Aside from his signature story, “Sonagi” (1952; usually translated as “Shower” or “Cloudburst”), the short fiction of Hwang Sunwŏn (1915–2000) has suffered from popular and critical neglect. This may not be surprising, given that Hwang published more than 100 stories in a career extending from the 1930s to the 1980s, in an educational environment in which literature tends to be commodified and compartmentalized for easy digestion by students. Thus, apart from the occasional story anthologized in a middle- or high-school reader, Hwang’s output in this genre, arguably the most sophisticated and accomplished in modern Korean literary history, is not especially well known among general readers in his home country, especially in comparison with the works of household names such as Pak Wansŏ, Yi Munyŏl, Hwang Sŏgyŏng, and Cho Chŏngnae. Moreover, in a literary culture whose scholars and critics (often one and the same) have tended to prize fiction that directly engages with the many upheavals of modern Korean history, Hwang is often pigeonholed as an exemplar of a distinctly Korean lyricism and romanticism. On that basis he does not compare well with writers judged to possess a “historical consciousness,” who use literature as a means of socializing a younger generation of readers to the harsh realities involved in Korea’s transition from a traditional agrarian economy to (in the case of South Korea) one of the most high-tech nations in the world. He is seen by many as a bit old-fashioned.
Readers of the stories in this volume, though, will hear an author who is not only a gifted storyteller but also strikingly contemporary in terms of his thematic concerns, sophisticated worldview, and multifaceted narrative style. This book comprises three of Hwang’s eight story collections, works written in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, respectively. Composed in the late 1930s while the author was a student at Waseda University in Tokyo, the thirteen stories in The Pond (Nŭp) show early indications of Hwang’s eventual mastery of the short-story form, especially his storytelling skill, the variety of his narratives, and the dualities in his worldview. Some of the tales are modernist narratives set in the city of Pyongyang (and in one case, Tokyo), others are starkly realistic sketches set in the countryside, and still others are surreal portraits that hint at Korea’s anomalous position as a colony of imperial Japan from 1910 to 1945. A precocious fictional voice relates conflicts within the family and between the sexes, describes a colonial society in the process of modernization, and offers glimpses of a sovereign nation emasculated by colonization. The Pond first appeared in book form in 1940 as Hwang Sunwŏn tanp’yŏnjip (Hwang Sunwŏn story collection), at a time when publication in Korean was becoming increasingly difficult in colonial Korea. Although Hwang was only in his early twenties, he was already a published writer, having issued the poetry collections Wayward Songs (Pangga) and Curios (Koltongp’um).
The Dog of Crossover Village (Mongnŏmi maŭl ŭi kae) was published in Seoul in 1948, the second of Hwang’s story collections to be published but the third in order of composition, after Wild Geese (Kirŏgi, 1951). Hwang wrote these seven stories during the chaotic post-World War II period that in South Korea is termed the Post-Liberation Space (Haebang konggan), a name that attests to the sudden removal of the Japanese colonial overlords after August 15, 1945, and all of them except the short “My Father” (Abŏji, 1947) reflect the turbulent social and political circumstances of those years. Hwang himself had only recently, in 1946, moved with his family to what is now South Korea, leaving forever his centuries-old ancestral home in the north (a fate shared by hundreds of thousands of Koreans). An empathic and curious writer, Hwang in this collection proved that he could write realistically about contemporary problems and, more important, about the people affected by those problems—without sacrificing his trademark command of narrative and dialogue or his insights into human psychology. That is to say, each of the Dog of Crossover Village stories is more than just an account of a contemporary issue. “Booze” (Sul, 1945), the first, is about a struggle among Koreans for control of a distillery recently abandoned by its Japanese owners, but it is also about the unraveling of a good man attempting to remain decent amid an increasingly frenzied scramble for position in post-Liberation society.1 “Toad” (Tukŏbbi, 1946) is a grimly realistic portrayal of the desperate housing shortage in Seoul shortly after Liberation as hundreds of thousands of refugees streamed back from Manchuria, Japan, and elsewhere, but it also shows us the ordeal of a man compelled to compromise his principles in order to feed his starving family. Hwang, who upon resettling in the South with his family lived in the Samch’ŏng-dong neighborhood described in this story, was surely sensitive to the plight of his fellow refugees. “Home” (Chip, 1946) portrays the new landowning class in post-Liberation South Korea and the conflict occasioned by their social mobility in a traditionally class-conscious and hierarchical society, but it also examines the psychology of addiction—in this case, addiction to gambling. “Bulls” (Hwangso tŭl, 1946) deals with a peasant uprising against the Korean constables who served the Japanese colonizers in Korea, but it is also a coming-of-age story related by a naïve narrator who knows that his father and the other men of the village are engaged in something dangerous and is compelled to follow this herd under cover of darkness as they advance on the county seat. “To Smoke a Cigarette” (Tambae han tae p’iul tongan, 1947) highlights the difficulties of Korean residents of Japan who attempt to resettle in Korea after Liberation, as well as the weakening of interpersonal relationships as people migrate from the ancestral village to the big city, whose denizens grow indifferent to the suffering of others (the protagonist’s concern for the difficulties of the returnees from Japan lasts about as long as it takes him to smoke a cigarette). The title story (1947) is usually taught in Korea as a story of the ultimate survival of Koreans amid adversity (represented by the progeny of Whitey, described at the end), but it may be read just as usefully as an allegory of Korean fears of outsiders (whether the Japanese colonizers or the more recent occupants, the USSR and the United States, who divided Korea at the 38th parallel upon Liberation in 1945 in order to accept the surrender of Japanese forces in Korea) as well as a case study of stigmatization as a means of social and political control. The aforementioned “My Father” is atypical of the collection in that it looks back in history—to the March 1, 1919, Independence Movement in Korea—more than it does to contemporary issues, but it shares with the other stories a distinctive (in this case autobiographical) narrative.
