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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-literary-crime-wave-jeong-jeongs-good-son-kim-un-sus-plotters/"></div>Americans in general don&#8217;t emigrate at particularly high rates, but some Americans in particular are given to declaring, in moments of frustration, their imminent move to another country. Often that country is Canada, possibly because of the vague impressions it inspires of a more humane and orderly civilization (and more probably due to linguistic and geographic convenience). Sometimes that country is Sweden, which to certain observers represents the fullest possible realization of political and economic idyll in this world. But as enthusiasts of crime fiction know, not quite all can be well in the land that produces such great quantities of what has been labeled &#8220;Scandi noir.&#8221; In the United States — a nation whose readers&#8217; appetite for crime fiction seems downright insatiable — that bleak, society-indicting genre is most popularly represented by Swedish journalist-novelist Stieg Larsson&#8217;s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels.
With the final book of that trilogy having been published in English translation more than a decade ago, and Larsson having died years before that, the publishing industry has cast around for other societies capable of producing counterintuitively stark and savage crime fiction. Certain well-established Japanese mystery novelists, like Hideo Yokoyama and Natsuo Kirino, have ridden the waves of this boom. But over the past decade here in South Korea, a number of younger writers have been working so productively and so squarely in the realm of crime fiction that they&#8217;ve made their country almost too likely a candidate to run with Scandi noir&#8217;s torch through the English-reading world. Earlier this month, Yun Ko-eun&#8217;s The Disaster Tourist, won the UK Crime Writers&#8217; Association Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger award, which over the previous decade had gone three times to Scandinavian novels, all of them Swedish.
If an international Korean literary crime wave is indeed afoot, an examination has to proceed from an earlier point in time. We must go back at the very least to 2019, when more than one high-profile, critically acclaimed Korean crime novel began appearing in English per year. 2019 saw the publication of both Jeong You-jeong&#8217;s The Good Son, translated by Kim Chi-young, and Kim Un-su&#8217;s The Plotters, translated by Sora Kim-Russell. In each book the protagonist is a killer, hardly an out-of-line choice for the genre, but the style of the killings themselves could hardly be more different. The Plotters tells the story of a professional hitman who has hardly known any other form of existence; The Good Son, of a 25-year-old layabout (a &#8220;NEET&#8221;) who wakes up to find his mother slain in the next room, with all signs pointing to him as the culprit.
When it came out here in 2016 (titled 종의 기원 or The Origin of Species, not to be confused with <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/evolution-meets-creation-uncommonly-speculative-fiction-kim-bo-youngs-origin-species/">Kim Bo-young&#8217;s recent collection</a>), The Good Son became an inescapable hit. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/making-korean-monster-kim-sagwas-bloody-high-school-novel-mina/">Considering Kim Sagwa&#8217;s Mina</a> back in 2009, I wrote of my curiosity about why Korean children almost never kill their parents. It&#8217;s not that I expect a nationwide vogue for patricide and matricide, but that the combination of the pressure exerted by parents on children and the penchant for explosive rage attributed to Koreans by Koreans themselves struck me as a ticking time bomb. Jeong quickly establishes her young protagonist Yu-jin did indeed kill his mother, an idea that seems to have struck a resonant chord indeed with domestic readers. But the murder, as she crafts it, turns out to have been the result of nothing so simple as the son&#8217;s having been pushed too hard.
However dark and complex things look to begin with, they can always grow darker and more complex: this, so I&#8217;ve gathered, is the rule with crime fiction, whatever its country of origin. Deepening the darkness and complexity makes great demands on the author&#8217;s ability to provide information to and withhold information from the reader, sometimes alternately, sometimes simultaneously. On that level, this genre is a pure test of storytelling ability, and in The Good Son Jeong puts her own to the test on a spare stage. &#8220;I was the investigator interrogating the criminal,&#8221; says Yu-jin, also the story&#8217;s narrator. &#8220;But the two were one and the same, the criminal had a slippery relationship with the truth, and his memory was spotty.&#8221; His problems with recollection owe to the medication he takes at the behest of his psychiatrist aunt, ostensibly to treat epilepsy, but really for reasons darker, more complex, etc.
The Good Son has been acclaimed as an exploration of the mind of a psychopath. As they watch the deaths attributable to Yu-jin pile up, few readers could disagree with that framing. Or at least couldn&#8217;t until they consider the narrative proposed by Yu-jin himself, that of a promising if emotionally disengaged young swimmer flimsily suspected of insanity, then deceptively medicated and manipulated to the point of being, in effect, made a murderer. And though he does display a kind of heroism, at least insofar as he brazenly extricates himself from one hopeless-looking situation after another, he remains unambiguously the kind of individual most of us would rather see removed from society. So, perhaps, is Reseng, the 32-year-old protagonist of The Plotters — or he would be if he lived among normal people rather than the world of political contract killing into which he was practically born.
Found abandoned in a garbage can as a baby, Reseng was adopted by an organizer of assassinations, or &#8220;plotter,&#8221; known as Old Raccoon. Raised to kill, he came of age amid an industry in transition owing to the political transformation of South Korea. &#8220;Ironically, the overthrow of three decades of military dictatorship and the brisk advent of democratization had led to a major boom in the assassination industry,&#8221; Kim writes. &#8220;Under dictatorship, assassinations were clandestine operations carried out in secret by a small number of plotters, hitmen expertly trained by the government or the military, and highly experienced and trustworthy contractors.&#8221; But the new democratic administrations &#8220;sought the trappings of morality. Maybe they thought that by stamping their foreheads with the words It’s okay, we’re not the military, they could fool the people. But power is all the same deep down, no matter what it looks like.&#8221;
The relatively genteel brutality of Old Raccoon, who maintains a government library as a front for his real operation, is falling into irrelevance. A younger plotter called Hanja, a &#8220;dandy with a Stanford MBA&#8221; who &#8220;secretly cultivated his own team of plotters and mercenaries under the cover of a perfectly legal security company,&#8221; represents the new guard. And it is the slick, Gangnam-style Hanja against whom the more rough-hewn Reseng (whose hobbies include binging on canned beers for a week at a time) eventually finds himself locked into mortal conflict. The elaborate series of events that leads to their showdown begins not with a killing, but with a hesitation to kill: the book opens with Reseng fixing the crosshairs of his rifle on just one of his many assigned targets, an old man living practically off the grid in a mountain cabin, but finding himself unable to pull the trigger.
