Book Shelf

A Book for Both Your Eyes and Ears

As someone who spins Korean into song, I have often worked with translators. Depending on the scope and timing of my ventures, my lyrics have been translated into English, Japanese, Mandarin, and French. While reading and writing in these languages is difficult for me, working abroad has taught me to understand and speak them, which I attribute to having good ears as a musician. I mostly use text-to-speech (TTS) technology when digesting documents that have been exchanged for work overseas, since I can understand what is being said even if I cannot understand what has been written. When sending responses, I use speech-to-text (STT) technology, converting the sound of my voice into words. (This does mean that, sometimes, words that sound similar to the ones I used but carry different definitions are sent instead.)  I now use on a daily basis the TTS and STT technologies I began to utilize to listen to and speak foreign languages, even when using Korean. After I was diagnosed with a rare eye condition in 2023 and underwent three surgeries, it became impossible to correct my vision, and STT technology became indispensable to me. I now must rely on my ears for tasks I used to tackle with my sight. My vision wavers greatly depending on my condition, so sometimes I find myself reading one-third of a book before my eyes glaze over, making the letters blur. To find out what happens next, I have to rely on an audiobook. However, listening to an automated TTS instead of a human voice is very different from reading a book on your own. Imagining the voice of the author while mechanical tones are relentlessly driving into your eardrums does take some training and getting used to. Gone are the pauses that would exist if the author were reading their work to you, or if you were reading it yourself; gone are the lengthy stops you would make when coming across certain words and the space you would give yourself to inspect the pregnant gaps between each word. Everything that the author and editor would have painstakingly considered vanishes, such as the ease with which you would have turned the page or started a new paragraph, and all you are left with are short beats that hang briefly between each letter. TTS models lack lungs. So, without the need to breathe, all they do is faithfully carry out their duties. However, even when assailed by words that are tossed toward me at breathtaking speed, I am moved to let out exclamations of surprise. Dazzling words elbow their way through the sounds of functionality and reach my body. I am no longer perturbed by the grating and stiff texture of the sound by which the words are being conveyed to me; instead, the images that have blossomed in my head comb through my consciousness and take me to places I have never explored before. Some stories will, whatever the obstacles, command your attention. Some books are marvelous that way.  Hoyoung, the author of Never Mind, is the translator who worked on the English lyrics for my three studio albums, and the translator with whom I have conversed the most. Working with them made me acutely, painfully aware that translating is not merely a technique, but an act of art and literature. Even before meeting Hoyoung, I commissioned various translators to work on short passages, longer pieces of writing, and lyrics. When I was still inexperienced in the art of commissioning translations, all I would do was gratefully use the work the translators had completed. However, after cultivating a knack for languages, I wanted to collaborate with a translator with whom I could speak in depth. That search led me to Hoyoung, who had contributed to chogwa, an e-zine that featured one Korean poem and several English translations.  As a child, Hoyoung spent some time living in the US. But—or perhaps for that very reason—the Korean they use in their writing is exceptionally beautiful. When they paint detailed pictures of their past experiences, I lose myself in those beautifully precarious words. The reader is presented with a veritable feast of carefully constructed sentences that evoke the physicality and voices of a younger Hoyoung, whose identity revolved around ambiguity and imperfection, and of the people in their orbit. As those sentences weave into Hoyoung’s stories, drawing vivid scenes from their life, one continues to run into beautiful phrases that challenge one’s preconceived notions of the Korean language.  Most of Hoyoung’s life, except their time as a youth, remains opaque. I do not know if it would be accurate to say that this is because they are transgender. In Never Mind, “trans” is mentioned over 150 times. The words “woman” or “female” appear approximately 160 times, while “men” or “male” can be spotted around 100 times. “I” makes 260 appearances. Probably what Hoyoung wanted to explain best by writing this book was their own identity. Even so, the book is titled Never Mind. There must have been days when they did not want to be perceived by others, days when they had to say, “Never mind,” and disregard the words and pronouns used to explain themselves.  Many of the people whom I have met who have a delicate way with words became expert wordsmiths in order to explain themselves. They wished to explain their thoughts and bodies, which, in conventional society, were categorized and perceived as “odd.” They respected the ever-surprising power of language while also remaining wary. In a world full of sexers who are quick to label others’ genders in less than three seconds—“Ma’am, the women’s fitting room is over that way”—some people with ambiguous and odd bodies mull over which words would best describe themselves, but the time they are given is far too short. Depending on how much energy or attention they wish to expend, they may choose to remain silent in those moments. “Why do you make life hard for yourself?” Hoyoung answers this question by saying, “Because this is how I become more defined.” If you wished to fit Never Mind into certain categories, you could say that certain chapters are more like poems, while others are like plays, essays, or prose poems. If you wanted to put labels on the book, you could say that it is an amalgam of various genres. Whatever its genres, this book flows naturally, its content gently permeating its readers. Days when Hoyoung follows their grandmother’s recipe to steam pumpkin leaves to make namul; when they, as a child, wanted to pummel the life out of their friends for refusing to eat soy milk noodles; when they danced in their favorite spot in a club; when their cat, Q, bit the tender skin of their ankles; when they wished that they lacked physicality; when all they wanted to say was never mind; when they wanted to define themselves. All these days are days owned by Hoyoung.  What is certain is that Hoyoung is alive and exists right here, right now. And there are readers avidly hoping that Hoyoung will continue to live in ambiguity and safety, penning many more books of fierce beauty. 

by Lang Lee

Translator's Desk

Practicing in the Dark

Until recently, I secretly viewed my two passions—writing and translating—as a two-headed snake, each head snapping at the other, wrestling for control. This feels almost sacrilegious to admit, given how much I have benefitted from both. But when one practice thrived, the other withered. I believed they could not coexist, let alone nourish one another. And I carefully built a life which upheld that belief. Writing was my first love, long before I knew literary translation could be a career, and the focus of my training: a background in English literature, a year-long writing program, and an MFA in creative writing. Translation seemed to arrive out of nowhere, almost too easily—or so I thought. I stumbled into translating Korean literature in 2001 while at university, winning the grand prize in the Korea Times Translation Contest with the first translation I’d attempted. After that high note came a long silence: my first full-length translation did not appear until 2017, sixteen years after I began. Since then, I have published close to thirty books. Yet the older dream—publishing a book of my own—remained elusive. I didn’t need anyone to explain how translation might benefit a writer, or writing a translator. Translation offers an immersive education in voice, rhythm, style, structure, and story, since no reading goes deeper than the reading required to recreate a work in another language. Writing, in turn, strengthens a translator’s creative range and command of language. I knew the arguments. I simply could not live them. Still, I tried. I studied writers who also translated, and whenever I met one, I would ask: How do you do both? Their advice was always some ver­sion of the same thing: Give more time to the practice you want to see flourish. If you want to write, make room for writing.  I would nod, agree, then devote all my time and effort to translation. The more I did, the more skilled I became, and the more work and validation I received. Translation came with contracts, deadlines, and payment. My writing came with none of those. I told myself I would return to my writing once I finished the work in front of me, but before one project ended, I would line up another. I had cleverly made sure the work never ended. The truth was, I was hiding behind translation. In the life I had constructed, I needed translation to succeed. To understand why, and what I was hiding from, I have to go back.  In 2016, I entered what I can only call my “Valley of Death.” Long before that, at the request of Han Kang’s agency, I had devoted years to translating The Vegetarian and other books by Han. Then another translator, Deborah Smith, independently secured a publishing deal for The Vegetarian, and my involve­ment came to an end without my ever fully understanding what had happened. In 2016, when Smith’s translation won the Man Booker International Prize, marking a historic moment for Korean literature, it seemed as though the whole literary world was affirming not only her achievement, but the course of events that had left me behind. By then, I had been translating for fifteen years and had formal training as a writer; Smith was new to both Korean and literary translation. The contrast only deepened my sense of absolute failure. Days after the win, I learned that Smith’s newly founded press had acquired the UK rights to my first full-length transla­tion, Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale, which was due to be published in the US the following year. I was told this was good news. Yet the person whose success I had come to interpret as proof of my failure was now being presented as my publisher and champion. My grief, shame, and sense of injustice had no outlet. So I swallowed it all. I experienced what happened not simply as the loss of one project or even one author, but as a verdict on every part of me—my career as a literary translator, my calling as a writer, my love of my Korean heritage, even my sense of self. I seriously considered quitting both writing and translating altogether.  Then, unexpectedly, translation opened another door. An email arrived. A British underwater photographer had come across one of my translations in an anthology and invited me to write the accompanying text for her project on the haenyeo, the sea women of Jeju. Numb and craving distraction, I said yes and began immersing myself in a world I had only vaguely known. The haenyeo dive and surface for hours at a time, holding their breath and pushing their bodies to the limit to feed their families. Their songs and sayings speak of “diving with coffins on their backs,” descending into the underworld to fetch food for their families. Every dive is a kind of death; every resurfacing, a miracle. But the real spark came when I encountered a forbidden word: mulsoom—“water-breath.” It’s the sudden catch of breath when a diver spots something precious underwater. Swallow it and you drown; let it go and you live. Mulsoom struck me like a revelation. It became a metaphor for desire itself—in my case, for recognition, validation, and praise. I began to ask: How do you resist what your heart most longs for? How do you leave behind a way of life that is also part of who you are? Out of those questions grew the story of a haenyeo family, one woman in particular, Soom, whose name means “breath,” who tries to outrun her past until tragedy forces her to confront it. The novel came to me in a flash, but writing it was another matter. The trauma of 2016 pushed me into overdrive. After The Impossible Fairy Tale appeared in 2017, more books, honors, and work followed. I was translating, networking, and pitching at breakneck speed, churning out two to four books a year, mentoring emerging translators, and often helping find publishers for my authors. Outwardly, I was thriving. Inwardly, I was trying to overturn the verdict of 2016. If I accumulated enough books, enough honors, perhaps I could prove that I had not failed. Translation was no longer merely the work that kept me from writing. It was also the work I was using to repair the part of me that had been damaged. Maybe heaven took pity on my sick, battered heart. Something began to shift in May 2024.  I was seeing more of an old friend from my first writing program, who had since become an established author. She reminded me that I understood writing at the level of both sentence and story. Perhaps, she suggested, the analytical part of my mind had become too dominant, and I had to silence it long enough to create.  Around her, I felt less like a failed writer and more like an artist again. I began to quiet the inner critic that judged every sentence before it had the chance to form. Slowly, in trickles, the writing returned. Then she proposed something almost absurdly small: fifteen minutes every other day. Write anything, she told me. Don’t edit. Don’t judge. She began texting me every other day with one question: Did you write?  That October, Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and everything resurfaced with astonishing force. I saw how completely I had absorbed what had happened as my own failure. For years, I had whipped myself for my naïveté and foolish trust, for not being business-savvy, strategic, or proac­tive enough. I had blamed my inability to write on busyness, a lack of discipline, even translation—on everything but the truth: what had happened had been beyond my control. Realizing this was like resetting a poorly healed bone. Once I stopped blaming myself, the trickle became a torrent. I had lacked not discipline, time, skill, or even daring, but belief—the belief that I had something worth saying, that my story was worth another person’s time. This didn’t mean believing I was exceptional, but trusting in the value of what I had to share without needing the world to validate it. After all, wasn’t that what I did whenever I translated a work I loved? I believed in it enough to carry it into another language and place it in the hands of readers. I had to learn to extend that same faith to my own story. By the following May, I had finished a draft of the novel. I revised it, sent it to my agent in September, and a month later, the novel had sold. Next May, Flatiron Books will publish my debut novel, When We Swallowed the Sea, fulfilling a lifelong dream. Only after finishing the book did I understand why I’d been so drawn to diving. The novel mirrored my own journey: descent, death, and surfacing again. I had to understand what I had lived through before I could carry something back—not as proof of my worth, but in the hope that it might help someone still moving through the same darkness. Translation was never the enemy of my writing. It taught me the craft, brought me the haenyeo, and gave me the symbol at the heart of the novel. The two practices seemed at war because I pitted them against each other, because I believed one could flourish only at the other’s expense.  This is new for me, this peace, this friendship between my two passions. How moving it is to discover that they have been allies all along, carrying me toward the same destination.

by Janet Hong

Cover Features

Human And Nonhuman

Living in the twenty-first century means living face to face with artificial intelligence, the product of an unprecedented leap in scientific technology. It also means living with an acute awareness of the fragility of the environment and the role of the human species among many other nonhuman species on earth. Our current concerns with and for the nonhuman, however, are not new. Indeed, we could say that nonhumans have never been far from our minds. Already one hundred years ago, science fiction writers were struggling with the ethical dilemmas they foresaw in future societies, and many of the stories they imagined involved robots, animals, and plants. Here are two Korean writers whose work grows out of an abiding interest in the complex relationship between the human and nonhuman: Bae Myung-hoon, whose satirical science fiction depicts the imbrication of humans with technology, and Kim Mella, who writes from the engaging viewpoint of insects, objects, and other nonhumans. by Taehoon Roh

Cover Features

[Essay] AI Ethics and a Century-Long Repeat Sign

At some point in time, Korea entered the “Age of AI.” Exactly what that means is hard to say. Two years ago in 2024, the great science fiction author Ted Chiang visited Korea and gave us his opinion about artificial intelligence. His message, which was quoted by various outlets, was this: What everyone is calling “AI” isn’t really AI; it’s ridiculous to say you’re going to use it to create art. On the page, his tone came across as calm and matter-of-fact, but in reality, he was probably screaming at the top of his lungs. The noise of that incident is now in the past, and Korean society has officially entered the Age of AI. In an era named as such, it’s only natural that science fiction writers receive questions about AI wherever we go. They’re usually questions asking us, as professionals who straddle the line between science and the humanities, to predict how the two will ever find harmony. Of course, I have my own thoughts and opinions on the matter, and so do the professionals from various fields with whom I’ve shared the stage. But these forums invariably end with the same call to action: “Now it’s time for us to think about the ethics of AI.” It’s a bit cliché and mechanical, but it’s always made with the most serious of expressions. What can artificial intelligence do? What are its limits? Conversely, what are humans uniquely capable of? How will society delegate work and make sure the two domains don’t overlap? And how can humans and machines possibly coexist? I always come away from these deep questions and serious debates with the same impression: “Wow, what a constructive discussion, reinventing the wheel for the progress of modern civilization!”   I included Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. on the reading list for my literature course this semester, a play which was staged across the US and Europe in the twenties to great popular acclaim. Not the 2020s, but the 1920s. I know, some of you are rolling your eyes right now—“Karel Čapek? But he lived so long ago!” However, the reason I’m bringing this old work into the conversation is precisely because it’s one of the many reinvented wheels of AI ethics. The title R.U.R. comes from the name of the robot manufacturing company at the center of the play: Rossum’s Universal Robots. In fact, the word “robot” itself was introduced in this play and referred to the company’s product. This isn’t to say that R.U.R. was the first and only text to talk about robot-like beings and artificial intelligence, but I believe it’s a natural place to begin the discussion. To skip straight to the point, if R.U.R. was the first wheel of AI ethics, it rolled fantastically well upon its invention. So well, in fact, that I find myself wondering how it was possible that someone like Čapek, living when neither robots nor AI nor anything remotely similar existed, could formulate questions so like the ones we see on television news today. (This is me encouraging anyone who hasn’t read the book to find it and read it for themselves.) The questions the work raises are as follows: What distin­guishes us humans from robots? Is it acceptable for humans to treat robots as objects and to discriminate against them? Isn’t the very pain and toil we try to escape through robots, in fact, the core of what it means to be human? Indeed, where do we find meaning once we are deprived of our ability to produce? Should robots be used in war? If the ethical questions we raise in 2026 are barely distin­guishable from those raised in 1920, it’s not only because R.U.R. is a great classic, but also in part because the questions we are raising in 2026 are so painfully superficial. At the threshold of the so-called “Age of AI” stands a repeat sign, one that transports every discussion about AI ethics back one hundred years. The ethical thought experiments pioneered by early science fiction writers and carried out over the last century, and the loose but far-reaching social contracts that emerged from them—it is these that the repeat sign conspires to make us pretend we’ve forgotten.  In which direction did the twentieth-century wheel of AI ethics roll? The number of authors who have written about robots and artificial intelligence is too great to count, and this makes it hard to reduce the trajectory of the discussion to a single line. We have no choice but to use the names of giants as signposts. Standing firmly at the junction of the 1940s is none other than Isaac Asimov.Behind Asimov’s famous “Three Laws of Robotics” is the memory of the rebellion staged by the robots in R.U.R. who took over the world. The robots of the play were originally designed to strip human workers of their livelihoods—the U in R.U.R. stands for universal, after all. So the robots were inherently terrifying beings. Because of this, Asimov encoded the following laws into the brains of his robots.  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.[1][1] Isaac Asimov, “Runaround,” in I, Robot (Doubleday, 1950), 40.  Asimov’s novels serve as case studies of the errors and loopholes that can arise despite these three laws. Nonetheless, the laws make clear one thing regarding the coexistence of humans and robots: humans are the masters, robots are the tools. Countless other writers and branching paths lie along the way, but Asimov’s wheel keeps rolling. In the 1960s, Philip K. Dick published Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, in which a human detective hunts down androids despite constantly grappling with the possibility that androids might be more human than actual humans. The questions raised in this novel were adapted into the 1982 film Blade Runner, allowing them to reach an even wider audience. Through this continued discourse, it became clear that, because of the terrifying possibilities that AI and robots posed for humanity, the industries producing them needed appropriate bargaining chips to win public acceptance. From this, an implicit agreement took shape. The use of artificial intelligence and robots as weapons of war would be heavily restricted, and they would instead be deployed first and foremost in the dangerous, difficult, and dirty work that humans don’t want to do—so-called 3D work. This agreement became a kind of social contract and functioned as a loose norm well into the early twenty-first century. Even in the 2010s, when AI technology made its dramatic leap forward, people thought of putting AI to use primarily in areas such as healthcare and caregiving. It’s probably in this same context that, during that period, the number of entries to science fiction writing contests featuring care robots exploded. The narratives themselves weren’t especially novel, but they had internalized the ethical lessons. For the most part, they were heart-warming attempts that somewhat renewed one’s faith in humanity. But this norm was quickly forgotten as AI technology became more visible. Now, engineers tend to develop not the technology in fields that need to be developed, like the 3D industries or caregiving, but the technologies that can be developed, like the production of art, literature, and music. It is here that the repeat sign of AI ethics appeared. The sign is also a proposal that we erase the thought experiments and social contracts of the twentieth century, and start thinking about AI ethics from scratch. The results of this attitude are already unsettling. Even the most progressive TV news channels report on the real-world deployment of AI-equipped weaponry with indifference. This would have been almost unthinkable back when the imagery of the Terminator series was fresh in the mind of the public. Even in 2016, when there was much ado about Lee Sedol’s face-off against AlphaGo, it seemed that the ethical lessons of the twentieth century were still alive and well. Newspapers and magazines were calling science fiction writers daily, and most of the questions I received stemmed from the same fear at the heart of R.U.R.: Was AI going to take over the world? At least up to that point, Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics seemed to be still in effect in human society. But the wheel didn’t just stop rolling with Asimov. Donna Haraway invented her own wheel, which rolled in the opposite direction from Asimov’s. Is it really the case that only humans can be subjects, while robots remain mere objects? Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, which subverts the relationship between human and machine, claims that humans are already cyborgs. I’m doubtful of the validity of her thesis as it applied to the world in 1985, before the internet and smartphones. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t a cyborg back then. But now, I probably am a cyborg; I couldn’t do even half the work I do right now without the internet. Haraway is not a writer of science fiction, obviously, but her wheel brushed right up against the concerns of contem­porary science fiction by following the intellectual current of posthumanism. About ten years ago, a somewhat curious phenomenon arose in the Korean literary scene. Literary critics and humanities scholars started furiously consuming Korean science fiction, which until then had been largely dismissed in academic circles. As a writer of science fiction who was at the time already twenty years into my career, I couldn’t help but find this a bit odd. I still read with skepticism any literary criticism that approaches science fiction from a posthumanist perspective. Too much of it feels discon­nected from the actual concerns of the authors. My impression is that posthumanism wasn’t brought in to make sense of the explosion of Korean science fiction over the past decade, but rather that science fiction has been commandeered and appropriated for the purpose of writing about posthumanism. Then again, I can’t dismiss the overlap between the two. The continued literary achievements of science fiction writer Kim Cho-yeop, the literary embodiment of posthumanism, cannot be overstated. As its name suggests, posthumanism is a theory of reflection and a reckoning against humanism which dominated all of modernity. It overturns the assumptions that humans are subjects while things remain mere tools. And in literature, it was used to rewrite the grammar that fixed subject and object in their respective hierarchies. By its logic, the Three Laws of Robotics would need to be rewritten completely; robots and AI would have the right to defend themselves, without regard for human safety or human intent. My point is: even before the recent wave of celebrated AI services, humanity was equipped to ask whether AI and humans can coexist. Do we really even need to start the ethical inquiry into this problem from scratch? Frankly, I don’t think so. This is a line of inquiry already in the stage of finding answers. We don’t need to go back to square one to reopen the discussion.And neither are the answers to all these ethical questions locked away in some ivory tower of literature and theory. You need only look at the countless children’s robot cartoons airing on educational television to start getting clues. Some robots still act as protectors of Earth, but plenty of others have transformed and combined with humans to rescue humans, to coexist with humans, to position themselves between the poles of humans and machines. And they do this all without ever once mentioning the word posthumanism. Even without such a concept, people are already thinking and feeling along posthuman lines.  Art is basically useless. More precisely, it’s an activity that can’t be properly evaluated with a ruler that measures usefulness. And because I’m so used to being called useless and watching my fellow artists being called useless, I find myself reluctant to ever call anything useless. But if there is one thing in this world that might have no use, it might be trying to improve the performance of self-driving cars by reinventing the wheel. Of course, there might be cases in which something useless in engineering might prove extremely useful in ethics, but this doesn’t seem to be one of them. Should a news anchor be allowed to proudly announce that cutting-edge weapons equipped with AI were deployed in combat? Even if the report is delivered calmly and objectively, are we supposed to sit around and accept the news without doing anything? Can AI be conscious? Can it have a soul? If we discover something within artificial intelligence, could we declare it real? How true is the claim that AI, through “training,” has become capable of creating art, and how much of it is just playing loose with definitions of words? And finally, is it really true that we still haven’t developed the ethical framework by which to judge any of this? Before we set about inventing anything new in the face of these kinds of questions, let us first look back at Karel Čapek. He gave us the wheel for this problem, and our civilization is already rolling along with it just fine.

