The Weight of Korean Lit
A few years ago, I realized that half of all the books I was reading were Korean novels translated into Japanese (since—no surprise—few are translated into English). The characters seemed to be battling misogyny, the burden of school loans, and family pressures in a way that gave these books a punch. Many characters seemed to be weighed down by 50 years of history, and yet they were still full of verve. A book by translator 斎藤真理子 (Mariko Saito), 「韓国文学の中心にあるもの」 (The Core of Korean Literature) puts all of this into historical context. And she was such a good evangelist that for the next two years, I spent most of my free time and discretionary income studying Korean (and thus the two-year blank here), with the goal of one day reading the books she cites. Although my pace has slowed down, I’m still working to reach my personal definition of fluency (enough ease with the language that you can just grab a book and read while brushing your teeth or waiting for the water to boil).
According to Saito, much Korean literature addresses the wounds left by violence in all its forms and the possibility of recovery. Many authors see the examination of South Korea’s history as a personal mission that is essential for the present and the future. Saito backs up this claim with chapters covering key events in South Korea and the books that grapple with them. In addition to the South Korean War, she writes about the feminist movement, which gained momentum in 2016 when a woman was murdered seemingly at random in a public restroom at Gangnam Station in Seoul. The anger this sparked found expression for many in Cho Nam-joo’s Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, published that same year. The Sewol Ferry accident in 2014 also forced a reckoning among artists. This disaster, which resulted in 304 deaths, including 250 high school students, and provoked the Candlelight Revolution that led to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye, was so traumatic for the nation that many artists felt powerless, robbed of all means of expression. Author Kim Ae-ran said that not just individual words, but grammar itself had lost all meaning. Saito also writes about the books inspired by the IMF crisis in 1997 that resulted in mass layoffs and bankruptcies, and the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980, the student-led democracy movement in which the military government beat, tortured and killed students (600-2,300 students are estimated to have died).
This gives an idea of how fast change has been in South Korea, and the pace accelerated after the Seoul Olympics in 1988. In an interview, Saito quotes Soyeon Jeong, a science fiction author who said that she thinks the reason South Korea’s sci-fi is so interesting and popular is because South Koreans have gone through such head-spinning changes in their lifetimes that it is as if they are living in a sci-fi novel themselves. After all, it was only in 1988 that the military dictatorship was replaced by a democratically-elected government, but before the public could even adjust, the IMF crisis plunged the country into an economic emergency in 1997. Measures to modernize the economy and education system shook up the traditional ideals governing relationships between parents and children and husbands and wives. Adapting is not as simple as a software upgrade and the resulting struggles come across in many novels (a good example is Concerning My Daughter by Hye-Jin Kim [translated into English by Jamie Chang]). Change has been more gradual in Japan, but I think Japanese readers saw many aspects of their own society in Korean novels.
This has spurred a dramatic increase in Korean literature translation and publishers in recent years in Japan, with entire bookstores devoted to Korean novels both in the original and translation. The readers are such a diverse group that it is impossible to generalize about why Korean novels are so popular, but Saito surmises that they provide a foothold in a world that is all too often irrational, violent and confusing. She points to 2016-18 as the period in which Korean novels really found devoted readers in Japan. This was a period in which a series of incidents made Japanese women wonder whether structural issues, rather than personal responsibility, were responsible for the obstacles they’d faced in their own lives. In 2016, a young mother unable to get a daycare spot for her child wrote what came to be known as the 「日本死ね」（Japan, fuck off）post on Twitter and it struck such a chord that it was even discussed in the Diet. Then there was journalist Shiori Ito’s civil suit against a well-known and politically-connected TV journalist for sexual assault in 2017 (please take the time to read Jake Adelstein’s writing on this, or Ito’s own book, Black Box, translated by Allison Markin Powell). This was followed by sexual harassment allegations against Junichi Fukuda, a vice minister in the Finance Ministry, in April 2018 and, a few months later, the news that Japanese medical schools, including the prestigious Tokyo Medical University, had routinely manipulated entrance exams to favor male candidates by making them more difficult for women. So when Kim Ji-Young: Born 1982 was published in Japanese translation in 2018, it found an eager audience among women who then went on to seek out more Korean novels.
Korean novels have something –a purposeful energy, a deep engagement with past and present injustices—that I don’t always find in Japanese novels unless I purposely seek it out. After reading Saito’s book, I could see behind the lines on the page and recognize the family dynamics shaped by economic struggle and the societal roles determined by age and gender, even in Korean novels billed as romances or coming-of-age stories. In an essay in the TLS entitled “Japanese Questions of the Soul,” Roland Kelt describes Japanese literature in this way: “Japanese stories focus on the individual adrift in seas of excessive convenience and information obsessed with personal not political identities, and questions of the soul. … On television, in film, anime, manga and literature, what matters most is the individual’s place in the world, and their ability to express and challenge that place imaginatively.” Something about that rings true to me, and I don’t want to overgeneralize. Mostly, I am just glad I get to read both.
Recent reading:
「わたしがカフェをはじめた日」 ホホホ座 (The Day I Started a Café, by Hohoza)
This was written by the Kenji Yamashita, who ran the famous Gake Shobo bookstore in Kyoto until he closed it in 2015 and opened Hohoza as both a bookstore and publishing company. This book is a series of interviews with women who opened cafes in the Kyoto area. The creativity and hard work involved in running cafes really came through. Some of these women worked day jobs to support themselves and opened their cafes in the late afternoon until the cafe generated enough profit. Yoshimoto Banana wrote a very moving afterword to the book about her fear that these places are disappearing: “someone goes about living her life, makes good friends, starts a shop, produces food she think is delicious, barely makes a profit but keeps on plugging away washing, polishing, making good food, brewing coffee, sweating, just about breaking even, but creating a unique space no one has ever seen before, putting on the music they love, just continuing to live—the sheer freedom of this, the darkness and the heaviness of this freedom.”
「うそコンシェルジュ」 津村記久子 (Concierge for Lies, by Kikuko Tsumura)
These were fabulous short stories, not a dud in the mix. They were less cynical and dark than There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job (translated by Polly Barton) but with the same quiet humor. In the title story, the main character gets roped in by her niece and then her boss into coming up with lies that will get people out of difficult situations, and then they become involved in the set piece she creates for the next lie she is asked to produce (and it really does become a production, with everyone playing a part).
「アパートたまうら」 砂村かいり
I usually don’t read love stories because the prose can get too purple, but this was nearly perfect, as long as you don’t mind being reminded of the embarrassing things we all did at age 27. Sako, who is obsessive about cleanliness, falls in love with her neighbor, and the novel consists of their near-misses and misunderstandings and that giddiness when it all goes right.