When his dog spots Reseng, the old man takes him (or decides to take him) for a hunter and invites him to spend the night. Only the next morning can Reseng summon the will to carry out his orders, and only after that does he find out his target&#8217;s identity: a former North Korean general who defected and spent decades thereafter drawing up the kill lists for South Korea&#8217;s military government. Curiously, one of the editions of The Plotters&#8216; English translation I&#8217;ve seen excises the parts about his Northern provenance entirely; it also simplifies other instances of Korea-specific detail, reducing &#8220;banmal, the familiar form of speech,&#8221; for example, to &#8220;the informal register.&#8221; There is, I supposed, an argument to be made for this sort of thing: to wit, that in genre fiction in general and crime fiction in particular, nothing must be allowed to &#8220;slow down&#8221; the story.
Even in a crime novel, I lament missed opportunities for the reader to learn more about Korea, and especially the Korean language. So I appreciate that neither Kim Chi-young&#8217;s translation of The Good Son or Sora Kim-Russell&#8217;s of The Plotters read as if excessively universalized. Some Westerners will take Jeong&#8217;s references to a &#8220;Hakuna Matata&#8221; cellphone ringtone and a matinée screening of The Bucket List to be localized substitutions, when they&#8217;re just the kind of dubious artifacts of American popular culture often encountered in everyday Korean life. In the main, what The Good Son conveys about the society in which it takes place, it conveys between its scenes of throat-slashing and evidence concealment: depictions of educational structures, family dynamics, and living space, that last being the rare two-story apartment Yu-jin, his mother, and his adoptive brother occupy in a new town still incompletely built on the outskirts of Incheon.
Life in such a marginal place, the likes of which crime fiction has no end of use, is a kind of exile: the family once lived in Seoul, but since a darkly hinted-at incident years before, they&#8217;ve been tossed farther and farther from the center of things. Reseng of The Plotters, for his part, may live in the capital, but his work takes him to a host of unspecified run-down urban warrens and dingy provincial towns. Early in the book, he&#8217;s sent to a port city on the skids since the colonial period (<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/pansori-disco-leenalchi-new-old-korean-musical-phenomenon-2020-gets-frustrated-tourists-dancing/">Mokpo</a>, I strongly suspect) to take out a call girl said to have run afoul of men in power. His impulsive decision to grant her a painless death marks another departure from orders; similarly, Yu-jin enacts an at-first minor rebellion against the tight controls imposed on his own life by secretly going off his physically enfeebling medication.
Both Yu-jin and Reseng are already killers when their respective stories begin. But neither had much choice in the matter, the killer instinct having been identified in them in childhood by an adult: an adult who attempted to suppress it in the former case, and one who attempted to cultivate it in the latter. Yet both Yu-jin and Reseng also end up going rogue, wreaking planned-under-pressure havoc in differently self-annihilating ways. Set in a high-end department store, The Plotters&#8216; chaotic finale reads as if written expressly for conversion into an action-movie screenplay — as, unfortunately, does much else in the book, at least by comparison to the chillingly pitched interior monologue of The Good Son. But each novel&#8217;s ending does represent one of the two of the major possible fates for the crime-fiction protagonist: the blaze of glory, or a &#8220;disappearance&#8221; (with the possibility of reappearance in a sequel).
Violent criminals in the real Korea seldom seem to manage either, tending by their very nature toward impulsiveness and incompetence. Accounts of violent crime in Korean news bear this out, less frequent though they are than in American news. For Americans familiar with Korean society, that difference alone is enough to motivate a declaration of intent to move here. But for Koreans steeped in the tradition of condemning Korean society, a tradition of which all kinds of fiction heartily partake, the country&#8217;s relative absence of visible everyday crime belies a rotten core. They would surely agree with the ill-fated character in The Plotters who says that &#8220;you need more than freeways and skyscrapers to be a developed country. You have to develop the right mindset first, dammit!&#8221; They&#8217;d also agree when Kim writes that &#8220;power is all the same deep down&#8221; — adding only that, in Korea, it&#8217;s even worse.
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This is the first of a three-part series on Korean crime fiction.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/making-korean-monster-kim-sagwas-bloody-high-school-novel-mina/">The Making of a Korean Monster: Kim Sagwa’s Bloody High-School Novel Mina</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/making-korean-monster-kim-sagwas-bloody-high-school-novel-mina/">We All Had a Hard Time Back Then: Lee Seung-U’s The Private Lives of Plants</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/lets-get-bitter-korean-neorealism-yu-hyun-moks-aimless-bullet/">Let’s Get Out of Here: The Bitter Korean Neorealism of Yu Hyun-Mok’s Aimless Bullet</a>
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin’s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his website');">his website</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
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The Korean Literary Crime Wave: Jeong You-jeong&#8217;s The Good Son and Kim Un-su&#8217;s The Plotters

The Korean Literary Crime Wave: Jeong You-jeong&#8217;s The Good Son and Kim Un-su&#8217;s The Plotters

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Stroll through the Real Cities of Korea from Anywhere in the World with YouTube’s Seoul Walker

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/evolution-meets-creation-uncommonly-speculative-fiction-kim-bo-youngs-origin-species/"></div>This is the second of a two-part series on the work of Kim Bo-young. The first, on her collection I&#8217;m Waiting for You and Other Stories, is <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/becomes-techno-mythological-imagination-kim-bo-youngs-im-waiting/">here</a>.
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&#8220;Speculative fiction&#8221; is in some quarters used as little more than a euphemistic label for science fiction, by readers hoping to preempt association with a stigmatized genre. But interpreted literally, the term covers a vast imaginative field encompassing horror stories, fantasy sagas, alternate history, and much else besides. Many writers specialize in one or two such subcategories of speculative fiction; few if any could be said to write speculative fiction itself, with the width of narrative and intellectual range that would demand. But if any current writer of my acquaintance does approach that ideal, it&#8217;s Kim Bo-young, whose collection I&#8217;m Waiting for You and Other Stories <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/becomes-techno-mythological-imagination-kim-bo-youngs-im-waiting/">I covered last time here on the Korea Blog</a>. That book, published in April by HarperVoyager, was her very first in English translation. And just last month Los Angeles&#8217; Kaya Press put out another, On the Origin of Species and Other Stories.
&#8220;If we see a person in the distance and they seem to have breasts, we hastily assume that they must be a woman,&#8221; writes Kim in her introduction to the new collection. &#8220;Science seems to occupy a similar position in SF.&#8221; Though breasts may not in themselves make someone a woman, Kim — a woman — notes that her own body &#8220;came equipped with a set. I didn’t, for example, decide one day to install a pair myself. Similarly, many of the stories I’ve written came into being without me consciously trying to turn them into SF.&#8221; Still, they&#8217;ve been received and even acclaimed as such, though some of them include nothing that the casual reader of the genre would call science — or in any case, not the kind of science that manifests in pieces of advanced future technology like the spaceships flown in I&#8217;m Waiting for You.
