butler. It led to her ending up on the list of authors who influenced me on my English language Wikipedia page. When a book of mine was coming out in Taiwan, the cover had, “An author influenced by Octavia Butler” written on it (I asked for this to be redacted). and An Italian interviewer once said to me, “So I’ve heard you were influenced by Octavia Butler.” When I realized that essay was the cause of all these problems, I requested it be corrected. I mean, no matter how much I may respect Octavia Butler, I published my first SF story in 2002, so it would be impossible for an author who was only introduced to Korea in 2011 to have influenced me. None of the books I listed apart from Demian had been released in Korea before my debut. I made similar complaints in the introduction to that essay as I am making in this one. There is no way that I developed into an SF writer the same way as a Western SF writer would have. Why are they expecting me, a Korean SF writer, to have been influenced by writers “Western people know”? I once heard it said that, “Previous generations of Korean SF writers depicted all their protagonists as white men because they grew up watching SF with white male protagonists. Starting from the 2000s, Korean SF writers began to try and escape this framing.” I do not agree with this statement. There may have been writers like that, but no more than a handful of people in Korea could be said to have grown up seeing SF with only “white male protagonists.” Ultimately, the works most accessible to Koreans were Korean works. The first SF work I read in my life was Go Yoo Sung’s Robot King. It’s a series that began in 1977 and, of course, it was set in Korea and the protagonists were Korean. This manhwa even had a scene showing a Korean shamanic ritual and blessing being performed before the first time a robot is piloted. I have read many SF works and have seen countless SF movies. All of them will have influenced me. However, the influence of works I came across after growing up, no matter how world-famous or highly-regarded the works are, will never compare to the influence of those I consumed over and over again when I was a child who knew nothing of the genre.A workwrittenby a Korean is Korean.Always.I don’t believe that saying Koreans create Korean writings means we are writing anything that comes from our identities as citizens under the country’s administration. I believe that Korean-ness exists on an elemental level beyond embodying premodern traditional religion, ritual, or dress. What Koreans put into their creative writing are things that have naturally formed from being born into and living in this society; they are universal sentiments that occur unconsciously and naturally. Things that are so familiar that I even catch myself asking, “Isn’t that a universal human thought?” But what seems strange and alien to people from other countries is our own uniqueness. Let me show you a few examples.Ex. 1:Public Servants instead of VigilantesWhen the Marvel superhero movie series became incredibly popular even in Korea, I heard of an ambitious plan to make “Korea’s Marvel” or the “Korean Avengers.” Every time I heard this, I would say that the Western superhero structure wouldn’t work for Korea, and one time in a meeting I elaborated, “Vigilantes don’t suit Korea. A Korean superhero would become a public servant. Just look at the Hunter subgenre in Korean fantasy.” “What the hell are the police doing?” is a question that often comes to mind when watching superhero movies. Police are one thing, but how could the government just leave civilians to deal with massive disasters on their own? It’s bizarre even if you try to explain it away as a convention of the genre. The question arises in the Marvel movie, Captain America: Civil War. In this movie we see how registering and regulating superheroes creates conflict among the Avengers. Viewers from the United States see those on Ironman’s side, the side championing the registry, as the villains. Whereas in Korea, we can’t understand Captain America, who is against the registry. We see him as someone who can’t separate private and public issues due to his personal feelings of love for an old compatriot. This difference in interpretations comes from the historical and cultural differences of these two countries. The United States is a country of immigrants, established by settlers. In the US, no matter how much crime and gun violence occur, there are still many people who are oppose gun control and believe that they must own a gun to protect themselves and their families. It’s only natural in a country like this to imagine a vigilante group fighting criminals. But Korea is a country with a history of strong governance stretching back to ancient times. All citizens have their fingerprints registered, and as soon as you are born you are issued a Resident Registration Number (RRN). Without an RRN almost everything in your life becomes impossible; you wouldn’t be able to attend school, to work, earn money, or open a bank account. Korea has become famous as a place where you can leave your wallet or other expensive items in the street and no one will take it since thieves are easily apprehended. And on top of that, even our ghosts can’t release their grudges on their own. Instead of going after the one who wronged them, they appear to the local governor and file a civil complaint to release them from their grudge, but handling these complaintsruns the governor ragged. The Netflix anime series Solo Leveling (story by Chu Gong, illustrations by Jang Sung-rak) is an adaptation of one of the most representative and popular Korean webnovels in the Hunter genre. The Hunter genre was first developed in Korea and is seen as a genre rooted in Korea with Korean heroes. In this genre, monsters usually show up and normal people suddenly develop superhuman powers. These people are called “Hunters.” When a Hunter’s powers manifest, they usually seek out a Hunter’s Guild, take a skills test, and are given a level. The Guild will create teams based on the Hunters’ levels and send them to dungeons where monsters have been sighted. If a team is sent to a dungeon that doesn’t match their level and a tragedy occurs, it is seen as the responsibility of the mismanaged Guild. It’s as if Koreans have naturally made a genre that centers on the type of registry that Captain America stakes his life on fighting against in Civil War. If we suppose that superhero stories created by Koreans will always have a system regulating superpowers, then the main conflicts in these stories would arise, not from the appearance of a powerful enemy, but rather from the weaknesses or contradictions within the system. This propensity for Korean SF writers to imagine their heroes regulated within a system can be seen in the Korean superhero story anthology, Superhero Next-door. In Yi Seoyoung’s “Old Soldiers,” those with superpowers are affiliated with the government and fight against “the reds” with superpowers. But after they grow old and senile, they realize that “the reds” were laborers and union members just like them, and the differences between enemy and ally become indistinguishable. In Kim Ewhan’s Superhuman Now, superhumans are able to share their location in real-time with one another through the collective intelligence of the internet, and a vote takes place on a law which would give police powers to superhumans.Ex. 2:Holding multiplebeliefs instead of oneWhen I was on a publicity tour for my book in Italy, one attendee at an event saw me standing with my hands placed one in front of the other and asked, “Is this a Buddhist stance?” When I asked my interpreter, they told me that when people give lectures in Italy they don’t speak with their hands gathered in front of them. When I thought about it, I realized that I had been strictly taught at school to stand in the “Gongshou Position.” I was indoctrinated to believe that this is a “polite” stance, and I usually stand this way without thinking about it. But what is the origin of the Gongshou Position? Confucianism? Occasionally my works shared abroad are critiqued as being “Buddhist” in some sense. I’m not even Buddhist. But perhaps some aspect of my writing might appear Buddhist to Western eyes. This might be the case since, in my eyes, works written by Westerners seem very Christian even if the author says that they are not. What is our foundational faith? Westerners might believe that Buddhism is the major faith in Korea, but if you look at the statistics, the highest reported “faith” is Atheism (60% according to a 2021 Gallup Korea survey). Among those who follow a religion, Protestantism (17%) and Buddhism (16%) were nearly tied for second followed by Catholicism (6%). A mixture of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Shamanism influences the culture at large. The way I look at it, there is no one predominant religion. I think this is a peculiarity of our culture. There aren’t that many countries with such a variety of faiths coexisting peacefully. When I visited Bali in Indonesia, the owner of the guesthouse I stayed at asked me what my religion was. As soon as I said I didn’t have one, the old man was utterly confused. “What do you mean? How can you have nothing you believe in when you could believe in anything?” This was apparently inconceivable in a place where you send offerings to countless gods every morning. Exhuma directed by Jang Jae-hyun is an occult film dealing with Korean shamanism that is attracting interest all around the world. Musok, Korean Shamanism, is our indigenous faith and a uniquely Korean practice impossible to find in any other country. However, the most Korean thing about Exhuma to me was the protagonists’ differing faiths, and that this difference among them felt natural. In one scene, while the mudang (Korean shaman) performs an exorcism, the undertaker stands next to her and reads passages from the Bible. Lee U-hyeok’s wildly popular serialized occult novel, Exorcism Diaries, which began in 1993, has similar scenes. Of the four protagonists, one has powers based in the martial art of taijutsu, one is a mudang, one is a Catholic priest, and one is a reincarnation of the Buddhist deity Rāgarāja. Qigong, the power of spirits, the Holy Ghost, and divine power are all mixed together, but this is perfectly acceptable in Korean culture. Rather, a world where only one faith dominates feels weird. Let’s take a look at Philip K. Dick’s alternate history novel, The Man in the High Tower. This novel tells the story of a parallel world where Japan and Germany have won the Second World War. Half of the world is steeped in Japanese culture. But when I read this novel, the strangest part for me was that these people used the I Ching to tell fortunes as a regular part of their everyday lives. Not only that, but when a big decision needs to be made, the I Ching is routinely consulted and treated as a significant indicator of the choice. There are people who study the I Ching in Korea too, but most people don’t use it. Even if you were considered an expert in the I Ching it is unlikely that you’d read its answers as definitive. There are a lot of fortune tellers in Korea and they have a variety of fortune telling methods. The concept of there being one definitive answer is a Western one. It’s the perspective of a monotheistic culture. When Sang-deok, the geomancer in Exhuma, says “Well, not everything facing South is good!” we don’t know exactly what he means, but we know it has something to do with Feng Shui. There is no definite good and no definite bad. Koreans get their fortunes read with Saju and Tojeong Book of Secrets, yet hardly anyone believes that their predictions are absolute. When your Saju tells you you’ve got bad luck in store, you can get rid of it by going to the public baths, or if you’re told that you were born with itchy feet, you can play an online travel game. Taking action like this shows we Koreans don’t presume there’s only one singular sign in the world.Whatever Koreans write is KoreanWhenever people look for something “Korean” they often think of legends, clothing, myths, food, and traditional rituals that have only been passed down in Korea. But I believe that something more meaningful than that is the philosophy that comes from the culture embodied within us. Instead of mimicking other works, good writers will take a close look at their real lives and experiences and use their imagination to draw upon what they find. These are the stories that come naturally only to us. When I was speaking on national tragedies at the Utopiales SF convention in France, someone from the audience asked, “How can reflections on colonialism be addressed in SF literature?” Very proudly, I replied, “Korea is a country that can only speak on the subject of colonialism from the position of the colonized. Therefore, Korea must tell more Korean stories.” These are stories that can never be created in Japan, which Westerners tend to imagine as representative of East Asia. I have sometimes heard that SF is the literature of Empire. They say that SF tells the stories of powerful nations who dominate the world, who have a sense of adventure and pioneering spirit, and usually center elite white male protagonists who conquer space as they conquered the world, fighting wars and settling on new planets. I have also heard that there may be limitations to what can be imagined in Korean SF literature because Korea does not have that colonizing history. I do not agree. Fortunately, since we have not taken part in the horrors of imperialism, we can write stories that those who do have that history would never be able to write. How amazing is that? Sometimes I hear people lament that space opera isn’t popular in Korea. It’s a complaint that seems to miss the point. From the start, space operas are not a story we can understand. The stories that Korean people can write well are not the stories of imperialists who conquer space. They are the stories of aliens who must fight back against earthlings who have suddenly appeared on their planet saying they will claim it as their own. We can write those kinds of stories. Because our history comes from an entirely different position.Translated by Victoria Caudle KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:• Robot King(Wolgan-Udeungseng, 1977) 『로보트킹』 (월간우등생, 1977)• Blue Phoenix(Manhwa Wangguk, 1988) 『푸른포에닉스』 (만화왕국, 1988)• Kingdom of the Winds (Daenggi, 1992)1 『바람의나라』 (댕기, 1992)• Solo Leveling(Papyrus, 2016)2 『나혼자만레벨업』 (파피루스, 2016)• “Old Soldiers,” Superhero Next-door(Golden Bough, 2015)3 「노병들」,『이웃집슈퍼히어로』 (황금가지, 2015)• Superhuman Now (Saeparan Sangsang, 2017)4 『초인은지금』 (새파란상상, 2017)• Exorcism Diaries(Dulnyouk, 1994) 『퇴마록』 (들녘, 1994)

