Shim Jinkyung: You have been writing for nearly 30 years straight since your literary debut. But your image is still that of a young writer, and in fact, your works are considered alongside the works of young contemporary writers. What do you think about the way your works are appraised?

Kim Insuk: I do make an effort to write like the younger writers. I debuted at 20, and debuting at such a young age can be a handicap. As a result, I’ve been treated as if I’m older than other writers my age. So I feel that if I don’t make an effort to make myself younger, I’ll get lost in the shuffle of time. But it’s not easy. When you write for many years, you never stop building your own house, and that house becomes the box that confines you. That “box” refers to the safe, easy method of writing that is all your own. Seeking out that box means creating the characteristics that are unique to “Kim Insuk, the writer.” But if you settle within that, it becomes difficult to keep pace with contemporary literature. My goal has not been to build up a method of fiction writing that can be summarized as “Kim Insuk’s style,” but to break out of the literary mold that I have created.

Shim: So perhaps that is why it is so difficult to group your body of work together into one consistent trend. You’ve demonstrated a keen eye for timely issues and matters that have been regarded as socially and culturally important. Your works from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s address the trends in each of those eras. Your fiction in the 1980s mostly dealt with the turbulence of the South Korean democratization movement or takes place against the backdrop of the labor movement, whereas in the 1990s, the setting of your work expanded to include the everyday spaces of personal lives and addressed the issues of female characters who are unable to break out of the mold of their everyday lives. Then in the 2000s, you broke down the theme of everyday life a little more and addressed it on a deeper level, while also cleaving a little more closely to social conditions. What are your thoughts on this?

Kim: I look at that in two ways. First, I tried to respond sensitively to each tendency in my work on a case-by-case basis. In the 1980s, all of Korean society was moving in that direction, and in the 1990s, I got married and had a baby, so that everyday life became a part of my work. Then, with the start of the 2000s, I got divorced, and my life changed. In particular, as I was raising my daughter, those experiences seemed to find their way into my writing. I think the changes in my writing have naturally accompanied the changes in my personal life.

Critic Shim Jinkyung and novelist Kim Insuk

Shim: Nevertheless, if I were to point out a common thread in your work, it would be the fact that you don’t limit the issues of individual lives to the dimension of individual experience but combine them with social and historical issues. Of course, it is a contingent approach, but the characters in your work do seem to represent their respective eras. Upon first read, they seem to be everyday, individual stories, but upon closer inspection, they move in step with their generation. In your writing, there is an unusual coexistence of history and the everyday, as well as society, and the individual.

Kim: I used to be called an activist writer. There was a time when I was well-acquainted with socialist realism, which says that literature must serve the social revolution. You could never separate the individual from society. Of course, the method of examining the individual in society and the society in the individual has changed. If the individual was examined through the window of society in the 1980s and 1990s, then now we look at society through the window of the individual. Nevertheless, one thing is clear: regardless of whether we are inside or outside the window, the “society” in my stories hasn’t changed. That’s the root of my literature. But right now, I’m trying not to openly reveal my interest in that society. Instead, I’m trying to show a critical view of society in a roundabout way, by closely scrutinizing individual lives one by one.

Shim: Your latest short story collection, Bye, Elena (2009), was awarded the prestigious Dongin Literature Award. This collection gives the impression that you have reached a kind of zenith of insight. This is truly a collection of literary gems. But in glancing over them, what jumps out at me is the keyword “wound.” It’s a vague keyword, but while digging deeply into the “wounded histories” of individuals, it seems to form a solidarity of wounds in the end. The characters in your works are bound together, albeit loosely, through their “woundedness.” Perhaps that is why painful wounds are read as a fate that we cannot escape. I wonder how you achieved such deep insight into wounds.

Kim: When I wrote the stories in this collection, I didn’t intend to base them on the theme of wounds. I guess it happened naturally. I just don’t believe that life is fair. You’re born, so you have to live life to the fullest. Steve Jobs passed away recently. One of the news articles that reported his passing included a collection of his quotes. I wanted to write them all down. But not everyone can become Steve Jobs, even if they live exactly the same way he did. When you strip away the layers of those adages or aphorisms, reality is not so glamorous. I think that literature has to focus on those pitiful, crumbling lives that cannot be understood through—or rather, cannot be filled by—adages and aphorisms. 99 percent of the world’s people will never become Steve Jobs or Bob Dylan.

Shim: But if Steve Jobs or Bob Dylan were to appear in your work, maybe it would not take place in that 99 percent world.

Kim: The lives we see are over 90 percent. But I’m not interested in that 90 percent of life. I only deal with the energy to maintain the life that is seen, or the unseen inner side that’s working hard for that life. Maybe that internal side is what you refer to as a “wound.”

1. Bye, Elena

Kim Insuk, Changbi Publishers, Inc.

2009, 226p, ISBN 9788936437107

2. The Autobiography of a Girl

Kim Insuk, Changbi Publishers, Inc.

