VOL.69/2024.04

Fiction is a Journey Into the Complexity of Human Identity

A Newly-Debuted Korean Novelist’s Pick

2023.09.04

The world is a jumbled mess, and humans cannot be explained by a single identity. I began to have a sense of this as I read Korean novels from the 1940s. From the mixed landscape at the end of the Japanese occupation to the rather abrupt independence and ideological conflict, the 1940s may be the most chaotic period in Korean history. The novels of this period portray human beings wandering in the midst of various crisscrossing powers.

Kim Nam-Cheon (1911-?) began his writing career in the early 1930s during the Japanese occupation as a member of the Korea Artista Proleta Federacio or KAPF. His early works were written with a clear political purpose and simple compositions. However, as he went through arrests, defections, and the dissolution of KAPF, his depictions of humans and the world became progressively more complex. Although his work spans just over a decade, reading along with those changes offers readers a significant expansion of perception.
Barley (麥), published in 1941, centers on Choi Moo-Kyung, a female employee working in an apartment - a modern space of the time - and two ideologically contrasting men. It is a fascinating novel in which various contexts such as ideology and romance, empire and colony, East and West, hierarchy and gender are simultaneously at play. The lines of Lee Kwan-Hyung, one of the male characters, express human futility and self-deprecation in the chaotic waves of modernity. Meanwhile, the attitude that Choi Moo-Kyung, the protagonist, takes at the end of the work is particularly thought-provoking, as it seems to foreshadow the “moral” of the capitalist life that most humans live today - feeding oneself. Will that be the only “moral” and strategy we can pursue in this chaotic world?

Korea’s liberation from the Japanese occupation must have been a shock before it was a victory. Heo Jun (1910-?)’s A Dim Light (殘燈), published in 1946, about his journey home shortly after liberation, captures the chaos of the time. Readers can spot Korean, Japanese, Russian, and even occasional English in this novel. If a change in the landscape of power is called a revolution, then liberation was a revolution. Revolution demands blood. Revenge against past dominators, greed for lost power and property... The novel focuses on an old woman who sells meals under a dim light in the heat of the revolution.
Even though she lost her son to the Japanese, she sells bowls of soup to Japanese people who have been unable to return to their homeland after the defeat and have become homeless. She once hated the Japanese, but as she sees them “naked” and begging for food, she is unable to hold a rod against them and bursts into tears. This is because she remembers a young Japanese man who was imprisoned with her son as a comrade in the anti-imperialist movement. In other words, for her, Japanese people no longer exist as a single identity of “imperial perpetrators.” The narrator finds in the old woman a “wide and beautiful vision of human hope,” and I believe that by gaining that “vision” and overcoming the desire for hasty condemnation, we can get closer to the truth.

Written by Kim Ki-Tae (Novelist)