by Kim Bo-young

[Cover Feature] Every Possible Thing Bar One: Four Keywords for Recent Korean SF

Externally TangentKorean SF has come of age, outgrowing the confines of its genre and spearheading narrative fiction. The Korea Publishing Marketing Research Institute identified the “SF surge” as an industry keyword of 2019, and the trend has only accelerated. How does one explain this Korean-style SF? To ask at the risk of simplification, does Korean SF form a regional, localized subset of SF, or does it carry unique traits as a variant? In the former case, Korean SF would constitute a subcategory of larger SF history. The genre’s evolution—spanning odes to science and technology, speculative fiction, and Donna J. Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985)—has yielded key works at each juncture. Korean SF achievements could count as one of those turning points inscribed within the larger category of SF. The diagram would appear as follows: Literary critic Sherryl Vint characterizes SF by the accumulation, repetition, resonance, allusion, differentiation, and transformation of myriad works. This universal set serves as the individual work’s prototype—the “megatext.” As a set of recurring backdrops, metaphors, conventions, settings, images, and devices, the SF megatext imparts its DNA to all textual offspring. The genealogical metaphor implies that all aspects of the individual text are already found in the megatext. If a text happens to present an entirely new element, the megatext incorporates the newness, turning creation into rediscovery. Megatext is the larger “one” from which all texts emanate—the One. I do not consider Korean SF to be a megatext child. Korean authors may have referenced SF elements, but instead of being inscribed within, their works stay externally tangent. As two separate categories, SF and Korean SF meet without subsuming the other: Recent Korean SF, linked to the “feminism reboot” of 2015, diverges from traditional SF. Major authors of Korean SF are mostly female, as evidenced by names on the 2022 SF sales list: Kim Choyeop in first and third places, Cheon Seonran in second place, and Kim Bo-young in sixth place. (Fourth and fifth places went to foreign authors.) Readers of Korean SF are mostly female as well: 66.1 percent.[1] Korean SF stays externally tangent to SF on one side, feminist/queer discourse on the other, an interdependent circle expanding its interface. It bears emphasis that feminist/queer imagination is not internal to Korean SF, nor is Korean SF internal to SF.Parallel UniverseIn SF narration, a “novum”—literary critic Darko Suvin’s term for novelty or innovation—typically acts as a nexus between the reader’s empirical world and the textual world. Suvin also defines SF as “literature of cognitive estrangement,” pointing to the novum as the genre’s differentia specifica—a portal into the textual world. By passing through the portal, readers internalize the logic intrinsic to that fictional domain. In recent Korean SF, however, the novum fades in importance. Though placed at the narrative gateway, it hardly represents an object of identification in the Imaginary or a translation of signs in the Symbolic; nor is it the Real prompting moments of anamorphosis. As mentioned above, Korean SF stays externally tangent to the feminism reboot ongoing since 2015. SF traces its lineage to the white male elite, the masculine knowledge production underpinning science as a whole. Hence the SF staple of the “mad scientist”—but not so in recent Korean SF. Korean SF in the spotlight rarely indulges in the male hero narrative or the masculine trope of tyrannical mad science. Instead, it engages with a new epistemology that recognizes the inherent deficiency, disability, intermediacy, and vulnerability of beings. In Kim Choyeop’s short story “Laura” from The World I Just Left Behind, the eponymous heroine suffers from phantom pain in a third arm. She tells her lover, “See, even now I feel as though that arm is touching you. When we hug, I use my third hand to caress your cheek. But whenever I realize it doesn’t materially exist, I feel like an interstitial being.”[2] Typical phantom pain—perceptions of a limb that should have been there—would express a deficiency or disability. What about a limb that no one has, a limb that should not be there? Perhaps that is the insight—“presence of absence” (existent sense of a nonexistent third arm) as the nature of being. This world could be termed a parallel universe, a counterpart world placed elsewhere due to some spatiotemporal rift. The novum in Korean SF serves as a guide to this parallel realm, indicating not difference but sameness.Undone ScienceSociologist David J. Hess problematizes “undone science,” referring to scientific research that is absent. Deprioritized and unfunded, undone science nevertheless holds value for civil society. Hess states that the jostling among political, industrial, and social-movement leaders results in “the systematic nonexistence of selected fields of research”—in short, intentional lacunae of knowledge.[3] SF stands on the optimistic ground of “not-yet-done” science. When Sherryl Vint defines the genre as one that “has the power to literalize metaphor, to build worlds that capture something true yet unrepresentable in the literary mode of realism,”[4] the trueness in question exists in potentiality, a not-yet space of the future. Science thus comprises three domains: the already done, the not-yet-done (which will be done), and the undone. The second pertains to SF, the third to Korean SF. Korean SF imagination, conjoined with feminist/queer ontology, establishes itself on the ground of undone science. This science, neglected for being unnecessary, contributes little to communal prosperity and fails to restore individuals to normality. Yet by shedding light on zones of indistinction (where individuals are excluded from the communities they inhabit), this science alone presents those beings in and of themselves without resorting to the logic of selection and exclusion (i.e., normal/abnormal, standard/nonstandard, internal/external). Kim Choyeop’s Planetarian Bookshop provides a case in point with “Swamp Boy,” a story in which beings connect to a mycelia network. The beings form a collective network of “we”; they function as members (the “ones among us”) of this “we”; they serve as components of both Owen, who retains his neural network of consciousness, and the boy, who consumes the mycelia. They also form the boy-mycelia and neural-mycelial complex (Owen-mycelia). As it turns out, the boy happens to be a clone created to “replace the dying bodies of humans,” and as such, is not a representative human entity. From a scientific point of view, the beings defy logic as they are neither object nor subject of cogito. Therein lies the power of undone science, the new imagination that undermines the theoretical framework of mainstream science differentiating “I” from “you,” “I” from “we.”NonsubstantialityExploring the point of contact between SF and non-SF requires a presupposed concept of reality. This reality, however, varies in meaning. In SF, reality refers to the reader’s empirical world in contrast to the textual world conjured by scientific imagination. In non-SF, reality refers to the world which fiction aims to represent. The former equates to the universe sans novum; the latter, the original universe represented by way of literary convention. These differences notwithstanding, the term reflects a belief in this world as an actuality, not a fantasy. Both realms accept the unconscious premise of verisimilitude underlying literary realism. Yet SF and non-SF should explore the opposite notion that the world does not exist—is that not the theme calling for variation? Consider these examples. The world as propagated by the ruling class (mere ideology) does not exist. The world as described by romantics (mere passion) does not exist. The world as shaped by capitalism (mere illusion) does not exist. The possibilities go on. What reality represents and forges by that term is a one and only world—simply One. Korean SF features “every possible thing” (à la Gu Byeong-mo in her story “Every Possible Thing”) bar One. Reality, and the world founded upon reality, ceases to exist in Korean SF. Though readers assume the verisimilitude of fictional entities, their substantiality as such remains questionable. Cheon Seonran’s “Some Shape of Love” follows Rahyeon, a navel-less alien child who falls in love. “Now that you love Minhyeok, you’ll be a boy,” says Rahyeon’s mother. Upon falling in love a second time with a female upperclassman, Rahyeon develops the physical traits of a girl. When under the assumption of reality, all beings take on substance. Boys as boys, girls as girls. Not so in recent Korean SF. Cheon’s protagonist will be a boy while loving a boy, a girl while loving a girl. Note that the bodily transformation does not comply with heterosexuality. Transformation within a cross-sex framework would still presuppose a certain substantiality. The “I” may be mutable, but the other provides the immutable constant. In “Some Shape of Love,” “I” transforms not in relation to a loved one but by virtue of being in love. The “I” leads a nonsubstantial existence.Viewing recent Korean SF as a tributary of the grand SF narrative or of feminist/queer fiction would offer at best a partial picture. Korean SF stays externally tangent to the three categories of SF, feminist/queer fiction, and Korean non-SF. Korean SF rejects both utopian outlook and dystopian eschatology, using the novum not as a genre converter but as a steering device leading to a parallel universe.[5] Not an alternate life, be it optimistic or pessimistic, but an alternate realm. While SF focuses on executable science, recent Korean SF focuses on systematically unexecuted science, probing into that undone domain. Lastly, Korean SF builds on nonsubstantiality. Gone is the vision of a one world that exists or should exist. For in that One lies Mad Adam’s fanatical belief that stifles SF imagination, suppresses feminist/queer plurality, and reinforces literary authoritarianism. Korean SF offers “every possible thing” bar One.Translated by Sunnie Chae KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:• “Laura,” The World I Just Left Behind (Hankyoreh, 2021) 1 「로라」, 『방금 떠나온 세계』 (한겨례출판, 2021)• “Swamp Boy,” Planetarian Bookshop (Maumsanchaek, 2021) 2 「늪지의 소년」, 『행성어 시점』 (마음산책, 2021)• “Every Possible Thing,” Every Possible Thing (Munhakdongne, 2023) 3 「있을 법한 모든 것」, 『있을 법한 모든 것』 (문학동네, 2023)• “Some Shape of Love,” Some Shape of Love (Arzak Livres, 2020) 4 「어떤 물질의 사랑」, 『어떤 물질의 사랑』 (아작, 2020)[1] Kim Yongchul, “In Search of Hope amid Anxious Reality, ‘We Head toward the Surreal World,’” Segye Ilbo, May 7, 2022, https://segye.com/view/20220505512377.[2] Kim Choyeop, “Laura,” trans. Sukyoung Sukie Kim, Asymptote (January 2023). https://www.asymptotejournal.com/special-feature/laura-kim-cho-yeop/[3] David J. Hess, Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry: Activism, Innovation, and the Environment in an Era of Globalization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 22.[4] Sherryl Vint, Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 5.[5] Author’s note: the SF-related term cybernetics derives from the Greek κυβερνήτης, meaning “steersman.”

by Yang Yun-eui

[Cover Feature] Korean SF Now

When Netflix was first launched, I was able to watch nearly every new science fiction movie and series it offered. These days, however, it has become impossible to keep up with all the new SF content emerging across various streaming services. Aside from Netflix’s offerings, staying current with the latest SF content and all its subgenres (including novels, webtoons, comics, etc.) can easily take up a whole lifetime. Regarding this sudden rise in popularity, seasoned writers and scholars of science fiction from both the US and South Korea now share a sense of excitement. They note how the genre has evolved from a marginalized, niche interest from just a few decades ago to its current status as a mainstream cultural force. However, there is a notable distinction between the Korean and American science fiction communities. In the US, the genre began its mainstream integration back in the 1960s and 1970s, propelled by blockbuster franchises such as Star Trek and Star Wars, and has continued to evolve ever since. In contrast, South Korea experienced this shift more abruptly within the last decade, compressing a similar scale of cultural integration into a much shorter timeframe. No one doubts that Korea now plays a major role in global science fiction production. Anyone who has followed the latest popular Korean releases will remember notable SF hits from the recent past such as The Silent Sea (2021) or Space Sweepers(2021). As for literature, the preference for science fiction and fantasy over the traditionally beloved realist genre is more notable among young readers on digital platforms. Today, new web novels abound with science fiction and fantasy themes. According to Korean fans of these webtoons and web novels, works that deals with the so-called “R.I.R” (or “R.T.R”, acronyms for Regression, Isekai or Transmigration, Reincarnation) themes comprise more than ninety percent of the bestseller lists. In these works, characters either find themselves in a parallel universe, travel back in time, or reincarnate themselves in someone else’s body. The prevalence of these themes among web-based content underscores the dominance of science fiction and fantasy genres among younger readers, who are the major users of digital platforms. Most global audiences encounter South Korean SF through these kinds of visual media or web fiction for the first time. This often misleads them into thinking that South Korean science fiction is solely about film and webtoons, without any historical depth. However, the rise of science fiction in South Korea is not just a visual and digital phenomenon. Paying attention to the nation’s literary history reveals a different genealogy. For example, a glance at the annual bestseller lists shows titles such as Kim Choyeop’s The Greenhouse at the End of the Earth and If We Can’t Go at the Speed of Light, along with Cho Yeeun’s co*cktail, Love, Zombieamong the top 25 bestsellers at Kyobo Books, the largest Korean online book retailer, for two consecutive years. SF works by other authors like Jeong You Jeong, Cheon Seonran, Serang Chung, and Bora Chung also grace these lists. In response to the increasing popularity of Korean science fiction, American book publishers have begun to show interest with many South Korean novels now being translated into English and introduced to global readers. Notable examples include the anthology Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction, co-edited by Professor Sunyoung Park of the University of Southern California, a leading scholar in SF studies, and Park Sang Joon, director of the Seoul Science Fiction Archive. This collection includes a range of Korean authors, both young and prominent, from Bok Geo-il, Djuna, Soyeon Jeong, Kim Bo-young, Young-ha Kim, Park Min-gyu, and Park Seonghwan. Additionally, Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny was shortlisted for the National Book Award, with a commendable translation by Anton Hur. Hur has also brought two more science fiction stories to global readers: Serang Chung’s novella Take My Voiceand Djuna’s novel Counterweight. Another of Djuna’s collections, Everything Good Dies Here, is anticipated to be published in English by Kaya Press. Other notable examples include Bae Myung-hoon’s Tower, Launch Something!and Dolki Min’s Walking Practice. These English translations hold particular importance for educators and researchers outside Korea. Before the publication of Readymade Bodhisattva, teaching South Korean science fiction literature in American colleges was challenging. Despite my eagerness to introduce these works and my awareness of the numerous high-quality SF stories from Korea, the absence of English translations made it impractical. Now, thanks to the availability of these translations, I can design an entire semester’s course dedicated solely to South Korean science fiction that includes literature, cinema, webtoons, and VR movies. Students initially express confusion when engaging with these texts due to cultural differences, but they soon adapt and become deeply interested in the unique perspectives that these foreign SF stories provide. It’s not just me; a growing number of scholars have begun to incorporate South Korean SF literature into American classrooms and academic publications. For example, the Korean Literature Association organized an academic conference on Korean science fiction at the University of Southern California in 2023. The Journal of the Fantastic in the Artsreleased a special issue on South Korean science fiction in 2023. Another academic journal, Science Fiction Film and Television, published its first article on South Korean SF films in 2021. There’s also a noticeable increase in the number of graduate students in the United States focusing their dissertations on South Korean science fiction. While it is undeniable that the study of South Korean science fiction is expanding, significant gaps remain that researchers have yet to address. A particular concern is the emphasis on contemporary visual media, such as films and digital platforms, while the literary tradition of the genre is often overlooked. Only a few existing research publications on South Korean science fiction, both within Korean and overseas academic circles, focus on key historical texts, such as Kim Dong-in’s story “The Study of Dr. K,” published in 1929, and the works of prominent figures from the 1960s and 1970s like Han Nak-won and Moon Yun-sung. However, these studies primarily examine these works from a historical perspective, rather than through the lens of SF scholarship. Research on the 1980s and 1990s is also scarce, centering mainly on two key figures: Bok Geo-il and Djuna. In recent years, a noticeable shift has emerged. Sungkyunkwan University has played a pivotal role in this development, hosting two major conferences in Seoul on science fiction as part of its Annual International Forum on Cultural Studies in 2021 and 2023. While still not abundant, more recent academic monographs and articles are bridging the gaps in scholarship in both Korea and the United States. Will this recent popularity and growth in fictional production and academic research continue in the future, or will it be just a short-lived fad that eventually disappears? To support this ongoing development, it is crucial to cultivate a deep understanding of the genre’s place within its national and global history. As South Korean science fiction experiences rapid growth across all media without sufficient discussion about its unique form and history, the Korean SF community seems to lack an adequate understanding of it as a genre. Addressing the following key questions is essential: What defines science fiction, and how does it distinguish itself from other genres? Is it inherently a Western genre? When integrating this Western genre into the Korean context, what adaptations are necessary, and what are the gains and losses? How should Korean science fiction differentiate itself from its British and American counterparts? Despite its rapid growth, Korean science fiction has not yet fully engaged with these questions. Then, what exactly is science fiction? Its definition and historical beginnings remain topics of active discussion among scholars, especially within the Western tradition. There appears to be a consensus around two primary theories: one positing that the genre began with Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, and the other tracing its roots to the early twentieth century with pioneering writers like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Either way, SF scholars generally agree that the genre emerged from Western Europe and then to America before making its way to Korea via Japan. This has led many recent Korean SF films to reproduce Western SF clichés and narrative frameworks, replacing Western characters and settings with Korean equivalents. The shortcomings of this method are evident in the underperformance of SF blockbusters like The Moon (2023), Jung_E (2023), and Black Knight (2023). Despite significant budgets and high expectations, these films failed to achieve financial or critical success. While deficiencies in creativity and imagination may have played a role, a deeper problem lies in a fundamental misunderstanding of the genre itself. Science fiction, like any genre, has evolved and diversified over more than a century, making it impossible to pinpoint a fixed, timeless essence of the genre. However, it seems that in South Korean film industry there is a prevalent, narrow view as if “hard science fiction”—characterized by elements like alien invasions and AI robots fighting for control of Earth—embodies the “true” and “core” elements of science fiction. The advent of the New Wave movement in the US and UK starting in 1964 saw writers like Ursula K. Le Guin challenge traditional hard science fiction motifs—such as alien warfare and AI robots—through her works, including The Dispossessed(1974) and Always Coming Home(1985). Similarly, Philip K. Dick, revered as the “Shakespeare of science fiction,” ventured into psychological and philosophical territory, exploring the nuances between reality and virtuality, and the nature of perception, thereby avoiding typical “hard SF” tropes. In response to these shifts, prominent SF scholar Darko Suvin suggested in 1977 that the definition of “science” in science fiction be broadened to include social sciences like anthropology and sociology, alongside the natural sciences and engineering. This led to proposals for new genre labels such as “speculative fiction,” “soft science fiction,” and “lifestyle science fiction” to better capture these broader themes. Today, SF communities often use terms like “speculative fiction” or “SFF” (science fiction and fantasy) as inclusive categories that encompass a wider spectrum of narratives. As a result, the issue of defining science is intricately linked to the understanding of the genre. Looking back, classic English science fiction, once celebrated as exemplary, often appears unscientific to contemporary readers. For instance, H.G. Wells’s seminal work, The Time Machine (1895), provides no explanation as to how the machine enabled travel to the distant future and back, thus appearing magical to contemporary readers. As we delve further back into the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, authors often embraced commonly accepted scientific beliefs of the times such as alchemy, telepathy, geocentrism, or even flat earth theory. This illustrates how the notion of “science” has shifted and expanded, consequently complicating the task of genre classification. This issue becomes particularly salient in the context of Korean science fiction. If novels by Wells and Verne, which utilized now outdated or pseudo-scientific theories, are still considered exemplary science fiction works, we must then consider how to classify Korean novels from bygone eras. Such works might incorporate neo-Confucian concepts like Li and Qi to explain natural phenomena, or explore traditional Korean practices like herbal medicine, acupuncture, pungsu jiri (feng shui), or geomancy. Grace Dillon, a scholar of Native American studies, contends in the introduction to Walking the Clouds(2012) that indigenous peoples possess distinct concepts of science. She argues that indigenous practices, from herbal medicine to storytelling and star reading should be viewed as legitimate forms of science, which she terms “indigenous science.” Re-evaluating South Korea’s literary history through this lens can clarify numerous works that, while not traditionally recognized as science fiction, warrant such classification. This approach has the potential to bridge divisions and enrich our understanding by linking science fiction with other narrative forms like fantasy, mythology, religion, and folklore. The future of Korean science fiction should focus on embedding its narratives within the philosophical, cultural, and mythological fabric of Korea. This approach moves beyond simply transplanting Korean characters and settings into Western narratives. As director Bong Joon-ho articulated during the Oscars in 2020, “The most personal is the most creative.” This ethos encourages Korean writers to craft narratives that are distinctly Korean, breaking away from Western SF structures and conventions. This requires a redefinition of “science” and “science fiction” that aligns with Korean sensibilities and challenges a Western conceptual framework. By applying this new perspective to the past of Korean literature, we can uncover a rich lineage of science fiction, spanning from pre-modern myths and folk tales to feminist comics of the 1980s and occult and fantasy novels of the 90s, and set the stage for an ever-evolving future for Korean science fiction. KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:• Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction (tr. Sunyoung Park, Dagmar van Engen et al., Kaya Press, 2019)1• Cursed Bunny (tr. Anton Hur, Honford Star, 2021)2 『저주토끼』 (아작, 2021)• Take My Voice (tr. Anton Hur, Stranger Press, 2023)3 『목소리를드릴게요』 (아작, 2020)• Counterweight (tr. Anton Hur, Pantheon, 2023)4 『평형추』 (알마, 2021)• Everything Good Dies Here (tr. Adrian Thieret, Kaya Press, 2024)5• Tower (tr. Sung Ryu, Honford Star, 2020)6 『타워』 (문학과지성사, 2020)• Launch Something! (tr. Stella Kim, Honford Star, 2022)7 『빙글빙글우주군』 (자이언트북스, 2020)• Walking Practice(tr. Victoria Caudle, HarperVia, 2023)8 『보행연습』 (은행나무, 2022)• The Greenhouse at the End of the Earth (Giant Books, 2021)9 『지구끝의온실』 (자이언트북스, 2021)• If We Can’t Go at the Speed of Light(Hubble, 2019)10 『우리가빛의속도로갈수없다면』 (허블, 2019)• co*cktail, Love, Zombie (Safe House, 2020)11 『칵테일,러브,좀비』 (안전가옥, 2020)• The Study of Dr. K(Shinsoseol December 1929) 『K박사의연구』 (신소설 12월호, 1929)