2005, 266p, ISBN 9788936436889

3. Sohyeon

Kim Insuk, Jaeum & Moeum

2010, 340p, ISBN 9788957074848

Shim: Since we’re on the subject, let’s get into it a little further. In, “Pavane for Jo Dong-ok,” the phrase tongip golsu caught my eye. “Pain that cuts to the bone…” Of all of the phrases about pain that I’ve read, that is the most extreme. This phrase is used to express the pain felt by Princess Suryeong, who suffered after sending her daughter away as a female tribute to the Yuan Dynasty in China, during the Mongol invasions of Korea at the end of the Goryeo period. But it also expresses the suffering of the young daughter who had a child after being raped, then left for Brazil and spent the rest of her life cursing herself as a “whore.” This adds to the pain of the speaker, who sends away her child on impulse. The story can be read as being about the pain and sorrow of three mothers. In that case, would you say that the female body is the source of suffering?

Kim: The hardest thing a human being can do is give birth to and raise a child. The role of a mother is the most difficult and painful. Even now I tell my daughter that even if she gets married, she should not have a child. I always feel sorry to my children. Even when they have everything and accomplish everything, the world is unfair. I feel sorry for bringing children into such a world. The pain that can be described as “pain that cuts to the bone” comes directly out of my relationship to my children. I feel regret and guilt and pain and hatred. It frightens me to talk about my children. In the past, it was difficult to talk about my mother, but now I fear talking about my children even more.

Shim: In Bye, Elena, you talk a lot about holes. Of course the holes in this case symbolize the empty spaces opened up by wounds. The grandmother in “Southern Village Beyond the Mountains” describes a wound the size of a hole in a sieve as gradually widening, and in the end, it becomes a bottomless pit. If a sieve-like hole has the possibility of being sealed, a “bottomless pit” is a hole that can never be stopped up. Each and every one of us who comes from the hole of a mother becomes another hole and vanishes. Saying that out loud makes it sound horrible. This mention of holes also appears in the story “Vertigo.” Isn’t that too nihilistic an imagination?

Kim: According to one of the Nobel Prize winners, after billions of years, everything will be reduced to white ash and will vanish. Light vanishes, and that is the fate of the universe. I feel the same way. These are the lives we were given, so we have to live them to their fullest, but what is left after that effort ultimately amounts to nothing.

Shim: It sounds like you have already turned into one enormous hole. But the interesting thing about your work is that you both hide and reveal these wound-like holes. For example, in “Pavane for Jo Dong-ok,” the daughter digs up objects buried in the ground while hiding her own wounds. In your most recent novel, Sohyeon, as well, there is this simultaneous concealment and disclosure. Your characters seem to express themselves through this same strategy.

Kim: I don’t express my characters in their entirety in my work. But even if a writer does not reveal a character in his or her entirety, the writer still has to know everything about that character. If the characters in my work seem to be simultaneously exposed and concealed, then that may be why.

Shim: Your latest works deal with social issues, but they are more like character studies than genre paintings. That is the case with “Pavane for Jo Dong-ok,” “Southern Village beyond the Mountains,” and “That Day.” But your novel Sohyeon expands this further. For that reason, Sohyeon strikes me as a character study colored by social conditions rather than a historical novel. The problem is that the characters, perhaps because they reveal themselves through concealment, hold back too much. They only guess at what the other is feeling, and they don’t discuss their emotions openly. They all say, “My feelings could not be misunderstood,” yet they withhold the most important words. Perhaps that is why the characters in this book, despite being historical figures, are difficult to understand.

Kim: When I wrote Sohyeon (2010), I did not write it with the idea of a historical novel in mind. I merely selected a historical background for the story. The starting point of this novel was my interest in Sohyeon’s loneliness, the loneliness of a person living as a hostage in an enemy country.

1. The Long Road

Kim Insuk, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp.

1995, 156p, ISBN 9788985712538

2. The Long Road (English Version)

Kim Insuk, Merwin Asia, 2010

Shim: I guess that is why the characters in Sohyeon are all lost in their own loneliness, make each other lonely, and hurt each other in the end.

Kim: This novel begins with loneliness and ends with loneliness. There is no one in this world that is not lonely. In particular, there is nothing more painful than the loneliness of being denied your own existence. “Sohyeon” is the crown prince of Joseon but is denied his rightful position. The story I wanted to tell was too obvious. Everyone loses his or her rightful place in the end for some reason or other. Everyone has her or his own existence disavowed. Therefore, everyone winds up feeling lonely. I am somebody, but at the same time I am nobody. That disavowed “somebody/nobody” is 99 percent of who we are.

Shim: Is that why you are more interested in reanalyzing and recasting people who are excessively evil or those who have been cast out from the world?

Kim: I suppose so. I also think that by trying especially to write about people who are not all that special, I’m drawn all the more to special cases.

Shim: Between things that look special on the outside and those that don’t, it turns into a riddle that must be solved, due to that 99 percent that is unseen. As a writer, you seem to have the desire to solve those riddles. Talking with you, I get the image of a writer who decodes secret messages. You seem to decode people, just as one might decode Princess Suryeong’s epitaph. I look forward to more of your decoding in the future. It was a pleasure to speak with you today.

By Shim Jinkyung