A great deal of Korean literature remains inaccessible to English-speaking readers, and while the situation has begun to improve, the amount of modern fiction being translated conveys only a small sense of the very lively contemporary South Korean literary scene (and essentially none of the admittedly well-masked North Korean scene).
Long overshadowed and often dominated by China and Japan, few of the classics from Korea have been able to compete with those of its neighbors for foreign interest. Three Generations (1931, English 2005), by Yom Sang-seop (1897–1963), one of the leading writers from the time of the Japanese occupation, is one of the few novels of that period that is available in English, and it offers a good picture of Korean life during those years. The Japanese occupation, which lasted for most of the first half of the twentieth century, and then the calamitous Korean War that split the nation also limited the development of a literary culture. Only since the rapid economic expansion in South Korea that started in the 1960s has Korean literature truly begun to assert itself.
Beginning in the 1960s, a system organized around the family-dominated chaebol (business conglomerates) fueled South Korea’s tremendous economic growth. Cho Se-hŭi’s (b. 1942) The Dwarf (1978, English 2006) is the most significant work of fiction dealing with the consequences of this rapid social and economic change. The linked stories entail characters from all walks of life affected by the shift to an industrial economy and the headlong rush to embrace global capitalism.
The classic novel cycle that Park Kyong-ni (1926–2008) began in 1969 and continued to publish over the next quarter century covers much of modern Korean history. The first tenth or so of the completed work was published in English in 1996 as Land, which was then reissued in 2008 as Toji I, along with a second volume. An earlier work, the family saga The Curse of Kim’s Daughters (1962, English 2004), set in a fishing town in the first half of the twentieth century, is a more manageable size, though it has a similarly deliberate pace. But it is the epic Toji cycle, with its immense sweep, that is Park’s most remarkable achievement, even though it is only partially accessible to English-speaking readers.
Yi Ch’ŏngjun’s (1939–2008) Your Paradise (1976, English 2004, previously translated as This Paradise of Yours, 1986) is an allegorical novel taking place in the 1960s on an island leper colony. It describes the efforts of a new director to instill a sense of self-respect and worth into the inhabitants, as well as to join the island to the mainland, and how he meets with considerable resistance. This is an entertaining work about a closed society with its own special rules and habits, shaken up by the new administration. Even though parts of the allegory can seem almost painfully obvious—such as the plan to connect the island with the mainland—Yi does not allow everything to fall easily into place. It is a novel about failures, even when it is clear what the right thing to do is. More important, Yi tells a very good story.
Yi Munyol (b. 1948) is one of the leading contemporary Korean authors, and his novella about adolescence,
Our Twisted Hero (1987, English 2001), is a Korean version of a tale that in its broader outlines could be set anywhere, the cult of personality that develops around a charismatic schoolboy. Yi’s biographical novel about the nineteenth-century poet Kim Pyong-yon,
The Poet (1991, English 1995), is completely different in tone, but both works subtly address the issues of the authoritarian Korean regime in power when he wrote them.
The liberalization of the South Korean government in 1987 gave writers greater latitude in what they could publish. Even so, Hwang Sok-Yong’s (b. 1943) visit to North Korea in 1989 was controversial and forced the author to spend several years abroad in voluntary exile. His novel The Guest (2001, English 2005) is set in the present but focuses on the still festering wounds of the Korean War, taking its protagonist to present-day North Korea. The Old Garden (2000, English 2009) is a fascinating look at the recent transformation of South Korea, even though this is just the backdrop for what is basically a love story. The main character was imprisoned in the wake of the 1980 Kwangju uprising and was released eighteen years later. He then learns from the diaries of his now dead lover about what he missed in the years while he was in prison. Although it is not available in translation, Hwang’s much more circumspect ten-volume epic Chang Kil-san, written between 1974 and 1984, a period of strict censorship, is a historical bandit tale that enjoys continued popularity and is noteworthy because it is one of the few modern Korean works that have been successful (and tolerated) in both South and North Korea.
Jang-Soon Sohn’s (b. 1935) A Floating City on the Water (1999, English 2004) is a curious South-meets-North novel that begins with a murder confession in 2014 before revealing something far more sensational that happened twenty years earlier when a South Korean and a North Korean met in Paris and fell in love. It is not ideology that forced them apart, but something equally divisive, and as with the two Koreas, the separation is not absolute but instead intimately connects them.
The very popular
Young-ha Kim (b. 1968), who already has a large body of work, will likely become the most translated author of his generation. The narrator of his novel
I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (1996, English 2007) is very detached and leads and pushes people toward suicide.
