Korean language novels

Untold Night and Day – Bae Suah (2013 trans. Deborah Smith 2020) 152 pages

When I see writing described as dreamlike, I often think of highly metaphorical language, perhaps with a heavy emphasis on sensory experience, and with an unreal quality. Untold Night and Day is definitely dreamlike, but not quite in the ways I’ve described.

It initially seems very much grounded in everyday experiences. Where it becomes dreamlike is that it follows its own logic, jumping about with recurring motifs, in a way that makes sense within itself but becomes more disconcerting the more you consider it.

“A man carrying a kitten in a birdcage pressed himself against the opposite wall of the alley to avoid her car. He was a preacher, a well-known figure in this alley; he went around surreptitiously stuffing pieces of paper bearing Bible verses into people’s pockets, so he’d been mistaken for a pickpocket and arrested more than once. While she waited for the lights to change at the end of the alley, the woman driving the green car took her hand off the wheel and raised a bottle of water to her lips. Still with the phone to her ear. Against the regular growl of the engine, the hum of the air conditioning.”

These images and characters recur throughout the novella, each time with their context slightly shifted. There are other repeated motifs, including to The Blind Owl, a deeply disturbing novella which I read back in 2019. The shifting repetitions unsettle the story but also ground it in its own world.

Ayami is a former actor who works at an audio theatre. We join her at the end of her last shift, in the oppressive heat of Seoul, where through the night she and her boss search for their missing friend Yeoni. The following day, she shows round a German writer who never wanted to be in Korea in the first place.

The two times echo each other and almost merge, but whenever the narrative almost seems on the verge of entirely disintegrating, it holds on to that interior logic and somehow pulls you along, trying to work out what is happening and where Yeoni could be.

“That was the secret of night and day existing simultaneously. Ayami discovered this through a single movement, bending down to pick up the pebble. And, remembering this simultaneous existence more vividly than she remembered herself, became unable to remember anything else.”

I realise this may be an entirely unhelpful review as I’ve not really said very much! But hopefully I’ve given a sense of why this novella is hard to describe and hard to review. I enjoyed it, but definitely not one to read when you’re in the mood for a linear plot and all questions answered at the end…

“I have to record whatever comes into my head in the same place it happens. Things occur to me as images, and as forms, not as words arranged into sentences. The images quickly dissipate after the moment’s passed, and once that happens there’s no way for me to capture them in language.”

Lemon – Kwon Yeo-sun (2019 trans. Janet Hong Higgins 2021) 147 pages

I thought the cover of Lemon was absolutely perfect. The simple image of an absent woman suspended in sky strikingly captures the unsettling quality of this story about a murdered young woman.

Lemon is not a whodunit, although I think that central question is answered obliquely. There is no satisfying resolution with all the ends tide up neatly – that is not what this novella is about. Rather, it is about people struggling to find a way through life when it has been touched by a violent crime. It is about how to try and find peace when there are no easy answers.

The murder of 19-year-old Kim Hae-on in 2002 shocks the local community. The killer is not found, despite two local boys being suspected. Predictable tabloid sensationalism means it becomes known as the High School Beauty Murder, as Kim Hae-on was strikingly beautiful and somewhat unknowable. Yet beyond the cliches lies a life taken and a grieving family.

The various chapters in Lemon have different narrators between 2002 and 2019. It begins with Hae-on’s younger sister Da-on, struggling to understand who she is in the wake of her sister’s killing.

“Does this mean I’m still not free? That I’m not free, not one iota, from those smooth, fair, irrelevant details from 16 years ago, those endless memories of my sister’s loveliness, which had made me undergo plastic surgery, turning my own face into a crude patchwork of her features?”

We gain perspective on Da-on from the memories of a classmate, Sanghui:

“Da-on, the younger sister, was the one who looked after Hae-on, as one would after a little sister. She’d stop her big sister on the street before they reached the school gate and then circle her examining the front and back of her uniform to make sure nothing was out of place.”

[..]

“Then you could witness the older sister fleeing gracefully down the hall or across the school field with her long lithe limbs, while the younger one raced shrieking after her, like some wild animal. They seem never failed to give both teachers and students a good laugh. That was Da-on’s gift. She had a lively, bubbly kind of warmth that could pull Hae-ons devastating, otherworldly, even glacial, beauty into our reality, dissolving it in laughter.”

We learn later on that there was a clear reason for this protectiveness. Hae-on seemed unaware of the modesty expected in society and could forget to wear underwear, sitting in a way that exposed this. Da-on would try to ensure this didn’t happen but the external misreading of this behaviour probably played a part in her sister’s disappearance. There is never any sense of victim-blaming from any of the narrators in Lemon, with one exception and the reader is clearly not expected to align with those views.

More details of the day of the murder emerge through the shifting views, bound up in the lives that continued beyond. There is real sadness here, particularly in the grief of Hae-on’s immediate family and also for Han Manu, one of the suspects.

There is a haunting quality in Lemon. It is never so crass as to make the murder of a young woman anything other than it is; it is not gory entertainment nor is it made easier through a suggestion of any sort of metaphysicality. But by capturing the fallout of the violence onto the everyday lives of those who knew Hae-on, Kwon Yeo-sun expertly demonstrates the ongoing destructiveness of a life taken.

“It will go on endlessly, until the end of Da-on’s life, or maybe beyond that. Not being able to put an end to an incident so horrific – I couldn’t begin to imagine that kind of weight on her life.”