by Sang-Keun Yoo

[Essay] Trust in Silence

Is it true that poetry is losing readers because it’s difficult to read? Who can say if contemporary poetry is hemorrhaging readers over an obsession with aesthetics or because of attrition in general readership? Whether poetry has lost readers because poetry is difficult or because poetry went into hiding behind its own difficulties as a reaction to having lost readers (or both), it’s clear to me that this reader attrition problem won’t be solved by simply writing more easy-to-read poetry. It’s the novel’s job to provide readers with entertaining stories, and new media or pop music’s with immediate stimulation to say nothing of movies and games and other stimulating forms of narrative. Poetry, on the other hand, is slow to read and lacking in plot. Even the slightly more popular forms of narrative poetry are weighed down with allegory and elaborate metonymy. (Plus, they’re long,which somehow makes it worse.) Despite this, poetry still strives to communicate, or to be more precise, to present a more diverse array of potentials to communicate. Instead of exploring the fertile lands of mainstream communication, poetry seeks out the arid wastelands on the margins of communication, seeking out undiscovered wellsprings. And to reach such remote emotions and thoughts, one must always be looking at ever more unfamiliar and inhospitable paths. The poetry of Kim So Yeon is no different. Her recent collection Catalyzing Night,epitomized by a “trust in silence” aesthetic, places her at the very forefront of contemporary poetry. Silence is the extreme delay of speaking, and it also connects to the slowest form of writing and reading. It is the political and aesthetic opposite of immediate stimulation and smooth communication. Before examining the dynamics of her anti-capitalist slowness and her resistance through silence against the absurdities of our age, it is worth noting the position of Kim’s work in our national poetry scene. Any serious reader of Korean poetry should have at least one of Kim So Yeon’s books. If a little hyperbole could be allowed here, perhaps we can designate the sales number of the latest of her books as the “So Yeon Index”—if so, should the Seo-yeon Index fall below 10,000 copies, our poetry publishing landscape is in dire straits. The slowness and frequent enjambment of her lines seem to contradict her best interests by their implicit advocacy of silence. How is it that she continues to attract readers? With the publication of her work The Bones We Call Tears in 2009, we could, as it does in its afterword, summarize the volume as “the task of subtly and beautifully delaying an answer to preserve its truth.” At a time when social discourse had entered a most mendacious zeitgeist, Kim’s poetry, which candidly confessed to “having spent another century holding the knife to carve out the same expression” (“For the Sake of One Summer”), was welcomed by readers from the get-go for its emphasis on the truth. In The Mathematician’s Morning,published in 2013, the critic Hwang Hyeon-san noted that, “You are practicing an ocean with a handful of wave, and it saddens me you might hear that ocean died a long time ago” and “it is sad that your now is the time wrought from your deepest sadness.” The very next year, the nation experienced several tragedies—on the mountain slopes in Gyeongju, the sea off Jindo, and in terminals and squares. As per usual, all the literature in the world is thoroughly useless against death in real life. But Kim’s helpless sadness found a sympathetic audience with the people mourning their era. Some years later, when ugly prejudice against women and other social minorities blew up in mainstream discourse, she came out with a collection titled To iabout a quietly unraveling character named “i.” In every era, Kim has foregrounded the emotional sensibility that readers have most urgently needed. Five years on from To i, what emotional sensibility are we in need of now? Let’s think of virtual fortunes going up and down by the second, the international and domestic politics that completely change every few weeks, the rapid development of our technologies, and the correlate rapidness of environmental degradation. Individuals and families lose their battles with time, neighbors lose their health and homes overnight, we lose our jobs and our lives. None of the lies, disasters, and hate that made us suffer were resolved—if anything, they’ve accelerated in their course to further ruin our lives. The strategy of Catalyzing Night in the face of such realities is as follows: To assert that “The slow on occasion know to abhor the quick” (“Catalyzing Night”). To “Sleep until late in the morning” and leisurely observe that “Yesterday is finally far enough away.” To spend or waste one’s life researching the lives of “the many stuntmen who moved so naturally in the unfocused background” (“Even the Bones of an Angel’s Wing Is a Formidable Skeleton Up Close”). Or slowing down to let mindless words run on ahead (“Leave Flowers Behind”). Speeding up to catch up to time is a losing proposition from the beginning. If time is indeed money, as the capitalist truism goes, then the easiest way to subvert time and capital is to slow down. Can we ever escape time’s velocity completely or catch up to it? Kim is not a romanticist trying to escape time toward some ideal, nor is she a foolish realist throwing herself under the wheels of reality in search of a solution. In the face of utter despair and defeat, which is the inevitable result before speed and the power of time, romantic escape and the pursuit of practical advancement are both sentimental musings. The aesthetics of extreme slowness she presents is the only way to sense the profound emptiness of time as a capitalistic value. By not trying to catch up to time, the poet can maintain a disdain for time and transcend it while existing in the midst of it. As “Cave” implies, the cave in which Kim evades time is not a space where sadness is eliminated or a sort existence beyond reality/unreality. It is, if anything, a place of “too much sobbing,” where “Everything is sobbing” because sadness has converged there. Just as all literature turned helpless in the face of the 2014 Sewol disaster, all such sensory attempts to resist the reality of time end up desensitized. But even if we do not transcend the “Dirtied / really dirtied you” here, Kim wishes to stay grounded in reality, vowing to “Let’s stay here / Yes let’s just stay here.” Endlessly repeating her cries until they become “the cries without an ounce of need for sadness.” This is her strategy: to respond to hurried time with an overflowing laziness of time, to make the cries that contain sadness faint by repeating them. How to realize this enduring of time within time and sadness within sadness in praxis? This is where silence comes in. Kim puts great trust in silence in several of her poems. For example, in “Second Floor Guest Lounge,” the speaker is in a cacophonous situation of “No one just listens anymore” and “The shouter keeps shouting the listeners start shouting” opting for silence in search of the missing piece broken off from life. The “What if . . . / I mean what if . . .” segues into silence, never speaking of this recovery. In a state of absolute despair, the voicing of hope is to instantly condemn that hope to defeat. And yet, simply not saying anything then becomes futile escapism. Therefore, the strategy of the speaker is to go back and forth forever between hopeless defeat and cowardly escape by choosing silence. They think about salvation “about 50,000 times” until they become “a what if,” creating an impossible vector of hope and recovery through endless repetition of praxis. The speaker in “Hide the Falling Rain” believes that they “believe it a little bit more” because “he never told me his name,” which means his name is never voiced, that the speaker has failed repeatedly to call upon his existence, which ironically enables the speaker’s praxis through this “he.” The speakers in Kim’s poetry do not voice themselves, but in silence, are able to closely observe or slowly embrace or carefully listen. Her praxis of silence is a specific method of imploding time through time and sadness through sadness. This trust in silence is most clearly presented in these lines from “Catalyzing Night”: Your boiling body I wipe with wet towels just as you’ve taught me and stay up all night [. . .] Recalling again how you cooled my fever I stay up all nightThe speaker takes care of “you,” but the method of care is not passed through speech but the memory of action, “how you cooled my fever” in silence, a praxis that was also “taught” to the speaker. This silence is indeed the most Kim So Yeon of words.Translated by Anton Hur KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:• “For the Sake of One Summer,” The Bones We Call Tears (Moonji Publishing, 2009)1 「한개의여름을위하여」,『눈물이라는뼈』 (문학과지성사, 2009)• A Mathematician’s Morning (Moonji Publishing, 2013)2 『수학자의아침』 (문학과지성사, 2013)• To i(Achimdal Books, 2018)3 『i에게』 (아침달, 2018)• “Catalyzing Night,” “Cave,” “Even the Bones of an Angel’s Wing Is a Formidable Skeleton Up Close,” “Leave Flowers Behind,” “Second Floor Guest Lounge,” “Hide the Falling Rain,” Catalyzing Night(Moonji Publishing, 2023)4 「촉진하는밤」,「동굴」,「천사의날개도가까이에서보면우악스러운뼈가강인하게골격을만들고」,「꽃을두고오기」,「2층관객라운지」, 「내리는비숨겨주기」,『촉진하는밤』 (문학과지성사, 2023)