The variety of science most consistently underlying On the Origin of Species is, unsurprisingly, biology, and evolutionary biology in particular. Several of its stories feature a humankind evolved, devolved, or obliterated only to evolve all over again. In &#8220;An Evolution Myth,&#8221; a fifteenth-century Korean crown prince undergoes a dramatic biological transformation by himself: as he flees the kingdom when a hostile cousin ascends to the throne, a process kicks in that aids his survival in isolated exile by granting him various animalistic features. Eventually the prince becomes a kind of all-powerful dragon, a type of creature that dominates the devastated future Seoul of the following tale, &#8220;Last of the Wolves.&#8221; Human beings still exist there, though they&#8217;ve taken on lupine characteristics and mostly been domesticated by dragon masters; the few who remain untamed squat in the &#8220;ancestral ruins&#8221; of Dongdaemun Station and forage for soybeans in the overgrown Gwanghwamun Square.
If you know Seoul as it is today, you know those are two well-trafficked places in the city, and if you don&#8217;t, the story&#8217;s footnotes do their bit to fill you in. Gwanghwamun Square, as one of them explains (at least to readers who missed <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/square-national-museum-modern-contemporary-arts-ambitious-review-120-years-korea/">my piece on The Square</a> at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art), is &#8220;one of Seoul’s most famous public spaces and the site of a surviving gate to Gyeongbokgung, the main royal palace of the Joseon Dynasty.&#8221; The footnotes don&#8217;t offer the information that the period of the Joseon Dynasty lasted nearly five centuries, from 1392 until 1897 — containing the life of that long-suffering prince-turned-dragon —  and nor should they, since it would violate the text&#8217;s respectful assumption of a certain amount of familiarity on the reader&#8217;s part with Korea, if not with every detail of Korea&#8217;s history and mythology.
Still, those who live here will find it at least a little funny to see something as common as ddeokppokki spelled out. &#8220;Spicy rice cakes sold by street vendors or at cheap restaurants,&#8221; says the footnote. &#8220;A popular snack among school-age Koreans.&#8221; That definition comes embedded in &#8220;Between Zero and One,&#8221; which has nothing to do with biology but much to do time travel, a more conventional sci-fi subject and one not often satisfyingly handled. But as in the title story of I&#8217;m Waiting for You, Kim refrains from getting as fantastical with it as so many writers fatally have, and again she anchors the concept in everyday, even mundane Korean reality. The setting is populated by nagging, academics-obsessed, socially competitive moms and their exhausted, cramming-addled children, some of whom protest against &#8220;<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/reach-sky/">College Entrance Exam</a>-Centered Education&#8221; — in extreme cases, by taking their own lives.
In discussing I&#8217;m Waiting for You, I mentioned that modern South Koreans have experienced a kind of time travel, so rapidly and dramatically has their homeland changed compared to other developed countries over the past half-century. Here Kim offers another explanation for the consequent generation gaps. &#8220;I don’t want to go to school,&#8221; complains the story&#8217;s central teenager Soo-ae. &#8220;The teachers are like people from another time.&#8221; But she means it literally: &#8220;Some took refuge here during the Korean War. They still despise communism and North Korea, even though we reunified ages ago. Some teachers even came from the colonial era or from the Joseon era.&#8221; Soo-ae&#8217;s mother pushes her to <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/koreas-english-fever-english-cancer/">study English</a> even though &#8220;computerized translation today covers one hundred and sixty languages in real time,&#8221; and what&#8217;s more, &#8220;it’s already been a long time since the decline of the United States and the importance of its language.&#8221;
Clearly the US, whose bankruptcy and dissolution is similarly referenced as a historical detail in &#8220;I&#8217;m Waiting for You,&#8221; doesn&#8217;t have a place in Kim&#8217;s futures. But then, in the title story of On the Origin of Species, the longest and most ambitious in the book, human civilization itself has long since collapsed. The cause seems to have been a change in the climate: as manmade factories &#8220;pumped out more and more carbon dioxide, the earth’s temperature began to rise, resulting in an extreme greenhouse effect. At some point, this process must have crossed a certain threshold beyond which nothing could be done to reverse the trend.&#8221; After the extinction of nearly all living things, this still-thickening industrial cloud &#8220;blocked the sunlight and lowered the earth’s temperature back down to its current state. Any organisms that had survived to that point perished in this latest temperature fluctuation.&#8221;
In this frozen desert of a world, only robots have survived. In fact they&#8217;ve thrived, having not just taken over the factories but established cities, universities, and even their own versions of history, philosophy, and religion. It is within this self-sustaining mechanical-and-digital society that one robot, an undergraduate student, posits a theory of organic life. Though dismissed at the time as a crackpot notion, the possibility of entities that can grow and decompose as if by themselves — without the aid of a factory, somehow — gradually finds its adherents among robotkind. Over the subsequent decades, or perhaps centuries or millennia, their clandestine research and experimentation makes its complicated and dangerous way to reproducing organic life, first simply and then in the diversity of forms in which we know it today. For robots, who have existential reason to fear even drops of water, this is an alarming prospect indeed.
For those robots who pursue the development of so-called &#8220;organic biology&#8221; all the way, however, the result is quasi-religious ecstasy. That their newly evolved Homo sapiens inspires them to blind devotion, even worship, stands to a kind of reason: what have they done if not re-created their creator in their own image, having been created in that image themselves in the first place? Kim&#8217;s descriptions of these robots&#8217; components and means of interaction with their environment had me envisioning Johnny 5 from the Short Circuit movies, but in the end it came clear that they were meant to be close to humanoid. The protagonist is of a model series with a deluxe face covered by a soft skin-like material, &#8220;but that softness came with a price: the skin on Kay’s face, like that of all 1029s, was so fragile that it cracked upon exposure to the outside air.&#8221;
And so, &#8220;needless to say, <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/ways-seeing-korean-plastic-surgery/">cosmetic surgery</a> was a booming industry among the 1029s, who had taken to covering their faces with gold plating that resembled that of the 700s.&#8221; Kim takes all the opportunities presented by this robot society and the various different models that constitute it to satirize aspects of human society, especially as instantiated in 21st-century South Korea. &#8220;Despite the claim of having abolished modelism, there was a limit to how quickly society could change,&#8221; she writes, &#8220;so it was exceedingly rare for 2000s to receive a higher education.&#8221; While most models communicate only through speech, their faces presumably remaining as static as a <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/secret-koreanness-sticky-monster-lab-character-brand-struggle-resist/">Sticky Monster</a>&#8216;s, the 2000s were designed to use facial expressions as well, and the resulting obviousness of their feelings puts them at a serious disadvantage in their personal and professional dealings.