by Bae Myung-hoon

Cover Features

[Essay] Boundless Like the Stars

I was the kind of child who put on plays by herself. The stage was usually in the back of the shop where my parents worked, and the actors were the small plastic dolls I collected. The plays always featured a troublemaker who sets off on an adventure in an unknown world, who never lets any adult stop her with a “Don’t go. It’s dangerous!” As all stories go, the troublemaker would encounter danger, falling into booby traps or having run-ins with giant monsters. Each time, she would quell the monster with a stunning kick. And once the monster had surrendered, the troublemaker would show mercy and stop her attack. After an apology from the monster, the two would become friends, and the troublemaker, climbing onto the monster's shoulders, would set off on a new adventure in yet more distant lands.  Writing fiction, too, is a play I put on by myself. I know some people might find this simplistic. But losing myself in a childhood game and losing myself in the act of writing really aren’t all that different. The little dolls that I moved with my hands, the troublemaker whose dreams about the unknown lead her to hardship-these are the same characters that make me keep writing fiction.  In one of my short stories, a child named Christmas has the ability to see a light that no one else can see. I call it “belly button light,” because it is emitted from a person’s navel. In the story, all humans give off this light, like giant fireflies. And just as fireflies flash their light late at night in search of a mate, the belly button light reaches out toward loved ones, carrying with it the emotions of its emitter. I thought the light should be emitted from the belly button because all humans are connected to their mothers through their navels before birth. The belly button light, thus, is evidence of that love and the desire for human connection. But Christmas cannot get others to understand the light she sees. In time, she seeks out others like her: the anglerfish with its bioluminescent lure in the deep sea, the bees and butterflies that can see ultraviolet patterns on flower petals, and even the dung beetle that navigates by the light of the Milky Way galaxy. It is with these unusual fellows that Christmas finds belonging. This is no different from how a loner troublemaker makes friends with a loner monster. Was the troublemaker setting off on an adventure in order to find a friend? Are sorrow and solitude the inner forces that propel us to discover other worlds?   People who feel pain and alienation from the words they hear and read look for another language and sound. They need to create new “words” to express themselves fully. And this language does not necessarily have to be uttered in a human voice. Suppose there is a couple who, for some reason, only treat each other as lovers inside the privacy of their home. Socially, they are just friends or housemates. Besides them, no one knows of their true relationship. That's because, in a society that is staunchly heterosexual, they cannot be anything but friends. But what if we look at the situation from the perspective of nonhumans? What if the couple's story were narrated by dogs, cats, or houseplants?  I once wrote a story about a dildo that observes a lesbian couple. The object is critical of the two women, who don’t treat it with care. Although its gaze is distorted and full of resentment, the narrating dildo nevertheless has a close-up view of the couple. It knows about their secret relationship and their hidden story. I don’t need to explain that a dildo is made for very human purposes and looks like a human body part. Yet it spends most of its time hidden in a drawer. In other words, the dildo is a great representation of the contradictions and duality of being human. Just think about it for a second: a situation in which an object that I hide in my drawer, an object that is the opposite of the image I present to society, observes and judges me 24/7. What if the object's analysis of myself were to become the final record of my existence? From what point of view should we tell our story? And from what vantage point should we analyze and interpret this world?  In my other work, The Book of Joy, I wrote about a springtail, a mosquito, and a spider, who all watch humans. These insects are commonly classified as pests. But whenever I meet readers, I explain in an excited voice how awesome it is that springtails can jump using their furcula, the tail-like appendage from which they receive their name. A famous biologist once quipped that it only takes a beetle for us to realize that God has an inordinate fondness for stars and insects. Indeed, the number of beetle species feels as vast as the stars in the night sky. It’s no wonder that some people stare at the tiny lifeforms beneath their feet with the same awe and wonder felt by people who gaze up at the stars. Mystery and miracles do not require distant lands or faraway galaxies; they take place in the very grass that brushes against our ankles. I have been curious about what lived on this planet before humans. Insects were the first animals to evolve the ability to fly, and they made the journey onto land even before plants. Human civilization is roughly ten thousand years old, but the wings of the mayfly have been around for 330 million years. While reading books about bugs, I learned that the cicada pupa stays underground for seventeen years, counting the seasons by listening to the sound of tree roots. I also learned that some butterflies and grasshoppers journey across entire oceans. That’s not to say I don’t swat at mosquitoes in the summer or mindlessly tear spider webs off the wall. But when I’m at my loneliest and most exhausted, when there is no one around who understands me, it is those small bodies that comfort me. One day, I was cleaning my room when I saw a spider crawl across the floor. It suddenly occurred to me that I was being watched by all the bugs in my house. They were watching me, just as I was watching them. While reading books about nature and insects, I imagined what they must see, what they might say if they could talk. Little by little, the troublemaker of my youth reawakened. The rhythm of the springtail jumping past its limits, the plight of the female mosquito who must drink the blood of other animals in order to lay her eggs, the spider who, like me, endlessly weaves a “text”-they all breathed new life into me. I felt refreshed by the richness of their diversity. Looking at things from the perspective of bugs, the hardships I was dealing with suddenly looked so trivial. The insect narrators in my head have unconventional values. As observers and recorders, they report the situation on Earth to the insects living on other planets. They declare, among other things, that the human species is a regrettable evolutionary error caused by the instinct to reproduce. Their perspective, which is heavily insect-centric, gave me a sense of liberation. A lot of the things that are called abnormal when measured by human standards are actually unique and full of individuality from a nonhuman perspective. If, for example, you look at things through the eyes of a caterpillar, whose body changes color according to the leaves it eats, the fact that humans discriminate against each other based on the color of their skin suddenly seems so immature. Through the eyes of insects, I came to understand humans better. I realized that the lifecycle of an insect is like the biological rhythm of my partner. I can’t detail my life with my partner in this short essay. I will just say that, just as insects sleep for long periods of time when the weather is too hot or cold, my partner's sleeping pattern also changes with the seasons. In the eyes of humans, my partner's lifestyle would need to be corrected, but in the eyes of insects, it's a clever mechanism to maintain harmony with the rhythms of nature. People in modern society work the same amount of time every day. This has nothing to do with our bodies’ biological rhythm. Only human lives are run on an unnatural schedule determined by the standards of industrialization and capitalism. Every plant and animal lives according to the movement of the Earth around the sun. The sea ebbs and flows according to the gravitational pull of the moon, and sea life migrates thousands of miles in response. Our knowledge of these processes is limited. We don’t know exactly how mullet or eels return to the river where they were born to lay eggs. We don’t know how the Pacific swift can sleep while flying, or how the warbler senses the Earth’s magnetic field as it makes cross-continental journeys-we don’t even know what it would be like to sense magnetism. We don’t know how a leaf produces nutrients with sunlight. We know that it happens through a process we call photosynthesis, but we don’t have a full explanation of the quantum interactions between photons and plant cells. And yet, despite our ignorance, billions and billions of leaves across the surface of the Earth achieve this miracle every day without fail.  I don’t want to imply that nonhuman organisms are superior. Nor do I wish to repeat the logic of power that divides things into superior and inferior things, into dominator and dominated. I just want us to think for a second about how anthropocentric thinking limits us to a terribly narrow framework from which to understand the world, about how humanity itself suffers as a consequence. Around the time I wrote The Book of Joy, I was so lonely that I found comfort in insects. I was so isolated that I couldn’t even sympathize with the pain of the person I loved. It was only after I saw flashes of the world through the eyes of insects that I realized my own arrogance and narrow-mindedness. The springtail, which is as small as a speck of dust, taught me to take pleasure in the joys of daily life. The female mosquito, which suffers from a fate far worse than my own, showed me what it really means to be exhausted. And the spider, who is constantly weaving its web, never quite sure when it will be destroyed again, taught me the patience never to give up on life. With their small and fragile bodies, they taught me the vastness of acceptance. While the rules and notions of human society failed to explain my love and my pain, the nonhuman voice allowed me to accept reality and simultaneously opened up a whole other reality for me.  While writing these novels, I often thought about Jules Renard, author of Nature Stories, who later came to feel ashamed of the jokes he'd made at the expense of plants and animals. I think about what he must have felt as he looked back in regret on his disdainful writing. That is the image of the kind of human being that I love, someone who reflects seriously on the damage caused even by acts carried out in curiosity and affection, who takes time to pray in remembrance of the dignity of the frogs and grasshoppers once laughed at. Jokes and metaphors find completion when they arrive at regret and reflection. Imagining the nonhuman perspective involves more than just personification. In the beginning, I suspected that I was analyzing plants and animals and objects by projecting a human perspective onto them. I even worried that my comparisons might be merely rhetorical devices for writing. But then I realized I wasn't describing the movements of worms and butterflies just to spice up my language. I wanted to marvel. That's why I was connecting with them. Just as worms move forward by devouring the soil and butterflies taste flowers through their legs, I use the body of language to sense the world. Like all corporeal beings, I am connected to the world through something both limited and unique.  What I wanted to fill my novels with was “flow.” The rhythm of the circle of life, of birds that eat snails whose shells become the calcium in eggshells that crack and fall to the ground, where they break down into soil from which plants grow, which feed the snails that grow the shells that birds will swallow again. I wanted to cross boundaries, the way these animals cross boundaries. To flow, with the help of the currents of language, across the boundary between people and fireflies, between people and things, between life and death. After all, that is the way that every other being, aside from humans, seems to be living its life. The scientific knowledge that all life forms are made from the dust of exploded stars is no different from the religious conviction that all things are connected. The spirit of inquiry that reaches for the stars and the quietude that allows me to look deep inside myself pointed me to the same path. Indeed, the realization that all roads eventually merge as one gave me deep relief and great joy.  Once, humans could hear the trees. They laughed looking at the faces clouds made and sang to the rhythm of raindrops. My three-year-old nephew thinks everything is human. He imbues everything with human voices. When he brushes his teeth, the cavities in his mouth yell: “Run away, run away! The toothbrush is here!” When he eats, he hears a voice inside his body. It rumbles: “What did the broccoli inside me just say? Where is it passing?” The voices he imagines are learned from the stories adults tell him. Stories invented to get him to brush his teeth, to get him to finish his vegetables. But the human imagination often strays from these well-paved paths.  One day, while running to the bathroom, he might wonder what his pee could say if it could talk. “I’m coming out to soak your pants!” In this way, a child puts on a play to express his own desire to wet his pants. In this game, even urine is a full-fledged, conscious being. But he anthropomorphizes more than just trivial things that belong in the toilet.  One day, he prayed to God for good dreams. Then suddenly, a doubt came to him: “But wasn’t Jesus weak?” The God he knew was always emaciated and had a tired expression, so he was not sure such a weak person could grant his wish. In other words, God was just another human to him. To children, nothing in the world is lesser or greater than a human. Everything laughs like them, feels pain like them.  KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:Kim Mella , The Book of Joy (Hyundae Munhak, 2024) 김멜라, 『환희의 책』 (현대문학, 2024)  Kim Mella, “Teary Eyes and the Invincible Bellybutton,” in OO (Moonji, 2026)김멜라, 「젖은 눈과 무적의 배꼽」, 『이응 이응』 (문학과지성사, 2026)  Kim Mella,”Sunset,” Please Dream of Me (Munhakdongne, 2022)김멜라, 「저녁놀」, 『제 꿈 꾸세요』 (문학동네, 2022) 