by Kim Sanghyuk

[Essay] Magnolia Melancholia

Sometimes, rapturous futures are only reached after passing through the most terrible of nightmares. Having captured the attention of Korean readers with her creative story structure for many years, Choi Eunmi shows time and time again that dark things lurk beneath the beauty and happiness of everyday life. Simply put, beneath the many layers of life is a sea of terrifying and violent emotions. In Magnolia Sutra, for example, one of her most famous works, Choi depicts through fairy tale-like imagination the cycle connecting life and death, a deterministic world view, as well as the heredity of bad karma between a mother and daughter. Choi borrows the forms of fairy tales and fables in her story about a girl named Mulian who inherits the sins of her murderous mother. In this instance, Choi chooses the safest method for depicting violence of a most frightening world. Subverting traditional tropes used by fairy tales, like good triumphing over evil and justice prevailing, this story ends with a picture of a cold, emotionless world. The magical world of fairy tales, which easily resolves conflicts and contradictions, is completely deconstructed by Choi’s icy gaze. Choi is perhaps more aware than anyone about how resentful violence and inescapable hatred are facts of life in a world where people must coexist. Heart-warming endings are not enough to solve the complexity of this world. Literary critic Kim Hyeong-jung’s reading of Choi’s somewhat pessimistic and masoch*stic gaze as an “allegory for hell” accurately presents the brutality delicately woven into her novels. Life-disrupting death and fiery, bone-engulfing hatred are the reality of our world. The aesthetic of this novel is paradoxical because it paints Mulian’s melancholic life with the sweet fragrance of a magnolia tree. We cannot deny the pain and violence that Mulian faces, but there is immense beauty in how the novel depicts these realities with metaphors that conjure myth and fairy tales. She uses the most beautiful language to paint the most violent world. In The Ninth Wave, her follow-up to Magnolia Sutra, Choi showed real-world, social concerns through a story about a proposed nuclear power plant and the regional social conflicts that surround it. By her second short story collection, A Person Made from Snow, Choi’s fiction began to address different problems from those of earlier works. In particular, she makes careful observations about the way in which the pandemic negatively affected daily life, pouring into her novel the various practical concerns that arose during that time. Choi’s gaze, which was already astutely aware of the violence of the world, shifted focus to confront the various catastrophic situations brought about by the pandemic. The deep valley of emotion that forms when social affects like isolation and transmission, fear and viruses, vaccines and social distancing, come into contact with personal conflicts is an important driving force in bringing out unexpected narratives. Of the many such works, “Here We Are, Face to Face” tells the story of married women who during the COVID-19 pandemic, must cope with an increase in caretaker work. Constantly checking for fevers, proving their vaccination status, using debit cards from the government filled with emergency funds—the women in this novel, who are all in their forties, are denied a comfortable space to exist because of their unique status as mothers and workers in dual-income families. For these women, who work as workshop owners and public transportation assistants, the scope of their work doesn’t allow them to separate their private and public lives. For example, the soap making workshop that the main character owns begins from a “home workshop,” and Sumi, a female driver, has two things demanded of her at the same time: driving and assisting people onto the vehicle. Furthermore, the burden of housework invades their workspace and destroys their efficiency of labor. And even when they take just a short break from work, they cannot help but think about housework, like repairing the air purifier or restocking the refrigerator, and thus do not even know what it means to separate work and home. The women in her novels cry out in frustration, complaining that no one has taught them how to raise children under such conditions; they urinate blood because they overwork themselves attempting to achieve perfection both at home and at work; and they specially prepare vegetable juice for their husbands, whose blood test results can either make or ruin their day. Not only do they have to endure intense labor that blurs the line between private and public, but they also must endure the intense emotional fatigue of being child caretakers. What can save these women who have died many deaths while fighting with their children, their husbands, and themselves? Married women struggling for survival naturally lean on one another, but this relationship can never provide them with utopian solidarity because, as Choi’s stories show us, greed and envy will eventually re-isolate people. These women yearn for a safe place, but the pandemic has converted personal homes into virtual classrooms. Beyond the screen of a laptop, we witness the safest of places—a house—collapsing at the sound of a woman’s pain. Precarious sounds, walls crackling and crumbling, fragile objects breaking—all of these reflect the reality of women who become isolated in the depths of pain they can never share with anyone. And yet, Choi goes one step beyond this terrifying awareness of reality. By simply staring into the face of other women who are in the same pain, women can overcome some of these feelings of isolation. Through a mirror that shows us that inherent in all of us is animosity and rage that threaten those closest to us, we see that Choi’s gaze has come to realize the violence of reality in a different light than before. Hers is not a world that ends with a cold-hearted message about violence, but a story about us as individuals who fully recognize the violence lurking in all subjects. And going beyond making observations about the precarious reality of women, Choi also depicts in a new light the sex of women. In Yours Truly,female friends who raise their children together eventually hold each other back. For example, we have the following scene, in which Jin-ah takes out a pack of frozen breastmilk from the freezer, thus confessing to the first-person protagonist of the story that she is defined by her past and her sex as a mother: “Jin-ah, if you leave it out like that, all of it will melt.” Jin-ah doesn’t budge. “I’m going to thaw all of it today. I’m going to thaw it all and pour it out. Just like you pour water into the kitchen sink.” As Jin-ah says this, she picks up and hands me the stack of papers lying next to us on the chair, her face looking like a good student who used to get perfect marks. Day 9, Day 30, Day 56, Day 98. . . Lactation times for each breast, milk quotas to achieve weight goals, stool and urination counts for the baby. . . All of this diligently recorded over seven months, not a day missing. “This is the milk that was inside my body back then,” Jin-ah says. “It’s the last bit of breastmilk I could have fed the baby. The milk I squeezed out of my body while crying all night watching my sleeping baby. Back then, every day was a roller coaster of emotion. These are six frozen lumps of me from back then, of Yoony from back then. And now I’m going to thaw them.” Jin-ah’s hair is stuck to her cheeks with sweat. “This is me. . . This is everything.” Goodbye. I’m positive that’s what Jin-ah said. Goodbye, Yeong-ji. Jin-ah has stored her breastmilk and all the history surrounding it, in a freezer for more than a decade. She puts this milk and history out on a table during a hot day to melt. Hidden in this scene, is a strange type of affect, furiously going back and forth between the maternity, childcare, friendship, and affection of women. Through this scene in which frozen lumps of breastmilk turn to sticky liquid, Choi makes the reader reimagine the relationship between Jin-ah and the protagonist of the story. In other words, this precarious relationship will disintegrate, collapse, or remain all right. Choi discovers a region that no one else who depicts female relationships has been able to discover. It is neither an amicable nor a hostile relationship, but a complex relationship between married women who are navigating maternity and their sexuality as women. Thus in Person Made from Snow, violence and pain are no longer inherited, as they were in Magnolia Sutra; they melt smoothly. Now, as the critic Kang Ji-hui has noted, the violence in Choi’s novels has transformed into “something like liquid or gas, melting and evaporating with the flow of nature, as opposed to legends with rigid worldviews.” This transformation from a threat that stubbornly persists in the world into something that accumulates and then melts can be understood as a slight relaxation in Choi’s grim perception of reality. Choi’s persistent gaze toward violence is not a cold-hearted resignation that leaves violence as violence, but a desperate struggle to find survival within violence. The novel Face to Face, Choi’s most recent work and a full-length novel that expands upon the aforementioned “Here We Are, Face to Face,” demonstrates a commitment into the future of her study of the sensations after violence. Just as Choi once wrote, we must view life from the bosom of deep time, as if those whom we sensed during the pandemic are both the same people who lived before it and the same people who will live after it. And I trust this commitment of Choi’s.Translated by Sean Lin HalbertKorean Works Mentioned:• Face to Face (Changbi, 2023)『마주』 (창비, 2023)• A Person Made from Snow (Munhakdongne, 2021)『눈으로만든사람』 (문학동네, 2021)• The Ninth Wave (Munhakdongne, 2017)『아홉번째파도』 (문학동네, 2017)• Magnolia Sutra (Moonji, 2015)『목련정전』 (문학과지성사, 2015)

by Chunglim Jun

[Cover Feature] Such Small Moments

“When will you rest?”I’m asked this quite often these days. Well, when will I rest? I’ve been teaching more college courses since last year, and on off-lecture days, I work at a bookshop. I spend three weekdays on campus, two at the shop. On weekends, I write and catch up on chores. The potted plant I’d recently received as a gift withered from neglect. It was a birthday gift . . . During busy spells, I don’t take a single day off. Sudden free time makes me anxious as I wonder if I’ve forgotten to do anything. I believe I’m in control of my time and tasks, but lately, they’ve been nipping at my heels. I enjoy the reading and writing—even the other related tasks can’t be separated from the life I wish to live. But now I know. I’m beat. It took me long enough to see it. Reading is no longer a pastime but an extension of work. Sometimes, I suspect that I’m deceiving myself, conforming to assigned roles instead of working with self-agency. After lecturing at the college located a four-hour round trip away, I muse on the subway ride home. I want to distance myself from this life. I want to go someplace far away. Maybe that’s why. Traveling is my only pause. The only bright spot in my busy routine comes with choosing a city and making plans to visit. Every day, I scour the internet for flights and accommodations. No matter if the trip falls through. Imagining is enough to pull me slightly beyond my quotidian force field. I recently traveled to Tokyo. I looked forward to one thing—staying open to chance. To empty myself of thoughts triggered by controlled situations, embracing chance sensations instead. The beauty of travel lies in those moments that let you shed routine-hardened senses. But they now seem harder to cast off. For one, there’s my smartphone . . . It keeps information at my fingertips, but at times, I long to leave it in a drawer as I voyage away. Wanting to at least leave my laptop behind, I stayed up late working the night before the trip. I finalized my students’ grades and pre-ordered books for the bookshop. I double-checked everything to preempt work-related texts and calls. Later, I walked through customs, imagining the impossible: Could I have traveled without my phone? Tokyo was the fifth Japanese city I visited. I had put it off, making the belated journey after seeing f*ckuoka, Nagoya, Okinawa, and Kyoto. (I always used the Korean pronunciation “Donggyeong” for “Tōkyō,” getting teased for an old-fashioned habit supposedly betraying my gukmin-hakgyo-era upbringing.)[1] Outside the window the sun was setting as I took the Narita Express to Shinagawa Station. I overheard several non-Japanese languages—Chinese, English, and French. The eager voices chattered while I dozed off. The late-night work had taken its toll, it seemed. I arrived at my lodgings barely awake. I was struck by the sheer number of people in Tokyo. The Shibuya Crossing and Akihabara Electric Town were inundated with pedestrians, and all the restaurants I stumbled on had long lines as if according to script. Like a scene from The Truman Show. Awed by the crowds, I stared and wondered where they came from. Instead of relaxing, I grew tenser than usual, even wishing to return straight home. I mulled over my previous trips. Does the fleeting getaway from familiar routines and settings lead to any rest? Am I not being my own taskmaster, utterly exhausted as I trudge back to the hotel and collapse into sleep? Outside the window, the Tokyo Tower gleamed in the distance with several metro lines passing by in the background. Thoughts crossed my mind, one after another. Being too intent on rest, I was hardly enjoying my trip. Rest by compulsion. The pressure of time and tasks had been replaced by my coercive self pushing me across the sea. Until age nineteen, I grew up in the countryside. The hillside village had only three buses a day going into town. Looking back, the place had enjoyed clear boundaries of rest. Seasons and weather separated work from repose—as an entirely “natural” consequence. For instance, farmers would leave the fields and head home at sunset, and once the cold winter set in, they would allow their bodies enough rest for the coming year. Nature affected the on-off switch of daily activities, and those rhythms set the pace for managing life. On days without work, Father looked after plants and animals. His time was divided almost equally between work and care. Even on off days, he rose at dawn. He built a chicken coop in a corner of the warehouse, and when two farm dogs had puppies at the same time, he cared for nearly twenty pups. Father was delighted when I was given a jujube sapling for helping at a friend’s orchard. The friend’s father said it would take time for the sapling to bear fruit in our yard. Our family took turns looking after the sapling. Whoever had time watered it and kept the base free of weeds. As the seasons passed, we gathered around on holidays and spoke about the tree. Within three years, it bore fruit. In the summer, villagers sat by the stream to escape the heat, and in winter, they swept the snow at dawn, exchanging greetings. Together, we worked and rested. The city, where I could work anytime, pressured me to work all the time. The sleepless, insomniac city disrupted my sleep. Outside central Tokyo lies a neighborhood called Kichijoji. I chose that quieter place for the last day of my trip and woke up early to catch the train. I watched the tall buildings through the window gradually give way to single-story houses. Having boarded an express train bypassing Kichijoji, I got off at the next stop, Mitaka Station. I decided to walk the extra distance. The paths were quiet, and cyclists passed by now and then. I saw locals walking their dogs and reading newspapers in the park. Aside from my travel companion, no other tourists were in sight. My edginess eased. We spotted a used bookshop on the way and stepped inside. The front counter was empty, and even as we browsed, no one arrived. My friend chose several story books in the children’s section while I reached for pocket-sized paperbacks. We had made our selections by the time the apparent owner emerged, adjusting his glasses. He took his time tallying the prices on a calculator. Once the books were in our backpacks, we left the shop. As we neared the small goods and vintage shops of Nakamichi Shopping Street, I saw several places leisurely opening for the day. No rush, no hurry. At a playground with a stately elm, a child squealed and skipped around. My friend and I bought donuts and ate them on a bench. The child left while we sat in the sunlight. A chilly breeze rustled the tree. Perhaps it was for these moments that I traveled. Small moments, an hour or even ten minutes at most. And for the places where those times gathered. Tokyo had plenty of old cafés that seemed to stand still in time. I walked in the door, finding the streetside bustle fading like a distant memory. Shown to a table, I was served a hot towel and a glass of water. My eyes ran over the posters and faded patches of wallpaper as other customers came and went. Some of them were reading, some were waving at others and joining them, some gestured at each other mid-chatter, and some peered gravely at their phones. I ordered the “morning set,” a Japanese café staple, and sipped on a cup of their “blend coffee.” Ambient jazz melodies and hazy indoor air. Now that I’ve left Tokyo, I remember the place as a cozy nook overlaid with small scenes. “Did you rest well?” My travel companion and I asked each other on our return flight. In my daily life, I make different attempts to rest well or empty myself. At the end of those mostly failed attempts, I look to the next try with quasi-resigned hope. One does their best at work, but can they do their best to rest? In his book The End of Work, the American economist Jeremy Rifkin predicts that more free time and less working time will establish new lifestyle modes in the place of traditional culture.[2] This points to the possibility of surplus time encompassing time for leisure or self-enrichment—in short, the possibility of rest. When asked, “What do you do to rest?” most people say, “Nothing,” but that’s easier said than done. To do so, one must do nothing at all. I recall doing the following to rest: 1. Gaming. I once spent a fortnight shut in at home, gaming. I buried myself in the game without going out to see anyone or stopping to work. With my PlayStation plugged into the TV, I barely budged from the armchair. My daily routine went sideways, but my mind was somehow refreshed. 2. Watching TV dramas. When a minor surgery kept me homebound for a month, I binge-watched drama series. My friends had recommended several shows. I’ve been hooked ever since, and now I have several OTT subscriptions. 3. Sleeping. I used to get my sleep in one stretch. But with intervals of sleeping and eating, sleeping again and eating . . . the slight regret over time spent asleep is now compensated by the sense of being recharged.As one would expect, resting bears on the question of how to spend non-working time. Free time will only increase in the long run. Not working as much as others used to make me an anomaly, but now I seem to go against the norm by not taking proper rest. I recently took up table tennis. In part for the exercise, but I also longed for physical learning. While writing my manuscript, I made a few resolutions. First, to separate work from rest. To work with greater focus and switch off to relax. Next, to ward off emptiness and ennui by seeking out new interests. To find occasions, not necessarily big or grand, that move my soul. Finally, to embrace the surplus nature of unproductive time. Doing nothing may be a challenge, but I can still free myself of guilt. These are my only wishes as I embark on 2024.Translated by Sunnie Chae[1]Translator’s note: the term gukmin hakgyo [elementary school], a remnant of the colonial era, was changed to chodeung hakgyo by the Education Act Amendment Act No. 5069 in December 1995.[2]Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: A Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam Book, 1995), 221.