This condition of inborn separation from the mainstream takes a variety of forms throughout On the Origin of Species. &#8220;Perhaps foremost among Kim’s thematic concerns,&#8221; as USC associate professor of Korean Studies and Gender Studies Sunyoung Park puts it in an afterword, &#8220;is the consideration of marginality, alterity, and radical difference.&#8221; That may sound stiltedly academic, but Kim executes these considerations with a playfulness as well as a comic instinct for reversal and recontextualization. &#8220;I have no desire to start treatment,&#8221; a woman writes to her brother in &#8220;Stars Shine in the Earth&#8217;s Sky.&#8221; &#8220;What chance of cure it promises is of no consequence to me.&#8221; In due time Kim reveals that this character suffers not from a terminal illness, but from her society&#8217;s inability to accept her daily need to &#8220;plummet into a state of total oblivion for a minimum of five to six hours.&#8221;
She has to sleep, in other words, but in her world most don&#8217;t. The majority insist that the minority &#8220;beat&#8221; their unorthodox habit, but &#8220;from where I stand, &#8216;beating&#8217; what we have looks a lot like turning ourselves into someone we’re not.&#8221; Remaining conscious at all times &#8220;would mean abandoning myself. Throwing away every thing that is truly me.&#8221; Kim at first seems to be constructing an uncharacteristically blunt allegory for the angered incomprehension with which certain people or ways of life meet in reality. But then the real speculation begins: maybe on the distant planet of Earth, the narrator imagines, the sky isn&#8217;t always bright. If Earth moves like she thinks it does, &#8220;the light shining down on the planet would change with each hour.&#8221; Just imagine — &#8220;a world that alternates regularly between light and dark. A world where warmth and cold, activity and rest, change places every day.&#8221;
The fruit of labor by three different translation teams, mainly Joungmin Lee Comfort and Sora Kim-Russell but also Eunhae Jo and Melissa Mei-Lin Chan (&#8220;Between Zero and One&#8221;) and Jihyun Park and Gord Sellar (&#8220;An Evolutionary Myth&#8221;), The Origin of Species provides what Park describes as a representative selection of Kim&#8217;s earliest and most successful work published in Korea. To the uninitiated reader, the jarringly breast-themed disclaimer at the beginning also gives a sense of Kim&#8217;s attitude: her attitude as a writer and thinker, yes, but also toward the genre in which she has made her name, to an extent inadvertently or even reluctantly. Yet in English or Korean, most of the stories collected here do, neatly and at once, fulfill both of the broad goals of science fiction: the inferior, making us reconsider the nature of our society; and the superior, making us reconsider the nature of our reality.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/becomes-techno-mythological-imagination-kim-bo-youngs-im-waiting/">When “I” Becomes “We”: The Techno-Mythological Imagination of Kim Bo-young’s I’m Waiting for You</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/live-building-turned-society-vertiginously-satirical-sci-fi-bae-myung-hoons-tower/">We Live in a Building-Turned-Society: The Vertiginously Satirical Sci-Fi of Bae Myung-Hoon’s Tower</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/blade-runner-2049-los-angeles-korean-future/">Blade Runner 2049 and Los Angeles’ Korean Future</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/seoul-next-great-cyberpunk-city/">Could Seoul Be the Next Great Cyberpunk City?</a>
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
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Where Evolution Meets Creation: the Uncommonly Speculative Fiction of Kim Bo Young&#8217;s On the Origin of Species

Where Evolution Meets Creation: the Uncommonly Speculative Fiction of Kim Bo Young&#8217;s On the Origin of Species

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/becomes-techno-mythological-imagination-kim-bo-youngs-im-waiting/"></div>This is the first of a two-part series on the work of Kim Bo-young. The second, on her collection On the Origin of Species and Other Stories, is <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/evolution-meets-creation-uncommonly-speculative-fiction-kim-bo-youngs-origin-species/">here</a>.
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South Korea has one of the first populations who can claim to have collectively traveled through time. In a trivial sense, of course, we all travel through time, forward at a rate of one hour per hour, one day per day, one year per year. But this country, as no introduction fails to mention, underwent in the second half of the 20th century a transformation already seen in other societies — &#8220;development,&#8221; &#8220;modernization,&#8221; &#8220;Westernization,&#8221; call it what you like — but at an unprecedented speed. Aggressive industrialization compressed a century of history into just a few decades, and the aftereffects of that process account for much of the good, the bad, and the weird in Korean life today. Among other traces, it has left tragi-comically wide generation gaps: for many Koreans, interactions with their parents feel like Westerners&#8217; interactions with their disoriented great-grandparents.
&#8220;My dad lived his whole life in his hometown,&#8221; says the narrator of the story &#8220;I&#8217;m Waiting for You.&#8221; But &#8220;by the time he passed away our hometown was a completely different place from where he was born. Buildings had been put up and roads laid, mountains flattened, and the courses of rivers diverted. Time moved him to somewhere completely different. Who could possibly say that he lived in one place his whole life?&#8221; The reflection comes in one of a series of letters to this narrator&#8217;s fiancée, whom he won&#8217;t be able to see for nearly five years. Both are aboard separate spaceships, she to emigrate to a distant solar system with her family, and he expressly — by way of light-speed travel&#8217;s dilation of time for the traveler — more quickly to pass the years her trip will require before they reunite for their wedding on Earth.