by Kim Mella

Fiction

[Fiction] Brown Sugar Candy

The reason I saw my grandmother in my dream last night was probably because of what Sangwoo told me. The day our entire family gathered and went to visit her grave ahead of the fourth anniversary of her death, I heard a shocking story about her from Sangwoo, my younger brother. “Nuna, remember that old man?” It was a Saturday afternoon awash in autumn light, and dragonflies flitted leisurely throughout the cemetery park. My young nieces and nephews were shouting and running around, and the tombstones gleamed in the sun. In so many ways, it was the perfect day to pay a visit to Grandma for the first time in a while. “What old man?” I asked.“You know. Back in France, there was that old man who lived on the first floor. The tall one who wore a hearing aid.” While the other adults and my sister-in-law sat around on the grass chatting once we had finished tending the grave, Sangwoo and I had walked down to the lakeside, which was where he brought up the old man. “Ah, Monsieur Brunier? That was his name, right?”“Was it? I can’t remember.”“I’m pretty sure. Or was it Monsieur Bruno? Anyway, why are you suddenly asking about him?” Our family had lived in France from the time I was thirteen until I was sixteen, already nearly twenty years ago. “Grandma was dating that old man, wasn’t she? I just thought of that.”I turned to him, eyes wide. “What in the world are you talking about?”“You didn’t know?” Sangwoo laughed, amused.“Of course not—that’s why I’m asking what the hell you’re talking about.”“Actually, there was this one time,” he said, “when I saw them at a park near our house in France, sitting on a bench and holding hands.”  That night after we all parted ways, I went back to the house where I lived alone and took out the large boxes of my grandmother’s belongings from the depths of my wardrobe. The overwhelming majority of the space inside one box that held things like her norigae ornaments and gold rings was taken up by dozens of volumes of her diaries. There were notebooks of all different shapes and sizes, each labeled with the year according to both the Dangun and Gregorian calendars: D. 4283 and G. 1950, D. 4293 and G. 1960, and so on. I couldn’t bear to throw them out when I’d gone through her things, so I decided to take them all, even the ones where she had recorded in minute detail things like “nylon socks” and “a 500-hwan bill” she was gifted at her children’s doljanchi celebrations. But until then, out of respect for her privacy, I had refrained from reading through a single one. My grandmother, who used old-fashioned spellings, writing today as to-day, tomorrow as to-morrow. Among her many diaries, I found the one where she had recorded her day-to-day life during the time our family had spent in France.  *  I was five and Sangwoo was three when Grandma started living with us. When our grandfather died after a prolonged illness, our two aunts—Grandma’s daughters—thought she might get lonely living on her own and proposed that she move in with their eldest brother’s—our uncle’s—family. Grandma immediately shot down the idea, snapping, “Now that I’m finally free, you want me to go and spend the rest of my life walking on eggshells around my son and daughter-in-law?” But what ultimately made her decide to come and live with her younger son’s—our father’s—family was the fact that in July the year I turned five, our mother suddenly passed away in a car accident. “Your father came all the way to my house and got down on his knees.” A long time ago, when I asked Grandma why she had decided to raise us, that was her answer. I couldn’t picture my father, a big man built like a mountain, kneeling in front of her. In any case, that fall, she packed her things and came to live with us. I can’t quite say that she “moved in,” because Grandma, thinking she would stay with us only until Sangwoo started elementary school, brought most of her belongings to our place but didn’t sell her house. Several times a month, she went back to the 20-pyeong apartment where she’d lived with our grandfather to sweep and mop, and it wasn’t until I was nine and Sangwoo was seven that she finally sold the house and took up full-time residence with us. What was it that had made our grandmother, who’d held that house close to her heart for so long, suddenly change her mind? Now that I think about it, I never once asked. Maybe it was my own way of protecting myself. I knew that at any moment, she could pack her things and go, and there was always this fear huddling in some corner of my heart that she might leave us behind and disappear. It wasn’t that I thought she didn’t love us, my little brother and me. The affection she showed us was special, and I firmly believed she had decided to live with us because she didn’t want to be apart from us for even a moment. I thought that was undeniable. But now I also know that, more than anything, the single most crucial reason for her deciding to do away with her own home and come to live with us was because we needed her.  Grandma was born in a port city during the Japanese occupation to parents who ran a large Western-style dressmaking shop. She was the eldest daughter, with three brothers born before her and two sisters born after. A long time ago, I saw a photo of her as a little girl in a sailor-style school uniform standing in front of a wall somewhere. The face of the little girl in the photo, who looked to be only eight or nine years old at most, already showed glimmers of her outlook on life, things like her unwavering confidence and curiosity. All six children in her family were able to receive a modern education thanks to their cultured and financially well-off parents, but the fact that—unlike her siblings, who were content just to finish high school—Grandma was the only one who convinced her parents to let her enroll in college reveals a key aspect of her personality. When my grandmother passed away, the people who came to the funeral mostly remembered her for being “that type”—some said “stubborn,” others even used the word “vain.” “Aigo, that woman sure did whatever she wanted in life.” Every time one of those people sitting in front of their bowls of yukgaejang that had gone cold and dried-out slices of pyeonyuk spoke about Grandma as if they knew everything about her, I felt myself growing more and more upset, but I didn’t know why. I must have taken offense to the notion of “a woman who did whatever she wanted in life,” which seemed innocuous on the one hand but also seemed to hide something pointed and sharp within. The fact that Grandma was the only one of her siblings to go to college became a huge talking point, but no one seemed to remember that even before the war broke out, she’d had to drop out of the university she so badly wanted to attend. To me, Grandma was the sort of person who had to have known the rules for attending a women’s college at the time—students were required to withdraw once they were married—yet, less than a year into her studies, still allowed her parents to set her up with a man who would bore her for the rest of her life.  My grandmother, who maintained a height of 5’2 and a weight of 108 pounds for decades, who kept her white hair in a neat bob. It always made me proud when I was younger, the fact that she was so different from other grandmothers. She was fluent in Japanese, made her rolled omelets and steamed eggs a little sweet the Japanese way, and could sing “Edelweiss” in English. Because Grandma was highly educated, unlike most grandmothers, my brother and I felt the absence of our mother relatively less growing up. Until we graduated from elementary school, she looked over the notices in our notebooks and packed the supplies we needed, made boxed lunches for us with consideration for nutritional balance, and taught us things like addition and subtraction and our times tables, the way other children’s mothers did for them. Grandma, who had dreamed of being a pianist and was briefly enrolled in the music department, even taught me and my brother to play using Beyer’s instruction books. Her straight back and the curve of her arms as she showed us how to play songs like “Daddy and Crayons” or “The Orchard Trail.” While other grandmothers had barely finished elementary school, ours had always been a vision of sophistication and elegance. I looked up to her with wistful eyes. When we were little, Grandma was the one who tucked us into bed instead of our father, who was constantly busy with his architecture work. At night, we lay side by side on three separate blankets on the floor. Grandma was always in the middle, with me on her right and my brother on her left. While my brother was fast asleep almost as soon as he lay down, I struggled to drift off, so Grandma would tell me all these once-upon-a-time stories. She had a real talent for taking familiar tales and shaping them into something new whenever she ran out of material. Of the countless stories she told me, the one I remember to this day was about Little Red Riding Hood being eaten by a tiger. In Grandma’s story, Little Red Riding Hood had an errand to run. She was to cross several hills to bring a basket of rice cakes to the neighboring village, but on every hill she crossed, she encountered a tiger. “Little girl, little girl, give me your rice cakes,” the tiger said. Little Red honored each of his requests—first for the rice cakes, then the basket, then her red cape, then her shoes, until finally the tiger swallowed up the girl herself. “Grandma, this story is too scary,” I insisted the first time I heard the tale, burrowing into her chest. Imagine, a little girl devoured whole after giving up everything she has. It made for a truly terrifying story. Grandma smiled, brushing down my bangs with the back of her hand and whispering so as not to wake my brother. “No. This isn’t a scary story,” she said. “It’s a story about a very brave child who survives even in the belly of a tiger.” Unbeknownst to anyone, the girl in Grandma’s story had been clutching a tiny shard of obsidian in her fist when the tiger swallowed her, and with it, she slit the tiger’s stomach open from the inside and escaped.  Wouldn’t Grandma’s last chance to live apart from our family have been around the time our father’s transfer to France was finalized? The evening our father gathered the whole family to tell us that he was being sent to Paris on an assignment, the first thing Grandma said was that she wanted to stay in Korea. “The church I go to for worship every week is here, and so is the community college where I take classes twice a week, and my high school reunion every month,” she said. But in the end, she boarded the flight bound for France with the rest of us. “It’s not right for the kids to be without me.” Whenever she told people that she was leaving, rather than mention the anxieties and fears she had about life in a foreign country, Grandma simply said, “Thanks to my devoted son, I get to live abroad.” She didn’t know how to share her weaknesses or woes and openly declared that she would rather die than seek sympathy from others. She had a terrible relationship with our grandfather until the day he died, yet she still accompanied him to gatherings where she would put on a smile and use honorifics to address him. Of course, none of this meant that Grandma was entirely opposed to the idea of going to France. Until then, she had never been to a Western country, and France was the birthplace of many of the artists she had long aspired to emulate. She was ready to take in sights like the Eiffel Tower or Montmartre whenever she pleased. For the first two weeks after we arrived in Paris, while my brother and I were still in the process of transferring into our new school and our father’s work assignment hadn’t yet begun in earnest, it wasn’t me or my brother—both too young to harbor any fantasies about France—but Grandma who was utterly enraptured as she placed flowers on Chopin’s grave and asked to have her picture taken at the Mirabeau Bridge on the family outings led by our father. Truth be told, France was nothing more to me at the time than the country that had snatched me away from my peaceful life. I was ready to be disappointed by everything Paris had to offer, and the Seine which seemed so drab compared to the Han River, the elevators as narrow as coffins, and the foul-smelling passageways in the metro stations did little to change my mind. That was why, in every photo taken during those first few months—most of the photos of me, my brother, and Grandma standing in front of the Eiffel Tower or the Palace of Versailles, taken by our father—I was sulking as I stood next to my beaming grandmother in a wide-brimmed cap and ever-cheerful little brother. Back then, I felt a strong urge to punch people right in the nose when they said that living abroad at a young age was a privilege, and I couldn’t hide my frustration with my father for completely uprooting my life. The humiliation I felt sitting in classes where I didn’t understand a word that was said. The mortification I endured every time I was teased for not being able to express myself, all while hoping this time in my life would soon be over. The innocent pranks of children who had not yet learned that racism was wrong could be so cruel. After classes, I always rushed home as if I were fleeing something. To me, our house—where Grandma was waiting, boiling potatoes or making snacks like syrupy deep-fried sweet potatoes—was the safest place in the world. I bet it was the same for her. She couldn’t go anywhere on the metro aside from the Japanese grocery store that sold East Asian ingredients, and she spent most of her time in the house cleaning and doing laundry while waiting for me and my brother to get home. When we got back from school, we would eat the snacks that Grandma had set out for us before taking our seats beside her on the sofa to watch TV. There were times we watched incomprehensible French dubs of Japanese animated movies or American movies whose plots we roughly knew since they had also been broadcast in Korea—and lots of the ads on French TV featured nude women, so whenever one came on, we would gasp in shock and change the channel—but most times we watched Korean dramas recorded on videotapes that Grandma rented in bulk every Sunday when she went to the Japanese grocery store. Miniseries and weekend dramas that we watched over and over until we had memorized the lines, to the point where our father would come from work and ask, “Did you at least do your homework first?” The three of us shared a certain something at that time. If I had to put it into words, maybe it was like the sweet, cozy camaraderie that formed among castaways on an island isolated from the world. But time went by, and after about a year, my brother and I had moved beyond the stage of rejecting our unfamiliar surroundings and had entered an era of trying whatever we could to adapt to our new lives.  How did Grandma fill her ever-increasing alone time? In the beginning, if she still had time to spare after finishing all the house chores, she would brew herself a mug of green tea, sit at the kitchen table, and read the Bible she had brought with her from Korea. Once she grew bored with being at home all day, she started going for walks nearby. She was afraid of getting lost if she tried taking the subway on her own, but she seemed fine wandering the neighborhood on foot. She would pack the dark blue pocket map our father had bought her in her small purse and set off for somewhere a little farther from the house each day. When one of her walks led her to a park that she loved, she marked it with a little circle on the map so she could find it again. Unlike my brother and me, who eventually became quite fluent in French, Grandma’s language skills didn’t improve in the slightest. Now and then, she would take out one of the basic French textbooks from our bookcase and leaf through it, but the only French she seemed to remember were a few greetings and rudimentary phrases like I’m from Korea and I don’t speak French. Considering how easily she had mastered Japanese and English during her school days, the fact that her French wasn’t getting any better made Grandma feel helpless. Not being able to converse in French meant that she had almost no one to talk to when she left the house. I don’t know whose fault it was, but that was around the time my brother and I, who once got along so well, started yelling and arguing constantly over petty things like who got to pick the TV channel. So we were too busy crying and screaming to have a proper conversation with our grandmother, and even in France our father was often away at company dinners or on business trips. In those days, cyber communication was already starting to catch on in Korea, but in France, there were still tons of people who didn’t know about even the concept of the Internet. Grandma sometimes called our aunts or her friends back home, but she was so worried about the cost of making international calls that she would hurry off the phone before she got to say everything she wanted. One time, our father even looked into a social gathering for expat wives to recommend to Grandma, who was clearly feeling bored. All the young wives in that group, who took turns hosting each other at their homes, were friendly but overly polite, and Grandma realized she was nothing more to them than an old woman who was difficult to manage. As time went on, her loneliness heaped up inside her, soundlessly, like snow. At first, it was a thin layer that seemed like it might soon melt away. But before long, it became a mound thick and solid enough to reach up to her waist. I was so busy trying hard not to seem like a typical Asian girl, overly serious with no sense of humor, in the eyes of the few friends I had managed to make in France that I didn’t realize Grandma had gone to the supermarket to buy pads for me because I’d just started my period only to wind up standing dumbstruck in front of a display case lined with nothing but tampons, not knowing what they were, or that she’d started visiting the Japanese grocery store hoping to find someone to talk to after a long and tedious day at home only to end up feeling both proud and humiliated every time she spoke fluently to the store’s Japanese owner.   Grandma became acquainted with Monsieur Brunier at some point in our second year of living in France, after many more such days. M. Brunier lived on the first floor of our apartment building, but we’d hardly ever run into him. The building manager told me that was because M. Brunier had been spending most of his time in a villa in Bordeaux since his wife passed away, leaving their Paris home empty. The building manager was an immigrant from Portugal, and she was kind to us as we were the only other foreigners in the building aside from her family. Once I could speak a bit of French, whenever I went to pick up parcels sent from my friends in Korea, I would end up listening with rapt attention as she told me stories about the people in our neighborhood. I would bring a little note that said a package had arrived when I went to the building manager’s apartment. Then I would ring the doorbell and wait for the door to open slowly and Madame Selina’s face to appear in the gap. Her resting face looked quite stern, but the moment she opened her mouth, her gaze softened. Whenever we blew a fuse or the power went out in the house, she would listen to my ridiculously long-winded and inarticulate explanations all the way through, then teach me the French word for whatever I’d been trying to explain. Why can I still remember things like that, and her voice as she gently pointed out, “You can say ‘short-circuit,’” after all this time? Now I suppose I should explain the layout of the apartment complex where we lived. It consisted of four buildings surrounding a rectangular yard. Our building was the farthest from the main road, which meant that when we wanted to go out, we had to cross that yard and leave through the main building, which was opposite ours. The building manager’s apartment was on the first floor of the main building. And M. Brunier lived on the first floor of one of the buildings that connected directly to ours. All this is to say it was inevitable that our grandmother would pass by M. Brunier’s apartment at the start of spring that year. She had long grown stifled from staying at home all day and was headed across the central yard to embark on one of her walks when she stopped in her tracks. She heard someone playing a piano. The pianist had clear talent, and the sound was coming from somewhere incredibly close by. The source of the piano melody was M. Brunier’s house. Grandma could see him, a gray-haired man hunched over at his piano, through his wide-open window. Liebestraum No. 3 in A♭ major. Ah, it’s Liszt. As soon as the title of the nocturne came to mind, Grandma suddenly remembered the day she had played this song for the first time. On the black Yamaha in her high school music room. And in an instant, the feeling of the keys under her fingers came back to her in time with M. Brunier’s playing. It was surprising and unexpected, like an electric shock. That was why Grandma stood there outside M. Brunier’s drawing room window, the sill of which was lined with three flowerpots of geraniums, until the performance ended. Until M. Brunier noticed her, approached the window, and greeted her, “Bonjour.” That night, Grandma knocked on my bedroom door. “Yeah?” I said, sticking just my head out. At some point, I had started shutting and locking my door, believing privacy to be of the utmost importance.“If you’re not using your radio, let me borrow it,” she said. While I searched for the Walkman I had left neglected in one of my desk drawers, the door opened a little wider. “What’s a school-aged girl doing with all this nail polish?” Grandma tutted, spotting the many colors—a pearlescent pink, a shade of sky blue—sitting on my desk next to a bottle of nail polish remover. “Everyone wears it here,” I snapped irritably, handing her the Walkman and shutting the door again. Everyone is like that here had become something of a magic spell that rendered my grandmother weak, and at some point, I had started to enjoy using the phrase. Grandma went back to her room, sat on the edge of the bed, and turned on the radio function on the Walkman. With much patience and after a long time spent adjusting the dial just so, she managed to find a station that played nothing but classical music. She couldn’t understand a word of the DJ’s comments between one song and the next, but she had no problem at all listening to the music itself. Keeping the volume at the lowest it could go so as not to wake up anyone else in the house, Grandma pressed the radio to her ear, and as she willed herself to sleep, forgotten memories washed over her in bed like a flood tide. The creaking of the old wooden floor in the music room where she stayed behind to practice after school, the copper kettle on the wood-burning stove, the rattle of the kettle lid as water boiled inside, and the endless silence outside the music room window, the golden light of the sunset pouring over the evergreen trees. The next day, Grandma was on her way home from a walk when she spotted M. Brunier from a distance, seemingly on his way back from buying baguettes, and a few days later she saw him from behind at a newspaper stand. Seems like every old person with time to spare ends up in the same places, she thought. She likely could have run into M. Brunier in the past, but there had never been any reason for her to notice his existence until then. Now, though, he stood out wherever they were. Every time she saw him, Grandma thought of his side profile as he sat at his piano, and every time she crossed that yard, she stopped outside his window, hoping to hear a melody. As the days grew balmier, M. Brunier spent more time playing with the window open. Did he know Grandma was listening? He must have. Sometimes when she was standing out in the courtyard, he would stop playing, head over to the window and strike up a conversation with her out of the blue, startling her. “I can’t speak French,” she blurted out whenever it happened, one of the few French sentences she knew. Then she scurried off, shyly, vowing never to stand by his window again. But the sound of the piano stopped her in her tracks every time without fail, and she was overcome with the desire to play. Flowers were in full bloom all around, and Grandma and M. Brunier began to take notice of each other. On days when they ran into each other on the street by chance and ended up walking back together, M. Brunier would walk more slowly, matching his strides to hers, then hold the main door open for her until she was inside. He was always the first to greet her initially, but Grandma soon started to think it was rude of her never to greet him first, and one day when she ran into him by the mailboxes, she mustered the courage to say hello before he did. Once, on the way back from grocery shopping, Grandma ran into M. Brunier, who took the handle of her wheeled shopping basket and brought it from the main entrance all the way to the elevator for her. Sometimes when Grandma and I were coming home from an outing or else leaving to go somewhere together, we would run into M. Brunier at the entrance. When that happened, he would ask us all sorts of questions or tell us stories about himself, having picked up on the fact that I knew French. Now that I think about it, he probably wanted Grandma, not me, to hear everything he was saying. But I had no way of knowing that then, and I couldn’t even begin to guess why every time we parted ways with M. Brunier, Grandma would ask me, “What’d he say?” I summarized it all as concisely as I could—“He asked if we were Vietnamese”—or else omitted much of it—“I don’t know. He was just rambling”—before returning to my own little world.  