Introduction “When I realized the rain had stopped, so did my tears. Or it could be the other way around.” The departure of the “main body” heralds both an inexplicable flow of tears and the beginning of an endless rain. Why does the world weep with me whenever I cry? After the “main body” leaves the narrator one day, their tears keep flowing unawares. And whenever “I” cry, it begins to rain. Unfolding against a background of the strange joint relationship between the tears of “I” and nationwide downpours, the novel Wah Wah rains down a series of bizarre and unpredictable events. On a dark and muggy summer’s night, “I” lost my “main body.” That night when I was bearing the full weight of the darkness and my nightmares my “main body” gently rose from me and, as if to say it was now time, took out a suitcase, packed up, and left. The loss of the main body didn’t change anything about “my” life. “I” went to the same workplace, ate the same meals, and fed the cat waiting for “me” on my way back home just as always. If there was one thing different now, it was that tears streamed down my face at all times of day. As if the main body had been a cork holding back a leak in a dike, I now shed tears enough to need to change my sheets every day. After five years of no news but text alerts of charges made to a credit card in “my” name to let “me” know of its continued existence, the main body contacts “me” with a request to come pick it up at Incheon Airport around 3 o’clock when its flight gets in. Following the main body’s lead, “I” discover countless others who have lost their own main bodies just as “I” have, and resolve to join their bizarre project instead of crying alone every night. Will “I” be able to stop crying by the end of the book? What has passed “me” by, and what remains with “me” forever? Wah Wah bridges the vast gap between that which speeds through change and that which seeks eternity. It wouldn’t be amiss to take Wah Wah as an instrument of contemplating our individual senses of eternity. Review The automatic tears of Wah Wah are the product of the overload experienced by the narrator who is wired into the sorrows of the world. But oddly enough, Kim Hong does not characterize this novel as one written because we cannot stop our tears. In fact, he says the opposite: that this is because “it’s possible for you not to cry.” ―Kang Bowon (Poet and literary critic) Excerpt I remember the day the main body left me. It was a fairly hot night. The weather seemed to be cooling down a bit in the wake of the typhoon, but the wet trees hadn’t dried out yet and it was adding humidity on top of the heat. My room didn’t have an air conditioner, and the bed was too small even to sleep in alone. Of all things, that was when my main body rose from me. Maybe that was why. Because it was so hot. Because it was so hot and cramped. I’d never thought about the main body before then. It had never once been separated from me. —Page 21 I cried like that for about four days and then I thought I won’t cry anymore but I cried for two more days. I didn’t cry outside, just at home. When I was crying it would always rain and I would think to myself I should pack an umbrella on my way out tomorrow. Every morning I would forget and leave without an umbrella and I would think what a relief that it didn’t rain. I cried like that for an age and then I didn’t cry anymore. (…) But even on the days I didn’t cry, my heart grew wet with the memories of my tears. I felt as though I were crying almost all the time. Though thinking about it there wasn’t even anything in particular to cry about. ―Pages 24-25

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