Lost Souls (Irŏbŏrin saram tŭl), the sixth of Hwang’s story collections, was published in 1958. Previously, between January 1956 and May 1957, the five pieces therein had appeared in literary journals.2 Among Hwang’s eight volumes of short stories, Lost Souls is thematically the most unified. The primary focus is moral transgression and the fate of an outcast in a highly structured society. The stories take place variously in the hinterlands of the Korean peninsula, on the southeast coast, and on the volcanic island of Cheju. Three are directly connected with the Korean War, the catastrophes of which Hwang and his fellow countrymen had only recently survived. Two concern elopement, one of them—the title story—unfolding with all the certainty of Greek tragedy. As always, Hwang’s storytelling skill and ear for speech are everywhere in evidence. In “Deathless” (Pulgasari, 1955), Komi and Koptani defy their parents’ wishes by eloping. In doing so they are committing a moral transgression that will likely result in their estrangement from their families and their ancestral village. Here Hwang is setting the stage for the title story of the volume. Just as Hester in The Scarlet Letter must wear a scarlet A for the rest of her life, Sŏgi will be forever marked by his missing ear as he and Suni begin an outcast life in which they are driven farther and farther from their ancestral home; not even nature welcomes them. The protagonist of “Pibari” (Pibari, 1956), a young diving woman on Cheju Island, is one of Hwang’s most complex female characters. This pibari (the word is Cheju dialect for ch’ŏnyŏ, “maiden”) is an outcast for two reasons: her act of fratricide and her sexuality. In “Voices” (Sori, 1957), the last story, moral transgression is centered not in a single person but in war. Tŏkku, the protagonist, becomes hardened to violence and death while serving in the Korean War, his trauma paralleled by physical injury—the loss of an eye. An industrious farmer before the war, he becomes drunk and irresponsible afterward and before long is a virtual outcast in his village, feared (as is the pibari) by the same neighbors who earlier welcomed him home from the battlefront.
Hwang is both a modern and a traditional writer. He is modern in his familiarity with Freudian theory, literary modernism, and contemporary trends in both Western and East Asian literature (he read contemporary Japanese authors in Japanese and especially liked Shiga Naoya, and read authors such as Lu Xun, Ernest Hemingway, and Albert Camus in translation). He is traditional in his storytelling technique. Hwang made no secret of the debt he owed his elders, at whose feet he heard many a tale as a boy (“The Dog of Crossover Village” may have been one such story), and he acknowledged as well the veterans whose accounts inform his novel Trees on a Slope (Namu tŭl pit’al e sŏda, 1960) and his several stories that take place against the background of the Korean War.3 Among Hwang’s several narrative approaches, the one that perhaps best reflects the performance of the traditional storyteller is his use of indirect speech, utilized to especially good effect in the title story of The Pond. Also distinctive is his tendency to reserve the use of first-person narratives for the autobiographical stories, such as “My Father,” that constitute about one tenth of his short-fiction oeuvre. Finally, it should come as no surprise that Hwang was a careful writer, observing a regular schedule and not infrequently returning to a story to edit and revise for second publication (the ending of “The Dog of Crossover Village” as it was first published in March 1948, in the literary journal Kaebyŏk, differs somewhat from the ending of the story as it appears in Hwang’s Collected Works, published in the early 1980s4). The result is a bracing experience for readers who prefer their fiction short, and especially for readers of modern Korean fiction in English translation, which until very recently has tended to showcase works with compelling themes but not necessarily commensurate narrative skill.
The translators wish to thank the editors of the following, in which earlier versions of four of the stories in this volume appeared: Shadows of a Sound: Stories by Hwang Sunwŏn, published by Mercury House (“Mantis”); Asian Pacific Quarterly (“The Dog of Crossover Village”); A Man, published by Jimoondang (“The Dog of Crossover Village” and “Pibari”); and Korean Literature Today (“Deathless”).
NOTES
1. Hwang, often waggish when asked to discuss his stories, told me that he wrote this story because he liked to drink (interview with Hwang Sunwŏn, April 3, 1997).
2. Of these five stories, one, “Mountains” (San, 1956), is not included here. The translation appears in Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction, rev. and exp. ed., trans. Marshall R. Pihl and Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2007).
3. Trees on a Slope, trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005). See the afterword to this volume, “The War Stories of Hwang Sunwŏn.”
4. The texts used for the translations in this volume are those in The Collected Works of Hwang Sunwŏn (Hwang Sunwŏn chŏnjip) (Seoul: Munhak kwa chisŏng sa): vol. 1, The Pond (Nŭp) and Wild Geese (Kirŏgi), 1980; vol. 2, The Dog of Crossover Village (Mongnŏmi maŭl ŭi kae) and Clowns (Kogyesa), 1981; vol. 3, Cranes (Hak) and Lost Souls (Irŏbŏrin saram tŭl), 1981.