It rained for ten days. We had been living in France for three years, but Grandma still hadn’t gotten used to the springs there, fickle and gloomy as they were. Because of the lack of postnatal care she had received, her wrists and knees ached terribly when it rained, so for ten days, she refrained from going outside and stayed in the house. At the first sight of sunlight, she went out to the park and sat on a bench looking up at the trees, wishing that the blindingly bright summer would come soon. In summer, stark naked children splashed around in the park fountain, laughing out loud. What a beautiful sight that was. Children’s bodies, soft and sweet-smelling. Grandma unclenched her fists and studied her hands. Her skin had lost so much of its elasticity that when she pinched the back of her hands, it took a long time for the flesh to return to its original state. Grandma spotted M. Brunier entering the park as she was sitting on that bench, listening to music on the Walkman and crocheting. He was wearing beige corduroy pants and a brick-red shirt. How old might he be? Grandma had a hard time telling white men’s ages. It was probably the same for him when it came to her. M. Brunier was strappingly tall, but he had a slight stoop, as was natural at his age, and his gait was a little crooked. Oh, he couldn’t possibly be coming toward me, could he? When their eyes met, M. Brunier gave Grandma a slight smile and started walking toward her, which set off her nerves. She thought he would continue on after just exchanging greetings, but he gestured to the space beside her on the bench and asked if he could sit with her, which made Grandma’s heart pound and dulled her senses. He said something else to her. Helplessly, she repeated her usual “I don’t speak French.” M. Brunier pointed to the Walkman and enunciated one word, slowly: “Beethoven.” Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor was playing on the radio. “Ah, Beethoven.” Grandma nodded in understanding. After that, whenever they met in the park by chance, they would sit side by side on that bench. Because they couldn’t communicate in words, they simply sat there. Sitting with M. Brunier and listening to music together made Grandma’s heart flutter, but she couldn’t tell whether it was because she was with a man she barely knew or because she felt such a strong urge to play the piano in those moments. Every night before she went to sleep, she would listen to the classical music station on the radio and think, Tomorrow, I should ask him if he’d let me play. But to do that, she would have had to ask me or my brother or even our father to translate and write out the question in French for her. For some reason, she didn’t want to tell anyone about M. Brunier and the piano. What on earth would I do that for? she thought, pressing the Walkman to her ear. What a strange idea.   “Can I play your piano?”About two weeks had gone by before Grandma gathered the courage to ask M. Brunier the question in English. At one end of the grass field in the park, children were having some kind of birthday party, and someone had strung up several pastel balloons in a tree. The balloons were swaying in the wind. Each time a breeze kicked up, the gust grazed the hem of Grandma’s favorite floral-patterned skirt as well as her bare calves. M. Brunier, who didn’t speak a word of English, stared at Grandma as if to ask what she was saying. As if she’d expected as much, she reached into her purse with a slightly proud look on her face and took out the thick Korean-French dictionary she had made sure to pack for the occasion. Then, with M. Brunier watching her with wide and curious eyes, she searched for each word one by one and showed them to him as she found them. “I,” je. “Want,” vouloir. “To play,” jouer. “Your,” vous. “Piano,” piano. M. Brunier patiently read each word, and at last he seemed to understand what she was asking. His blue eyes gleamed behind the lenses of his reading glasses. He smiled and said, “Ah, piano!” That was how Grandma ended up in M. Brunier’s home that afternoon for the first time. Visiting the home of a man who lived alone—a French man, at that—was a definite first for her, and as M. Brunier turned his house key in the lock, she briefly wondered if she was doing something incredibly foolish. She was about to remove her shoes at the entrance, but seeing M. Brunier step onto the carpet with his shoes on, she paused in shock. He’d left all the storm windows closed while he’d been out, so the house was dim, but the moment he opened the windows and curtains, the shapes of the various objects that had been crouching in the dark came into view, one by one. Antique furniture in the Louis XV style. Wallpaper patterned with illustrations of birds and flowers. An armchair covered in fabric and a grandfather clock. Several large ceramic flowerpots sat atop the marble fireplace. They were empty now but had probably been filled to bursting with flowers when his wife was still alive. As Grandma stood in a daze in the drawing room, M. Brunier took her coat and hung it up for her. “Puis-je vous offrir une tasse de thé?” he asked, but Grandma didn’t understand. She took out the dictionary from her purse again. M. Brunier found the entry for “thé,” tea, and showed it to her. She realized that he was asking if she wanted some tea. “No, thank you,” she said, shaking her head. She had her sights set only on M. Brunier’s grand piano—a 1930 Pleyel—sitting elegantly and ostentatiously by the drawing room window.   Grandma sat on the piano bench. It had been adjusted to the perfect height for her, and even her foot’s distance from the pedal was ideal. Feeling the firmness of the bench underneath her, Grandma opened the lid and gently rested her thumbs and forefingers on the ivory keys. Do, re. The keys were cold and sleek. All she’d done was press her fingers to them, but immediately the sense of wonder and rapture she had felt the first time she laid eyes on a Christmas tree at church as a girl burst out from somewhere deep within her. Grandma used to teach me simple pieces on the piano until I was ten, so it had only been about five years since the last time she had played. But that day, playing M. Brunier’s piano, she was consumed by the feeling that it had been a long time, that she was touching the keys again after an eternity. She leafed through her memory and started playing the second movement in Schumann’s Kreisleriana, a composition she had loved. At first, she was a bit rusty and couldn’t will her hands to move the way she wanted them to, but soon, to her surprise, her body remembered the familiar motions that had once been habit, and her fingers slowly began to glide over the keys. As she played, M. Brunier sat beside her, watching with a slightly dumbstruck expression. He had probably never seen an Asian woman playing the piano before.  As Grandma’s recital went on, M. Brunier’s gaze shifted from a blend of surprise and confusion to one of gentle warmth and anticipation, but Grandma had, for a moment, forgotten he was there at all. That was because, in the flurry of her excitement, the person who came to mind was her music teacher from her high school days, a married man she’d had an unrequited crush on. “Nansil, you have a special talent for music, so you have to listen to lots of it,” he’d told her. He taught young Nansil to play the piano after school at a time when record players and pianos themselves were rare. One day, just so that she could listen to the music she always yearned to hear, he secretly slipped her the key to the music room that had a record player inside. Those were the days when none of her friends could even dream about something like love, all girls who averted their eyes and whose faces burned red if they ran into the boys from the nearby school at the bakery they stopped by on the way home after classes for mochi bread. But Nansil was different. What had she longed for? Something special, something edifying, something that would transport her to another world. The letters she exchanged with her music teacher. The ones they secretly stashed and retrieved from inside the instruments. What kept her up at night were the stories of lovers like Yun Sim-deok and Kim U-jin, or Clara and Robert Schumman. She had no doubt that the life that lay ahead of her would be one full of surprises, and she believed she had an obligation to make hers into an extraordinary narrative.  After that day, Grandma would regularly visit M. Brunier and play his piano. She would show up bearing fruit and juice as a sign of gratitude. Unaware that people in France didn’t bring such things when visiting others’ homes, when she filled a bowl with apples or melons and presented them along with bottled orange juice to M. Brunier, she couldn’t understand why he would regard her offering with a bewildered look before bursting out laughing. In the beginning, she would simply play for a while before getting up to leave, but slowly over time, she began having tea with M. Brunier in the drawing room. At first, when he asked her if she would like some sugar or milk or perhaps a slice of lemon in her tea, she hadn’t understood. She found his tastes so bizarre—who put milk in their tea! But soon she came to accept the tea he served with a splash of milk and two sugar cubes. They didn’t share a language, but as they sipped, they made plodding attempts to converse through the dictionary. They did away with things like articles and adverbs, stringing together a conversation with verbs and nouns and, later on, one or two adjectives. Because these conversations centered around a dictionary, no matter what they said, the verbs they used were tenseless, only ever in their base forms. But one day while looking up a verb, Grandma suddenly realized that most of the omitted tenses were past tenses, and that there was almost nothing she could express using future tense verbs. That was how she came to learn that M. Brunier’s wife—her name was Éliane—had died four years earlier from cancer; that he himself had been wealthy for most of his life and had never held a proper job; that he’d once lived in Vietnam, a former French colony; and that his given name was Jean Paul. In turn, M. Brunier came to learn that Grandma’s name was Park Nansil, that she was Korean, and that her day-to-day life was incredibly lonely. They conversed in the drawing room, sometimes going out for walks together on nice and sunny days, but most often when she went to M. Brunier’s house, Grandma listened to Bach or Mozart on his CD player. Whenever he put on a CD and steeped some tea, he and Grandma would sit a certain distance apart in the drawing room chairs, listening to the music and carrying out their respective tasks until the song ended. As that went on, old memories would crop up out of the blue, and Grandma entrusted her body to the music, allowing it to guide her as she set off on a journey somewhere far away. The evacuation route taken by refugees during the Korean War as they listened to the faint sound of shelling in the background, the flames visible in the distance from where she stood in a field somewhere and the black smoke blocking out the sky overhead, what looked like a parade of people walking like ghosts with bundles on their backs—she thought of these scenes that, even in the moment she first saw them, she knew would be imprinted on her mind forever. But even trivial memories from the past, ones she didn’t even know she had stored somewhere, suddenly unfolded before her eyes. Things like the feel of the white jeogori on her bare skin and the pale foam-like patterning on her lace veil on her wedding day—at the time, Grandma didn’t know what she stood to lose or gain from being unable to deny her parents’ wishes until the very end—or the raindrops she had seen on a day long ago, back when every restaurant had to thin out its rice with at least 20 percent mixed grains. One day in the midst of her suffocating life, where every day was exactly the same as the one before, Grandma had asked her neighbors to look after her still-young children and raced downtown to see a movie, either The Last Days of Pompeii or Miracle in the Rain, at the Jungbu Theater. She wasn’t sure which movie it had been, but the memory of the sensations she had felt that day was still uncannily clear. She had left the theater and set off on her own, ducking underneath an awning to wait for the downpour to pass, when the smell of grilled fish wafted toward her from some restaurant or other. The feel of the humidity on her cheeks and the roar of the pouring rain. The sensation of being alive and, at the same time, the feeling that she had already grown so old. Ah, how can one’s memories remain this vivid when so much time has passed? Looking back, Grandma was stunningly beautiful then. She started wearing the makeup she had abandoned since coming to France again, and I even caught her sometimes sneaking spritzes of the perfume in my room—a Calvin Klein fragrance I had begged my father to buy me for my birthday—but that wasn’t all. “Grandma, has something been going on with you lately?” It must have been one of those days when I paused as my brother and I had been doing our homework peacefully side by side at the dining table to ask Grandma a question. But she simply scoffed, “What would be going on with me?” and didn’t say anything else, so I turned back to the dictionary open on the table in front of me to finish my assignment.  It happened one afternoon in winter. Grandma was sitting in M. Brunier’s drawing room, and Brahms was flowing from the CD player. The afternoon sunlight danced over her hands as she crocheted, and Grandma looked up at M. Brunier sitting beside her. He had been so quiet, she thought he might have dozed off, but to her surprise, he had his sleeves rolled up and was stacking sugar cubes like a tower. He looked serious, intently focused, like someone carrying out an extremely important task. What on earth was he doing? This inscrutable man who constantly spilled food in his lap whenever he ate and occasionally took part in completely baffling behavior. Grandma studied M. Brunier’s arms as he stacked the sugar cubes; like hers, his were mottled with liver spots, but also covered with silver hairs, unlike a Korean man’s. As she watched him, it dawned on her that she would never understand M. Brunier, and that he would never know certain things about her. To her surprise, she felt a pain inside her chest at the thought. Ages ago, when she felt she was too old but was still in fact quite young, Grandma thought that aging meant the body and the mind degenerating at the same rate. Desire and yearning atrophying at the same pace as the body was stiffening. But now she knew. That it was only the body that deteriorated. Whenever such thoughts occurred to her, she invariably wondered if God had made humans age to punish them for the sins they had committed over the course of their lives. Was there any punishment more terrifying than having a heart filled with pulsating desire while the body refuses to cooperate? What a terrible kind of retribution—being confined to a body that could not move an inch. As she grew older, the thing that scared Grandma the most wasn’t dementia or the catheter bags she might someday end up wearing and filling with piss. No, the fear that haunted even her nightmares was the thought of what would happen if she were to spend the rest of her life like the stroke patient she had once seen at the nursing home where her husband had been hospitalized—fully conscious and wailing in anguish even as her entire body was paralyzed. But on that winter afternoon, as she gazed at the gentle sunlight dancing on the crown of that old man’s head while he concentrated wholly on the useless, silly task of stacking his sugar cube tower like a child as she sucked on one of the cubes as if it were candy, Grandma was once again overcome with a yearning for life and an anticipation for the future, and she had no way at all of stopping the flood. What was there to anticipate in life? Was that an incredibly foolish thing to do? Spending your whole life being betrayed. Even though she had given up her youth to raise her children, her daughters would take turns accusing her of hurting them, saying she doted only on her sons all their lives, and the sons would scream at her whenever they’d had a bit to drink, saying they had been made to feel cowed all their lives in the presence of their mother, who looked down on them for not turning out as well as their older sisters had. “You take issue with everything the men in this house do, down to the way we breathe!” No doubt her grandchildren, too, would come to hound her like creditors someday. She was lost in such thoughts until she realized that M. Brunier was there now, and while Grandma believed that there was something between them—whether empathy, understanding, or the tenuous solidarity and friendship forged between people who had been pushed to the margins in life—it occurred to her that M. Brunier might not attach any meaning at all to the time he spent with her. Who knows? Maybe he had other friends with whom he could communicate. Maybe he even had a lover. “Nansil!” Grandma had been so consumed by these thoughts that she didn’t notice the music had stopped playing and was startled when M. Brunier suddenly called her name. When she opened her eyes, she found a tremendously tall tower of sugar cubes on the table. A high sugar cube tower stacked painstakingly layer by layer. “Wah!” Grandma exclaimed. Like someone witnessing such a marvel for the first time in her life. Excited by her reaction, M. Brunier took the sugar box he had brought from the kitchen at some point and very carefully poured the remaining sugar cubes onto the table. Little brown sugar blocks spilling across the tabletop. Looking at the sugar cubes, Grandma picked up the one nearest to her and placed it in her mouth. Aiee, that’s sweet. What a pure sweetness, too. She decided to roll the sugar cube around with her tongue, slowly spreading the sweetness, and memories from when she was very young sprang up in her mind.That day in early spring when she sat on the dirt path outside the tailor’s shop and wept after being scolded for something or other, and the elegant purple cloche hat that one of the women customers had worn. The woman had gotten down from a rickshaw and pressed a brown sugar candy into the palm of Grandma’s hand. The splendid sweetness which she was tasting for the first time ever. It occurred to her then that this was another memory she would never be able to tell M. Brunier about. Grandma’s life had been one where even when she was with someone, she felt as if she had washed ashore on a strange island all alone. One where, as the days dragged on, she begged God to just kill her, yet where she would never be able to speak of the immense fear that inevitably followed trying to imagine what would come after death. But what could she do? Funnily enough, she suddenly felt as though it didn’t matter, either way. The delight that came from the unexpected. The particular joy that could be found only in the moment when the best-laid plans gave way. The moments of happiness that suddenly fell from the sky like shooting stars in midsummer when she thought she had lost everything. Grandma stood up then and placed one more sugar cube on top of the tower with M. Brunier. Then another one. And another. They did that until the tower collapsed. Until the sugar cubes scattered in all directions, and Grandma and M. Brunier clapped their hands, howling with laughter.  This relationship with M. Brunier lasted nearly a year. Until our family unexpectedly ended up returning to Korea earlier than planned due to sudden financial troubles at our father’s company. “So they were dating.” If I’d said as much to Grandma after listening to the whole story, she would have waved my words away, tutting, “Dating, my foot.” But Grandma never once told me anything about M. Brunier. Not only throughout my teenage years, during which time she consoled me and kept me on the straight and narrow while I was so consumed with resentment toward my father for not giving us any say at all in coming back, asking him if he knew how painful it was to be separated from my friends yet again when I was just beginning to adjust to our new lives. And not only throughout my brother’s struggle with depression due to the other kids bullying him whenever he failed to conform to Korean middle school culture and accusing him of showing off that he’d had a taste of life abroad thanks to his rich parents. But all throughout my adulthood and my brother’s, throughout our relationships and heartbreaks, she never said a word. Which is why the story I’ve been telling up until now is one I merely imagined while reading through her diaries.  In my mind, the farewell scene between Grandma and M. Brunier goes like this. They’re in the park on a spring day when gladiolus flowers are abloom in all sorts of colors, and they’re holding hands. In silence. All around them is the smell of fresh grass, and as she’s holding this man’s warm and wrinkled hand for the first time only when they are about to part ways forever, Grandma thinks. About what an arrogant thought that was. About how the life of an elderly person is not much different than that of a stroke patient with paralyzed limbs. Grandma lives this way, and her body lives this way, feeling everything vividly. According to her diaries, on that last day, M. Brunier searched in the dictionary and said his final words of farewell to her. Regarding what exactly he said, Grandma wrote only that the phrase consisted of two pronouns and one verb, so I don’t know what the words hidden therein might be. They could have been “Je vous attendrai,” I’ll wait for you, or “Vous me manquerez,” I’ll miss you. They could have even been the words I was imagining, “Je vous aime,” I love you. But now I have no way of ever knowing the truth of what was said.  All I know is this. It has to do with the dream I had last night, where Grandma visited me. She didn’t appear to be suffering the way she had been right before her death but instead appeared as the healthy woman she had been in her seventies, wearing gorgeous clothes and enveloped in the faint light of early dawn. I was probably a little girl in that dream world, so happy to see my grandmother after all these years that I ran to her in a single bound and embraced her. But then—what was that smell? As soon as I hugged Grandma, I caught a whiff of a strong, sweet aroma coming from somewhere. But I couldn’t find the source of the scent, not in Grandma’s hat or skirt or anywhere, and I got anxious. “Grandma, Grandma, look at me.” At the sound of my urgent pleas, she turned to me, and I suddenly noticed that she had her fist clenched tight. “Grandma, open your hand,” I nagged. Over and over again. I knew that if I started crying, she would give me whatever it was that I wanted. I was sure of it. But in the dream, Grandma said in a gentle yet firm tone, “No.” She looked slightly pained and, at the same time, as if she weren’t in any pain at all. Clenching her fist even tighter, she added, with the same resolve in her voice, “This is mine.”