For his fiancée doesn&#8217;t intend to stay with her family, of whose meddling in her life she&#8217;s had enough. She wouldn&#8217;t be the first Korean to go to great lengths to get away from relatives, nor the first to engage in instrumental immigration: &#8220;anyone who travels to another solar system gets an outer planets residency permit,&#8221; she explains, and &#8220;there are loads of advantages when it comes to taxes and things like that.&#8221; The more things change, as many a literary vision of the future has meant to show us, the more they stay the same. But change is precisely what the narrator&#8217;s fellow emigrants in time went into the &#8220;Orbit of Waiting&#8221; hoping for: &#8220;Some people are traveling to the year their pension plan matures, others hope real estate taxes will come down while they’re away. There are artists too, who believe they were born in the wrong era.&#8221;
&#8220;I&#8217;m Waiting for You&#8221; is the title piece of the collection that marks the English-language debut of Kim Bo-young, who has been a respected and prolific science-fiction writer in Korea since the mid-2000s. Rather than presenting an assortment of short stories each of which imagines a different future, the book instead comprises what initially feel like two complex novellas, one split in half so as to bookend the other. While Kim tells &#8220;I&#8217;m Waiting for You,&#8221; the opener, entirely through the man&#8217;s letters to the woman, the closer &#8220;On My Way to You&#8221; consists only of the woman&#8217;s letters to the man. Upon first reading, the two seem to have been composed of a piece; only in a post-script essay does Kim reveal that she wrote &#8220;On My Way to You&#8221; years after &#8220;I&#8217;m Waiting for You,&#8221; which was itself the fulfillment of a one-off commission.
The request came from an unusual client: a man looking for a distinctive means of proposing to his girlfriend. It just so happened that he was an old friend of Kim&#8217;s, and his girlfriend counted Kim among her favorite writers. To that point Kim, who got her start plotting video games in the late 1990s, had &#8220;never once written a story where two people get together, let alone a romance,&#8221; but she took on the challenge anyway. The result drives this unwonted scenario toward what, if the rest of the material in I&#8217;m Waiting for You is anything to go by, must be one of the author&#8217;s themes of choice: things not going according to plan. A series of uncontrollable mishaps on both ends keeps delaying the fictional couple&#8217;s reunion by years at a time — and ultimately, back on a repeatedly devastated Earth, centuries or even millennia.
&#8220;The Prophet of Corruption,&#8221; which follows &#8220;I&#8217;m Waiting for You,&#8221; presents what seems like starkly different setting, and even conception of reality. The early appearance of the word bardo, recently popularized (to an extent) in the English-reading world by George Saunders&#8217; novel Lincoln in the Bardo, tells us we must be in the world of Buddhist myth, and specifically in the liminal space it places between death and rebirth. Those who don&#8217;t recall exactly what a bardo is can turn to the glossary at the back of the book, which explains that &#8220;disciples gather at their teacher’s bardo to discuss their previous life and plan their next one before they descend to the Lower Realm again.&#8221; The Lower Realm is Earth as we know it, occupied by humans, animals, and everything else; the teachers of these disciples include Prophets, entities &#8220;born from the division of the primordial universe.&#8221;
Most of the important characters in this long middle section are Prophets. Getting across to the reader the nature of their existence and the laws they must obey demands even more from Kim&#8217;s skills as a storyteller than conveying the mechanics of the spacefaring civilization in the first and last sections. Frequently and in many ways she stresses that none of these characters, nor the objects that surround them, are truly separate from one another, spun off as they all originally were from the single being that encompassed all existence. But division turns out to bring pleasures of its own: &#8220;By severing the connections between our minds, we gained the pleasure of devising new tools for communication. We preoccupied ourselves with making thousands of signs and symbols each day&#8221; — in other words, creating language itself. &#8220;Who knew limitations and inconveniences could be so joyful and fun?&#8221;
It&#8217;s not hard to understand the appeal such ideas hold out to a translator — nor, for anyone with a little knowledge of the Korean, what challenges a story like this poses to a translator. When not descended to the Lower Realm in human form, the denizens of the &#8220;Dark Realm&#8221; have no human attributes, and especially not gender. Once could argue for the superiority of the Korean language when it comes to dealing with figures possessed (like <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/pengsoo-genderless-shameless-giant-penguin-antihero-winning-korean-hearts-minds/">Pengsoo</a>) of neither maleness nor femaleness, since even where human beings are concerned it doesn&#8217;t force its speakers to make a choice between the two with every pronoun. In her own accompanying notes, co-translator Sophie Bowman writes of sending Kim &#8220;a list of minor characters and asking her which gender each of them was,&#8221; apologizing all the while for what she optimistically calls &#8220;current expectations in the English language.&#8221;
In &#8220;The Prophet of Corruption&#8221; and its companion piece &#8220;The Other Me,&#8221; Bowman&#8217;s translation partner Sung Ryu (she of <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/live-building-turned-society-vertiginously-satirical-sci-fi-bae-myung-hoons-tower/">Tower</a> by Bae Myung-hoon, a writer often mentioned alongside Kim) opts to use the plural pronoun &#8220;they&#8221; in reference to groups and individuals alike. Though this never quite comes to feel natural (I kept losing track of whether I was supposed to be picturing one or many, another distinction the Korean language doesn&#8217;t always make clear to begin with), that&#8217;s surely part of the idea, reminding us as it constantly does that these characters we see conversing, interacting, and even attacking one another could easily merge back together again or divide up further still. Not that it would occur without controversy, Kim&#8217;s idea for this Dark Realm being, as she explains it, that of &#8220;a world in which &#8216;division versus merging&#8217; was hotly debated.&#8221;
Because nobody in the Dark Realm is human, nobody in the Dark Realm can be Korean. Still, in Kim&#8217;s depiction their attitudes are at times reminiscent of the old jokes about Koreans&#8217; readiness to draw hard ideological dividing lines among themselves no matter the circumstances. &#8220;The hardliners prepared for war; the moderates prepared gifts and a diplomatic delegation,&#8221; the narrator of &#8220;On My Way to You&#8221; writes of her shipmates during the days of preparation for meeting another spacecraft. &#8220;By the time we were ready to land, it was so bad that they had almost gone ahead and formed political parties.&#8221; In this story Kim does make the characters explicitly Korean. When they speak of going home, in the larger sense, they speak of returning to Earth; but whenever they do return to Earth, they never touch down anywhere but Korea, unrecognizable though time and trouble may have rendered it.
