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[JAPANESE] Between the Living and the Dead: Voices and Their Absence scrap
by Masatsugu Ono
June 9, 2026
![[JAPANESE] Between the Living and the Dead: Voices and Their Absence 이미지](/fileDownload.do;jsessionid=875875FA65F0442B36012C1BD0F048FC?srvFile=20260609132705800717.webp&usrFile=23.webp&target=default&width=100&height=100&folder=reviews)
心の浮力
The original title of Lee Seung-U’s short story collection is Moksori-deul, or Voices. As the title suggests, many of the stories revolve around voices—or their absence—and the roles they play in human relationships, memory, and loss.
In “The Buoyancy of the Heart,” the title story of the Japanese edition, a younger brother, who lives a steady and conscientious life as a civil servant, mourns his older brother, an artistic figure who died without a stable job or family. Their voices are nearly identical, to the point that even their mother frequently mistakes one for the other. The younger brother harbors a faint envy for his brother’s freedom, yet also believes that he himself was the object of their mother’s favoritism. He is haunted by the possibility that he may somehow have taken something essential from his brother. The similarity of their voices blurs the boundary between the living and the dead, especially for their mother, whose advancing dementia prevents her from distinguishing between them.
In “I Should (Not) Have Answered the Phone,” voice again forms a fragile bridge between life and death. The narrator reflects on a younger colleague, who looked up to him as an older brother, and who was later investigated for alleged harassment. Listening to the final voice message the colleague left him, the narrator is overcome with regret, wondering whether he might have intervened. The recorded voice becomes both a remnant of presence and a reminder of irreversible absence.
Language is our primary means of understanding others, yet its limits are repeatedly exposed. In “When I Turned the Valve of the Fire Hydrant, Water Overflowed,” an elderly woman opens a fire hydrant and floods the street. Repeated warnings from police officers fail to get through to her because she cannot speak and seems unable to hear. Like the uncontrollable stream of water, something seems to overflow within her. Even if, as one character suggests, it could be a form of prayer, it remains unheard because it is never articulated. The story points to the tragic isolation that arises when inner experience cannot be translated into communicable voice.
“The Vacant House” explores how the absence of voice invites misinterpretation. A quiet woman is persistently misunderstood, as those around her fill her silence with their own assumptions that suit their own needs. Unable to endure this frustration, she leaves home and collapses in front of an abandoned house. She is rescued by a man who once lived there. He recalls how, in his childhood, his father—an adherent of a cult—confined him and his mother to a small room and forced them to listen to and memorize the words of a “seer.” Here, voice is not a medium of connection but a form of oppression: when saturated with excessive meaning, it suffocates the listener and destroys relationships.
In “Voices,” two characters deliver opposing monologues about a man’s death. One, the mother’s, blames the daughter for not answering a desperate call for help; the other, the daughter’s, accuses the mother of having rejected her son through gestures and attitudes, even without words. What emerges most powerfully is the absence of the dead man’s voice. The truth remains inaccessible because the one who could speak it is gone forever.
Across the collection, when voice links the living and the dead, it often carries regret, grief, and guilt. Characters are haunted by the realization that they failed to listen when it mattered most. Voice becomes a site not of reconciliation but of belated recognition.
Only “Homecoming” offers a different perspective. Set in a depopulated area awaiting redevelopment, the story follows a man who returns to an abandoned house where his mother once lived. A watchman repeatedly warns him that he is trespassing, but the man does not respond, having been deaf since birth. As he silently cleans the house and the garbage-strewn alley, his actions seem to constitute a kind of voice—one that resonates in a space emptied of human presence. In the final scene, the watchman, holding two coffee mugs, suggests the possibility of connection between the living and the recovery of shared memory. In this quiet gesture, the story intimates a form of communication beyond spoken language. It is, in a sense, an image of literature itself: a medium through which voices, even in their absence, continue to reach us.
Writer 필자 소개
Masatsugu Ono
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