Interviews

[Interview] Lingering Long and Delving Deep into the Unseeable

Across the many novels and stories you have published, from your debut collection Falling in Paul to your most recent Everything About Spring Nights, it seems you have always spoken about love. Readers have been captivated by the fluency with which you narrate the expansiveness of our relationships with others while depicting inner pain through images of light. In your author’s note for Summer Villa, you wrote that “there is nothing else we can rely on but understanding and love.” Is love still the most important life value in your work, or have you perhaps discovered a more important value in the meantime?  I never consciously thought of myself as writing about love all this time, but now that you mention it, I suppose I was. After all, we can’t help but call it “love” when humans, who can only ever see the world from their own perspectives, make an effort to understand others despite that limita­tion. As I write, I often find myself growing attached to the stories of those who are striving in that way—people who somehow find the strength time and again to reach out to someone or stay true to their own desires, pushing forward in life even when they believe their efforts may be in vain. If those efforts can also be called “love,” then I don’t think I’ve found a value more important to me.   Your early works primarily explored inner solitude and subtle rifts in relationships. The repeated use of the word “falling” is indicative of this. What stood out even more was a chilling sense of the impossibility of commu­nication. In your recent work, however, your gaze seems to have shifted from “me” toward “us.” This is especially true of the stories in Everything About Spring Nights, including “Radiant Days,” which depicts an elderly woman’s inner turmoil, and “When the Light Reaches,” which delicately sheds light on the various forms of life within a community—the subtle emotions between women, questions of gender identity, and the issue of care. It’s been quite a long time since your literary debut in 2011. Could you comment on the conscious shift you made toward the possibility of solidarity with others and communal ideals?  Looking back, when I first started writing, I think I was more interested in expressing the imperfections of language itself. Even before I became a writer, I was extremely sensitive to the fissures on the underside of seemingly smooth conver­sations, and I wanted to explore them through fiction. But over time, my focus gradually shifted toward those very brief moments where communication occurs, even amid imperfection. I consider myself a fundamentally pessimistic yet ordinary person, and I still feel daunted when faced with phrases like “the possibility of solidarity with others” and “communal ideals,” as if I’m standing in blinding sunlight. But the more time I spend as a writer, the more I believe in the value of these things, and I think I write fiction from within that belief.  I fully relate to that feeling of being daunted, like being blinded by sunlight. I also noticed a shift in your writing style. We associate the name Sou Linne Baik with neat, beautiful sentences. But if your early writing was defined by a keen expression of the fissures of everyday life and clear, sharp writing, the sentences in your more recent work seem to showcase a deepening of your signature tenderness and warmth. I imagine this stems from an inclusive attitude that seeks to embrace pain rather than merely observe it. Could you tell us about your process of writing and refining your sentences?  As I mentioned earlier, because I was always acutely aware of the imperfections of language from early on, writing came paired with a constant sense of discomfort. As a writer, language is all I have—a tool that I must use to express myself even though I don’t really trust it. At some point, though, I came to accept that discomfort as a condi­tion of the work and wrote anyway. Since language has so many limitations and the words I write can never reach others exactly as I intended, I began to think that I had no choice but to convey certain sensations by creating them through language, much like a painting or a piece of music. As a result, lending rhythm and breath to my sentences became more important to me, and my sentences have grown longer than they were in the beginning.   So there was an internal shift—a realization that you had no choice but to create and convey sensations using language. Since we can’t give up on language even though we know nothing can be fully conveyed through it, perhaps writing fiction is an attempt to keep approaching that impossibility. When I consider how the distinct rhythm and breath in your sentences were created in an effort to convey deeper sensations while embracing language’s limitations, I feel a sense of endearment and a desire to reread your work more carefully and cherish it that much more. What exactly does it mean to give rhythm or breath to a sentence? You seem to be pointing to a quality of liveliness beyond mere precision or polish, so I’d love to hear more about what holds your attention longest when you’re crafting your sentences. I’m so happy and grateful that you feel the desire to reread my work and look at it more closely. I once did a book talk with a writer whose style was the complete opposite of mine, and something they said left a strong impression on me. They believed the most important element of a story was the narrative, and that each sentence owed strict service to that narrative—which was why they strove to write precise sentences and avoided embellishment. I think about precision a little differently, though. I tend to believe that even if I stripped each sentence down to a subject and a verb, I still wouldn’t be able to express one hundred percent of what I really wanted to say. Because of that, when I’m revising, I go over my work repeatedly, focusing not only on whether the sentences sufficiently convey the narrative but also on whether the rhythm, the breath, and the modifiers are used appropriately to shape emotions and imagery. If I decide that it’s necessary to create a melody or rhythm even at the risk of compromising readability, I may deliberately string more and more words together to form long, complex sentences, and sometimes I’ll even replace a three-syllable modifier with a two-syllable one of similar meaning.  In your novella To Love and Be Loved, the grandmother appears to the protagonist as a figure who fills the void left by her mother. Through this narrative of three generations of women—“Grandma,” “Mom,” and “me”—this work speaks to another kind of possibility for women, an unknowable, infinite possibility of “woman” that can be retold and rewritten, not as a story of contradiction and negation but as a history that can be shared and understood. I personally feel that this novella serves as a stepping stone that must be crossed on the way to your full-length novel Brilliant Regards. I think so, too. In many ways, I feel like To Love and Be Loved has come to mark an inflection point in my writing.  In your earlier works, the characters tended to linger before feelings of loss, lack, and incomprehension. In this novella, though, we can see the beginnings of a cautious desire, despite the incomprehension, to try reading others again. Perhaps that’s why it reads at times like an emotional or narrative passageway into the broader, deeper mourning and hospitality of Brilliant Regards. When you describe it as an “inflection point,” do you mean a specific moment of change? Could it be connected to a shift in the very way you see the world and others? Yes. When I was writing those earlier stories, I tended to portray characters who withdrew inward rather than turning their gaze outward—characters who tried to peer deeper into themselves. After all, my main focus has been on magnifying and depicting certain moments of dissonance, and that was meaningful to me in its own way. But in doing so, I think my characters often came across as somewhat static or passive. While I was preparing to write To Love and Be Loved, I became acutely aware for the first time that most of the characters in my stories are women. I thought a lot about how, even though I had put forward these narrators and characters to explore universal themes of communication and language, they might all be read differently with this “woman” modifier attached to them. So I wanted to try portraying different kinds of women—characters who didn’t simply stand by and watch moments of failure unfold but who, after witnessing those moments, attempted to do something. Those are the kinds of characters who began to appear in my work.  Your short story “Brown Sugar Candy” also features a significant grandmother figure. The story is structured so that we see the narrator—an adult who had witnessed her grandmother Nansil acting as a caregiver during her own childhood—reconstruct the last years of her grandmother’s life using diaries kept while the family was living in France. The narrator’s portrayal of her grandmother is fascinating, and the fact that this is a story of a presumed past that no one can ever fully verify ironically evokes a very human tenderness. Please tell us about how this story came to you and how you finished it.  This story grew out of the themes I had explored while writing another story, “Heavy Snow,” which also appears in Summer Villa, and To Love and Be Loved. Around that time, I was deeply interested in how mothers are depicted in narratives, and I often found myself wanting to create “Mom” and “Grandma” characters who didn’t sacrifice as other mothers did—or, more precisely, who were perceived as not having sacrificed as much as was expected of them. By the standards of Korean society, Nansil in “Brown Sugar Candy” might be considered an atypical grandmother. I wanted to write about the granddaughter of a woman like that, a granddaughter who only belatedly comes to understand her grandmother’s life. I remember listening to many of the piano pieces that Nansil would have played while I was writing the story.  When the narrator demands to see what her grandmother is clutching in her hand, she says, “This is mine.” You depict the grandmother as a woman with a strong and frank sense of desire. You are obviously very far from old age. Still, is there something that might make you say right now, No, this is mine, like that grandmother? Anything you’re holding tight and can’t give to anyone else? Oh, that’s a tough question. For me, wouldn’t that be writing fiction?  The narrative structure of “Brown Sugar Candy” weaves together multiple storylines, similarly to how Haemi secretly reads Aunt Seonja’s diary in Brilliant Regards, and both works feature women’s love stories that are heartrending and moving. I want to ask you about the unpredictable clues, secrets that must be uncovered, and scattered truths that organize your stories. Do these formal elements, so expressive of the vulnerability that lurks in every corner of our lives, connect in any way to your authorial concern about entertaining the reader? I don’t think I’ve ever consciously thought about the entertainment factor while writing. Which is why, after Brilliant Regards was published, I was quite surprised to hear from readers that they had become so immersed in the story that they found themselves trying to guess what would happen next. The reason I structured both works around characters imagining other people’s lives through diaries was because this felt like a metaphor for how I write fiction. I’m always cautious about writing as if I know everything. We strive to understand others, but in reality, we’re often just imagining and interpreting what we’ve learned about them based on what we know about ourselves. For me, fiction is the outcome of that process, which is why my characters seem to repeat those attempts, searching for clues and making guesses over and over again.  Besides “Brown Sugar Candy,” you have written many stories set abroad. I can think of “Midday in Summer” and “Night at the Border” from The Wretched Light, “The Trajectory of Time” and “Summer Villa” from Summer Villa, and the novel Brilliant Regards. I’d like to think these settings contribute to making the worlds within your works that much more captivating. Is there anything you pay special attention to when foreground­ing landscapes outside of Korea? I don’t think there’s much that I pay more or special attention to. In the same way that specific, real-life place names are mentioned in stories set in Korea, I simply describe the settings abroad with the hope that readers who know those places well will find my renditions natural. Beyond that, I suppose I just try not to reinforce the typical images or preconceptions associated with a particular country or city.   Your vigilance about avoiding the typical images superimposed on certain places seems to manifest as a distinctive narrative texture—one that resists the mere consumption of foreign landscapes. After all, the foreign settings in your work function not merely as backdrops for the story but as sophisticated devices that create a certain sense of distance or a particular sensibility that drives us to view the characters’ emo­tions and relationships in a new way.  I’m glad to hear that it comes across as distinct from “mere consumption.” If I choose to set a story outside of Korea, it has to be for narrative reasons—not because I want readers to romanticize and consume exotic locales.   If you could introduce one more story alongside “Brown Sugar Candy” to international readers encountering your work for the first time, which would you choose and why?  It’s so hard to choose just one. I think I’ll go with “Radiant Days.” It’s a relatively recent work as well. While “Brown Sugar Candy” consists of a granddaughter’s imaginings as she tries to piece together her grandmother’s life, “Radiant Days” features a grandmother herself as the protagonist, so I think it might be interesting to compare the two side by side. Besides, Nansil from “Brown Sugar Candy” and Okmi from “Radiant Days” are very different grandmothers. I’d like to show readers the lives of two women who are too dissimilar to be grouped under the same umbrella of “Grandma.”   You also work as a translator, and I imagine that feels worlds apart from having your own works translated. Do you have any memorable anecdotes about how you felt when your work was translated for the first time or when you met international readers through those translations? And if any of your works are currently slated for publication in translation, I would love to hear about that. While not many of my works have been translated yet, I remember feeling fascinated and extremely curious about how my novels were translated when I saw them made available in a language I couldn’t read. Because I am also a translator, I know that when translating literary works, there are inevitably omissions that the translator makes and elements that the translator works to retain. In the case of my own stories, I’m always curious what the translator decided to take out and what they chose to keep in.   As a side note, I remember when I asked a student who had submitted an assignment for my fiction writing class to deliver an author’s note—a bit of com­mentary including anything they wanted to say to their classmates before the group critique—this student immediately blurted out, “I wrote my story in the vein of Sou Linne Baik.” I didn’t understand what they meant right away and asked for clarification, and the student explained that they had written a work of literary fiction that didn’t draw on the conventions of genre fiction. The fact that your name was the first thing they mentioned must mean that they really admire your work. I remember smiling a little because I found it so adorable. I understand that you also teach creative writing at a university. Is there anything you make sure to stress to your students when they set foot in your classroom?  I’m so curious about your student’s story. The thing I stress the most to students in my own classes is to write their sentences with sincerity. Many students often seem to forget that fiction is a narrative genre conveyed through language. Other than that, I guess I tell them to leave some room in their stories for things they can’t control?   Between writing, translating, and teaching, you must have a very full schedule. Writing is no easy feat either physically or mentally. Do you have any personal methods for conserving energy and getting back on track when you feel worn out or exhausted in your daily life? I don’t think there’s a special method. I just try to carve out as much time for myself as possible—time to simply be myself, unrelated to work. Not responding to messages immediately is also a way that I conserve my energy. I tend to check my emails and messages only when I’m in a position to respond, and while others might find it inconvenient or frustrating, to me, that feels like one of the small practices I can put in place to ensure that I remain in charge of my own life.  In a world overrun with “things to see,” what is the narrative power—the energy or driving force, if you will—that fiction can and must possess to capture readers’ attention?  I think that paying attention to the unseeable is an important role that fiction plays in this era where there is so much to see. Fiction involves lingering long and delving deep into the unseeable. This may feel tedious and slow to people who are growing accustomed to increasingly shorter forms of content, but I think that, paradoxically, this is precisely why the power of fiction remains valid today.   Finally, please tell us about your forthcoming novel, the one that will follow your collection Everything About Spring Nights.  I’m currently in the middle of writing it. I’ve been struggling for months because I can’t quite figure out the ending, so I’m not sure I’ll ever finish it. While Brilliant Regards was a story about Korean women in Germany, the novel I’m writing at the moment features many foreigners who have come to Korea. I am curious myself about how I’ll tie up the loose ends and whether it will ever be published, but I hope I can finish the manuscript and greet readers with a new book in the not-so-distant future.   KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED: Sou Linne Baik, Falling in Paul (Munhakdongne, 2014) 백수린, 『폴링 인 폴』 (문학동네,  2014) Sou Linne Baik, “Radiant Days” and “When the Light Reaches” in Everything About Spring Nights (Moonji, 2025) 백수린, 「아주 환한 날들」, 「빛이 다가올 때」, 『봄밤의 모든 것』 (문학과지성사, 2025) Sou Linne Baik, “Brown Sugar Candy,” “Heavy Snow,” “The Trajectory of Time,” and “Summer Villa” in Summer Villa (Munhakdongne, 2020) 백수린, 「흑설탕 캔디」, 「폭설」, 「시간의 궤」, 「여름의 빌라」, 『여름의 빌라』 (문학동네, 2020)  Sou Linne Baik, To Love and Be Loved (Hyundae Munhak, 2019) 백수린, 『친애하고, 친애하는』 (현대문학, 2019)  Sou Linne Baik, Brilliant Regards (Munhakdongne, 2023) 백수린, 『눈부신 안부』 (문학동네, 2023)  Sou Linne Baik, “Midday in Summer” and “Night at the Border” in The Wretched Light (Changbi, 2016)백수린, 「여름의 정오」, 「국경의 밤」, 『참담한 빛』 (창비, 2016) 