&#8220;The Other Me&#8221; also sends its narrator-Prophet Naban into a Seoul of the future, abandoned and overgrown: &#8220;I considered visiting the Underwater Tomb of King Munmu or Seokguram Grotto, but decided on Lotte World Tower for the irony.&#8221; That building, at the moment the tallest in South Korea, has become an Ozymandian ruin, albeit a moist one, containing as its submerged basement does &#8220;three types of mushrooms and five new species of fish.&#8221; The name Naban comes from Korean mythology, the glossary notes, as does much else in Kim&#8217;s tales of the Dark and Lower Realms. Ryu and Bowman are to be praised for simply transliterating these and other concepts in the main text; not every Western reader will know a dopo from a dokkaebi, but better to gather a mental image from the context than to rely on misleadingly familiar approximations like &#8220;cloak&#8221; or &#8220;goblin.&#8221;
At the same time, other of these stories&#8217; roots run to Western antiquity: Kim writes of beginning with the proposition that &#8220;the world of the living was a school for enlightenment and the world of the dead a forum where various schools of thought debated teaching methods, in a similar fashion to the agoras of ancient Athens.&#8221; She pulls off the subsequent coalescence of science, technology, religion, and myth with a rare assurance; as Ryu writes, &#8220;I doubt I’ll ever translate another book singlehandedly leading me down rabbit holes of general relativity, genetics, Buddhist philosophy, and world mythology&#8221; — as well as superstring and evolutionary theory, not to mention space-based maritime law. Korean science fiction, even the small sample of which has so far been published in English translation, has demonstrated an intellectual capaciousness, and Kim&#8217;s imagination clearly has an even greater such capacity than most.
As represented in I&#8217;m Waiting for You, Kim&#8217;s work also expresses an emotion seldom popularly associated with science fiction: longing. The title story and &#8220;On My Way to You,&#8221; with their lovers separated by ever more difficult-to-conceive distances over an ever more difficult-to-conceive span of time, hardly obscure the source of that emotion. Division occurs and reunion must follow, a tension that also animates much of &#8220;The Prophet of Corruption&#8221; and &#8220;The Other Me.&#8221; There another variety of longing emerges among Prophets and disciples who grow corrupted: that is, too attached to the fragile and disordered human life they&#8217;ve allowed to come into being. Though the book&#8217;s halves never converge in any obvious way, some readers will speculate about the Prophets to which the man-and-wife-to-be must belong. Other readers, those accustomed to a more conventional kind of sci-fi, will at least be pleased to hear that both narratives feature spaceships.
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This is the first of a two-part series on the work of Kim Bo-young. The second, on her collection On the Origin of Species and Other Stories, will appear here on the Korea Blog on June 20th.
 
Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/live-building-turned-society-vertiginously-satirical-sci-fi-bae-myung-hoons-tower/">We Live in a Building-Turned-Society: The Vertiginously Satirical Sci-Fi of Bae Myung-Hoon’s Tower</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/blade-runner-2049-los-angeles-korean-future/">Blade Runner 2049 and Los Angeles’ Korean Future</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/seoul-next-great-cyberpunk-city/">Could Seoul Be the Next Great Cyberpunk City?</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/seoul-stars-journey-indie-synth-electro-k-pop-queen-neon-bunny/">From Seoul to the Stars: The Journey of Indie Synth-Electro-K-Pop Queen Neon Bunny</a>
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
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When &#8220;I&#8221; Becomes &#8220;We&#8221;: The Techno-Mythological Imagination of Kim Bo-young&#8217;s I&#8217;m Waiting for You

When &#8220;I&#8221; Becomes &#8220;We&#8221;: The Techno-Mythological Imagination of Kim Bo-young&#8217;s I&#8217;m Waiting for You

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/k-pop-evolution-youtube-original-docuseries-traces-origins-koreas-prime-cultural-export/"></div>Certain Western observers of Korea wear their aversion to K-pop, or at least their pointed disinterest in it, as a badge of honor. From them I&#8217;ve heard the rise of K-pop credited with destroying Korean culture, or — somewhat more positively — with turning the Korean mainstream bland enough to give rise to a counterculture of correspondingly extreme marginality and transgression. But at this point the music itself is, at least here in Korea, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/k-pop-classic-rock/">never wholly ignorable</a>, and as the country&#8217;s third-largest export (a position held fifty years ago by wigs) unlikely to go away in the foreseeable future. Even those Western Seoulites who walk around with headphones lest they pass through one of the many public spaces soundtracked by K-pop must now have moments of curiosity about how and why it&#8217;s become quite so prominent. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjq6DwYksrzxsfMkXHOU0sN6RVemYByW_" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjq6DwYksrzxsfMkXHOU0sN6RVemYByW_', 'K-Pop Evolution');">K-Pop Evolution</a> is the first documentary series to attempt an explanation.
Distributed under the banner of Youtube Originals, K-Pop Evolution recently finished making free to view on that site the last of its seven episodes. Together these tell of how Korean pop music has cultivated enthusiastic and often large fan bases around the world, a story not necessarily well understood by many of those fans themselves. Anyone living outside Asia could almost be forgiven for assuming that Korea didn&#8217;t make pop music at all until 2012, the year Psy&#8217;s &#8220;Gangnam Style&#8221; went unprecedentedly viral. Though few of Psy&#8217;s countrymen would have elected him as K-pop&#8217;s emissary to the West, his surprise breakthrough aligned with the priorities laid down fifteen years earlier, at the time of the Asian Financial Crisis. Known locally as &#8220;IMF,&#8221; that economic disruption weakened the domestic market enough to force many Korean industries, music included, to create product expressly designed for foreign consumption.
&#8220;At the time, there was a general sense of inferiority in Korea&#8217;s mainstream culture, that we weren&#8217;t as good as Japan,&#8221; says music critic Kim Zakka, one of K-Pop Evolution&#8216;s more knowledgable interviewees. But there was also a willingness and ability to cater to Japanese consumers, the continuing capitalization on which has meant that &#8220;the K-pop we know today wasn&#8217;t made for domestic audiences, but created to sell on the international market.&#8221; Also among the series&#8217; taking heads is Kwon Bo-ah, better known as BoA, whose great success in Japan almost two decades ago did much to earn her the title &#8220;Queen of K-pop.&#8221; Coinciding with a period of increased cultural exchange across what Korea calls the East Sea, this endeavor necessitated on her part the cultivation of not just singing and dancing but Japanese language skills as well.