by Min Byeonghun

[Cover Feature] Letting Go and Living with Mold

Living through COVID-19, a global pandemic, we all came to have a unique story of our own, one that could be shared with others. In 2020, the year marking the sweeping spread of the pandemic that upended the conventional human way of life, my own daily life didn’t change much. I read and write for a living, which I can do well enough without leaving the house or meeting people face to face. I continued to work from home as before, corresponding with my editors through email. The swimming pool I used to frequent daily closed down, though, so I spent more time walking instead, going out to the neighborhood park when it wasn’t crowded. The class I taught was switched to online at the start of the spring semester, but since the class was small, I invited the students to my place from time to time to have class and lunch together. The most notable change in my life during that time was that I won access to a community garden patch overseen by the district office, and became a city farmer for the first time in my life. Around the end of March I plowed the soil; in April I planted seedlings of lettuce, tomato, eggplant, crown daisy, cilantro, and peppermint; I also sowed seeds of rucola, canola, carrot, dill, and radish, and waited for them to sprout. With the coming of May, the crops grew taller by the day, drinking in the sunlight and the warm air. In June, flowers blossomed, dazzling my eyes. I dug out the flowers by the roots and shared them with some fellow gardeners, then brought the rest home and put them in water. I placed a row of transparent bottles along the white wall and filled them with dill, tall with an abundance of yellow blossoms. I learned through the garden patch that flowers of edible plants are just as beautiful as decorative flowers. I had brought nature—the work of my own hands—not only into the kitchen but into the entire house as well, which quite pleased me. So passed spring, and summer arrived. The rainy season that year was uncommonly long. In the central region of the Korean Peninsula, where Seoul is located, it lasted for fifty-four days, from 24 June to 16 August—the longest on record since 1973. Day after day, I would alternately close the windows when it rained, and open them when it cleared to let fresh air in.Mid-August, toward the end of the rainy season, I noticed a suspicious stain on the wall next to the study window. I went up for a closer look and saw three round spots of mold. Appalled, I immediately searched for how to remove mold, then wiped them away using a rag and diluted bleach solution. I was to leave on a three-day trip the next day, so it would be disastrous for the mold to spread with all the windows of the house closed and no one home. When I came home I found that the spots of mold, to my horror, had returned in exactly the same color and size as before. I was utterly dismayed, but I mustered my strength and once again got rid of them. Then I went into the kitchen to cook and have my first meal back home. Feeling refreshed after getting rid of the mold, I wanted to set a nice table; I opened a cabinet drawer and took out a wooden spoon, which I don’t use very often. But something felt off; I took a good look at the spoon and found green mold along the edge of the oval head. A disheartening thought froze my mind: was it possible that everything in the house made of organic matter was covered in mold? I never used an electric fan or air conditioner, as the cold, artificial air didn’t agree with me; during the unprecedentedly long rainy season, the stagnant humidity in the house might have given rise to mold in unchecked corners. I promptly threw open the kitchen cabinet doors and inspected the inside of each cabinet. My gut feeling had been right—a thin layer of mold had formed not only on the wooden spoons, but also in the grooves of all the wooden articles such as a bamboo wicker tray and a plate carved from a log. Even so, up to that point, I was ready to tackle the mold. At once, I pulled out all the household articles in the cabinets and sterilized the cabinets with alcohol. I washed the dishes, let them sit in diluted bleach solution for a time, then rinsed them again with water. Tiresome as it was, three days should be plenty to complete the task, I thought. I felt lucky that only the wooden items had been affected, and was relieved that the books remained untainted. Talking to a friend on the phone, I joked around and laughed, saying the books must be unscathed because I didn’t read much. After cleaning the kitchen, I started on the study. As I dusted off the bookshelves, my eyes fell on the hardcover volumes in the original languages. To my astonishment, molds of different colors—white, green, yellow—lined the angular edges of the fabric covers. The molds were markedly different in color and shape from the ordinary kind that arise in the bathroom or kitchen when it’s not regularly cleaned, and the sight of them sickened me. I had never seen a life form of their kind before. Rubbing my arms to ease the goose bumps, I tried to cool my head, and making an effort not to shut my eyes, I went through each and every book on the shelves. Mold had taken over a good number of them, not only the fabric-covered ones but the paperbacks as well. A volume of Walter Benjamin’s work in English revealed, when I lifted its dust cover, white mold inside the hard covers and on the spine. Without hesitation, I shoved it into a paper bag. Avital Ronell’s Stupidity in its original English was ruined as well. Quarantining Benjamin and Ronell in the paper bag and throwing them out the door, I wept for the first time because of the mold. Not because the beautiful thoughts and words had been corroded by something so trivial as mold; my feelings of loss and grief were for the words underlined in inks of various colors and the notes in the margins. The traces of those days in which I had so struggled to make sense of the abstruse texts had been stolen by the mold. What had been taken from and become lost to me were not certain volumes by certain scholars, but those days of stupidity. Calming myself, I walked past the shelves of books in English and looked through the books in German and French. My heart raced, as I didn’t know how badly the paperback books had been damaged; then I realized that funnily enough, the damage differed in degree depending on the publisher. The pages of the dark blue Suhrkamp editions of philosophical works being fungi-resistant, were clean though faded yellow. Thus the entire collection of Benjamin’s works in German, as well as Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Hegel’s Aesthetics, survived. So did the peach-colored Gallimard paperbacks and Folio editions. As for the French PUF editions, however, pretty green mold had developed along the spines; so the works by Foucault, Laplanche, and Kant were expelled. Scrutinizing the shelves, I grew increasingly cold and desensitized, feeling no regret at tying the books up in bundles and dumping them. Distancing myself from mold was the most critical issue at hand, and I no longer had any qualms about mechanically eliminating, expelling, and isolating what had been tainted with mold. Now came the time to examine the shelf of Korean books. I noted that a shimmering green-gray mold had accumulated on all of the Workroom Press “Proposals” series. I’d never seen mold of such beautiful color before. It resembled rust on ancient bronze artifacts. In admiration, I yearned to contemplate it in silence. These books, I never wanted to dispose of. With each publication of the series, the editor had arranged a gathering with the translator, which I’d attended every time and took notes, in the book, of the translator’s words. Discarding the books was like discarding the vividness of those moments and the words, which I wouldn’t be able to hear anywhere ever again. I searched online to see how to restore books contaminated by mold and learned that librarians in Japan use gauze fabric dampened with 75 percent ethanol solution to wipe books with. I tried the same method to bring the “Proposals” series back to life. But the mold on the covers, made of imported paper, and on the inside of the spines was so persistent that I couldn’t let the books stay in the room with the other articles. In the end, I gave up on restoring them, and shed a flood of tears as I relinquished them. Hearing the news, the editor shared my pain. I sent her the dozens of peach-colored Gallimard editions of Maurice Blanchot as a sign of our days of friendship. So I sent away without hesitation even the ones that had survived—hoping that they’d live long in a safer environment. In the end, though, I couldn’t be wholly indifferent or cold-hearted. As I tied up the severely damaged books, I felt as if my heart were slashed with a knife.It kept raining, even when the rainy season had supposedly ended. September came and the fall semester began, but I wasn’t done cleaning mold. Typhoons raged one after another. Rain fell without ceasing, and the disinfection took forever, with the mold ever multiplying. It was no longer a matter of picking out contaminated books to discard. I had to give the shelves some breathing space. I began to throw away unmarred books at random as well. Otherwise, the infested books would spread mold onto the books that were yet untainted. I scrapped all of Lacan’s Seminar series. A whole shelf was emptied, along with a period of my life. I got rid of all the German books on philosophy, too; I wouldn’t read them anyway. Hegel’s Aesthetics, I sent to an artist friend of mine. I asked my acquaintances if they wanted any of my Penguin paperbacks, and sent the books out in the mail. I threw out the signed copies of books that authors had sent me. I had no choice. The authors knew what I was going through and said they would give me another copy when things returned to normal. I threw away so many things. I had to let them go, without condition. I had to create empty, quarantined space in order to salvage what still had life in them. I had to, to let myself live.Neighbors I hadn’t interacted with before learned about my situation, as I was constantly going in and out of the house to chuck loads of stuff, clutching an umbrella to protect myself from the typhoon. One of them, who lived a floor below, invited me over when I was all scruffy and offered me a meal. When I was absorbed in sterilizing the books, she would knock on my door and hand me something to eat. She sympathized with me, saying it must be heartbreaking for someone who studied books to have to throw them away. Where had the mold come from? From the natural produce of the organic garden patch which I had so greedily brought home? Probably not; no trace of mold was detected at the front door, where I would leave the bag, straw hat, and rubber boots I used in gardening. On the other hand, the study, which had suffered the most serious damage, faced a mountain through the window. The mountain was thick with trees, but just outside the window there was no tree, only weeds in an empty lot. According to the neighbor who lived downstairs, there had been several acacia trees there up until a year ago, but the green space management at the district office had them felled. After the trees had been cut down, rainwater seeped through an embankment into her house during the rainy season one year. My guess is that with the trees gone from the forest, whose thriving trunks and weeds had made for a healthy, self-regulating ecosystem in which growth, development, and decomposition occurred in a cycle, the fungi in the humid air carried by the wind infiltrated my window; the mold spores that would have been kept at bay by the trees settled in my room and extended their power with the long rain. Three years have passed since, but the mold hasn’t been completely eliminated. The mold has done no wrong. All it did was fly when the wind blew and grow when it was humid, according to the order of nature inherent in itself. No matter how much I wiped at it with ethanol, the spores, invisible to the naked eye, stayed hidden in unseen corners, ready to run rampant when the air began to stagnate and grow moist. When I spot such corners, I once again feel the need to empty my space and allow the air to flow. When the air begins to circulate again, of course, so do the spores. In 2020, I experienced something irreversible that manifested itself in a powerful way through human factors—such as a climate catastrophe that included a long rainy season, frequent typhoons, and forest logging—that tangled with nature in the form of mold on the books in my room. Since that summer, as is the case with all inflection points in life, my idea and substance of life have never been the same.Translated by Yewon Jung