by Yeom Seung-suk

Reviews

[Review] Weaving Together Traces to Rewrite Future Narratives

Sou Linne Baik’s stories do not converge neatly into a consistent message or a single idea. As the writer herself has stated, in her short stories she concentrates on picking up on “the traces of emotions that are difficult to capture in everyday language.”* She reveals in the “Author’s Note” to Don’t Disappear Tonight that she has consistently strived to “capture, through language, certain signs and vestiges that clearly exist.” In her novels, too, she “focuses on separating individual lives from their collective contexts, then delves into each person’s stories, aiming to vividly restore the personal histories that have been suppressed by the rhetoric of poverty, patriotism, and sacrifice.”** She portrays characters who communicate in an array of languages and travel between various countries, effortlessly spanning differences in nationality, race, and age. This is not to say that she glosses over or dismisses the subtle hierarchy or the discriminatory practices that occur among them. She does not cover up their differences by categorizing them simplistically as “fellow human beings” or connecting them with a loose sense of solidarity. Nor does Baik subscribe to the common notion that lives are predetermined by such immutable dividing lines. While we sense the countless boundaries that divide and trigger emotions in us, we perceive them through particular instances, in a sporadic and fragmentary way. So these dividing lines are also fluid and mutable.  * Park Sehee, “A Brilliant Meeting of Compelling Mystery and Sensual Sentences: Sou Linne Baik’s Brilliant Regards,” Munhwa Ilbo, June 24, 2023.**Jeong Jua, “The Struggle for an Ordinary Life,” Changbi Quarterly 51, no. 3 (2023): 421. Baik’s fiction reveals that such demarcations are not only fleeting but fictional, and that the innocence of a child redrawing the lines alone can be enough to adjust them. In “Summer Villa,” Leonie refers to herself, a white-skinned German girl, and the narrator Jua, a Korean woman in her thirties visiting Siem Reap, as “we,” drawing with a pebble a square around the two of them. When a Cambodian boy who wants to play approaches, Leonie erases the line between herself and him and draws a new one behind the boy to include him in the shape. Jua sends a letter to her German acquaintance Verena, hoping that the power of that moment—when Leonie breaks into a bright smile—will outweigh all the exhausting times spent in conflict over differences in age, race, ethnicity, and class, as well as the history of colonial rule and discrimination that made such conflict inevitable. Thus, the story shows that a single shining moment can create the hope needed to overcome the sense of alienation or helplessness that one might feel in the face of innumerable barriers. This story can be read as an attempt to break away from the remnants of a tragic Korean history in which dictatorial power relied on the exclusive solidarity of “us,” as distinguished from “the enemy,” as the basis of governance. Korean politics has long stressed nationalist and anti-communist ideologies while upholding national unity as a value to be prioritized above all else. While externally imposed identities such as nationality, gender, class, and race are used to define people, Baik’s work reminds us that we are ultimately defined by the ineffable emotions and personal experiences we have encountered moment by moment throughout our lives, as well as the unique sensory mode by which the body, the seat of all these experiences, perceives the world. The process of lending a narrative to these fragmentary moments and accepting and affirming the meanings drawn from them is what distinguishes the act of “living” from mere survival or “living through.” The genre of fiction is all about interpreting and joining together the fragments of our lives to make them feel like a rich, cohesive story. What sets Baik’s stories apart is that they always delve into the past of—or the past shared with—the other, shifting the tense to create narratives that allow us to move toward the future “together.” This can be seen in several passages from “Us on a Spring Night,” where Yuta describes all the time he spent with his grandmother using present-tense verbs, his love for her persisting even in her absence. “Brown Sugar Candy” is perhaps the work that best exemplifies these hallmarks of Baik’s writing. This story deals with issues such as care work, racial discrimination, language barriers, and physical decline due to aging. Whenever you try to interpret it according to any one of these issues, however, it always slips through your hands. The story combs through the nameless sensations and emotions that make up our blind spots, that are difficult to bring to light even with a sophisticated and intricate perceptual framework. In “Brown Sugar Candy,” the narrator reminisces about her beloved grandmother Nansil. However, she does not merely stop at recollecting her grandmother “having been there.” Rather, she edits the traces of her grandmother to create an imagined context in such a way that, in the narrative currently being told, her grandmother gets to unfold her own life and create her own “being.” The story attempts a narrative regeneration that does not simply retrace the past but imagines and processes past incidents in the present, allowing the object of longing to come alive and breathe within the newly constructed stories. We may never fully understand another. All we can do is imagine the many strands of others’ feelings. However, when we follow the different paths of their emotions, we find ourselves, in certain fleeting moments, striving to reach out to others. This resonates with the author’s conviction that although communication through language, an imperfect medium, cannot be trusted, people narrow the distance between themselves and open up the possibility of solidarity by filling in “the gaps between words and sentences in their own ways, even if it is in a complete misinterpretation” (“To a Beloved Outsider”). The narrator of “Brown Sugar Candy” belatedly learns that her grandmother was romantically involved with a man named M. Brunier. As she weighs the hardships her grandmother must have faced after leaving for France and studies her grand­mother’s emotions through her diaries, the narrator immerses herself in the life of this woman who transcended language and exchanged affection with M. Brunier. At some point, she essentially becomes her grandmother. When Grandma spots M. Brunier from behind, the narrator states, “Seems like every old person with time to spare ends up in the same places, she thought.” This passage suggests that the narrator and her grandmother have become completely superimposed. The narrator—who had once dismissed M. Brunier’s stories as useless chatter before “returning to [her] own little world” and could not comprehend her grandmother’s desire to know what M. Brunier said to her, a proficient French speaker unlike her grandmother—can now access her grandmother’s world within the stories she creates anew after her grandmother’s death. As the narrator devotes herself fully to pursuing and feeling her grandmother’s intimate emotions and the delicate sensations she faced, she lives out this woman’s life as if it were her own—the life of a woman who cannot be fully explained by labels such as an educated woman, a caregiver for her grandchildren, an elderly woman whose body is atrophying, and so on. The narrator’s grandmother once told her an adapted version of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. When the narrator became frightened after hearing the story of a girl devoured by a tiger despite giving him everything he demanded, Grandma changed the ending, explaining that the young girl uses a small shard of obsidian hidden in her fist to cut open the tiger’s belly and escape. In this context, the obsidian shard is connected to the brown sugar candy, the brown sugar cubes, and the mysterious object that Grandma was clutching in her own fist in the narra­tor’s dream. In the scene in which Grandma feels “a yearning for life and an anticipation for the future” welling up again as she watches M. Brunier utterly engrossed in building a sugar cube tower, we come to understand the meaning of this small, solid piece of something that appears repeatedly in various forms. The “pure sweetness” that spreads when one of the sugar cubes that has been spilled onto the table is placed in the mouth evokes the brown sugar candy that an elegant customer handed to a young Nansil as she cried outside her parents’ dressmaking shop. The fear of death and anxiety about aging, the sense of loss from having lost everything and the loneliness stemming from the belief that none of us can understand one another—they all melt away in the face of the overwhelming sweetness of those “moments of happiness that suddenly fell from the sky like shooting stars in midsummer.” As such, the piece of something that the narrator’s grandmother refused to show anyone, insisting, “This is mine,” even as her granddaughter pestered her to reveal what she was holding in her hand, is the most splendidly shining moment in life that others can never fully understand. It is also the crystallization of an unconditional hope that compels one to praise the very act of being alive for a single moment. Nonetheless, it is impossible to be entirely optimistic about this. This is because that piece, that fragment, is something that Grandma has guarded throughout her experiences of being denounced as a woman who “sure did whatever she wanted in life” simply because she enrolled in college. She had been repeatedly criticized and ultimately thwarted whenever she harbored independent aspirations. We should note the fact that this steadfastness in protecting what is hers, a sweet yet solid bit of self-regard, is passed down to her granddaughter rather than her grandson. Her struggle to protect what was hers in a discriminatory society that deprived women of their fair share had a different kind of resonance for her granddaughter. This also ties in with Aunt Seonja in Brilliant Regards, who writes that regret, pride, failure, and frustration are “entirely [hers],” after having lost her beloved K.H. (Cheon Keun Ho) in a heterocentric society that pressures women into forming normative families. Women who have not lost their individuality are wise and benevolent, and what they have held onto and protected all this time is brilliant. However, we must not forget that this, too, is merely the share that remains for them after so much else has already been taken away. Considering this context, it becomes clear that the work of meticulously examining the textures of sensations and emotions, rather than approaching the subject through discourses that are easily refined with language, is all the more necessary when it comes to women’s narratives. The fact that language is constructed primarily around universal experiences implies that language conforms more readily to the lifestyles of those mainstream groups considered “universal.” It is difficult for meaning to be properly assigned to women’s lives using existing language, which has inevitably evolved to recreate a society centered around men. In turn, the feminine subjectivity gained through the use of this language is far too limited. Baik’s fiction gathers sensations and emotions to transcend the narrow confines of this language.  What had she longed for? Something special, something edifying, something that would transport her to another world . . . She had no doubt that the life that lay ahead of her would be one full of surprises, and she believed she had an obligation to make hers into an extraordinary narrative.   The narrator writes expansively here, breathing a special narrativity into Nansil’s life. We might interpret this passage as expressing the narrator’s selfish longing for a higher class status or her attempt to uplift herself by elevating her grandmother’s life. However, it would be far too shallow to judge it this way. There are beautiful moments that the narrator wishes to resurrect for her beloved grandmother—shining fragments that completely disarm human beings of their fundamental solitude, sensations as sharply bright and emotions as firmly resplendent as the obsidian that cuts through the external categories that confine us and allows us to return to life from death’s borders. What the story revives, then, is not a belated retrospective or a proper assessment of the kind of woman Park Nansil was, but rather the sensations that are minor yet irreducible to anything else: the sound of the piano she heard in the music room during her high school years; “the feel of the white jeogori on her bare skin” on her wedding day, the result of not being able to defy her parents’ wishes; and “the smell of grilled fish [wafting] toward her from some restaurant or other” when she fled to the movie theater to escape the suffocat­ing burden of childcare and housework. Here, this expansive writing and rewriting becomes not merely a process of deep mourning but an act of writing fiction as a form of regeneration—an effort to bring a human being back to life. Thanks to Sou Linne Baik’s rekindling of the traces of those who have passed, we who still linger together in this moment can write a more brilliant future.  KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED: Sou Linne Baik, “Author’s Note” in Don’t Disappear Tonight (Maumsanchaek, 2019)백수린, 「작가의 말」, 『오늘 밤은 사라지지 말아요』 (마음산책, 2019) Sou Linne Baik, “Summer Villa” and “Brown Sugar Candy” in Summer Villa (Munhakdongne, 2020) 백수린, 「여름의 빌라」, 「흑설탕 캔디」, 『여름의 빌라』 (문학동네, 2020) Sou Linne Baik, “Us on a Spring Night” in Everything About Spring Nights (Moonji, 2025)백수린, 「봄밤의 우리」, 『봄밤의 모든 것』 (문학과지성사, 2025) Sou Linne Baik, Brilliant Regards (Munhakdongne, 2023)백수린, 『눈부신 안부』 (문학동네, 2023) Sou Linne Baik and Lee Siseong, “To a Beloved Outsider,” Literary Criticism Today 113 (2019)백수린·이시성, 「친애하는 이방인에게」, 『오늘의 문예비평』 113호 (오문비, 2019)

by Sung Hyunah

Fiction

[Fiction] Moüan

Moü, nature repeats herself. Just when she seems to perish, she feeds on her husk and revives, restores, regenerates. Her time differs from ours. Only humans live within temporal frames, having lapsed from infinite nature. The union dissolved when humans, wielding language, imposed names on all things. Humans exiled themselves from the natural order, forever estranged.  Moü’s teacher refused to adopt a call-word. He answered only to his role: teacher. Prior to that, young man, student, and at times, being. He paraded this seeming sacrifice as proof of his deeper resistance to fixed words. To Choü, he was no different from others. He, too, had a word that referred to him, except that it changed over time. Noēphon, their mode of communication, had its limits. Not even the most highly sensitized among them could single out a recipient for their noēphon. All messages were shared, inadvertently. No, inevitably. Whether intended or not.  The same held true for him and his desire for Choü’s flesh. Whenever he stood nearby, his lust unsettled her senses. The primal appetite surfaced first in his body. It throbbed against his thick lower garment made of single-horned northern goral hide. Choü would look the other way, only to have his lust leech onto her skin. She abhorred the sensation. He would have detected that abhorrence and known what it meant: rejection. Choü had repelled him before he could make his feelings known. The humiliation stoked his fury, though not without reason, leaving Choü to shudder under the weight of his tangled emotions: dregs of desire, shame, and faintly murderous, fitful rage.  As members of the same tribe, they could hardly avoid one another. Others sensed Choü’s discomfort. He sensed it too, unconcerned. He took cruel delight in her unease and the disturbing effect of his presence. He went out of his way to loiter in her path. He leered, desensitized to her distress, while Choü’s resentment roiled.  As tension thickened in the air and pressed upon the villagers, Gorusin sent for Choü. When Choü noēphoned, (Would it be better if I disappeared?) Gorusin shook her head. A simple gesture, noēphon withheld, indicating a firm no. Ro. (You’ve done nothing wrong.) The guttural noise lent weight to the message.  Huduseu. (It’s a matter of the heart. He needs time to let go.) Gorusin kept circling back to the same sentiment. The noēphon overwhelmed Choü’s senses. Her stomach lurched and her mind reeled, but she could not make it stop. She lacked the power. The right. The justification too. The susurrus of Gorusin’s thoughts coiled through her consciousness: you must understand, you must be patient, you must accept it as a matter of the heart.  Choü left, heading toward the northern lake. A low mountain range cradled the vast lake, its waters drawn from ancient ice that once crowned the planet’s highest peaks. Whenever her nerves frayed, she floated on its surface, imagining the ice-capped summits. Alone on the expanse, none of her thoughts would reach anyone. Though it was sheer distance that severed the connection, part of her wanted to believe the mountains stood as a barrier. Choü tried to distill her thoughts, to trace the outline of an emotion stirred by Gorusin’s insistence. It took an unfamiliar, unfathomable form.  Clouds mirrored on the lake slowly blanketed Choü. Their currents tingled against her skin. Eyes closed, she savored the sensation. She turned her thoughts back to Gorusin and the weight of responsibility cast upon the elder’s shoulders. Choü’s mother had left a hundred and thirteen years ago. They had walked along the lake, hands clasped, the day they parted. A low whistle was their only farewell. (We no longer look like mother and daughter. I’ve set you free in my heart. There is nothing left to say.)Choü had noticed their reflection in the water. There stood not parent and child but two long-time friends. Could they not live as such? Choü’s noēphon vanished into silence, lost on her mother. It had to be a pretext, a convenient excuse to leave. Before departing, her mother entrusted her to Gorusin, who gladly befriended the daughter of an old friend. This gave Gorusin a complicated place in Choü’s life. Choü heard a cry—a baby’s cry. She jolted upward, only to sink beneath the surface. She thrashed her arms and legs, shattering the crystalline lake. Shards of white spray splintered. The cry cut through the splashing. Choü emerged, her bearings restored. She scanned her surroundings. The cry echoed against the mountains, but her senses pointed westward. She swam to shore and sprinted straight into the woods. She stumbled as her heart rushed ahead. The forest darkened with startling speed, as if racing Choü to sunset. Yet the baby kept crying, pulling her onward, guiding her way. I’m here, the baby wailed, without deceit or disguise, disarming in transparent honesty. The wails pierced her skin, coursed through her veins, and struck the chambers of her mind. The shock sent shivers down her spine. Choü trembled. Her body shook as she chased the cry. A singular sensation, unlike the loathsome shuddering he had stirred in her. She sprinted on, even as sharp leaves slashed at her limbs. No matter if a beast was luring her in, or a young cub. Not now. She had to reach it before the crying stopped.  Mother, it’s called fate.  In the woods, she found a human baby—not a cub or a starving beast. The ear-splitting cries cut off the moment Choü appeared. Eyes still wet, the baby gazed upon its finder. Face to face, Choü wondered for the first time how many years had passed since she herself had been an infant. A modest celebration had marked her fiftieth birthday, but she had lost track of time since then. However many years had passed, Choü still retained the body of a teenage girl. Humans had evolved beyond physical aging. New cells proliferated by feeding on the old, a survival mechanism dating back to a desperate era, when all life had teetered on the brink of extinction. The species had found a way to survive without increasing its numbers. Biotechnology had likely contributed to the process, but none of the records remained. Humankind now differentiated adolescence from adulthood not by the body, but by the mind. As they aged out of adolescence, humans developed an urge to protect the young and the weak. That protective instinct signaled the start of adulthood. Choü realized she might have crossed that threshold. She lifted the baby into her arms.  What was I like? Back then.Warm and soft. Eyes, jet-black. Hair standing up like a horn, making me smile. But most of all, soft and warm.And the sound you made to me?  The baby pressed its palm against Choü’s heart, breaking into a smile as a larger hand closed over hers. The tiny fingers curled over Choü’s as if accustomed to the touch. Choü brushed them with a kiss. Without resorting to noēphon, she surrendered herself to the currents around her—wind, sky, sunlight, grass, dew, insects, lake-soaked body, tiny hand, warm breath—and let them burst forth in sound.Moü.  Why?It emerged.And its meaning?Moü—it has none. Everything around me brought forth the sound. All that cradled you gave you the call-word.  The tribe set aside a single month for adopting new members. During those thirty days, they observed twenty-hour fasts and communal baths in the lake. The rituals expressed gratitude: for the finite resources that sustained them, and for the bodies tasked with enduring infinite time. Whoever joined during the ritual month was considered a fellow tribesperson, bound to shoulder the sins of civilization together. Newborns were no exception. The tribe accepted infants only when born during this period. All others were cast aside—or expelled with the humans who created them. Excess could only breed disaster. A tribe swollen in numbers would give way to codes and signs. Down that treacherous path lay language. Their greatest threat. Choü hid by the lake to care for Moü, waiting for the ritual month to arrive. With Moü swaddled on her back, she spent the first few days trying to build a hut. To last five moons in hiding, they needed some form of shelter. Unfortunately, the woods surrounding the lake sat on damp soil. Whenever the villagers built their homes, they mixed mud with straw and laid it in the sun to cure. The mud blocks would otherwise crack and crumble within days. Choü’s mud walls caved as she stacked them. Trees towered overhead, blocking the sunlight, but had she dried the mud blocks by the shore, she would have risked discovery. Choü carried Moü into the woods instead. Whoever left Moü must have taken a path that led beyond the mountains. The woods closed in, growing darker with every step. The dense brush offered little footing. Moü did not cry. She held onto a lock of Choü’s hair and gazed upward. Like reflections rippling across the lake, her jet-black eyes mirrored the flickering shadows of the trees.  (Beautiful eyes) Choü noēphoned.Moü stayed still. Other infants, especially the more sensitive ones, sometimes burst into tears, but Moü did not so much as blink. Choü noēphoned again. Nothing. Were her senses underdeveloped?Huya. As Choü voiced a sound, Moü stirred and glanced up. Her primitive senses seemed stronger than her transcendent ones.Huswi. Ho. Swahari. Hira. Choü let out raw sounds without noēphon. Moü hung on the syllables, giggled as though to a story, and listened again. Then she threw her head back. A beam of sunset ran down her throat and across Choü’s chest. Choü traced the stray light to its source, looking up with Moü. Her eyes landed on a jagged cliff face, where the rock had fallen away and exposed six iron pillars. Concrete clung to the skeletal frames like strips of flesh. From the gaps spilled the light. An earthquake from a few days earlier had collapsed the cliff, laying bare a colossal ruin. Choü stood before the monumental remains of a structure that had once denied the planet its night. It dated from a bygone era of possibility, discovery, and accelerated speed. The era had also expelled the impossible, the dark, the unknown, and all things slow—committing and condoning acts of violation and extermination. It punctuated fifteen thousand years of human history as a brief interlude: the nightless age. Concrete blocks and iron pillars, blackened as if they had devoured the dark, shrieked that the era had existed. The clangor of steel laced the shrill cries.  What was it like?Vexingly beautiful.Which part?The carvings . . . on the wall. Scratches without any pattern or meaning I could see.Mother, that was language.  The pillars and concrete provided a sturdy refuge. They sheltered Moü from the harsh sun, gales, torrential rain, and famished beasts. The concrete even tamed the midday heat. Choü braided straw into a snug bed and wrapped Moü in tanned goat hide. Moü took to the gruel she made from foraged grains, ground into a mash. They had little left to fear, provided no human or beast stumbled upon them. Provided Moü stayed alive. Choü spent more than half of each day watching over Moü. Sometimes, she went days without returning home. Moü grew with miraculous ease, as if she needed no protection. Whenever Choü shielded her from danger, Moü seemed to soothe her in return. The baby would brush Choü’s forehead when she nodded off and smile when her eyes blinked open. Moü gurgled, and Choü longed to reciprocate. She asked if Moü was hungry or sleepy, sang her lullabies, and called her name, but none of the noēphon reached her. She responded only to raw sounds—empty spurts that scattered without meaning, uttered only to vanish without trace. Lying beside Moü and staring up at the ceiling, Choü could make out faint marks etched into the ashen concrete. Choü found herself tracing their forms and patterns. Whenever a curve, line, or shape stood out with clarity, a migraine would hit like a hammer, sending her spine into a spasm. Her heart raced, bringing with it the uncanny sensation of blood surging through every vein, pulsing through every fiber of her body. One day, after several moons, Gorusin halted her work gathering tree sap and drew Choü toward a secluded edge of the forest. Choü did not ask any questions. The worry welling within the elder passed through the hand that clasped hers. Gorusin halted near the volcanic crater known as the Judgment. She surveyed the area multiple times to ensure they were alone yet still took precautions. With Choü’s hand in hers, she sent the faintest silent noēphon. (Where are you? Doing what? He—no, people talk. They suspect. No more secrets. There are none. There must be none. Talk. To me, at least. When the time comes, then I can help.) Gorusin noēphoned in a frantic scramble.  (Your house sits empty. You don’t return. Even at dawn. I lie for you. The gravest sin. Do not conceal. Do not tempt your fate. What is it? What is happening to you? Choü, lay your thoughts bare. Let me see them.)Alarm gave way to fear, which curdled into suspicion and uncertainty. Secrets were forbidden. To conceal was to invite the unforeseen. Humans no longer wished to keep watch over darkness—so they evolved. Fear, once a means of survival, had mingled with greed and propelled the world toward obliteration. When fear became their undoing, evolution changed course. Whatever lacked certainty was deemed dangerous and discarded, including imaginations of the future. Choü noēphoned back to calm her.Naho. (You’ll see, soon enough. No secrets. No worries.)Choü intended to bring Moü into the tribe and did not consider this a lie. She sensed Gorusin’s relief. If only the exchange had ended there. Nohago. (Have you ever seen language?)Choü blurted the question, and Gorusin could not hold back—a scream.  Muum was the eldest being—the first seed of their evolution, the Immortal of current humankind. No one worshipped Muum, as worship was forbidden. Yet Choü knew the ban was not perfectly obeyed. Tribespeople merely contained their reverence. Muum’s preternatural senses set her apart. Sensitivity to noēphon varied from person to person. Some struggled to discern it, whereas Muum perceived minds without it. Nothing stayed hidden from Muum. All was laid bare. To avoid the barrage of sensations, Muum lived away from the village. At Gorusin’s insistence, Choü went to meet her. She found Muum waiting at the door. (You did well to protect the child. I believe so.) Muum noēphoned without so much as a glance, then disappeared into the house. Choü sensed the command to follow.Inside, Muum’s paintings covered every wall. Each one featured rectangles of varying shades and sizes geometrically arranged. Choü paused before a particular painting. Muum noēphoned with her back still turned.(I finished it yesterday. The paint is still wet, but you can touch it.) Muum knew exactly which painting.Kiho. (You see without looking?)Choü noēphoned deliberately with sound, as a warning: do not invade my mind. Muum smiled, bemused by the defiance. Her skin glowed in the shadowed space. Only after sitting down did she face Choü. All tribespeople appeared young, but Muum, especially so. Her face never creased. Sunlight slipped through a crack in the wooden wall and settled on her. Covered in downy hair, her skin shimmered like a sandy beach. Muum, it seemed, was evolving into something beyond their species.  (All language has failed. Do you not agree?) Muum noēphoned.Kasak. (You must noēphon with sound. You yourself set the rule.)(Language will destroy the senses we acquired. Language flattens sensation. It binds thought and judgment to form.)Mun! (Answer me!)(I did. You asked me later how language would change us. The language you saw was an illusion. Empty lines.)(Stay in the present. I will not be mocked.)Choü sent a silent noēphon so as not to yell, but rage flooded her senses. (Choü, do not be deceived. All that fails has a cause. Look to evolution and what humanity once called progress. Language enabled categories and institutions—and passed them down. The world marched toward war, poverty, destruction, slaughter, and ruin. Human vision narrowed, and senses dulled. Surrendered to language, humanity doomed itself to extinction. Our brains have evolved since then by discarding language, reawakening what it suppressed—the senses of our prehistoric ancestors. Our sounds resist language. We defy its oppression. Defend our way.) Muum rose to her feet and came closer. Her hair gleamed like the iridescent scales of a carp, and the fingers that stroked Choü’s cheek were warm and gentle, like hands coaxing milk from a ewe. Muum whispered. Domdureusamasiheu. (We cannot speak of good or beauty in language of the condemned, language stained with blood. The child is welcome. It is already done.)  *  Once Moü entered school, she got scolded for repeating the same sounds.It happened again the day Choü learned Moü was unwell. Moü’s friend Blong came running to the riverside, where Choü was mending a fishing net. Moü had been called out of class, she noēphoned. Choü brushed it off—(The same as always). Blong clutched her chest. She noēphoned again, this time with a wail. It was serious. Choü threw down the net and raced to the school. He was the schoolteacher in charge. Perhaps his fury toward Choü had been redirected toward Moü. When Choü first presented the child, the tribespeople sensed his agitated accusations: there had been someone all along, she had hidden it to play with his feelings, she had feigned purity while indulging her desires. He sulked as if dealt an irreparable wound. The villagers knew that Choü had never been pregnant. Her body never swelled, and no one sensed another life inside her. Then where had the child come from? She arrived during the ritual month, but the villagers hesitated to welcome her. He fueled their fear with his slander. Umsasiheuraha. (It is evil. I sense evil in that child. Our noēphon does not reach it. It must be a monster or a witch.)Choü insisted on the child’s innocence, but he refused to back down. His vilifications carried enough force to slowly sway the villagers. Had Muum not come to the rescue, had she not cradled Moü in her arms and noēphoned a welcome, he would have turned the people against her and driven her from the village. Muum allowed Moü into the fold. He alone withheld a welcome. Over time, the villagers no longer recalled Moü’s mysterious origins, but he did. He never stopped doubting and despising her. This, Choü believed, was why he seemed especially harsh on Moü. Children naturally enjoyed repeating sounds. Surely not only Moü. Surely not. When the teacher asked, Syureuha, Moü replied, Jya. He asked again, Bido. His utterances accompanied the same noēphon question: had Moü understood? Moü replied again, Jya. The teacher erupted in a mangled burst of rage. His noēphon lashed the children’s nerves like a whip: (Do not dare repeat sounds!) Several began to cry. When Moü repeated Jya a third time, they squeezed their eyes shut and wrapped their arms around their heads, bracing for the shockwave to follow. Blong noēphoned the terror of that moment, raising the hair on Choü’s arms. Moü stood in a corner, trying—and failing—to look sorry while digging up damp soil with her foot. Not wanting him to notice, Choü grabbed Moü’s hand and scuffed the dirt back into place. His fear and chagrin were laid bare. Gogaraswi. (She repeated sounds.)Uno! (The same sounds!)Uwano. (Make her stop.)Nakahaeum. (She must not repeat. She must not make meaning.)Choü replied, Nyuhokeuduheu. (There is no meaning. Moü is only playing with sound.) He pressed a hand to his forehead. His refusal to communi­cate any further bore down on Choü, like a lump of iron settling into her skull.As she turned to leave with Moü, he muttered. Kuulla. (She is unworthy. Dark and evil. Full of secrets. She will bring a curse on us.)Choü glowered, imagining her fist in his face. She did not act on the impulse, but her hatred and fury were enough to leave his face burning, as if from a blow. At the Planegg Crossroads, Choü turned west. The road stretched away from the village toward the lake. Moü followed in silence without projecting any noēphon. No questions, no resistance. Choü looked back. Moü became inscrutable at times, unsettling Choü. His warning echoed in her mind. (She will bring a curse on us.) Did he truly believe one person could curse an entire village? She did not. The two arrived at the ruins. Like humans who lost the use of language, the ruins had lost their artifice and reverted to nature. Moü had made it her fort, painting the ash-gray walls with mineral and berry pigments and draping the metal frames of furniture with patchwork leather. Choü sat Moü down on the bed layered with sheepskins. She then knelt down in front of her, clasping her hands. Choü had a habit of kneeling to look up at Moü. Though hardly any years apart in appearance, they were separated by two and a half centuries in actual age. It seemed increasingly unnatural to raise the child at eye level. Choü was beginning to understand why her own mother had chosen to leave. Choü stroked the backs of Moü’s delicate hands and brushed them with a kiss. Without that touch, Moü often failed to receive her noēphon. She was only slow. Not dark, evil, or full of secrets. Swihoroamusaha. (Do not take his rudeness to heart. But tell me the truth. Why did you do it? Why did you repeat those sounds?)Moü replied, still struggling to project her voice with noēphon.Ma . . . wa . . . ho . . . u . . . a . . . (Mother, what is language?)Choü dropped Moü’s hands. Gahu! (You must not ask! Ever! Not a soul. Have you? Have you asked Blong?)Mo . . . ha . . . u . . . (I just want to know. About sounds with meaning.)Sasiki. (It belonged to a failed civilization. Language sealed their judgment and caused their doom. Do not seek it. It is forbidden.)Ma . . . (Mother.)Nireu! (Do not ask anyone again. Promise me!)(Then why do we make sounds at all?) Moü noēphoned in silence, prompting Choü to extend her sounds. Inagoumamupgasamunagaemenagorialleu. (To guard ourselves. To keep our sounds free of meaning. We must stay on guard. So practice. You will learn.) Choü’s senses seemed to spiral—no, they spiraled. Cold air swept through the concrete, stinging her cheeks and grazing her ears. Dust blurred her vision, and even Moü’s faint breath frayed her nerves. She plunged into hypersensitized agony. The turmoil would have transferred to most others, but Moü stayed impassive as she watched. Choü gripped the child’s shoulders.Musya! (Moü, you must feel this! My noēphon. My emotions.)Ma . . . (Mother, tell me.)Ruswia. (Feel this. Language will dull and flatten these feelings. It severs us from nature. Once we name, define, differentiate, those things become our limits. We will know only through language. And language will so often deceive and fail.) Choü wrapped her arms around Moü and pulled her close. She tried to transfer her feelings and project her noēphon. Moü’s body remained deadly still. Ma . . . (Mother, look at me—the wrinkled eyes, the dry skin. I eat half as much as I used to, but it takes me longer to digest the food. My hair is thin and gray . . .)(Enough!)(My body is aging.)(Nonsense!)(Mother, please. Look at me.) Moü pulled away to meet her mother’s gaze. She cupped Choü’s face. Choü tried to look away, but they both knew it would not last. Moü waited. Quiet. The light spilling through the concrete cracks crimsoned as she waited. Patient. With a sigh, Choü raised her eyes to meet Moü’s. The sunset blotted out perception, darkness descended as an interlude, and moonlight unveiled the truth, long hidden by the sun. A day of judgment, followed by three millennia of punishment. Humans evolved in its wake to preserve their species without multiplying their kind. Language had created order and disorder, tolerance and aversion, just and unjust laws, salvation and despair, faith and mistrust, parades and military marches, medicine and murder, security and peril, mobs and masses, humans and nonhumans—together breeding chaos. (Humans evolved by discarding language) Muum had noēphoned, (reawakening their senses. The ones we use now). Once humans abandoned the language that severed them from nature, they returned to a natural state of being. They fed on husks, restored and regenerated. Freed from time as conceived by language, they entered eternal life. As eternal beings, their senses encompassed and commanded all matter. Thus did Choü believe that Moü was as ageless as herself. Thus did all the villagers believe.With her perception shattered, Choü faced a strange woman. (How?)(Do you see me now?)(You are not the Moü I know . . .)(Mother, my body has been aging. Slowly, steadily.)Sound abandoned Choü as she surrendered to noēphon. (Moü, sometimes I wonder if you rose from a chasm. Days before you cried out, the earth had quaked. Violently, as if setting things right. Villagers gathered in the field for silent noēphon prayer. The last prayer had been held 64,240 days before, after a 247-day spell of drought. We did not ask for forgiveness. We only prayed that we may slowly pay the price for sins. Our sins. Sins against the planet. Sins against each other. Our species will never be washed of sin. The species may perish, but not the stain. But no, we will not be allowed to die. We have evolved to pay the price, in undying penance, with senses attuned to all sins . . .) (Look at me, Mother. Do not be afraid.)(I am not afraid.)(But you are. Look at me. What do you see?)(Do not ask me this.)(Mother, I am still alive, but I have begun to flow. Time flows through me. I feel it, the fine threads. Finer than spider silk. I will wrinkle as it brushes past.) (Wait. We will tell the villagers, and they will help find a way to make it stop. Nothing is beyond healing. We must simply find a way. Every effect has a cause, and every cause a solution. No more worries, Moü.)(Mother.)(Yes.)(Mother.)(Yes. Go on.)(I heard the sounds of language. Now I sense the time it weaves.) But then, beyond the broken walls, Choü recognized a murder­ous hostility. She wanted to hush Moü, but it was too late. He had sensed their noēphon. His malice mingled with relish; Choü’s dread turned into terror. She rushed out and found him already there. For a moment, he feigned surprise. His lips curled up.  How did you feel? When it happened?I needed the right language . . . to express that feeling.  Bihagassu! (This child knows language!)He hollered. Moü stood tied to a wooden pillar in the village square. He ripped the sack from her head, unleashing a deafen­ing noēphon.Yanomasiamadiaratyusyu! (Behold the child who dared to deceive! Behold the true face—not of a child, but of a witch! A face defiled by language!) Horror and panic shot through the village. The current surged, reaching Choü, who had been locked in her home. She sprang up from the corner and rushed to the door. She wrenched at the handle, but it would not budge. She pounded her palms against the wood, pouring out noēphon. Hoping it would reach someone, anyone passing by. Her palms split open, gushing blood. Then—scalding heat. A ravenous frenzy engulfed the house. The heat rose from torch flames, not feelings. Choü stopped pounding and glanced around. Could anything extinguish the fire? The eastern well lay too far away. She spotted a knife—a curved blade used for drawing tree sap.  As she grasped the knife, the door swung open. Moonlight spilled in, pooling against Choü’s legs. Muum stood in the door­way. Before Choü could beg for help, Muum stepped aside. As if urging her to run. To hurry. With no time for questions, Choü dashed out. The blaze had billowed, the heat ready to reduce the village to ashes. Flames flickered toward the moon. Choü sensed a warm wind behind her, carrying an unfamiliar image: Muum holding a baby wrapped in leaves, a newborn yet to open its eyes. Muum whispered to the baby, her lips pressed against its ears. Choü paused. She turned back, but Muum was nowhere to be seen. She had vanished, as though erased from existence. At the village square, Choü gripped her knife. She took in the scene: him, gloating with a torch in hand, and Moü, tearless despite the flames at her feet. Choü wielded her knife against the fire. Blood, hotter and brighter, doused the flames. The blade had sliced through his stomach and cut through the cords binding Moü. Choü’s skin seared, the creases reminding her of Moü’s wrinkles. The burning pillar collapsed over a house. Walls of grass and mud crumbled and fed the flames. A body caught fire. The pain transferred through noēphon. Everyone writhed, except for Moü. She embraced her anguished mother.(We must go to the forest . . .) Moü took Choü’s hand and began to run. Moü’s hand was thin and weathered, all bone and tendon beneath the skin. Yet warm as damp earth and soft grass.The two ran toward the ruins. Murderous noēphon pierced Choü’s back. He was close behind. Choü wanted to flee beyond the forest with Moü, to enter the world she had never known. But Moü, with her weakened lungs and joints, could not keep pace. She guided Choü to their refuge.Ha. (He will find us here. He will arrive. Soon.) Choü tried to warn her, but Moü insisted on taking shelter.(He will not know. He will not detect any noēphon.) Moü sat Choü down on the bed.(But he will not give up. Not until he drives a knife through you. Listen to what I tell you, Mother. You must remember. And record. Never forget the danger. Someday, you must stab him again, all the way through. You must stop his breath. For now, he must not sense where you are. You must guard your thoughts. Let none escape. I will repeat the sound you heard the moment you saw me. It carried your yearning—and I gave it meaning.) Moü embraced her mother. Choü could see Moü’s draw­ings on the wall. Only then did she notice their patterns, like the shapes of language.(Mother, Moü means . . .) “Life.”The spoken word seared Choü’s senses. It dried her blood.“The finite breath I gift to you.”Choü did not fully grasp the sounds as language, as carriers of meaning. Yet they reached her all the same, passing through her eyes, ears, and skin. “Now that you know language, you will live as I do in its flow of time. Where beings weaken with age, slowing, receding, dwindling. It is a curse. Nature’s curse, pulling humans back into earthly existence. You will no longer know without speaking, but no speech will ever be complete. You will wander the laby­rinth of language, isolated and alone. And yet, I wish you this life.”Moü stroked Choü’s cheek. Then she whispered in clear noēphon. (Mother, nothing lasts. Look through the veil. Humans have not evolved. He is right. I am a curse. Because I am, I can inscribe our story in language. For everyone to see. I will start with your words.)  Moü, nature repeats herself . . .