This strategy has expanded along with K-pop&#8217;s geographic reach, first across east Asia and now into the West: BTS, the golden tip of the boy-band spear, released their second English-language single just last week. Nowadays, in addition to training Korean singers in other languages, group members have been brought in from Taiwan, Thailand, and other countries increasingly hooked on Korean popular culture; K-Pop Evolution shows such foreign inductees struggling to fit their Korean language studies in with their years of nearly round-the-clock singing and dancing practice. This expectation of linguistic proficiency is admirable, on some level, but the series takes a less neutral point of view on other pressures applied to a K-pop performer-in-training: the strict diets seemingly adhered to by most of the girl-group hopefuls living in shared company dormitories, or the tacit prohibition on dating that applies even (or especially) to established stars.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15561" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/kb-k-pop-evolution-2.png" alt="" width="1000" height="562" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/kb-k-pop-evolution-2.png 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/kb-k-pop-evolution-2-300x169.png 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/kb-k-pop-evolution-2-768x432.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
The rigors of K-pop training and fandom alike invite comparisons to athletics, and some of the figures interviewed draw such comparisons themselves. Metaphors of soldier-like regimentation and mobilization are more common (BTS&#8217; followers call themselves the &#8220;ARMY&#8221;), and as for the final product of a live concert, Korean-American music executive Bernie Cho likens it to a megachurch. (These resonances with sports, the military, and Christianity hint at K-pop&#8217;s vast untapped potential in the American heartland.) I found Cho&#8217;s presence an especially welcome one, since he was <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/?p=2498" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/?p=2498', 'one of my own interviewees');">one of my own interviewees</a> when I first visited Korea seven years ago to record a series of podcasts. His ability to speak about K-pop as both a Korean and a Westerner — and as the rare music-industry professional not evidently high on his own supply — makes him even more of an asset to K-Pop Evolution than he was to my show.
The series&#8217; interviewees also include some of the performers who became stars as K-pop assumed the form it broadly retains today. Quite a few of that generation were raised in the United States, and several seen here grew up in the greater Los Angeles area, like Tony Ahn of 1990s boy-band H.O.T. and Joon Park of the slightly later g.o.d. (speak though he does with vaguely east-coast bray). Both recall the indignities of K-pop stardom in that era, from being arranged into ginned-up rivalries (reminiscent of the mendacious framing of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones by the media of the mid-1960s) to — in Park&#8217;s specific case — tearfully confessing in a press conference, at the age of 31, to having a girlfriend. Even the rise could be humiliating, as when g.o.d. signed on to a reality show that had them collectively and incompetently parenting a borrowed infant.
Without H.O.T. and g.o.d., there would surely be no BTS. But even those earliest three-letter K-pop groups owe a good deal to their predecessors, albeit ones overseas: the New Kids on the Block, whom the entertainment companies involved used as a model (or in the <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/know-korean-netizens-high-spec-new-paradigm-synergy-koreas-dilbert-era-loanwords/">Konglish</a>, &#8220;benchmarked&#8221;) to create Korean boy bands. Parallels appear even between the New Kids and current K-pop acts like Kang Daniel (born Kang Eui-geon), K-Pop Evolution&#8216;s biggest &#8220;get.&#8221; Glimpses of the limitless variety of merchandise that sends his fans into a frenzy bring to mind a moment in the New Kids on the Block&#8217;s E! True Hollywood Story in which one New Kid recalls seeing his and his bandmates&#8217; face embedded in marbles: &#8220;It felt weird. Wrong.&#8221; A scene of girls lined up at video-call simulation installed in a Kang Daniel-dedicated exhibition is reminiscent of nothing so much as Lisa Simpson dialing the <a href="https://youtu.be/hqJ5gKZNkuY" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/hqJ5gKZNkuY', 'Corey Hotline');">Corey Hotline</a>.
So unexpectedly powerful has K-pop proven as a commercial and even geopolitical force, one can easily forget that the music itself is made for adolescents. A friend of mine here has a teenage daughter who went through a BTS phase not long ago: one day her desk shelves filled up with the band&#8217;s CD box sets, photo books, and official light sticks (for synchronized waving at concerts), and within a matter of months the girl had made all the products vanish without a trace. But Western K-pop fans seem able to maintain their enthusiasm, even to gain it in the first place, at startlingly advanced ages. In K-Pop Evolution one Canadian woman remembers the first K-pop concert she attended, breaking up as she recalls both the freebies and the feeling of communion she received there: &#8220;As someone who didn&#8217;t really love themselves in high school, that really connected with me.&#8221;
It would hardly be an exaggeration to describe the K-pop fan&#8217;s experience as one of spiritual devotion. Nor would it be too much to see K-pop performers as striving for almost holy perfection, through self-denial and other means of removal from the everyday human realm. Not for nothing are they called &#8220;idol singers,&#8221; uneasily though the concept may sit with other aspects of modern Korean culture. (&#8220;I grew up in the church,&#8221; says a Diamond Bar-raised member of boy band 1TYM. &#8220;Idol is something you&#8217;re not supposed to have.&#8221;) Despite the frivolity of K-pop products, music and otherwise, a deadly seriousness attends both their consumption and their production. Suicide occurs among stars with a chilling but unsurprising frequency, given the intensity of public scrutiny fixed upon the brightest. The fans&#8217; expectations only add tinder to the box; surely a Mark David Chapman-style incident is only matter of time.
Perhaps it&#8217;s thus in the best interest of K-pop acts to reference current concepts of mental health, as a growing number have done in songs as well as other forms of media. Today&#8217;s adolescents certainly face psychological challenges unknown to older generations, not least coming of age in the social-media-rich environment of which K-pop itself has made such relentless use. The subject matter of the songs they listen to has to that extent grown more complicated, at least compared to that which H.O.T., g.o.d., BoA dealt with. But even at the beginning of the 1990s, the seeds were being planted by Seo Taiji and the Boys, who introduced Western sounds (particularly those of new jack swing, big at the time) into their music and social criticism into their lyrics with a competency that had eluded many of the the singing groups who flashed in the pan throughout the 1980s.
K-Pop Evolution could do well to dedicate another season to Seo Taiji and the Boys alone, though their aggressive adherence to passing trends — Seo&#8217;s orange-dreadlocks period alone — may give it the feel of a mockumentary. And though the series as it exists does more than any other English-language documentary to draw a line between K-pop as the world knows it today and the wholly domestic popular music enjoyed here in the mid-20th century, a richer story remains to be told. The impressive first episode does manage to situate the major currents of South Korean popular music within those of the country&#8217;s still-short history. Incorporating an interview with the guitarist of the Key Boys, who were probably the first rock band in the country, it recounts how President Park Chung Hee cracked down on the youth-oriented music that had only just begun to flourish after the war.
In the 1970s emerged the genre now called &#8220;psych folk,&#8221; whose leading lights like Shin Joong-hyeon and Kim Jung Mi pulled off what one DJ calls the distinctive musical &#8220;combination of imitation and reinterpretation.&#8221; Alas, these artists get only a minute&#8217;s focus, which is still more than the episode pays to &#8220;trot,&#8221; the often-sorrowful Korean balladry that emerged in the colonial period — having more than a little in common with the similarly sentimental Japanese style of enka — and in recent years has enjoyed something of a new fashionability. (And <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/yoo-jae-k-pop-masterpiece-love-30-years-untimely-death/">Yoo Jae-ha</a>, known as the &#8220;father of the Korean ballad,&#8221; apparently merits not even a mention.) Much is said about how the most successful Korean popular music, both domestically and internationally, interweaves Western musical elements with distinctively Korean ones, but never are those elements and their characteristics, complementary or otherwise, broken down on a seriously musicological level.
