Naturally, numerous Korean literary works find the apartments as their only habitat. The most representative work among all of these is Choi Inho’s The Flower at the Equator (1982). The protagonist of the novel is a man called by his initial, M. He starts peeking in secrecy at every move of a young woman who just moved into the apartment across from him. For more effective observation, he purchases a telescope and starts photographing her with his camera. He thinks, “If I could peek into that apartment through my telescope, I would be able to see every detail of her beautiful face and her sometimes angry or tired expressions, as if I were a pathologist, observing the multiplication of bacteria using a microscope.”

Life in the apartment is visualized in this way, and the residents of the apartment unconsciously suffer from voyeurism. The relationship between “the one who sees” and “the one who is seen” finally makes M entertain a fantasy of power. He intends to intervene and control her life. Therefore, he comes to think, “If I could make her into a plaster sculpture, if I could have her, a living being turned into an object of taxidermy, and if I could stuff her, decorate the surrounding with all kinds of flowers and colorful leaves of the trees, and lay her down around me.” What enables such voyeurism is his solitude, isolated without his family. In the short story "A Stranger's Room" by the same writer, even when a couple lives together, the ghostliness of being does not disappear. In this story, the husband who came back from a business trip slowly turns into an object while reading his wife’s letter that reveals she is having an affair.

1. The Flower at the Equator
Choi Inho
2. A Stranger’s Room
Choi Inho, Minumsa Publishing Group.
2005, 426p, ISBN 9788937420092
3. The Sloping Shade
Jo Jung-Rae, Hainaim Publishing Co., Ltd.
2011, 300p, ISBN 9788965740049

Park Wansuh’s short story "The Resemblant Rooms," published in 1974, is probably the first fiction that dealt with the space of the apartment and women’s lives. This residential space that was sought out of an expectation of a convenient life is soon regarded as an object of disgust. In the story, life is compared to that of a “prisoner serving a life sentence.” One night, the protagonist in the story goes to the apartment next to hers while the woman next door is away, visiting her parents. She then has sex with the man next door, who was asleep. However, because everything there is just like her own place, it does not even occur to her that she is committing adultery.

Since 1990, the apartment in novels has spread its roots deeper in women’s lives and started to take a bleaker tone. In Jon Kyongnin ’s novel The Woman Herding Goats, the protagonist keeps calling to ask about the price of a house by the river. However, she and her friends are not able to escape the apartment. The apartment has just become a bright prison cell for these women. It is a nightmarish life, which can be summed up in these words: “On a quiet afternoon when I look at the chicken coop-like households partitioned only by walls, I get caught up with a feeling more absurd than when I hear the most bizarre story in the world; a mature woman is in each partition; each of them cooks, cleans for a man; when their men come back at night, they fulfill their sexual duties; they go to their men’s house to hold a memorial ceremony for his ancestors… And they gave birth to a child or two; men complain that they can’t even die because of their family; in that chicken coop a normal woman spends five to 10 years raising children by herself… And then, one day, she wakes up at dawn, and her feet have stiffened and become hard. She finds herself unable to walk out and leave forever.” Therefore, a goat forcibly left behind by a certain man could represent the desire of a woman who wants to escape a space, such as the apartment.

In the novel The Fruit of My Woman, the writer Han Kang contemplates this sort of life in the apartment, extending her view to the entire city. A mysterious bruise has spread over the body of the protagonist’s wife, which seems to be a disease caused by living in the apartment: “I feel like I am slowly drying up towards death here, where, supposedly, seven hundred thousand people are gathered and living. I hate the several hundred or thousand people in the same building, the same kitchen in each partition, the same ceiling, the same toilet, bathtub, and even elevator. I hate it all: the park, the playground, the shopping center, and the crosswalk.” Unlike the narrator who desires the average life of a city dweller, the apartment is nothing but a barren space that cannot bear any kind of life for her. In this space, she dreams that she has transformed into a giant plant, “breaking the ceiling of the veranda, passing through the upstairs’ veranda, going up through the 15th, 16th floor, breaking cement and steel bars, and stretching all the way up to the rooftop.” This becomes reality.

In the novel Wife’s Box by Eun Heekyung, the wife falls into a deep sleep instead of turning into a plant. In Insects, by Oh Soo-yeon, the insects swarming the apartments are the problem. “All kinds of insects that should belong to the jungles keep rushing into the apartments. How could we have so many of these various and countless insects in a new satellite city next to Seoul, where all is covered by cement and asphalt?” No one knows. Nevertheless, all the people who live there quietly endure because they have to pay for apartments they can barely afford. Apartments are paid for with retirement benefits from working all their lives, or mortgages that take entire lifetimes to pay back. The protagonist goes to see a dermatologist and only wants to have her skin problem treated. However, at the end of her fight against the insects, she also turns into a giant insect.

Of course, here, a dilemma exits. Many people feel that life in an apartment is unbearable. But at the same time, most of these people show reluctance towards an inconvenient, non-apartment living environment. It may be true that poets and writers are particularly negative about apartments. Because if literature is to continuously pursue the fundamental contemplation of life, the space of the apartment, with its homogeneous, abstract, and one-dimensional characteristics is, in many ways, the space of anti-literature. The apartment is not suitable to dreams. In apartment buildings, human beings merely transform into noise, a bothersome nuisance, between floors, and naturally, poetry emerges even there:

If someone downstairs drives a nail into the wall



The whole building vibrates.
To make
A crack in a huge building
The whole building gives up its own seat.
If a mirror gets hung in the crack, over a nail,
Look, if we yield little by little, just little by little,
It's not a problem at all
For a person to enter.
The noise in the middle of night,
I smile and endure.



—"Pleasant Noise" by Ko Young-min



 



Korean poets are bound to ask, “What do the poets of today’s apartments write?” One can dream of escaping the apartment, but the reality makes it difficult. Therefore, Ko gazes into the space of the apartment and wants to find hope there. As a being nailed into the square, concrete walls, this pained, citizenry-minded creature's slow yielding in order to accept the other is desperate, and at the same time, beautiful.

4. A Long Day
Park Wansuh, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp.
2012, 290p, ISBN 9788954617383
5. The Woman Herding Goats
Jon Kyongnin, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp.
1996, 326p, ISBN 8985712993
6. The Empty House
Oh Soo-yeon, Kang Publishing
1997, 292p, ISBN 9788982180149
7. Wife’s Box (1996 Yi Sang Literary Award Anthology)
Eun Heekyung et al., Munhaksasang Co., Ltd.
1998, 430p, ISBN 9788970122847
8. The Fruit of My Woman
Han Kang, Changbi Publishers, Inc.
2000, 328p, ISBN 9788936436575