Fiction

[Fiction] Lucky Clover

The first thing Jayeong did when summer arrived was go to the dance hall and talk everyone’s head off about her plum orchard. The venue was cramped, and tipsy patrons were dancing to Tempalay. The plum orchard that Jayeong was going on and on about was nothing more than an empty field, a destination for the neighborhood kids, lured by the smell of rain and pesticides, to spend a grand old time waving their hands in the air while staring blankly ahead.  But that didn’t mean (just because it was a refuge for the unwell, where all sorts of smells intermingled and the fruit struggled to ripen) that Jayeong’s plum orchard was all bad. After all, it did produce fruit, though not much; clean water pooled in the numerous holes she’d dug around the property; and the land was expansive enough for any animal to race across it gleefully. “I’ve been taking care of the orchard this whole time,” Jayeong said. Jayeong’s colleagues, who’d been listening to her with a burnt cinnamon stick in each of their mouths, nodded. “Yes. That’s right. You’ve been taking care of that orchard this whole time.”Jayeong was satisfied with her colleagues’ response, and she was satisfied with her colleagues as well. They were all farmers. Every so often, they would meet at a restaurant or bar and order a variety of dishes to share. Cheeks full of food, they would sit outside and watch the shifting sunlight during the day or venture indoors and stare at the flat glow of an establishment’s neon sign at night. It was six o’clock in the morning. Dawn was breaking. The weekend was still a long way off. Soon everyone in the dance hall would go home, splash some water on their faces, throw up a little, and head to work. The owner always saw off her customers one by one. “Get home safe. And remember, we’re closed tomorrow. The water cooler is broken beyond repair.”Everyone understood the owner’s plight. Jayeong wondered: If a single malfunction could shut down an entire establishment, could something similar happen to her orchard as well? But it wasn’t as though the orchard had a thick curtain to block the entrance with or a heavy security shutter Jayeong could roll down from the ceiling. Most importantly, as far as Jayeong could see, her orchard never broke down past the point of repair. A sturdy orchard. My sturdy plum orchard.Jayeong smiled wistfully.How to smile wistfully: Smile wistfully. Jayeong wrote in her notepad as soon as she arrived home. She liked to scribble whatever words came to mind on the first line of each page (How to smile wistfully: Smile wistfully) and write out her to-do list underneath (Clear out sacks, pull weeds, open windows, watch birds, make money). This summer, Jayeong planned to bring in some income by holding a Pick-Your-Own event for customers. A thriving orchard could yield approximately twenty boxes of plums per tree, but Jayeong’s decidedly not-thriving orchard would likely yield, at most, four to five small boxes per tree (she guessed). Even that was a generous estimate. “But that’s good enough,” Jayeong said.And she was right. That was good enough. Jayeong turned her head and peered out the living room window. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass, she could see the tall church steeple off in the distance, as well as the surrounding mountain ridges and her plum orchard. She had a clear view of the orchard from her house, a prefab home built on a raised foundation of earth and stones. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It was also prone to the occasional wildlife attack—geese, a herd of goats, roe deer and the like—so Jayeong had to keep a hunting rifle outside the front door. She’d never actually shot an animal, nor did she have any intention of doing so. It was just an intimidation tactic. Hey! Get away! Far away, you hear? That’s my orchard, don’t you dare mess with it . . . The one time she did try to shoot something, Jayeong was knocked back by the recoil. Her ears rang from the deafening sound and the billowing gunpowder caused tears and snot to stream down her face, and yet she was enthralled, a full-throated laugh bursting out of her. What had Jayeong tried to shoot that day? The half-visible fog, or perhaps night itself. Why had Jayeong tried to shoot this that day? To prepare for an even greater darkness, or perhaps she was afraid?She couldn’t be sure.  Jayeong pulled on her work boots and walked over to the orchard. She gauged that day’s wind speed by observing the shape of the clouds and the morning dew on grass. The wind was adequate. The sky was clear, the air pristine. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, the weather would remain nice all day. Jayeong decided to weed and level the soil before the heat grew unbearable. All the shaded patches under the plum trees were over-grown with weeds. Jayeong had learned that if left to run unchecked, weeds would rob the trees of the soil’s essential nutrients. The malnourished trees would then wither, no longer able to bear flowers or fruit. “You can kiss the orchard goodbye at that point,” Jayeong’s mother had once said. “Not all fruit is created equal. You must snap off and throw out the ugly ones right away. Only then can you be a healthy farmer with a healthy farm.” The plum orchard had been passed down to Jayeong by her mother. Her mother had passed down an orchard full of plum trees to her, then left. Jayeong had no way of knowing where her mother had gone—if on a whim she’d run off to manage some other person’s farm, or if she’d chewed her own wrists to death somewhere. From time to time, Jayeong imagined her mother out there in the world—dipping her fingers in holy water before making the Sign of the Cross, or sitting somewhere silently, or stumbling around in an inebri­ated state. Jayeong’s thoughts would sometimes reach all the way to a snowy winter day, and she would imagine her mother showing up out of the blue after all these years and walking toward her, saying, It’s snowing. White, round snow­flakes. Coarse salt. Silvergrass-shaped eyebrows. A lungful of air, a nativity scene, an owl’s hoots. “Sweetheart, you really mustn’t leave that area so disheveled. It’s been long enough. It’s black and ugly, what an eyesore.” Jayeong walked with long strides around her property. Just as her mother had pointed out, the branches she had trimmed over the winter were piled dark and high like a burial mound.“I don’t see the problem,” she muttered. “What’s so ugly about that?” Jayeong rolled down the top of a burlap sack and pushed it around with her foot. Trowel in hand, she pulled the weeds. She leveled the soil. It was close to noon when she completed her tasks. She went to the shed and opened the window. Then, she leaned against the busted doorway and watched a nearby bird. She didn’t wonder what kind of bird it was. She simply picked up a fallen plum, split it in two, and gave half to it. The bird trod all over the soil, wandering near the ditch. One bird, one human. Dozing off, Jayeong accidentally stamped her feet twice. The startled bird flew eastward, but I won’t follow. I’ll stay right here, my hands are just so sticky . . . A lukewarm breeze came blowing through, lightly sweeping away the bird’s footprints when, behind the brambly hedge that surrounded the orchard, eight Clover Soldiers showed up in formation. They were white and resplendent.The sunlight made Jayeong dizzy.Before she could think, They’re back, she had the urge to feign ignorance and ask instead, Who are you? Then the eight Clover Soldiers would respond, We’re friends of Jayeong’s. Then I’ll be able to start anything anew, as if it were fresh. Friends of Jayeong’s? How nice to meet you. So you’re my friends, I see. I’m Jayeong. I look after the orchard. See? All this land, it’s mine. With awe and fear, we would exchange pleasantries. It would be our first meeting, after all. We would be unfamiliar with one another. That’s what a first time is all about. Not knowing. Not being tired of each other. Being able to betray each other easily. But none of this is possible. To be honest, I don’t enjoy new things. Maybe my brain does, but my body is set in its ways. I already know you, and you already know me. Still, not well, right? I’ll keep taking what comes, closing my eyes each night, waking up in the morning. I’ll dream of crabgrass cutting up my arms and legs, and patches of soil coming alive. Jayeong quickly put an end to this spiral by telling herself that they were back because, as always, she was having difficulty turning off her thoughts.They’re back.Jayeong didn’t let her mind go there again. Because she had to stop herself. That was why.  The eight Clover Soldiers were squat and stocky sentinels. They came up to Jayeong’s knees, but aside from that, they looked nearly identical to her. Their clover-shaped heads, which appeared as though someone had taken a bite out of each side, and their chlorophyll-green skin, however, were in stark contrast to Jayeong’s head and skin. When Jayeong first discovered them by a tree stump, they couldn’t walk or run, nor were they carrying tree branch guns the way they did now—they were simply docile and two-dimensional, like, well, a leaf. They came into this world together, as a unified cluster, right where the white whirling butterfly blossoms bloomed and withered.And now, the eight Clover Soldiers charged straight at her. They walked in formation, then ran, then scattered. Nine is too many and ten is too few Then how about eight? Eight is plenty No that’s not enough either How about the firstborn lead the way up front Good, where’s the firstborn? Firstborn, go over there and stand tall Hold your head up high I’ll take your picture What’s with the tone, how rude Is now a good time to sing Goodness no, my mood will sour . . . Who did you just call Firstborn? The firstborn is me, myself, and I. They all wanted to be the firstborn, but of course nobody knew who had been born first.“Left foot, left foot, left foot, form a circle, mark time, halt!”Each time the soldiers moved their feet to execute a close-order drill, the formation descended into chaos. “If we go out to battle like this, we’re all goners!”“I read about something like this in a book once. We’ll be dead meat, that’s for sure!”“But we can act alive, even if we’re dead.”“But we’ll still be dead. It’ll be all sorts of painful. I’m scared.”“What do you think?”“What are you asking that for? I’m scared. Of course I’m scared.”“That’s it? What’s with the face?” Jayeong often regretted teaching the soldiers human language. This was one of those times.“Be quiet, for the love of God,” she snapped. “One more word, and I’ll kick you all out.” The soldiers closed their mouths. And then, they started to laugh. Their low chuckles mingled with the sound of the wind blowing in from the woods and the water rushing through the four streams of the river down below the valley. Jayeong glared at the soldiers. Sweat trickled down her forehead, stinging her eyes. The soldiers swayed merrily in the breeze as they collected pebbles to place in their pockets to weigh themselves down, so they wouldn’t fly away. “But Jayeong,” they said. “You can’t kick us out.”Indeed. The clouds swept past the sun. The soldiers’ wide-open eyes soaked in the sunlight. They sparkled freely, and they were beautiful. Jayeong’s muttered response of I know, the soldiers’ fleshy ears that didn’t hear her response, peach fuzz, eight heads. A hunting snare. Balloon string. A carrot stick. Bird traps. A bomb shelter. A dried-up well. Clusters of grapes in the vineyard across the street. Angels. Everything was bathed clearly and brilliantly in the scorching midday sun. The eight Clover Soldiers began marching along the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust. From one sunlit patch to another, their shadows, as sticky as tar, avoided being swallowed up by the shade of the trees, alive.She could bear this. That was the only thought in her head. And that thought made her feel as though something was missing. Shall I make things bad for them, Jayeong pondered. Bad, harmful, unbearable.But how? she asked herself. But as she well knew, Jayeong’s perspective had already been so accustomed to this set of conditions that there was nothing she could make worse. Her question waited for her briefly, then stopped in its tracks. “No, there’s got to be a way.”Jayeong hadn’t said a word, but the soldiers came over and responded. “There’s got to be a way, Jayeong. A way for you.”A way for me. When Jayeong was a child, she loved attending the Vacation Bible School her local church held each summer. She liked memorizing the books of the Bible in order, and she enjoyed the taste of the orange juice they handed out before morning calisthenics. She loved sleeping in the same room with all the other girls, lying there under the covers in the middle of the night, eavesdropping on people’s conversations and wondering what sorts of things lay waiting in her own future. Jayeong believed in a higher power, and she’d started attending church because someone had told her that was where God lived. But whenever she thought about this entity called “God,” she couldn’t help but think, Just one? Jayeong believed there were three or four gods, not one. Maybe it was similar to holding three or four feelings at once. Perhaps that was why, when after many years had passed and Jayeong was now a VBS counselor teaching middle schoolers about the majesty of God, despite having been asked to start with His sublime sacrifice and deliver the short, simple, and predetermined message of the Gospel, oh wait, it had totally slipped her mind, and she instead went on and on about the concept of sublimity. “Sublime means lofty, grand, or exalted in thought, expression, or manner. It holds absolute value, so we humans can’t help but admire the sublime, to want to emulate it. It points to the sheer will of people to continue living, instead of taking the easier path of death. That’s what they say, anyway, and I agree. But these concepts of crudeness and nobility, good and bad, living despite thinking life’s not worth it—if we look at these things from a lens of absolutism, what could I possibly tell you guys for sure? Nothing, that’s what. Besides, it’s not like dying is easy. Dying is hard. So let me ask you, kids. What could it possibly mean for something to be ‘sublime’? Would we even be able to tell?” “I think we can.”“How?”“Because someone told me so.”“Who? God?”“My parents.” Just then, a golf ball came hurtling through the air and shattered the classroom window. What Jayeong could remember was that the window shattered because someone had shattered it, and in the hustle and bustle (thankfully no one was hurt), she could hear someone playing the piano. It was a plain walnut upright, and someone had scribbled “motherfuckers” on the rightmost pedal. In a dedicated area within Jayeong’s memory lived broken glass, a tiny “motherfuckers,” the sound of piano music, and the banner for that year’s VBS. The banner had always flapped peacefully in the wind outside the now-broken window, and Jayeong had gotten a good look at the Bible verse printed on it. Guard the good treasure that was entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us. What had she seen next? Her memory was blurry. A few scenes almost reemerged, only to recede again.  But when it came to a Tuesday like this, or a Thursday or a Sunday, any day when the soldiers appeared out of the blue really, Jayeong remembered everything clearly. Enough for her to recall certain memories instantly, even through the shimmering haze of the past. Because that’s what Jayeong wanted. That’s what she wanted to want, and was able to want. Right. I wanted this . . . “What are you thinking about?”The eight soldiers’ specialty was appearing. Reappearing. Accomplishing the act of appearing. Also: Helping or not helping Jayeong, chasing off beetles, rearranging items, gazing at the sun, etc. Jayeong couldn’t say they did nothing, and one January they even brought her some homemade alcohol they claimed warded off evil, telling her to give it a go. This was why, though they were so tiresome at times that she wanted to pinch the palest and most delicate parts of their flesh, or even wished they would disappear altogether, she didn’t actually want any of that to happen, and sometimes she even waited for them to appear all the while thinking, Something doesn’t add up here about the way I’m feeling. “Anyway.”“We have to get going,” the soldiers said, playing with the wounds on each other’s hands and feet.“Pay attention to your surroundings today, alright?”“When did we ever not pay attention?” The soldiers called protecting the orchard from outsiders “eyes front,” and this was the duty they took most seriously. It was very important to them that they stand guard, observing neighboring areas for suspicious boxes, plants, charcoal lumps, or rumors. They appeared ready to attack anyone who got in the way of this very important duty, but of course, nobody ever got in the way. Jayeong joined them this time. She suggested she join them, and the soldiers agreed. Jayeong and the soldiers patrolled the area, drawing a circle around the orchard. The soldiers tried to walk in formation but this didn’t go well, perhaps due to this new variable that was Jayeong. The soldiers discussed the lovely weather and tried to fathom the severity of the hail or earthquakes or ocean tsunamis this long-awaited lovely weather was sure to eventually cause as they stroked the forget-me-nots that had bloomed along the side of the road. Their fingers turned bright blue. “If hail falls from the sky, if an earthquake occurs, if a tsunami strikes, we’ll secretly lay down our roots next to a kind-hearted tree. Hey, why isn’t this coming off?” As the soldiers perspired and rubbed at their fingers, Jayeong peered wordlessly at the sky. A little while later, the soldiers also peered up at the same sky that Jayeong was peering up at. “What are you looking at?” They stood under the clear and high sky and bared their faces. A young traveler wearing a rucksack passed everyone just then, heading toward the forest, and Jayeong and the soldiers withdrew their faces from the sky and went on their way.Patrolling the area around the orchard took approximately fifty minutes. Discovered a new toad. Saw people of yore (they were referring to elderly people) looking at the sun halo. They claimed to have lost their eyesight due to the sun. Premises secure. Neither good nor bad? Both good and bad. On the way back, the soldiers took out and unfolded a map. On it was a point marked with a mountain symbol (△). It was the area above the orchard, near the dried-up well. “We didn’t inspect this zone earlier, so as not to rouse suspicion,” the soldiers said. “But there’s something there. We don’t know if it’s flora or fauna, but it could be lying in wait for the right time to strike. It’s a threat to the orchard, whatever it is.” They nodded, as if seeking assent. They proposed they return after nightfall. “Alright, let’s do that then,” Jayeong agreed. She almost asked, But what’s the plan if we really do find something there? but didn’t. Instead, she asked if they could go back to the orchard and harvest the plums together, as nobody had signed up for the Pick-Your-Own-Plums event. “I’ll take the top area, you guys take the bottom.” Plums had to be harvested within a two-week window, starting right at the onset of summer. After that, the trees dropped all the fruit on their own. “You want to go back to the orchard and pick plums together?”“Yes.”“But that’s your job. Why are you asking us to help? Don’t you see how hot it is?”“You’re asking why? I’ve never thought about the why of it all.”“We don’t want to. That’s not our business,” the soldiers said.“You could make it your business,” Jayeong said.“We won’t do it, we won’t. Just let us be. We’re allowed to not do something we don’t want to do.” So Jayeong let them be. As soon as they returned to the orchard, the heat radiating from the layers of smoldering dirt hit them square in the faces. Jayeong mixed some fertilizer into a bucket of cold water, filled a sprayer, and hoisted it onto her back, adjusting the shoulder straps. She then went around to every corner of the property, drenching the plum tree branches and their fruit, the dead trees and their dead fruit, severed stems, bottles of vinegar, some tissue paper, a bag of bean chips, and the soil and atmosphere that had nurtured it all. This was Jayeong’s specialty, the work that had been ingrained within her. The strong and steady stream of water glimmered in the midday sun. The soldiers chased the stream, basking in the cold drops that scattered in the air. Annoyed, Jayeong aimed the hose directly at the soldiers, sending them tumbling, feet entangled, into a puddle. “It hurts, it hurts!” they yelled. Jayeong blasted them again. “Stop that! You’re bigger than us. No fair! Stop bullying us.” The soldiers grimaced as if in pain, but there was a clear vitality to their wet faces. The soldiers showed Jayeong multiple flourishing life forces.Jayeong stopped, her back to the sun. So . . . She stood, suddenly unsure of what to do next.  “Why did I do that? I have no idea myself. I’ll probably never know. My thoughts are fuzzy, and I don’t try . . . Why did I do that?” Jayeong repeated the same thing again and again, so as not to blurt out everything in her head at once. She figured out what she needed to do next and got to work picking plums, muttering, “What the, who knows.” She sprayed pesticides every season, so there weren’t many worm-eaten plums. Still, there weren’t many edible ones, either. As always, making her way from one end of the orchard to the other, Jayeong stooped and straightened, ascended and descended step­ladders, and gazed off into the distance, all in the sweltering heat. The midday heat returned day after day. Gigantic plums and itty-bitty plums and even the rare perfectly ripe plum mingled together in a plastic crate like balls in a ball pit. Yellow and red and green, they were Jayeong’s plums that Jayeong had picked. Seeing them together like that, Jayeong smiled proudly. This time, the soldiers watched in silence. There was no hint of anything, no sadness. Just pride and joy. A bright smile. That was it.Jayeong stacked the full crates on one side of the field, then grabbed a few thin glass bottles from the shed, washed them, and laid them out in the sun to dry. Each year, she gathered the edible fruit and threw together the correct proportions of plums, sugar, soju, vinegar, and flavor enhancers to make homemade plum wine. She kept a few bottles for herself, but she sold most of them at a local market whenever it opened. When the weather cooled down, she even sold some bottles out of her truck by the side of the road. Whenever a driver would roll down their window and pick a fight (usually a young woman or man around Jayeong’s age), she would pretend not to see them or move to a different location out of fear of being reported. On one of these days, Jayeong was not with the soldiers and all alone. A man exited a sedan and approached her, calling, “Excuse me,” so Jayeong climbed down from her truck to greet her customer. But instead, he said, “Oh, I’m not here to buy. I bought a bottle from you earlier but it made me sick.” “But I haven’t sold a single bottle today,” Jayeong replied, to which he said, “I didn’t mean earlier, I meant recently.” He seemed quite new to lying. Still, she didn’t want to accuse the man, so she stayed quiet. After a while, however, the way he was standing there, so stubborn, began to grate on her, and she said, “So what? You have something to say?” “I’d like my money back.” The man showed no signs of backing down.“There hasn’t been a single person who’s gotten sick from my wine.”“Yes, there has. Me.” Well that’s true, Jayeong thought. You say you did, and you’re standing right here. She decided to play along and gave him 10,000 won in cash. She waited for him to say something to the effect of, All this over a measly 10,000 won. Why are you selling this crap, anyway? Just give it up. It’s a waste of time. Nobody needs this weird homemade wine. At which Jayeong would, her hands trembling with rage, hit the man with her truck. She even thought of what she would say to him, this man who would be crumpled on the ground by then, as she took the 10,000 won note back out of his wallet: So what? I did my best, okay? Do you know what that even means? To try your best at something? But the man just took the money, climbed back into his car without a word, and drove off. “A con artist for sure. A bottle is 15,000 won, yet he took the 10,000 won and didn’t say anything. He didn’t even know how much each bottle costs. I can’t believe I returned money that he’d never paid in the first place,” Jayeong muttered. More than anything else, she couldn’t forget the image of the man’s two hands as they politely accepted the money. Unlike Jayeong’s calloused, dirt-caked hands, his were clean and soft, with elegant fingers and clean nails. This son of a bitch, how much do you make conning people with those delicate hands of yours? Jayeong calculated the possible amounts in her head as she walked away from the road. She bought some gum and water from a vending machine in the underpass and strolled past a green barley field dancing in the breeze. After that, she returned to her truck and took a quick nap in the driver’s seat. In a dream, Jayeong learned that the man from earlier had just been released from prison. “Everyone who meets me says there’s something ominous about me,” he said in her dream.Was that true? Did he really hear that from everyone he met? Jayeong woke up and thought about this for a while. For starters, I never said that to him. Nobody could peek into her dreams, so she had to come to her own conclusions. Could go either way. Jayeong retrieved her notepad from her pocket and wrote down her conclusion. On the radio, which had been on the entire time, the DJ offered tips on residue burning and summer wildfire prevention. Jayeong started the truck. The fresh scent of greenery and the smell of hot asphalt wafted in and out through the open window. Three crape myrtle trees. Stone embankments. A faucet. The sound of footsteps tracking a flock of birds. The sound of a Coca-Cola can opening. The smell of dry ice. The smell of sulfur. Feathers. Bones. A shadow shaking its head. A cluster of kids, who’d been waiting for a snake in the middle of the road to move along, fidgeted and looked at Jayeong’s truck.  After nightfall, the wind suddenly picked up and it started to pour. Jayeong brought the soldiers a tarp. Unfazed, they installed a tall tent and waited out the storm. They waited with their bodies bent awkwardly, as if they were prop chairs in a play. Being a small chair. That’s what Jayeong called this awkward slouching, and as always, she sat in each chair, one by one. The soldiers’ bodies were neither cold nor hot, just soggy. A lantern shone dimly on the wet soldiers’ forms. Nobody spoke; it was completely silent, making the rain and breathing sound like a lullaby. Unlike during the day, the orchard felt listless and drained. Jayeong leaned toward the chair soldiers and waved. Whenever she waved slowly at them, as if greeting them happily or seeing them off, she would feel them slowly drift off to sleep. Jayeong had never learned this but she knew how to do it, and she didn’t hate it. The shower didn’t last long, but the wind was still strong so they continued to wait. Jayeong didn’t wake the soldiers, only sprinkled some powdered incense around the tent so unknown souls couldn’t enter without permission (not that she knew any souls to begin with). She killed the remaining time by drawing mountains on the ground with the leftover powder. A group of children big and small came rushing onto the field, dashing around but taking care not to step on the incense on the ground. They then whispered amongst themselves before running off. Am I happy? the children asked themselves. They answered themselves, too. I can’t sweat the small stuff. “Why did they come here, anyway?” she muttered, watching them leave as quickly as they’d come. She recalled the map from earlier in the day. The area above the orchard, near the dried-up well. Her mother’s corpse could be there. There were always people who were attracted to black water, after all. People who, entranced by the black water, threw themselves into a deep, dark well only to find there wasn’t a drop of moisture within and cracked their heads open on the hard floor. Pop, their heads went. Whenever Jayeong heard rumors of someone being swept away in a strong current or someone’s small spark nearly causing a massive forest fire in this imagined small town, she would visit the place to confirm if these things really did happen or not. If they were real or not. This was important to Jayeong, and this importance was virtuous. And this virtue was what saved Jayeong from time to time. “In that case, we should really go check it out. Don’t you think?” the soldiers said, waking from their slumber and rubbing their eyes.It was so pitch black outside the tent that it looked the same whether they opened their eyes or not. The darkness buzzed around them, and they traversed the buzzing darkness and traveled upward. Jayeong adjusted to the absence of light quickly, listening to the soldiers’ footsteps draw nearer or farther as she imagined herself walking alone. She could now hear the crickets chirping, and though she could make out what was around her, there was nothing particularly interesting to look at. “About earlier,” the soldiers said. They claimed that they’d had a dreamless sleep in the tent, but if they were being honest, there was a dream they’d wished they’d had. “It would’ve been an interesting one. It would’ve been about us losing you.” “If we had a dream like that, we would stop moving, and time would keep flowing. Of course, you would have to keep moving. Because it wouldn’t be your dream. Then if we happened to have a dream about finding you again, we would start moving again, moving toward you, but by then you’ll have become a person of yore.” Jayeong asked about the meaning of that dream.“We don’t know. Meaning can just appear out of nowhere. If it does, we’ll know.” Jayeong didn’t know what they meant by this, but she also kind of felt like she knew. There were simply some things like that in the world. Just as she knew how to put the soldiers to sleep despite never having learned, the soldiers knew how to rouse Jayeong without ever having learned. Jayeong and the soldiers marched on, alternately taking the lead. No one would ever mistake them for just one person. The dappled shadows of nearby tree branches retreated from her face, and the full moon hung low in the sky, bathing the area in a fractured white glow. With the light and wind in her face, Jayeong watched as the soldiers’ heads bobbed with each exhale. Their spiral cowlicks bounced up and down, small and adorable. They were alive. They appeared alive. “But what if we don’t find anything?”“Then we don’t find anything.”“I hope we find something. Anything.”“I hope I’m the one who finds something first.”“Boo! Boo! Boo!”“Or I hope I’m the one who’s found first.”“Alright, then. Clasp your hands together and say a prayer.” Jayeong nodded halfheartedly, saying, Yes, yes, and walked with them for a long time. Yes. I hope she’s there, dead. I hope she’ll give me an ending. Then I’ll forgive her. 

Poetry

[Poetry] Two Poems by Song Huiji

How to Make Crop Circles I thought when I grew up I would live a truly lewd life of a hedonist, dripping in the pleasure of anal sex fucking a different man every night banging four, five strangers until my body shat­tered in pieces until I ran out of breath until I tested positive and died as the universe had me believe  What I’m picturing is Gyu’s face his wavy body hair resembling a wheat field his dry lips that often chafed when not wearing lip balm his hands and feet soaked in heat and sweat, that dampness used to take me to a certain swamp, an eco-park, a swarm, of deep round black eyes I used to encounter amid the blades of water grass Even at the time we walked in the Keondae district and joked if we held hands here all these passers-by would do a double take, the lighting the colors here would all turn into iridescent gunshots, even at the time we looked over at the beach from that Gangneung cafe where waves prey on waves, bite off and swallow each other, a phenomenon that continues that is ceaseless and the toes of our shoes kissed to brave off the chills, Knowing all these could be condensed into duchang [pox] or ddonggochung [fag]  What is it, this thing called beauty, Gyu pondered as I sat next to him Starting a fire in quiet, the call of a thrush, the scent of wet grass, the impoverished hand of darkness grasping us, a day of recalling such things keeps  me as a sharecropper, in my palm is the sharp blade that severed the ancient god’s testicles, the tool that’s long been used to harvest the heads of crops, yet somehow useless in my hand, the old-fashioned life  playing on-screen  like a glacier under the sun like curdling milk; the endlessly  expansive  field Sitting in a cafe by a window framing the aftermath of the flood, I’m waiting for Gyu who is stubbornly unarriving, I sing him, reenact him, peel the skin of my future with him, layer by layer, then in a blink a paper cut, blood drips drips drips and pools, breaks ripples upon ripples, I do not moan, I do not look away, as that is my share, only that much is my  all     Memory Étude In first grade, I wrote this under “dream” in the class anthology—poet.  In second grade, I discovered it in a rice paddy—an abandoned duck carcass eaten to the bare bones. There I whispered to myself. Here you were. I thought I recovered it.  In third grade, I wrote my first story. In a lined notebook with a teddy bear on its lime green cover—titled “A Dreaming Bear.”  In fourth grade, by observing red tulips planted in a line along the school flowerbed, I wrote a quintain and wanted to get slapped in the face out of nowhere. I wanted to confess my sins and beg. Until full bloom.  In fifth grade, as I witnessed a dark, crooked bone protruding from my body, being alive became as bizarre to me as the Bully a Plant experiment.* Every time I opened my mouth It spewed out dry leaves. A whole slew. An invitation. Thanks to which I realized the exis­tence of my garden in the deepest corner of myself. Here you were. I thought I recovered it.  In sixth grade, I promised myself to become a healthy homosexual.  * There’s a pair of sprouted onions. One is a positive-word onion. The other is a negative-word onion. To the positive-word onion you only say positive words; to the negative-word onion you only say negative words. The experiment was based on the premise that negative words would have negative impacts on plants’ growth, but at the end of every experiment it was always the negative-word onion that had grown creepily lush.

Poetry

[Poetry] Two Poems by Song Jin Gwon

When Will the Adults Come Many days and many years of moonlit mornings and sunlit nights have passed Cattle and horses broke out of their pens and tore the house apart even taking over the master bedroom The rooster became the hen white cloth blackenedwhile ten, twenty, one hundred, one thousand suns sizzled in the sky and big floods and big fires came one after another leaving everything in shambles leaving only us in the world with Dad gone away and Mom gone away looking for Dad I comfort my crying baby sibling to sleep Just ten more nights and Mommy and Daddy will come Hush little baby don’t you cry The little kitty is already dead Hush little baby don’t you cry Tucking them in and comforting them and singing them a lullaby But when will the adults come for ten nights and twenty nights have passed and countless ten nights have passed   Oxen Dream On nights when the ox comes to me my heart stirs so that I cannot sleep On nights when the ox wearing arrowroot blossoms tiger lilies and even daylilies on its horns comes to me I cannot curl my leaves like a silk tree nor shut my doors like a squash blossom and sleep  Aigo you came all this way to come back home Mom comes out of the kitchen and caresses the ox Dad quietly runs a besom along the ox’s back then boils cattle feed with plenty of soybean pods and rice bran On nights when the ox comes to our house the light stays on in the barn all night the yard glows bright as broad daylight and word is quickly sent to the owners that the ox is here for shouldn’t the ox stay the night seeing as it came back home  On nights when the ox that was sold off to Jeombo’s in the upper village comes back home On nights when the ox comes to me with my dead Mother and Father in tow— like a prickly-ash tree peppered with swallowtails my heart sways so that I cannot sleep like a jar holding a live carp my heart ripples so that I cannot sleep 