by Kyung Hee Youn

[Cover Feature] Breathe, Live, Rest

When I saw the painting Breathing Space, I remembered feeling like I was taking a deep breath. The piece was part of a solo exhibition, Wandering Mind. The painting depicted a person leaning against a small window of a large building, gazing at the sky—the artist’s way of saying that sometimes a small window can become an unexpectedly vast breathing space. The sky stretched beautifully above the building, its hue a poetic blue. I, too, have moments where I do nothing but space out. On such days, I make a conscious effort not to plan anything or assign tasks to myself. I silence my alarms and sleep in; when I wake up, I give the house a thorough cleaning. I take in the tidy surroundings and gaze out the window—sometimes sunrays pour in, while at other times snow falls in large flakes. During those times, I don’t turn on the TV or play music. I savor the freedom to spend time in my own space. I observe the people passing beneath my window, simply letting myself feel the quiet flow of time. The days I purposely spend in idleness fill my heart with a strength that eludes me on my most productive days. Until a few years ago, I didn’t know how to properly rest. I constantly thought about what needed to be done the next day, or the manuscript I’d be working on at the time. One day, I woke up, and my neck felt stiff—I couldn’t turn to the side. At first, I brushed it off as a result of a bad sleeping position, but as days passed, the symptoms worsened. Stretching only seemed to amplify the pain, expanding from my neck down to my shoulders, and I couldn’t get a good night’s sleep. I went to see an oriental medicine doctor who pressed and prodded my neck, shoulders, and back. His diagnosis was as follows: “You frequently experience tension-related pain in your neck and shoulders, don’t you? It’s because when you do something, you pour yourself into it, which results in a tension build-up.” I almost fell to my knees at how accurate his observations were. It was like he had read my mind. He emphasized the importance of concentrating during the day and fully relaxing at night. He told me that I unfortunately wasn’t able to unload the burden from my shoulders, which caused me pain. “It’ll get better over time. But you shouldn’t try too hard. When you’re resting, you need to let the burden go. Otherwise, your back will keep hurting.” I hadn’t even realized how hard I was pushing myself, and that my body was already overloaded. I was used to my frequent back and shoulder pain, and when I started hearing a popping sound in my jaw whenever I opened my mouth, I just thought it was a symptom commonly experienced by people in modern society and neglected it. From then on, I began carving out dedicated time away from work and writing. For a while I threw myself into swimming; these days I opt for an occasional run. I head out at night and just run for about twenty minutes, without a set route. Running at night has its charm—you can hide your face in its shadows. What’s surprising is that I’m not the only one; many others walk or run in the darkness. Running is good for the heart, lungs, and legs, but it’s especially beneficial for your mental well-being. Focusing on each step gives me a temporary escape from my worries. Afterward, I feel light and refreshed in both body and mind. I’ve also started learning the violin as a hobby, and I’m being consistent about it. I take lessons once a week and practice the pieces I’ve learned whenever I find the time. I don’t mind if I’m not good at it—it’s something I do for fun, and I enjoy it as such. When playing a piece, there are rests in the sheet music. These rests are periods of absolute silence, and when the next note comes along, it’s that much clearer. In the passages where the music needs to be delicate and soft, you have to play more quietly so that the emphasized notes stand out. Well-played music has good moments of rest. Rather than trying to excel at everything, I’m practicing letting go of a few things. I was lying in bed, listening to a podcast, when one of the speaker said something I empathized with a lot: “In South Korea, from the moment you open your eyes until you close them, everything is all about competition: catching a bus, taking the subway, making a restaurant reservation.” Though this may not apply to all countries or cities, I believe it holds true for many places that have developed as fast as Seoul. Long commuting hours, repetitive labor, constant crowds wherever you go, a life of never-ending competition. Even when you’re resting, you crave more rest, and just taking a breath feels draining. At morning rush hour, the commuters’ faces on the subway carry a particular weariness. Sometimes they argue, hoping to get a seat. They’re all on edge due to how exhausted they are. I, too, have spent a few years among them. I’ve worked as an editor for a decade now and made my debut as a poet seven years ago. Last year, I edited the highest number of books in my entire life. In the summer, I also published my second poetry collection. It wasn’t a new way of life for me—I was used to scrutinizing other people’s manuscripts and coming home to look at my own, but for the first time I was sick and tired of it. It became hard to make simple decisions; I didn’t have the will to do anything; I woke up in the morning crying for no reason. I wondered if that was what burnout felt like. For a while, I did little else besides pour my heart into the violin. I hardly wrote or read, but I found myself drawn to reading several books related to music. Music revealed new territories for me. Reading Show Me Your Hands, I slowly delved into the inner world of a pianist, and with Lev’s Violin: An Italian Adventure, I envisioned countless violins, each made of different wood, each with their own unique timbre. Reading Schubert, I discovered all the failures the world-renowned composer had faced. Knowing that others have failed brings a smile to my face: it means that they were serious about their dreams and struggled to make them come true. I feel that, rather than success, moments of failure are needed; instead of constantly pushing forward, we need periods of rest. For me, rest is a time to regain a pure perspective on the world. After a deep rest, I find that the words trapped in me start bubbling to the surface. I become eager to reveal what I’ve seen, what I’ve thought, and what I’ve experienced in my subconscious. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, I came to realize the increased importance of a good rest. Koreans habitually go to work even during a typhoon or push through tasks when feeling unwell. But we are not machines—we’re humans, and as such, it is impossible to keep producing and creating without taking breaks. We know this, and yet we live as if it were possible. Rest is a fearful concept for me, even though ironically, I always long for it. I always think, “What if quitting my job and stopping to write means I won’t be able to start again?” I know that pausing doesn’t cause the world to collapse, but I’ve always had this irrational fear. Now my neck and shoulders hurt, my back is damaged, and on some days, my mind is so exhausted that I fall apart completely. I have asked my poet friends what they do when they take a break. One of them mentioned isolating at home and immersing themselves in a movie or book they’ve been longing to watch or read. Another said they go camping or take a short trip somewhere. All their ideas were nice. How wonderful would it be to light a fire in the woods, grill and eat a delicious meal; or bury yourself in a beloved book—splendid! I, too, used to relax while doing the things I enjoyed. Do what I want, read what I like, eat something tasty, go to my favorite places. However, when true burnout hit, none of these activities seemed possible. I needed a time devoid of plans, a moment to pause everything and do nothing. At the end of the year, I took my remaining vacation days and enjoyed an extended break until the new year rolled in. I stood in front of the window—as I stared at the large snowflakes, it almost seemed like they weren’t falling down, but instead, rising towards the sky. Like music played in reverse. I thought it resembled the rhythm of life. My puppy was asleep on my lap; gazing at that serene view brought peace to my heart. I’ve always enjoyed going to the library, the swimming pool, the museum, or just wandering around aimlessly, yet I liked this freedom of being alone, doing nothing, meeting no one, with no music or media. Now, I’ve finally come to understand the beauty of this solitude, one that I do not need to rush to fill. I don’t need to go to cool places—a stroll around my neighborhood brings me a new joy. Instead of constantly reading books, I’m happy to take a break from all kinds of texts for a while. While being surrounded by friends is great, savoring the solitude of being alone is also perfectly fine. Once I embraced this mindset and spent my time resting at home, doing nothing, I began looking at my routine and the familiar places I frequented under a new light. I’m not talking about resting in preparation to move forward, to take a leap; rather, it’s about indulging in unadulterated rest for the sake of resting itself, a complete acceptance of the nothingness that is the self. It is the freedom of existence, of reverting to an amoebic state, a form with boundless potential. This kind of rest brings me back to my innate self. Back to my childhood; to my early twenties when I was passionate about so many of the things in the world; to the days when love was the sole occupant of my heart; when I looked at the world with more simplicity; when writing brought me pure joy. Writing is sometimes like a motionless swamp that offers no answer or reaction. Embrace that lack of an answer, let the emptiness sit there. Do not fear loneliness—step willingly into it and spend time with it. When I ceased fearing loneliness and heeded the doctor’s advice to lay down the burdens from my shoulders, I finally could slip into a deep, dreamless sleep. Good rest isn’t merely a gesture in preparation for optimal movement, much like emptying your mind isn’t just a preparatory process for filling it up again. In Korean, 잘 쉰다 means both “to rest” and “to inhale and exhale.” So, 쉬다 (“to rest well”) means “to take deep breaths, exhale, and empty the body.” This implies that resting your body leads to resting your mind, which then leads back to resting your body in a seamless cycle. I wonder if leaving the empty spaces created by rest untouched isn’t just another way of saying “to be alive.” To rest essentially means to live—not to excel at something or to have a busy life, but rather to feel the happiness and fullness of simply being alive; to focus on the present state of both the body and mind. In September, for my birthday, I went on a trip. I wrapped up all the work at the company, finished the manuscript that had held me captive until dawn every day, and escaped to Yeosu; the sea I saw there was the most wonderful I’d ever seen in my life. It took me four hours by train and then a little taxi ride to get to my accommodation, and once I got there and opened the curtains of my hotel room, the sea glittered beautifully in front of my eyes. I looked down to see the locals walking along the colorful street that followed the stone wall. At last, outside of Seoul, I could enjoy the different scenery and lifestyle of another city. It felt like a breath of fresh air after being stuck in the daily grind of commuting between home and work. With no particular plans, I strolled around with a little jump in my steps; I ate a patbingsu, looked at the cats, and relished the joy that complete relaxation brings. During these empty times, I feel new stories and new desires emerging. The beauty of emptiness. Poetry knows this very well—its charm lies in the space between the lines, after all. Rather than the act of adding, I find the gaps left by subtraction more fascinating. Poetry is a game, a confession of your inner self, a reflection of all things of the world. It’s ironic, but after I spend periods without writing anything, my poetry becomes better, and I feel that the act of writing becomes more precious, and more fun. During my experience with burnout, I learned that any weary heart finds restoration through proper rest. You don’t even have to work hard for it. Whether it is love for someone, an open heart towards the world, generosity towards others, a desire to write again, or a yearning to stand tall—all these feelings will eventually resurface. All you need to do to rekindle them is to bask in these moments of pure rest. I didn’t want to escape from work or writing; rather, I always wanted to break free from the monotonous landscape that was “me.” I didn’t realize that this person I knew as myself, who looked the same every day, was undergoing a constant process of internal change. Someone once asked me, “Why do you write poetry? It seems lonely.” Back then, I couldn’t provide a proper answer, but now I think I can. Poetry allows one to peer into the solitude of one’s inner self, to appreciate life’s empty spaces. It’s the joy of filling the spaces between the lines by leaving some deliberately empty. Only after a good rest do you come to realize the multitude of answers that are out there.Translated by Giulia Macrì

by Ju Minhyeon

[Cover Feature] The Bookstore as a Book

The topic of bookstores always brings me back to a personal story that begins the year before I was born. It was 1980, and my mother’s youngest brother, freshly discharged from military duty, decided to leave his boring old hometown and strike out for Seoul. He had no plans, only some money in his pockets to get him through the next few months. He scoured the big city for areas with cheap rent, and finally settled on a sleepy neighborhood in the Seodaemun District. His new home was a tiny shop with a floor space of about 10 pyeong, to which was attached a tinier room. The shop, he filled with books. The Munye Bookstore. That was the name of my other school—the place where my young self spent countless afternoons, and where—if I may be so bold—I learned even more than at my classroom desk. The Munye Bookstore was a home where my young uncle ate and slept, where my young self would read until I nodded off into short naps. It was also a place of community, where young locals hung out in little groups and sang along to a strumming guitar, and a sort of pub where, late in the evening (a nationwide curfew was in place in South Korea until January of 1982), the bookstore doors would be shut and those young people would engage in debate and discussion over beer with peanuts and dried cuttlefish. How did they end up gathering at Uncle’s bookstore? I’m afraid I don’t know. What I do know is that those young people were, to me, just as part of the bookstore as the volumes on the shelves. Not knowing what title to use for these friends? regulars? neighbors?—of my uncle’s, I would call them “uncles” as well (a few women were among these patrons, but I don’t recall calling them “aunties.” I wonder why?) and grow to recognize them. Employment, marriage, and other facts of life would call them away to other neighborhoods, but they were quickly replaced by new faces. The ones who left, too, would drop in when they were in the area, spot me reading on a stool in the corner, and exclaim, “Hey, it’s been a while! You’ve gotten taller, eh?” Some of those people still get together for meals—although they almost never drink—and to travel together. Even now, more than ten years since Uncle retired. Uncle, why a bookstore, of all things? The question came to my mind after I’d finished my own military service and prepared to return to school, wondering what I should do with my life. At the time I had vague dreams of authorhood, so perhaps part of me hoped to hear that he’d wanted to be an author too. But Uncle’s answer blew away my expectations. Because I was broke. The thing about a bookstore, it doesn’t cost much money to start one. All you need are shelves, and the wholesalers were happy to supply you and get paid once the books sold. And if they didn’t sell, I’d just return them. It was the best kind of business for a poor kid like me. It was coincidence borne of chance, then. But wasn’t that just another word for inevitability? Necessity had driven Uncle to that business, but in the blink of an eye, the bookstore ended up being a perfect fit for him. Uncle’s life revolved around reading books, selling books, and talking about books with patrons. So I can imagine the helplessness he must have felt in early 1998, when the landlord—who’d lost his job in the Asian Financial Crisis at the end of the previous year—decided to run the bookstore himself and refused to extend Uncle’s lease, kicking him out without even paying back the deposit. But I was only a high school student back then, too young and feisty to understand. I didn’t realize back then that Uncle’s youth, my adolescence, and maybe a period in Korean history, too, had ended forever. Uncle opened up a new business near a local university. The new shop was packed with books on every wall save the door, but did not have a little side room where people discussed their books, or display shelves where interesting reads were proudly exhibited for all. Instead, the center of the floor was taken up by two rows of low shelves. Uncle’s new business was not a bookstore, but a chaekbang (book rental store) where patrons could rent comic books and novels. Unlike the ever-bright Munye Bookstore, the Kkaebi Bookshop (the most popular book rental franchise at the time) was dark, and the books stained by all the hands that had flipped through their pages. Uncle’s chaekbang started off on a downward spiral, which went on and on until the other franchise stores closed and the head office, too, finally closed the curtains in 2010. Munye Bookstore, stolen from Uncle by the landlord, had long since shuttered its doors by then. If the financial crisis had been the death knell for Uncle’s bookstore, online bookstores would be the nail in the coffin for all the other physical bookstores, big and small. And I was there to see it all. While in the military, I became a Platinum-rank customer with an online bookstore, the credit card payments for which led me to take a logging job for an online store’s book database straight out of the army. In the summer of 2006, only one term away from my undergraduate degree, I became a full-time employee at an online bookstore. I was the merchandiser who oversaw books in the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and history sections. Looking back, I must have learned everything I needed to know about books from Uncle’s shop. In On the Commerce of Thought by Jean-Luc Nancy, subtitled Of Books and Bookstores, Nancy explains, for the bookseller, the act of reading a book is both a lectio (reading) and an electio (choosing): “The bookseller. . . brings [books] and exposes them, giving them the vantage from which to play their role as subjects.” Over the three years and six months I spent at that workplace, I tried to think of myself as a “book deliverer.” An individual who procures books, displays them, and creates the right environment for them to play leading roles of their own. But reality didn’t quite work that way. Unlike flesh-and-blood customers I could see at a physical bookstore, online readers were faceless statistics. And it was no easy task to deliver anything to faceless statistics. Worse, even the books were formless statistics! Although almost every book in existence was recorded in these online databases, they were utterly devoid of scent and difficult to estimate their thickness. They were completely flat. Although I could look up any book I could think of with the touch of a finger, I could neither turn them over in my hands nor look at the books around them, nor simply stroll through their presence. I was sick of work, I wanted to read only for the pleasure of it, I wanted to write for myself, I said, making up one excuse after another as I quit my job. But looking back, I think I know the real reason: the faceless readers and the formless books. Long story short, after quitting my job, I became a writer—a book reviewer, to be precise—and continued to maintain my Platinum membership with all my book purchases. All the while, small bookstores around the country continued to shutter their doors. But I was so busy reading and writing that without any awareness of the issues at hand, I considered this phenomenon part of a natural progression, as unavoidable as the disappearance of record stores and video rental shops. Then, in 2015, I saw the tides of change. I saw the rise of independent publications, and the continued growth of Unlimited Edition, a book fair specializing in independent books. So-called independent bookstores underwent a Renaissance (to exaggerate mildly), with more and more articles covering the “revival of neighborhood bookstores” and the “small bookstore boom.” But—strangely, thinking back—I wasn’t particularly interested. Not interested at all, in fact. Was I just that sick of bookstores? Was I just that steeped in the traditional publishing system? Or maybe I no longer felt the need to be a reader of the book deliverers. My shelves had long since been packed with more volumes than those that had filled the walls of the Munye Bookstore. Then, in 2016, I received an email from Iro, the owner of first-generation independent bookstore Your Mind and organizer of Unlimited Edition. At the time, the rapid growth of local, or small, or independent bookstores had led to reader concerns that the quality of such establishments might decline. Iro’s proposal was that I join a bookstore exploration project that would examine the differences between these bookstores, learn about the bookstore owners’ outlooks, and the challenges they faced in their work. I accepted and spent one month with novelist Kim Junghyuk meeting the owners of eight wildly different independent bookstores for open interviews. (The transcripts have been published in a book titled Bookstore Exploration and include lectures from two Japanese bookstore owners as well as the transcript of a group conversation between four Korean bookstore owners.) To confess, even as I started the first interview, I was skeptical. The napkin math just didn’t add up: these businesses didn’t look like they could afford the rent, let alone make a profit. I saw my uncle lose his bookstore. I saw the thieving landlord bungle the business in just a few years. I saw my uncle’s book rental store wither away with the times. To me, independent bookstore owners were naïve romantics, no different from Don Quixote. Let me begin with the conclusion: I was being conceited and judgmental. These bookstore owners, naturally, were all aware of the potential problems. But they worked away at what they could, where they could. They led the charge of bookstores specializing in independently-published books, LGBT works, theme-rotating publications, artbooks, and travelogues, charging ahead alongside local bookstores big and small, and making all sorts of impacts on their communities. Just like Uncle’s Munye Bookstore all those years ago. Although the variety and quality of perspectives have since skyrocketed, the essence of these spaces remains unchanged: a sanctuary for people with non-mainstream interests. As an author whose works appeal largely to people with non-mainstream interests—that is to say, as an author with a fandom of minuscule proportions—I empathize wholeheartedly. My bookstore events are attended by anywhere from four or five to no more than thirty to forty people, but those events are comforting. At those events, I see the faces of my readers, breathe the same air as my readers, and share certain emotions with my readers. But in a big meet-and-greet at a cinema, for example, I sometimes break into cold sweat, and not just because of the sheer number of people. And not just because of the small differences between book readers and movie audiences. I attribute it to the setting. A cinema is not a place for communication. When I’m at the front, I see the audiences watch me as though watching a film (one in which they recognize neither the actors nor the director), with arms crossed. A bookstore, on the other hand, is a place of exchange. In a bookstore, the readers and I—because I prefer discussions to lectures wherever possible—speak and respond as though having a conversation. One experience that opened my eyes to the power of bookstores took place last spring at Goyo Bookshop, an independent establishment in Haebangchon specializing in literature. I led a seven-session workshop titled “A Writing Style Workshop for Those Lost Amidst Sentences.” A serial event like this was a first for the venue, which generally hosted one-off book discussions. Because space was limited, we capped the number of participants, which meant that registrations closed almost instantly. To confess, I was once again skeptical. I’d only elected to lead a workshop rather than a lecture series because I thought it would be easier for me, but then I realized that lectures might have been easier after all: once I’d prepared a lecture, most of the sessions would have been under my full control. In a workshop, I would never know just how much to prepare or what direction the participants might decide to go. What if no one spoke up? Or what if we went off on tangents? For me, reading had always been a solitary activity, which was the very reason I loved it. Once more, I was proven a fool. In a book talk, most participants are fans of the author. In this workshop, half the participants didn’t know me, and didn’t particularly care even after I introduced myself (they were diehard fans of Goyo Bookshop). In spite of that, reading and discussing the same book together was supremely fun, occasionally thrilling, and ultimately moving. I finally understood (and not just with my head) that books were not unchanging monoliths. Different readers, places, and contexts gave them entirely new meaning, and at times, different perspectives on the same book would entangle and generate a completely new chemical reaction. How should I put it? Jonas Mekas must have read my mind when he wrote Requiem for a Manual Typewriter, in which he said: “Ah, if you have never experienced it, been with it, no use telling it to you, you’ll never understand it.”Translated by Slin Jung