I Have the Right to Destroy Myself is an existential novel of contemporary Korea with all the modern frills. Here the civil war and the military rule that had long overshadowed civilian life have been superseded by a culture and economy integrated into the global community, which nevertheless brings with it similarly fundamental concerns of identity and one’s place in the world. With its cosmopolitan awareness, Kim’s book is a transnational work, but it also reflects its specific locales, the clearest example to date of a Korean work of fiction that fits neatly in the international library. His more recent novel
Your Republic Is Calling You (2006, English 2010) is a fascinating take on the North–South split and the Korean psyche. The main character, known as Kim Ki-yong, is a sleeper spy who infiltrated South Korea as a student. For two decades he has lived as a South Korean, with a wife and daughter, and in recent years he lost all contact with his northern handlers. The novel presents a day in the life of the family—the day when Kim suddenly receives an e-mail summoning him back to the North. Mixing everyday routine with these extraordinary circumstances allows the author to present issues of Korean identity and culture, as well as the divergent paths of South and North, in a novel that also works as a spy thriller.
Kyung-Sook Shin’s (b. 1963) tale of a family reflecting on a mother’s sacrifices, Please Look After Mom (2008, English 2011), is crushingly sentimental but certainly strikes many chords and has proved to be enormously successful, both in South Korea and abroad. The very popular author’s I’ll Be Right There (2010, English 2014) takes place in the 1980s and early 1990s and is a similarly broad exploration of family and personal connections.
NORTH KOREA
North Korea is one of the most isolated nations in the world, its official
juche ideology of self-reliance precluding almost all foreign contact. Little of the literature from the country has leaked out over the decades, and almost none has been translated into English.
Han Sŏrya (1900–ca. 1970) was one of the leading exponents of what was in effect the mandated socialist realist school of writing. His novella
Jackals (1951) is available in B. R. Myers’s study
Han Sŏrya and North Korean Literature (1994), which itself gives a useful overview of North Korean literature. More recent examples of fiction from the self-styled Democratic People’s Republic can be found only in anthologies, notably
Literature from the “Axis of Evil” (2006), which includes an excerpt from the most discussed North Korean novel of recent times,
Hong Seok-jung’s (b. 1941) historical novel
Hwang jini (2002). This is one of the rare pieces of North Korean fiction that was also published in the South, where it was quite successful. If any North Korean novel were to be translated in full into English, it would be this one.
KEEP IN MIND
• The great Ko Un (b. 1933) is South Korea’s foremost modern poet, but he has also written some fiction. Little Pilgrim (1991, English 2005) is his major prose work. Loosely based on an ancient Buddhist sutra, the novel describes the spiritual journey of a young boy and his encounters with fifty-three beings who guide him toward enlightenment. For a time, Ko Un was a Buddhist monk, and Little Pilgrim is somewhat weighed down by its spiritual earnestness but is still well worthwhile.
• Perhaps Choi In-hoon’s (Ch’oe In-hun, b. 1936) best novel is The Square (1961, English 1985, 2014), which examines the Korean War and the North–South split. His A Grey Man (1963, English 1988) also is worth reading.
• Two novellas by Lee Oyoung (b. 1934) are collected in The General’s Beard (English 2002). The title piece (1967) is a variation on the detective story involving a novel also entitled The General’s Beard. The second novella, Phantom Legs (1969), is a story in which a work by Stendhal functions as a constant frame of reference and counterpart.
• Jang Eun-jin’s (b. 1976) No One Writes Back (2009, English 2013) is a well-crafted and moving road novel that slowly reveals itself to be more than it initially seems.
• The collection of three longer stories by Ch’oe Yun (b. 1953), There a Petal Silently Falls (English 2008), addresses some of the major Korean issues: the 1980 Kwangju uprising in one story and the consequences of the divided state in another.
• Lee Seung-U’s (b. 1959) The Reverse Side of Life (1992, English 2005) is a book about a writer putting together a book about another writer. Its approach is interesting and presents a good picture of Korea.
Ironically, the most insightful fictional portrayals of North Korea come from writers working outside its borders, such as Hwang Sok-Yong’s The Guest. Hyejin Kim’s “novel of North Korea,” Jia (2007), is a workmanlike effort with good local color, especially in its depiction of everyday life after the death of Kim Il Sung in 1994. Perhaps the most appealing works set in North Korea, however, are the pseudonymous James Church’s quite convincing Inspector O novels, beginning with A Corpse in the Koryo (2006), the mystery genre again proving particularly accommodating to the presentation of the foreign and unfamiliar.