Reviews

[Featured Review] The Body We Call Our Own

Biologicity Shin Hae-uk’s Biologicity has been a touchstone for Korean poets since it appeared in 2009. In a Winter 2025 interview for KLN, the poet Im Seungyu said she doubts there is a writer in Korea who hasn’t passed through it. Spencer Lee-Lenfield’s recent translation was nominated last year for the 2025 Lucien Stryk Prize. The recognition is well earned, for Shin’s poetic voice may seem too idiosyncratic to cross into another language at all. Shin writes a poetry preoccupied with what it might be to exist and feel as something other than a stable, bounded self. That preoccupation is real, and yet this description cannot do justice to the book’s strangeness and, just as often, its humor. These are poems about what it feels like to be an organism, a self uncomfortably housed in a body, leaking at the seams into other people, animals, objects, and even the dead. The collection’s governing unease lies in how easily a self can dissolve into sameness. “Let’s share a name from now on,” proposes the speaker of “Apart, But Together,” a name that is “Perfectly equal.” The offer is tender and faintly menacing at once, for to share a name is to risk becoming interchangeable, an indistinguishable item in place of a singular life. Shin’s speakers register that risk even as they court it, insisting on the oddness of their own embodiment while the body refuses to cooperate. In “Some Thoughts on Not Ending,” the speaker reports, “Each day I die in someone else’s dream,” before arriving at the book’s quiet thesis: “I am sadness become human.” Selfhood here is less a possession than a symptom. That predicament is staged with deadpan literalism and a habit of veering without warning. A house speaks. A color speaks. Planets, child­hood friends, and a witch from a fairy tale each take the microphone in turn. The speakers are forever out of sync with their own anatomy. In “Birthday, Haply” (the chance-haunted pun on “happy” is the point), a body’s “ears, eyes, mouth, nose exist most of the time as they like,” wandering off and only sometimes returning, while their owner admits, “I’ve never learned how to keep them straight.” In “Times Table,” a speaker can “only do the tables from memory up to nine,” her fingers forever “one too few,” until she finds herself “becoming a number.” In “Catcher in the Rye,” the speaker is “soaked in emotion” while reading a textbook, underlining every word “with all my heart” but weeping “with just one eye.” The wit never quite dispels the dread. A sack informs its contents, flatly, “This is no place for you to be.” In the aforementioned interview, Shin described her craft as a matter of “‘collecting,’ ‘dislocating,’ and ‘transplanting’” words: she gathers terms that, in ordinary use, “look subordinate to their indexical function, dead and buried under the dust of habit,” then digs them “up by the roots” and replants them in “the soil of a text” so they “can have a new life.” Biologicity is also, by her own account, an effort to “save time in that void created between lines, between stanzas,” to capture “not time’s flow” but “time’s motion.” The result is a poetry of short breath and abrupt silences, at once precise and porous, in which the thinking arrives sidelong, through surreal scenarios rather than statement. At its best, in poems like “Hands,” “One Hundred Percent House,” and “End of the Earth,” the work opens a palpable gap between perception and the body we call our own. Lee-Lenfield’s translation, the latest in Black Ocean’s Moon Country Korean Poetry Series (which has also brought Moon Boyoung, Ha Jaeyoun, and Oh Eun into English), is alert to all of this. Checked against the original, his versions are faithful at the level of the line yet read as real English poems. “Catcher in the Rye” tracks the original’s purpose clauses almost word for word (“that children in pain might not suffer, / and trees dying alone might not feel lonely”), and the close of “Hands” becomes “What I really envied / wasn’t you / but your tender fingers,” about as good as one could hope for. He resists the temptation to smooth Shin’s oddness into fluency, keeping her hard stops and tonal swerves intact. Shin’s poems thrive on what she calls the “foreign-object sensation,” a deliberate awkward­ness lodged in the language like a splinter. She has recalled how the book’s title itself “just kept floating around because it couldn’t find a place,” “sliding around,” she says, until it had “left its traces over a bunch of different poems,” at which point she made it the title of the whole collection. It is, fittingly, a coinage: saengmulseong fuses saengmul (“organism,” literally “living thing”) with the abstract suffix -seong, close to the English “-ity,” and Lee-Lenfield’s “Biologicity” lands in English as a freshly minted, faintly clinical noun, exactly as the Korean does. Some effects inevitably slip the net, and Lee-Lenfield’s foreword and note on the translation name those losses rather than papering over them, which is part of what makes the volume instructive. Shin has said that her poems in translation “feel like Voyager 2, out beyond our solar system,” and that she hopes “the nuances of my language also touch someone out there.” In Lee-Lenfield’s lucid, unhurried English, the signal arrives intact. Throughout Biologicity, Shin treats the body as a place we are only renting, and the loneliness of that arrangement, punctuated by jokes, lingers well past the last page. It is a small book that keeps getting larger the longer one sits with it.

by Jack Saebyok Jung

Reviews

[English] The Beginning of a Fantasy Classic: Why the World of The Bird That Drinks Tears Is Worth Falling For

The Heart of the Nhaga At a glance, The Heart of the Nhaga, the first installment of Lee Young-do’s fantasy epic The Bird That Drinks Tears, appears to follow the familiar narrative path laid out by works such as The Lord of the Rings: a band made up of different species sets out on a perilous mission. The party is formed of four individuals: Kagan Draca, a mysteri­ous human pathfinder who hunts and eats Nhaga yet finds himself tasked with escorting one to safety; Byong Srabble, a cheerful Tokkebi scholar and trickster who wields the mystical Tokkebibul; Teenahan, a towering Rekon warrior armed with a seven-meter spear; and Ryun Pei, a young Nhaga haunted by the murder of his father and burdened with a mission that may determine the fate of all four races. This is where the novel already diverges from familiar fantasy conventions. Rather than populat­ing his world with variations of elves, dwarves, and orcs, Lee’s worldbuilding fills it with races that feel entirely his own. Take the Nhaga, a reptilian people who molt their skin, lay eggs, and relinquish their hearts in exchange for immortality. Or the Rekon, gigantic avian humanoids capable of moving massive boulders, running at astonishing speeds, and unleashing cries powerful enough to sweep people away like a tornado. What truly distinguishes these races, however, is not their physiology but the civilizations Lee builds around them. The Nhaga live in a matriarchal society, yet Lee does not simply reverse patriarchal roles. Every social dynamic is grounded in history and custom, giving their culture a convincing sense of evolution. One example is the Shojainteshiktol, a practice in which the murder of a household member must be avenged by one of the perpetra­tor’s relatives hunting down the killer. In the central dispute between two Nhaga households that propels the story, what matters is not whether a murder occurred or not. The real question is whether the murder even matters since both the victim and the perpetrator are men. In that single conflict, Lee reveals an entire worldview. Lee also enriches his world by drawing from Korean mythology. The Tokkebi, a staple of Korean folklore, wield the mystical Tokkebibul, a fire used for warmth, illusion, and combat, while the Duoksini—also from Korean folklore—appear as a fallen race that has “lost its god,” existing in a grotesque state where nothing about their bodies or existence seems to make sense. There is certainly the potential for all of this to overwhelm readers. But this is where Lee’s strength as a storyteller truly shines. He shows us the world instead of telling us about it. In doing so, he allows us to become immersed gradually and naturally. Fantasy authors often struggle with the temptation to front-load background information, particularly in the opening volume of a series. Lee does not readily take that path. Rather than explaining his world, he invites readers to experi­ence it. The customs of the Nhaga emerge through conversation, ritual, and conflict. Their attitudes toward men are not explained through exposition but demonstrated through the way they live, speak, and make moral judgments. Even when exposition appears, it rarely feels forced. Much of it comes through Kagan Draca, the party’s most worldly member. Lee not only expands the world’s lore but also deepens Kagan himself, turning every explanation into another glimpse of his mysterious past. That same restraint extends to the novel’s mysteries. Whenever the novel seems ready to reveal the truth behind Kagan Draca’s history or the larger purpose of the journey, it instead offers another carefully measured clue. Lee trusts both his story and his readers enough to embrace delayed gratification, allowing its secrets to unfold across multiple volumes rather than rushing toward premature revelations. Anton Hur’s confident and refined translation skillfully captures all of this. His ability to carry an author’s voice into English, already proven across multiple genres, shines just as brightly in this fantasy epic. The prose has depth without sacrificing momentum, preserving both the novel’s grandeur and its humanity. Korean fantasy is rich with remarkable works that have yet to reach English-language readers. Among them, The Bird That Drinks Tears has long stood tall as the work that most urgently deserved to cross that linguistic boundary. With The Heart of the Nhaga, English readers can finally discover why.

by Jinwoo Park

Reviews

[English] Pop Culture Goes Political

Project V The year is 2037, and Korea is on the brink of devel­oping its first large-scale mech. In order to find a pilot, the government plans—what else?—a reality TV competition. Twenty-two-year-old Kim Wooram just happens to be one of the best mech engineers in the world. Winning the competition and piloting a cutting-edge mech feels like Wooram’s destiny, but there’s a slight problem: the competition is open to men only. Wooram decides to disguise herself as her twin brother, Boram, in order to enlist in the competi­tion and fight for her dreams. Thus, the stage is set for Park Seolyeon’s latest novel, Project V. Park’s 2022 novel A Magical Girl Retires explored the beloved magical girl genre through a contempo­rary feminist lens. In Project V, artfully translated into English by Gene Png, Park turns her pen to another pop culture institution: mechs.  The term “mech” or “mecha” refers to any number of humanoid robots. The concept has roots reaching back to science fiction writers like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, but its modern incarnation is generally credited to Japanese film and comics, with series like Astro Boy and Mazinger Z capturing people’s imaginations in the mid-twentieth century. 1979’s Mobile Suit Gundam spawned one of the most enduring franchises in anime history, and 1995’s Neon Genesis Evangelion, with its profound explorations of the relationships between humans, spirituality, and technology, is widely regarded as one of the greatest television series of all time.  Though Project V’s protagonist Wooram sees mechs as useful extensions of humans’ preexisting capabilities to help others, she isn’t so naive as to think that mechs aren’t ultimately viewed as weapons by the wider world. She reflects: “No country would ever admit that in the event of an emergency, their mechs would be deployed as war machines.” Indeed, the mech genre has proven to be fertile ground for nationalist and militaristic ideals—ideals that author Park subtly critiques throughout the novel.  Following in this tradition, “V,” the mech Wooram competes to pilot, takes its inspiration from the 1976 film Robot Taekwon V. Though the film earned millions at the box office and remains a landmark of the Korean animation industry, Robot Taekwon V’s legacy has been tainted by the accusation that it disseminated anti-communist propaganda masquerading as children’s entertainment—a critique that could fairly apply to many stories in the mech genre and one that Park is clearly well aware of. Park’s own political leanings are no secret: her award-winning 2018 novel Capitalists Must Starve draws inspiration from labor activist Gang Juryong, while A Magical Girl Retires similarly explores themes of labor activism and trade unionism. Her works feature heroines who question authority and explode feminist stereotypes; Project V is no exception.  Project V’s protagonist represents what a conscientious use of mech technology could look like. Wooram quickly distinguishes herself in the competition with her creative problem-solving skills and human-first approach. While other contestants are eager to display their dominance and brute strength, Wooram finds a way to face each new challenge while ensuring her fellow contestants remain out of harm’s way. Her skillset quickly sees her become a fan-favorite contestant and a top-three finalist. The irony that Wooram distinguishes herself in a male-dominated field by using more “feminine” skills is not lost on the reader. While Project V as a whole is a meditation on the mech genre, the book’s latter half takes a critical look at artificial intelligence. While large-scale superweapons like mechs may have encapsulated the Cold War-era’s technological fixations, govern­ments and corporations around the world are now pouring money into the promise of AI’s efficient problem-solving skills.  As a finalist, Wooram has the opportunity to pilot V, but her excitement at witnessing such cutting-edge technology is quickly replaced with profound concern. During their first interaction, V is cold and guarded, even asking Wooram, “Do I need a pilot?” As their conversations progress, Wooram suspects that the AI powering V is beginning to think and feel for itself. Her attempts to teach V compassion for human beings are met with violent resistance. What’s worse, Wooram’s warnings about V’s AI go unheeded after her identity as a woman is exposed and the sexist backlash takes precedence over national security concerns.  After the explosive conclusion of Project V, readers aren’t served up any easy answers about the complex questions the novel raises. While Wooram is left reflecting on the fact that creations like V will always be reborn in one form or another, readers are likely to conclude that we need heroes like Wooram to rise and resist these powers. Though pop culture and politics are inextricably intertwined, the two don’t often intersect in the literary world. Park Seolyeon is forging a new path with stories that mirror the absurdity of our contemporary age—and posit a future of hopeful possibilities. 

by Katie Fustich

Reviews

[English] Two Women Living Together Is a World

Two Women Living Together The title of Two Women Living Together is decep­tively straightforward. In their joint memoir, Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo introduce themselves as longtime “singletons”—unmarried women living in single-person households—who, some years ago, decided to co-purchase a home in Seoul’s Mangwon neighborhood. Their memoir arrives amid headlines that routinely sound the alarm about South Korea’s plummeting birth rate and aging population—trends often attributed to rising living costs and an ever-stratifying labor market. Feminist and queer critics have stressed that patriarchy and heteronormativity are also at play, noting that same-sex marriage and adoption in South Korea remain illegal.  The memoir became a bestseller upon its release in 2019, with over 56,000 copies sold to date. In forty-nine mini-essays, Kim and Hwang ponder the meanings of the life they have built as housemates, co-homeowners, and platonic life companions, addressing topics from splitting household duties (Kim does the dishes, Hwang does the cooking) to overarching questions of aging, caregiving, and entering each other’s extended families in midlife. The writing is warm and conversational, peppered with humor and affectionate interludes featuring the authors’ four cats, Haku, Goro, Tigger, and Young-bae. Gene Png’s English translation captures the resultant sense of camaraderie between the authors and readers with apparent ease. The memoir has also inspired a popular weekly podcast in Korea, Two Women Talking Together (여둘톡), where the authors discuss issues of work, relationships, and self-purpose.  Kim and Hwang rarely narrate the significance of their partnership as an explicit response to systemic effects. The two met on Twitter, now X, while working in adjacent industries: Kim as a manager at a major marketing agency and Hwang as an editor at W Korea. Both had grown weary of living alone. The authors depict their decision to cohabit as an incidental effect of a friendship rooted in similar upbringings—growing up in Busan, moving to Seoul for university—as well as kindred tastes in music, drinks, and humor. But societal pressures to conform surfaced in day-to-day encounters. In one essay, Hwang recalls attending a dinner with a male guest who characterized marriageable women as “real gems” to be “excavated” by men. Hwang writes, “He demonstrated no regard whatsoever for these women’s humanity, treating them like exploitable goods with neither agency nor interests.” Most of the time, the authors’ abode provides ref­uge from such unwanted interpellations. However, at other moments, their home is the source of relational friction caused by disagreements about when to fold and put away the laundry or how to spend the holidays. These everyday frictions will ring familiar to anybody who has shared a home. Sometimes the issues Kim and Hwang face have deep roots. In one series of essays, the authors reflect on the challenges of taking out a loan to finance their apartment, a common path to homeownership in Seoul’s fierce housing market. Whereas debt in Hwang’s family was an “unwelcomed burden—something to be ashamed of and to get rid of quickly,” Kim looks back aghast at her “audacity to keep bugging Sunwoo about buying a house” together. Only in retrospect did Kim learn that, without Hwang’s name on the loan, her status as a freelancer would have likely disqualified her. Yet with enough patience and trust, the authors are able to turn their divergence over debt into a chance to explore their underlying attitudes toward work, finances, and responsibility. Discord over laundry routines turns out to be more about ingrained attachment styles. Curiosity about each other creeps in, presenting a chance to resolve conflict differently. In the space of friendship, the authors become each other’s mirror, both in conflict and in joy. “Stuck in an endless cycle of disappointment and forgive­ness,” Kim writes, “we will never stop pinning our hopes on each other.” Two Women Living Together represents the possibility of reprieve from everyday scripts about who we ought to be—a marriageable woman, a trustworthy loan applicant, a respectable career holder—and from narratives that promise conformity as the antidote to abandonment. How Kim and Hwang show up for each other illuminates how care in relationships is not about effacing difference between people but about recognizing and upholding difference as a core component of intimacy. In a world where “two women living together” is a politicizable act, we can begin to enact wider possibilities for what partnership, care, and love look like, beginning with our own living rooms.

by Madeleine Han

Reviews

[English] If Anyone Could Kill

Mrs. Shim Is a Killer Kang Jiyoung’s Mrs. Shim Is a Killer, translated by Paige Morris, follows Shim Eunok, an unassuming middle-aged ajumma who becomes a contract killer for the Smile Detective Agency to save her family from debt. The story operates in a lawless underworld befitting a crime novel, populated by desperate inhabitants driven beyond the edges of respectable society. Yet Kang renders this underworld not through grim realism, but an offbeat, farcical, and fast-moving narrative style whose violence is as comic as it is disturbing.  Mrs. Shim enters with her handwritten resume, oblivious to the true nature of the position she is applying for. Wielding a chef’s knife, she saws into the air as though slicing a “well-aged rack of beef,” successfully completing the job interview by drawing on the expertise she acquired as a local supermarket butcher. Park Taesang, the Agency boss, is transfixed. He, too, learned to handle knives from his father who ran a sashimi restaurant by the sea.  Such whimsical details lend the novel a certain animal sensibility, collapsing the presumed distance between the everyday and exceptional violence. In a chapter entitled “The Killer,” a chopstick assassin also works as a chicken sexer, taking pleasure in being a “cold-blooded arbiter” of the chicks’ fates. This visceral authority affords the assassin a minor victory in a society that otherwise seeks to obscure the little power she holds, and her pleasure resembles the apprehensive thrill Mrs. Shim experiences upon carrying out her first kill. These animal instances move beyond primitive bloodlust, gesturing to something more fundamen­tal: the human desire to matter, to be seen, remains inseparable from the exhilarating experience of transgression.  The book’s characters are hardly virtuous; fraudsters, mercenaries, and manipulators con­tinually devise schemes for making quick money. Human desire, however, is never innocent; as the characters’ complex and compromising histories gradually come into view, Kang allows them to dwell at the edges of familiar moral taxonomies, unsettling the age-old fiction of good and evil, of villain and victim. This approach is reinforced by the novel’s episodic structure. Each chapter is titled after a different narrator—“The Shaman,” “The Secret Agent,” or “The Confidant”—as though mimicking modern society’s tendency to quantify a life into its social function. Each story, however, unveils the past behind that role, undoing the ostensible certainty of identity. Mr. Park once cherished the modest dream of becoming a CEO who also writes poems, but a disastrous romance with the sashimi restau­rant’s daughter draws him into the murder-for-hire business. His star apprentice, Joongi, comes to Seoul not for a job, but in search of his emotionally distant mother. As the characters come into being with every chapter, relationships accumulate, converge, and become entangled through an undoing—an undoing into the past that human­izes these unruly people who had to sin to survive.  The novel’s enmeshed lives evoke the wave of Korean crime-noir films of the early 2000s, which popularized tropes of gangster romance, tragic twists, and sentimental criminals. Kang, however, places the disarming ajumma at the center of this masculine genre. When she isn’t out to kill, Mrs. Shim is a caring mother and a friendly neighbor who brings banchan to an elderly woman with dementia. While her prescriptive identity becomes her greatest camouflage, the anonymity of her double life does not last. As the plot develops, the rival Happy Detective Agency begins investigat­ing the mysterious new killer, and the ensuing turf war soon places Mrs. Shim’s children in danger. The novel’s escalating conflict establishes the propulsive momentum of a crime thriller, while its shifting narrators reveal how a web of scattered personal histories—misplaced love, a fateful guess, or sheer bad luck—converge to form an entire universe.  With its rousing imagination and adrenaline-fueled rhythm, Mrs. Shim Is a Killer overturns the familiar claim that life is a sum of the choices we make. Choice is no self-contained act, but a strange amalgam of unforeseen events, serendipitous encounters, and unreasoned forces that intrude upon a life from beyond the limits of intention. Kang embraces a profusion of narrative: those bizarre, obscene, and endlessly diverging experi­ences that make up human existence.  We are often told to believe that our realities can be chosen, that the good life is achievable through sovereign decisions of private sacrifice and quiet endurance. Yet the novel’s eccentric and comically impulsive characters leave behind a different impression: perhaps life is a sum of contingencies, improbable and capricious. Sometimes, life simply happens in a certain way. If that is the case, why not welcome what is to come with a smile?

by Luisa Hae Yoon Kim

Reviews

[Turkish] When Grief Takes Shape

Hayaletin Kalbi First published in Korea in 2022, Lim Sunwoo’s collection of eight stories reached Turkish readers in 2026 as Hayaletin Kalbi, translated by Tayfun Kartav. In the collection’s title story, the narrator observes a version of herself step outside of her body before confessing: “The fact that I had not actually died left me deeply disappointed.” That sentence introduces the book’s central question: What happens when the body keeps going, but the heart has already started to leave the world? Throughout the collection, this tension between being alive and actually feeling alive becomes a recurring theme.  Many of Lim’s characters are alive, but have withdrawn from life. Grief, insecure jobs, broken relationships, family pressure, and lost dreams have taken a toll on them. The ghosts, mutant jellyfish, rooted bodies, and hibernating people do not provide an escape from reality. Instead, they give hidden emotions a visible form. In Hayaletin Kalbi, the fantastic does not erase sorrow. It gives sorrow a body, a voice, or simply a place to rest.  “Hayaletin Kalbi” (“With the Heart of a Ghost”) follows a bakery worker whose boyfriend, Jeongsu, has been in a coma for two years. Unlike many stories that would seek out the miracle, Lim rejects that possibility. Jeongsu does not wake up. Ultimately, the woman is waiting not because she still hopes for love but because she does not know how to leave. The story is strong precisely because it offers no solution to the suffering of the woman. Even though a ghost appears in the story, it does not offer her a solution to her sorrow but makes it impossible for her to continue avoiding it. These stories place grief directly inside the body. “Işık Saçmıyor” (“You’re Not Glowing”) and “Yaz, Suyun Rengi Gibi” (“Summer, Like the Color of Water”) both locate transformation as an intermedi­ary phase between disappearance and rejuvenation. In the first story, an invasion of jellyfish generates an ominous industry where people wish to disappear. Services such as contracts, caretaking, and cleaning make that dream into a business. However, one of the jellyfish reconnects the narrator to her music career which she had abandoned. In the latter story, San plants himself in the floor after a breakup as a manifestation of his grief. The narrator can’t rescue him, but she can pull down the curtain, offer him water, and be beside him. Both stories ask what it means to stay with someone when there is no clear way to help. Lim’s answer is modest: Sometimes care can consist of water, shade, music, or company. “Kış Uykusundaki Adam” (“The Hibernating Guy”) uses the motif of retreat to make a socio-political commentary: While everybody else works and pays their rent, who has the privilege of sleeping throughout winter? “Alaska Değil Ama” (“Even Though It’s Not Alaska”) transforms a tale of vengeance into one of bereavement that blurs the boundaries between human and animal. Here, the wish to disappear is tied not only to grief but also to money, work, housing, and exhaustion. Lim never lets private pain float free from its material conditions. The last story, “Alkışa Çıkmak, Uzatmalar, Büyük Final” (“Curtain Call, Extra Inning, Last Pang”), provides a definitive response to that question. Granted one hundred hours of life after death, the narrator takes Irang to a specific stage in her life. Through this process, the narrator comes to realize that the disappearance of another person is still important. In Lim’s universe, perhaps this is the clearest indication of a living heart. The ending does not offer a grand return to life. It suggests something smaller and more believable: Caring about another person may be enough to remind us that some part of us still endures. Lim writes in a quiet, matter-of-fact style that is at times even humorous, and Kartav’s Turkish translation fluently recreates Lim’s rhythm and detachment. Ghosts and physical transformations coexist with bakery counters, hospital beds, unpaid bills, domestic work, and unemployment. Occasionally, the narrative follows a familiar pattern. An emotionally numb individual encounters the inexplicable and gradually returns to life, making certain conclusions rather predictable. Nonetheless, Lim never insists on the healing of her characters. Hayaletin Kalbi does not exhort weary individuals to stay strong. It stays beside them. Here, care is not a cure but a refusal to turn away from those who are fading away. This is also where Lim succeeds in her writing. She never forces emotions or overexplains. Rather, she leaves everything to the ordinary details and the reader’s imagination.

by Sümeyra Buran