Therefore, you are there, 

Yet, you are there,

However, you are there,

Nevertheless, you are there,

And, you are there.

The Chronicle is the fourth short story collection by Han Yujoo, whose repetitive experiments in “writing and deleting and writing and deleting” have established a unique literary world. Han Yujoo’s writing reminds us of an unequivocal mode: a story woven with words and sentences in repetition, enumeration, negation, and reversion; a step toward failure, with a full awareness of the impossibility of a perfect meaning. In this book, the author again squanders and exhausts language. A collection of eight stories from 2014 to 2018, The Chronicle attests to the records of solidarity after “we” experienced some unnamable events together and the paths Han Yujoo has taken as a writer.

In “In the Summer of That Year, We Were,” a story of four people sharing an office, the readers are to discover the “we” of today. “We” are rotting rather than aging. “We” are neither happy nor unhappy. “We” only exchange shallow questions, not wanting to see the true face of each other. “We” pay taxes and the national health insurance thinking that contributes to society. Sometimes, “we” joke about how the indirect taxes on lottery tickets, cigarettes, and drinks should also be considered a kind of social contribution. In this story with more than a few dozen mentions of suicide, “we” are “still, in general, in any case, on average, or even above average, enjoying ourselves.” “We” want and also don’t want to die. “We” sometimes wonder if this is really all there is to it, but still hope to age with nothing happened to “us.”

Where is a “concrete self”? In The Chronicle, Han Yujoo restlessly asks and answers herself in search of a concrete self, someone/something that once existed and disappeared. All eight stories in The Chronicle help explain one another as if each of them is a hint leading to the other stories. The following sentence from “The Name of the Plant,” a story of a woman who claims that she came to live in the house of someone whose name is similar to hers, may aptly describe Han Yujoo’s literary approach: “I tried to look for the name of the unnamable and count the countless since the time I didn’t know what to call a being that stopped existing.”

Han Yujoo is the author of the novella When We Are Written in The World, the short story collections Breath, The Chronicle, My Left Hand the King My Right Hand the King’s Scribe, Book of Ice, To the Moon, and a full-length novel The Impossible Fairytale. She won the Literature and Society’s New Writers Award in 2003, the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award in 2009, and the inaugural Kim Hyun Literary Prize in 2015.