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Stories that Hook You from the First Line: Five Korean Works with Unforgettable Openings scrap download
읽자마자 빠져드는 이야기: 도입부가 인상적인 한국문학 5선
The opening line of a novel isn’t just the sentence that happens to come first. For instance, I love the opening line from Eun Heekyung’s “Talking to Strangers”: “When we call out to someone from behind, we use their name.” It makes me pause and wonder whether I’d have thought to use the phrase “from behind,” but what stays with me is something else entirely: the fact that throughout the entire story, neither the first-person narrator “I” nor “she” is ever named. I love how that first sentence quietly sets up a subtle tension with everything that follows.
Another opening line I’ve returned to again and again comes from Hwang Jungeun’s “The Man Who Laughs”: “For a long time, I have been thinking about it.” That same sentence closes the story as well, and in between, similar phrasing built around “I think” repeats with an almost obsessive rhythm, pulling the reader along as we follow what it is the narrator has been thinking about for so long. In that sense, an opening sentence is like the first stitch in knitting: it can hold the entire fabric of the story together—or, with the slightest tug, let everything unravel.
“A week ago, I stole a kick scooter from an apartment playground.”
Come to think of it, there’s always one—an ownerless scooter sitting in some apartment playground. Anyone could take it, sneak a ride, maybe even crash on a downhill slope and end up sprawled on the pavement. This opening could easily be passed over, yet it has the quality of a sentence that anyone could pick up and spin their own story. I’ve always thought of it as a deeply novelistic first line,one that has stayed with me for so long.
“This story begins on a night road, with two women so absorbed in their conversation on their way from New York to Boston that they blew past the Hartford junction and kept going all the way to Springfield.”
The novel takes the form of a translator’s afterword. Having just finished translating a manuscript, the narrator recalls a passage in which Adrienne Rich reminisces about driving from New York to Boston with Elizabeth Bishop, the two of them sharing major losses in their lives the way people do “when they feel like they are being understood.” The afterword opens with the narrator wanting to know how those two women had made each other feel so understood. That question quietly pulls the reader in almost effortlessly.
“An animal escaped from a zoo in North Gyeongsang Province. The moment I heard the news, I knew the animal was my mother.”
This is how Dana begins—the story of a narrator born between a human zookeeper and a being of the species called “Dana.” With these opening lines, readers begin to follow the voice of a speaker who calls an “animal” their mother, and by the time they reach the end, they come to understand that “Dana” is a name for whatever is most intimate and most wounding, and also another name for the self that most despises the thing one loves most. The story follows two Danas—one hunted as a disease carrier, and the other, Byeori, trying to remain among humans—quietly posing questions about the relationship between humans and other forms of life.
"I walked toward myself to reach myself.
I wanted to reach,
I don’t want to reach."
Maybe there are two kinds of sentences that pull us in: the kind that compels us forward to the next line, and the kind that makes us stop and read them again. These opening lines belong to the latter. They slow you down, asking to be read and felt line by line. Kim Soom’s Rainbow Eyes is a linked novel; each chapter gives voice to the distinct language of visually impaired narrators. The book reveals a world encountered through senses and modes like listening, drawing, and touch—a world discovered through “rainbow eyes.”
“I’ve slipped my foot into someone else’s shoe.”
Imagine walking out of a restaurant where you have to take off your shoes and accidentally putting on someone else’s shoes. Unless you’re remarkably oblivious, you’d feel it immediately—the strange sense of something not quite right. This sentence captures that precise moment and pushes deeper, probing something essential about our relationships with others. In the wake of the pandemic, many of us found ourselves reflecting on how connection with other people is possible and why it matters—why family alone is never quite enough—and why that possibility of genuine connection with others always comes as a kind of surprise. This novel captures the reflections of those years.
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