by Keum Jungyun

[Cover Feature] Where Literary Experience Meets the Personal

"If books take us to new worlds such as we have never seen before, it is bookstores that provide the passage to those chance meetings,” wrote the author Kim Choyeop. Tucked away in the city’s alleys, small bookstores provide an intimate space for those wishing to embrace the literary experience of reading and writing. At small bookstores, we stumble upon new discoveries and the experiences that go with them. And when we pursue those chance meetings, intentionally or spontaneously, we find ourselves part of a community of readers sharing a range of interests.Why Small Bookstores Are on the Rise Local bookstores, once a venerable neighborhood fixture, are steadily on the decline. This year alone saw the closure of Chuncheon’s Kwangjang Books, established in 1999, and Suwon’s Kyomoon Books, which opened its doors in 1986, while Daejeon’s best-known local bookstore, Gyeryong Books, founded in 1966, is struggling to pay the rent. On the other hand, oddly enough, new independent bookstores are popping up every week. The proliferation of independent bookstores, however, is unfortunately not due to an influx of readers discovering a newfound love for books and the joy of reading. In practice, the reasons are more varied than that. The first is the popularization of social media. Independent bookstores are often located in areas with less foot traffic. You usually find independent bookstores in small, hidden alleys, at basem*nt level or on higher floors, say, second or fifth, rather than on the ground floor. More often than not, these stores bear only the most discreet of signage and hardly advertise. How do readers find these out-of-the-way booksellers, then? The answer is social media. Connected by chance online, the reader seeks out the bookstore offline. Online encounters lead to physical meetings, sometimes developing into loyal followings. The second reason can be found in changes in the publishing industry. The boundaries between independent and commercial publishing have been blurred as special editions and zines abound, with authors, illustrators, and content creators from various walks of life selling their own publications. Bypassing the traditional publishing system, they enjoy greater freedom selling their wares through independent bookstores. As independent publications and editions increase, so do independent bookstores, which in turn encourages and feeds this boom in diverse publications. Third, running an independent bookstore can be combined with one’s primary job. Not only those who already work in the industry such as writers, publishers, editors, designers, or book bloggers, but pharmacists, lawyers, bartenders, IT developers, and videographers have been known to take up bookselling on the side. These bookstores operate at flexible hours. There are nocturnal bookstores, bookstores open only on the weekend, or bookstores that run as pop-ups. Not that running a bookstore in tandem with one’s day job is easy work, but it is true that, compared to other businesses, it doesn’t require much capital or highly technical expertise to start one. Fourth, readers’ needs are expanding and changing. From a bookseller’s point of view, this is the most important reason. We live in an age that treats values as consumable goods. The independent bookseller must appeal to the customer’s heart. It’s the only way to compete with the discount pricing, loyalty points, and same-day delivery offered by chain bookstores, with their slick advertising videos. Which is why, at my bookstore, Yeonhui, the emphasis is on providing the reader with experiences. By this I mean not just the experience of buying books, but of reading, writing, and creating them.Reading Together In-StoreFinding time for oneself can be a challenge in today’s busy world. Going to a brick-and-mortar store in person takes time and effort in an age when, with a few clicks, it’s possible to have books chosen and delivered to one’s doorstep in the same afternoon. With that in mind, imagine setting out to a small bookstore. The experience of buying books there starts with leaving the house. At the store, you browse on your own, without searching for adverts or reviews online. The lighting and temperature are just right for the books on display. Sometimes, seasonal music or scents complete the background. You discover a signed copy here, a favorite book there. Then there are the small pleasures of receiving a bookmark or postcard with your purchase, wrapped in that store’s distinctive paper. You might choose to read in-store, or take your books to a nearby park or café. Outside of the business of buying and selling books, the most important function of a bookstore is to provide its customers with literary experiences. By literary, I am not referring to the mere act of reading novels, essays, or poetry, but learning how to explore thoughts and emotions, values and meaning, through artistic language or images. Book clubs and author events are the most common type of event offering such experiences. Gone is the age of authors only speaking through their books. Authors are no longer mythical creatures, but ordinary people living lives much like those of their readers. This realization makes the reader feel closer to the writer than ever. In some cases, such small meetings have led to authors being discovered by readers or going on to achieve fandoms of their own. At Yeonhui, we host about two book talks a month for authors introducing their new works. We always take questions in advance and set aside a good portion for Q&A so it doesn’t become a one-sided event. Yeonhui also hosts Wolgandokseo, a monthly online book club, sometimes with the editor of said book participating. We also offer workshops devoted to reading various titles in the humanities under a particular theme. Then there are reading challenges held randomly on group chats for readers who crave company but find it difficult to come in-store. One of our most popular events is the annual Year-End Book Adjustment, in which participants share their reading experiences of that year. People swap their reading lists with others and share the books they enjoyed or hated, the ones they recommend or intend to offer as gifts. The participants thoroughly enjoy talking about their reading habits and what they’ve learned through books that year. This is the one event I take part in as a reader and not a leader.Writing, Recording, CreatingAfter reading, the next step is writing. There’s a saying that there are more writers than readers in Korea these days. Or, as some put it, those who read, write. Bypassing the traditional channels of new writers’ contests or similar competitions, today anyone can become a writer. Of course, as Tolstoy said, nothing can be gained in fits and starts, but one must start somewhere. There is a platform for every kind of keyword, from poetry and fiction to webtoons, web novels, essays, business, and self-improvement. Publishers and IT companies make it easy for anyone to publish their work and be discovered by developing writing platforms. Self-publishing physical books, too, is easier than ever. Which might explain why the majority of those frequenting small bookstores express an interest in writing. Not necessarily because they aspire to become a famous author or to write full time, but because they see writing as a means of self-reflection, a healing pastime. Which brings me to Yeonhui’s writing workshop, a favorite with our customers. At the workshop, everyone becomes friends. Participants read their work out loud and listen to the works of others. Laughter and tears are shared. Through that person’s writing, it’s possible to catch a closer glimpse of who they are than even their family or friends have ever seen. And so the workshop writers are drawn more tightly together in shared intimacy. Along with writing, the experience of recording is equally dear to me. Recording is different from writing. Text is only one way of recording; there is also photography, drawing, painting, and collecting things. For instance, writing a journal is one way of keeping a record, but so is taking a picture of the sky every day, collecting receipts, or recording conversations with one’s children. The records I love best are of neighborhoods and cities. As a reader, I particularly enjoy records of how personal histories tell the history of a city, of a certain page in socio-cultural history. From writing and recording, the next logical step is creating one’s own book. More and more people write and draw these days with publication in mind. With side jobs becoming commonplace, books can serve as one’s calling card. Some decry the trend, saying it degrades publishing. However, I agree with Virginia Woolf who said, “Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast.” Take traveling, for instance. One could write about the journey itself, or record one’s impressions of a new place, make a shopping list of the things one bought there, create a scrapbook of photos or postcards, or a map showing all the shops and stops one enjoyed. Rather than writing a thousand things in a secret journal that never sees the light of day, I believe that there is more to be gained by making ten pieces public if you have written fifty. With that in mind, Yeonhui offers workshops on self-publishing, storyboarding picture books, and creating your own postcard book.Literary Experiences in PracticeYeonhui’s customers are a varied bunch. From teens to people over sixty, from locals who live minutes from the store to people who drive several hours to make the trip. There are nearly five hundred bookstores in Seoul, including chain bookstores, used bookstores, and independent bookstores, with around seventy in Mapo-gu alone. Out of all of those bookstores, why do people come to mine? Is it the Hongdae location? Is it because it’s run by a writer? The shop’s vibe? The books I stock? L explains that coming into the shop and meeting other creators, writers, and readers keeps them on their toes. Making the long trip twice a month gives them the motivation to keep on learning, to keep on living. They particularly enjoy meeting people they might not come across normally, saying that it enriches their settled life. P admits to liking the selection of books on offer enough that they wish they could take all of them home. They might not know me personally, but my taste in books is enough to endear me to them. In the end, a bookstore is all about the books. Pretty storefronts are all well and good, but as Arthur Danto says, real beauty comes from stimulating the mind. J struggled at first with the idea of paying to attend a book club. They say, however, that the club introduced them to books they might never have read otherwise, inviting them to think about gender and environmental issues, and giving them a fresh perspective on how to deal with their family issues. Back when the Gangnam Station femicide dragged feminism into the social discourse, countless bookstores around the country read about feminism together. A young man participating in one such event marveled at the questions brought up in the book we were reading, which had never occurred to him before. He went on to recommend the book to colleagues and friends, quizzing them about it over drinks. Their talks and debates were a direct result of his attending a book club. Bookstores not only expand the scope of one’s literary experience, but can aid in self-discovery and personal growth. Which, in turn, leads to new opportunities. K, who participated in a bookmaking workshop at Yeonhui, now gives professional classes of their own on book design. H, who came to Yeonhui as a reader, is now an independent publisher and creator responsible for a host of events. G, a self-published writer, found a partner in illustrator Y, whom they met at the store. B, a frequent customer who amassed a pile of titles on bookstore ownership and completed Yeonhui’s workshop on opening one’s own bookstore, went into business opening a bookstore-cum-bindery in their neighborhood. As for myself, the shop is where I found my co-authors S, a longtime book club member; D, an author who was invited to give a book talk; and M, who came to interview for a job at Yeonhui, with whom I have a new book coming out soon. So as you can see, I’m no different. I went to bookstores first as a reader, and through that experience, grew into a writer and then a bookstore owner. Books have turned me into an exceedingly active person. Reading, by definition, requires an actively participating reader. Video and audio clips play on whether I pay attention to them or not, but books remain forever still unless I turn the page, unless I follow each thought. Books have taught me that every step I make takes me that much further. And so when life gets me down, I read. With each line that I read, I prove that I exist. As a bookstore owner, reader, and writer, this is my take: people who think books are boring just haven’t found the right book yet. If someone claims not to see the point of reading, it’s because they haven’t really had a proper reading experience. Once the mental switch is made that books are fun, or say, useful, one can begin to repeat and expand that experience. And that literary experience, in turn, lights up hidden pockets of happiness in one’s life. Through language, through images for which there are no words, through that which defies any sort of proof. I guarantee that small bookstores will aid you at the beginning of this journey. I, and countless others, have gotten our start and continue to grow that way.Translated by Yoonna ChoKorean Works Mentioned:• Books and Coincidence (Yolimwon Publishing, 2022) 『책과 우연들』 (열림원, 2022)

by Gu Sun-A

[Cover Feature] From Bookshop Enthusiast to Bookshop Owner

I want to start with a confession: I didn’t always like reading. Even into my twenties, I only ever read books for school. But in navigating life and society as an adult, I became overwhelmed with pointless doubt and anxiety—although, as a young adult, it didn’t seem so pointless. I developed insomnia. And then one day, I started going to bookstores to read books. I became a regular at my local bookshop. I even sought out bookstores to visit while on vacation. There was something therapeutic about opening a book and feeling the paper beneath my fingers. It brought me comfort. Sometimes I even imagined that books were letters sent to me from a faraway friend. Before I knew it, I had become a bookshop enthusiast. It’s common for one hobby to lead to another. I attended every event held at my local bookstore, no matter what the occasion. I met authors and fellow bookworms. And through those experiences, I learned to read with greater depth and purpose. Then, a few years ago, I quit my job, escaped to Jeju Island, and started working at a bookshop in Hamdeok-ri. Through interacting every day with other people who loved books, the world of reading became even richer and more tangible. Just a few months back, I left my job and opened my own bookshop in a neighborhood filled with tangerine groves. I named the shop Goyo Letter. All this I did simply because I liked books, because I wanted to be closer to them.Connecting Literature and MusicSome say that physically going to a bookstore to buy your books is inefficient, especially when nowadays you can buy anything with the click of a mouse. So why do some people still visit bookshops? As a store owner, it’s my job to attract customers. But I can’t do that by haphazardly displaying books on shelves. I eventually realized that people come to bookshops for a diversity of stories, and not just those you can find on a page. These days, if someone wants to read a book of poetry, where do they go? I bet for many of us, the last poem we read was one assigned in our high school literature class. Many readers think that poems are too hard to understand. They try to read poems not to appreciate them, but to analyze them. Most people’s first contact with books happens through reading text on a page. But poetry originated from song and, for many centuries, was passed down orally. And yet, few people rack their brains trying to understand the hidden meaning of song lyrics. We just listen to the melody and enjoy ourselves. What if that was how we first came into contact with poetry? It is from this very question that Midsummer Night’s Poetry Reading and Music Concert, a program I started at Goyo Letter, was born. Adults and the elderly far outnumber youth in the neighborhood of Hahyo-dong, Jeju Island, where Goyo Letter is located. Young people here hardly have the time to experience the arts, and even if they wanted to, this region doesn’t have the infrastructure to support it. Thus, Be Locally Lab, located just a stone’s throw from Hanhyo-dong in Harye-ri, was started with the goal to help young people in the countryside experience arts and literature. Last summer, Goyo Letter and Be Locally Lab teamed up to put on Midsummer Night’s Poetry Reading and Music Concert where poets and readers came together to read poetry. We organized the event with the goal of reading Hur Eunsil’s Stories of Recovery to participants, whom we presupposed are “youth living in a time when romance is disappearing.” Stories of Recovery, as its name suggests, is a book of poetry that tells stories of recovery from various points of view. The poems in this collection contain messages of recovery about social and historical issues, including everything from deep personal and interpersonal wounds to major historical events like the Jeju April 3 Uprising to global problems such as the climate crisis. We also read and discussed Hur Eunsil’s other essays and poems on the topic of recovery. It’s not uncommon for bookstores to host poetry reading events. But Midsummer Night’s Poetry Reading and Music Concert distinguishes itself with music. Inspired by the way people make streaming playlists, we made a playlist of music and poetry. Hur picked the music herself. Each song either inspired her to write one of the poems or was what she listened to while writing them. Participants listened to the poet read her poems out loud, after which they listened to its accompanying song. This allowed for the simultaneous creation of two types of experiences: poetic and musical. We also made a separate YouTube playlist under the title “Midsummer Night’s Poetry Reading and Music Concert.” This playlist was comprised of songs that the readers chose after reading Stories of Recovery. We made a QR code and distributed it to participants so they could experience it again on YouTube after the program ended. Singer and songwriter Yang Hyung-uk also performed a song he composed beforehand based on one of the poems read aloud by the author.Scenes from Midsummer Night’s Poetry Reading and Music Concert [. . .] I think I can forgive you I think I can almost write it Why are these two feelings the same? From where the flower has fallen Medicine sprouts At long last I think I can write The name of tender things —Hur Eun-sil, “Story of Recovery 1”Yang Hyung-uk performs at Midsummer Night’s Poetry Reading and Music Concert At first, the listeners, who weren’t familiar with this collection of work, looked as though they had trouble understanding what the poems were about. But as the program went on, they volunteered to read poems out loud and eagerly shared their opinions. One participant, a writer, confessed that they were experiencing writer’s block because they couldn’t forgive someone. But as the program drew to an end, they had a transformative experience. They said, “I think I’m ready to forgive them. I think I’m ready to write again,” echoing one of the poems we had read together. Another participant even said they’d become a fan of Hur’s after the poetry reading. I don’t want people who visit my bookshop just to read poems; I want them to experience poems in various ways, through poetry readings and music, for example. I think that such dynamic, artistic experiences can expand the scope of what it means to experience literature. When you go beyond merely reading a book, you become closer to that work and become interested in reading other works. I wanted to give readers a memory that would remain for a long time after the program. Would such a thing be possible had they read the book of poetry by themselves? Perhaps, but I think I’ve increased the probability of a lasting memory. That day, by gathering in one place to read poetry, listen to music, and share stories, we were able to connect on a deeper level, to each other and to the poetry.Connecting Literature with PhotographyI want to introduce another program that provides different ways to experience literature. The program was created in collaboration with Still Negative Club. At Still Negative Club, people can buy film camera equipment, develop their own film, and share stories about photography. Our collaboration began with a simple question: What would it be like if people could experience literature and photography together? The goal of this program, which we named Reading Photos, was to allow people to transform the way they experienced their photography from “seeing” to “reading.” And then, if possible, we wanted to go one step further and transform that experience again, going from “reading” photography to “writing” photography from their own perspective. The experience of moving visual experiences to reading and writing takes a great deal of literary imagination. My hope was that through this program, readers would discover the points of overlap between photography and literature on their own. In photography, the same scene will look different when photographed from a different angle. Likewise, in literature, individuals living in the same world will express that world through their own unique perspective. Participants were asked to bring a “scene from their life” in the form of a digital file. We developed and printed the photos on site, giving them a physical form, and then linked each photo to a scene from a book we had read. After going around and sharing our impressions, we wrote one sentence about our photo and read them out loud. In this way, a single photo gave birth to an entire story.Scenes from Reading PhotographyExpanding literary experiences and sharing warmthBookstores aren’t simply places to purchase books. We come to bookstores to enjoy and experience books in various ways. The traditional way to appreciate books has been to read them silently. This is still the preferred method for most people. But because of the spread of digital media, we have become used to watching videos and are unable to focus while reading text. Sometimes, books feel like a difficult homework assignment, a chore. And there are many people who feel pressured to read books, not because they want to enjoy experiencing literature, but because they think that’s the only way to become “cultured.” For these people, bookstores can be a stepping stone that connects and brings them closer to literature. And we at Goyo Letter are helping them do that, one step at a time. I want to help people feel close to literature through programs that connect books with more familiar forms of art, like music and photography, and I want to let people know that reading texts isn’t the only way to experience literature. In Jinwoo Hwon Lee’s Don’t Think Us So Desperate, which was introduced to participants at Reading Poetry, there is a picture of a large truck driving along a road at night. The title of the photograph is “The Sight of One Person’s Night Passing By.” By introducing this work, a poem comprised of only a title and a picture, I wanted to show participants that, just like how there is no rule that states a picture can’t become a poem, people have the freedom to express their thoughts in ways unique to them. We embodied the literary experience by connecting pictures with books and unraveling their stories. The experience of crossing genres shows that literary experiences are closer to everyday life than we think, allowing people to look at their daily lives through a literary perspective. In the end, expanding our literary experiences is the same as pushing the frontiers of our own world. “Connecting people through books” and “Sharing each other’s tranquility”—these are Goyo Letter’s mottos. In an age where humans are being replaced and virtualized by AI, it’s possible that we might lose entirely the need to meet other people. But the further the world is digitalized, the greater the need for analogue forms of art and life, for standing across from real people, making eye contact, and exchanging warmth. When we read physical books, we experience sensations in our hands. I hope that readers who turn the pages of a real book will feel the need to come to Goyo Letter to meet the person behind the pages. At Goyo Letter, I call the books I’ve read companions. They are here to help. Every day, I come here to look after my companions, to take care of the bookstore, and to maintain the tranquility, the Goyo, that resides here. If you visit this place, I hope you discover your wholeness in this tranquility. I want you to feel your whole self, just as it is, without the need to prove yourself to anyone. And with that feeling of wholeness, I hope you find a book that will become a friend. I hope this book stays with you for a long time, that it lets you know you aren’t alone, that we’re always by your side. Translated by Sean Lin HalbertKorean Works Mentioned:• “The Sight of One Person’s Night Passing By,” Don’t Think Us So Desperate (Siindongne, 2018) 「한 사람의 밤이 지나가는 광경」, 『우리 너무 절박해지지 말아요』 (시인동네, 2018)• “Story of Recovery 1,” Stories of Recovery (Munhakdongne, 2022)「회복기 1」, 『회복기』 (문학동네, 2022)

by Han Min-jeong

[Essay] Let the Face Be (Re)Born

Since Yi Won’s debut in 1992, an intense set of descriptors have clung to her poetry—terms like “cyborg sensibility,” “electronic desert,” “monitor kinder.” These descriptions were an attempt to explain the shock that her unfamiliar imagination sent through the Korean poetic establishment with the scenes in her first collection, When They Ruled the Earth, of people strolling down the street with wires and plugs hanging from their bodies like umbilical cords (“In the Street”). Yet even as they define her poetry in such terms, critics have also taken interest in those aspects of her poetry which break free of this definition. Such critics worry that this imaginative intensity obscures the fact that Yi’s poetry is “a kind of ontological question on a more fundamental level.”1) These concerns ring true because Yi has always been immersed in the question of being human. As the electronic desert is no longer the central subject of her poetry, we can see that what interests her is not digital civilization, but ways of life in the here and now that we inhabit. The issue that has interested her for so long, it seems, is how people live in a changing world and how we as humans respond to these changes. Here the motif that draws attention is the face. Perhaps because of the intensity of her other imagery, the face is rarely discussed by critics, but it appears prominently and consistently across her work. Notably, we often find faces in the process of disappearing or having already disappeared. Take, for example, the faces in “Self-Portrait” from her second collection, A Thousand Moons Rising Over the River of Yahoo! Even now, more than twenty years later, they form a remarkable and frequently discussed self-portrait. As I took the mobile phone my face dropped and cracked I picked up a shard and slit my right wrist A twisted vein splits and the sun drops to the ground. [. . .] As soon as I turned on the computer the 17 inch monitor sucked up my face like a vacuum cleaner My eyes nose mouth all sucked in together and only the skin left sliding down over the edge of the desk I pick up my lukewarm skin and hang it next to the new calendar These vivid descriptions—a cracked phone screen as a shattered face, a face sucked into a computer monitor—are the poet’s distinctive way of capturing human life under the domination of digital civilization as we become stuck to our phones like a single body, sharing nearly all our information with them, our senses lost entirely to digital devices. What’s interesting here is that the poet expresses this situation as the destruction and loss of the face. The broken shard of the human face ultimately attacks itself and brings about the end of the world as “the sun drops to the ground.” Why does Yi place the face at the center of this frightening imaginary? What does the poet mean to convey with this image of a faceless person with only skin left over? The meaning of the lost face still eludes us. Scenes of lost and damaged faces appear in The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, where the face is torn to pieces and devoured by bread (“The Mirror Eats My Face”), and The History of an Impossible Page, where the face slips out of itself (“Face Escapes Face”) and faceless bodies walk (“Your Left Cheek”). In other words, each collection offers slight variations, but disappearing and destroyed faces are a persistent theme. Why does the poet explore the face in such depth? To borrow the words of Giorgio Agamben, “only human beings have a face.”2) Agamben quotes Cicero’s observation that the face can exist in no animal other than humans to establish the face as a mark of human existence. From this, we gather that the loss of the face is not only the loss of that which is human but further, the loss of the human being itself, and a world in which the face is lost is a world in which humanity is lost. That is, Yi’s self-portrait as the faceless speaker of the poem points to a changing world which strips us of our humanity.3) The faces depicted in the poet’s 2017 collection Let Love Be Born, however, reveal a somewhat different aspect. While the speaker of earlier poems typically perceives her own disappearing face, this collection finds her describing the ruined, erased faces of countless others. Here lies the Sewol ferry disaster. When the children return with faces crushed by the sea, when those faces must be covered in “a white sheet,” when we become numb or try to avoid the memory of the children—our minds “covered in darkness” (“Night and Day”)—Yi writes of their disappearing faces. To return to Agamben, the children’s faces have at some point become the ultimate site of politics. The most affecting element here is that the face of the speaker writing about the lost children’s faces is also lost. In “Self-Portrait with Beak,” the speaker is “only beak / and neck / and below nothing but / vast horizon.” In other words, nothing is left of the speaker’s face but a beak. write like slitting a pale throat long beak, break through the flesh let us walk again from the very end (the place where words come out) should we call it the railing it is lucky we can still write let us not lose writing  cut across smelling of burning meat only beak and neck and below nothing but vast horizon The first thing we notice in this poem is the hopelessness of the speaker, who realizes she no longer leads a human life after experiencing the children’s deaths. But one of the poet’s essays, “Don’t Show the Bloodied Hand” from The Smallest Discovery, in which she describes the face of Francis Bacon, suggests there may be more than hopelessness here. She writes that the reason “[Bacon’s] face fills the air with the uncontrollable scent of existence” is that “his eyes, nose, and ears are unerasable,” and thus hold his face up “until the bitter end.”4) In the self-portrait above, is the speaker’s mouth the last thing barely holding up the rest of her face, and with it her humanity? Nothing of her face remains but the mouth, yet she writes and talks about the faces of the faceless, remembering and grieving them. In that sense, this act reads like a desperate struggle to lead a human life. But why does the speaker grow this beak long enough to “break through the flesh”? Of course, this can be read pessimistically as the loss of the speaker’s humanity—the mouth is all that’s left of the face, and even the mouth is a bird’s beak. However, the poet has written elsewhere of how “the beak cracks the arc the lips can’t” as she chooses the “hard and sharp” bird’s beak in a mythic rebirth, hatching from an egg (“VirginEyes Birth”). Maybe if she uses this hard, sharp beak to write of those lost faces, the beak won’t slip from the children as it picks up their faces and writes about each of them one by one. This bird’s beak is like the “long tongue” that “breaks through the horizon,” the most useful tool to “pull [the children] from” the darkness (“Pocket Knife”) and to maintain, ironically, the speaker’s humanity. In another poem, the speaker “Walked along the hills There were no hills but I walked the hills Who knows when a hill might emerge” (“This Is a Love Song”). Like this walk through the nonexistent hills expecting a hill to emerge, the speaker writes with her beak to find the children’s faces even though they are all gone. Starting again “from the very end [. . .] where words come out” and leaning on this beak as precarious as a “railing,” she risks her own face—no, her very humanness—to write about the lost faces and recover her humanity. Are these not the actions of someone who believes fully in the power of language? When she busies her beaks to bring back those vanished faces, we can no longer say that her face is lost. “In the vanishing, empty air called face” (“Red and Lips, Play if out of Step,” from I Am My Affectionate Zebra), this self-portrait with long beak is Yi’s new face. In her poems we come face to face with the most human of faces, although with the beak of a bird. And this face goes on asking us to lead a human life.Translated by Seth ChandlerKorean Works Mentioned:• When They Ruled the Earth (Moonji, 1996)『그들이 지구를 지배했을 때』 (문학과지성사, 1996)• A Thousand Moons Rising Over the River of Yahoo! (Moonji, 2001)『야후!의 강물에 천 개의 달이 뜬다』 (문학과지성사, 2001)• The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (tr. E. J. Koh, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Zephyr Press, 2021)『세상에서 가장 가벼운 오토바이』 (문학과지성사, 2007)• The History of an Impossible Page, (Moonji, 2012) 『불가능한 종이의 역사』 (문학과지성사, 2012)• Let Love Be Born, (Moonji, 2017)『사랑은 탄생하라』 (문학과지성사, 2017)• The Smallest Discovery, (Minumsa, 2017) 『최소의 발견』, (민음사, 2017)• I Am My Affectionate Zebra, (Hyundae Munhak, 2018)『나는 나의 다정한 얼룩말』 (현대문학, 2018)• “VirginEyes Birth,” Literature and Society vol.134 (Moonji, 2021 Summer)「난생처음 설화」, (문학과사회 2021년 여름호, 2012)1) Ham Donkyun, “Impossible Elevation, Cliffside Flower Tree,” Afterword to The History of an Impossible Page, by Yi Won (Seoul: Moonji, 2012), 152.2) Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now: The Epidemic as Politics, trans. Valeria Dani (London: ERIS, 2021), 86.3) This point also helps us to understand the shadow and mirror that appear repeatedly, just like the face, in Yi’s poetry. While the shadow, which must clearly bear a distorted face, acts as a device to reveal those aspects of humanity which possess faint tinges of human being (“Shadows,” The History of an Impossible Page), the mirror is a means to look further into the face (“For the Mirror,” The World’s Lightest Motorcycle).4)Yi Won, “Don’t Show the Bloodied Hand,” The Smallest Discovery (Seoul: Minumsa, 2017), 153.

by Song Hyun-ji