Other than the language in which most of its lyrics are written, what makes K-pop Korean? Many answers are possible, even valid, but it may be more illuminating to ask a different question. Even the scant attention K-Pop Evolution pays to the musical movements of the 1960s and 70s suggests an abundance of roads other than the one taken, down which an enormous amount of time, money, and energy flow into the development of acts that — let&#8217;s face it — sound and look to the uninitiated mostly indistinguishable from one another. (And as Youjeong Oh notes in <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/selling-south-korea-youjeong-ohs-pop-city-reveals-k-pop-k-drama-transformed-homeland/">Pop City</a>, less than ten percent of agency-accepted trainees make their debut; of the 82 girl groups who did debut between 2013 and 2015, &#8220;fewer than ten achieved substantial public recognition.&#8221;) Here we have a plausible and entertaining account of how K-pop became what it is. But what might K-pop have been?
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/k-pop-classic-rock/">Why K-Pop Is the Same as Classic Rock</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/listen-seoul-1980s-real-imagined-streaming-mixes-korean-city-pop/">Listen to the Seoul of the 1980s, Real or Imagined, with Streaming Mixes of Korean “City Pop”</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/yoo-jae-k-pop-masterpiece-love-30-years-untimely-death/">Yoo Jae-ha’s K-Pop Masterpiece Because I Love You, 30 Years After His Untimely Death</a>
<a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/selling-south-korea-youjeong-ohs-pop-city-reveals-k-pop-k-drama-transformed-homeland/">The Selling of South Korea: Youjeong Oh’s Pop City Reveals How K-Pop and K-Drama Have Transformed their Homeland</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-punk-indie-rock-k-pop-world/">Korean Punk and Indie Rock in a K-Pop World</a>
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
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K-Pop Evolution: A Youtube Original Docuseries Traces the Origins of Korea&#8217;s Prime Cultural Export

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/grandma-minari-grindhouse-femme-fatale-kim-ki-youngs-insect-woman-1972/"></div>This is one in a series of essays on important works of Korean cinema available free to watch on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvH6u_Qzn5RQdz9W198umDw" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvH6u_Qzn5RQdz9W198umDw', 'the Korean Film Archive’s Youtube channel');">the Korean Film Archive’s Youtube channel</a>. Previous selections include <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/beloved-childrens-story-turned-psychedelic-rural-reverie-go-yeong-nams-shower-1978/">The Shower</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/sex-please-korea-jang-sun-woos-road-race-track-1991/">The Road to the Race Track</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/selling-body-seoul-kim-ho-seons-yeong-jas-heydays-1975/">Yeong-ja&#8217;s Heydays</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/american-dream-dies-los-angeles-bae-chang-hos-deep-blue-night/">Deep Blue Night</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/lets-get-bitter-korean-neorealism-yu-hyun-moks-aimless-bullet/">Aimless Bullet</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/harrowing-journey-island-women-koreas-psychological-recesses-kim-ki-youngs-iodo-1977/">Iodo</a>, <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/revisiting-301-302-park-chul-soos-stylish-film-food-sex-horrors/">301, 302</a>, <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/march-fools-college-comedy-darkened-dictatorship/">The March of Fools</a>, <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/seopyeonje-surprise-art-house-megahit-showed-korea-forgotten-culture/">Seopyeonje</a>, <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/wangshimni-hometown-gangster-filmmakers-pledge-devotion-korea/">Wangsimni, My Hometown</a>, <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/watching-madame-freedom-movie-scandalized-postwar-korea-fifty-years-later/">Madame Freedom</a>, <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/unbearable-preposterousness-westernization-park-kwang-sus-chil-su-man-su-1988/">Chil-su and Man-su</a>, and <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/boring-heaven-exciting-hell-kim-soo-yongs-night-journey/">Night Journey</a>. You can watch The Insect Woman <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwh2Z1Q8q9o" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwh2Z1Q8q9o', 'here');">here</a>.
Now that K-pop, K-drama, and K-beauty have been international phenomena for years, Westerners must prepare themselves for the reign of the K-grandma. I&#8217;ve heard that label, or rather its more Korean form K-halmeoni, applied to Youn Yuh-jung, a veteran actress famous here in Korea since the 1970s. Much more recently she&#8217;s become a star in the United States as well: the anointment occurred last month, in the form of an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress granted for her performance in Lee Isaac Chung&#8217;s Minari. Much lauded even before the Oscars, Chung&#8217;s film tells of a Korean immigrant family struggling to make a go as farmers in the Arkansas of the 1980s. Youn plays the mother-in-law brought over from the old country to watch the children; at first an alien presence to the American-born young son, this foulmouthed grandmother comes ultimately to provide just the kindness and encouragement he needs.
Though perhaps not a role that will win any awards for originality, as written by Chung (in a &#8220;semi-autobiographical&#8221; script) and played by Youn it has resonated with viewers Korean and non-Korean alike. Increasingly many of the latter have been moved to watch Minari expressly in order to see Youn&#8217;s performance, so endearing a personality has the actress displayed in her post-Oscar interviews. An immigrant to the United States herself during a decade of &#8220;retirement&#8221; from the mid-1970s through the mid-80s, she&#8217;s spoken playfully and often sardonically in English about the rigors of low-budget independent filmmaking, Western mispronunciations of her name, and her desire to meet absentee producer Brad Pitt. As she accepted her Academy Award, she dedicated it to &#8220;my first director, Kim Ki-young, who was a very genius director. I made my first movie with him. He would be very happy if he is still alive.&#8221;
Released exactly half a century earlier, that first movie Woman of Fire (화녀) features a 23-year-old Youn playing a femme fatale who brings about the destruction of a stolid middle-class household. It shares this basic story with an earlier Kim picture, 1960&#8217;s The Housemaid (하녀), which is now regarded, in the company of Yu Hyun-mok’s <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/lets-get-bitter-korean-neorealism-yu-hyun-moks-aimless-bullet/">Aimless Bullet</a> from the following year, as one of the greatest Korean films of all time. Restored by the Korean Film Archive in 2008, it was later granted the supreme cinephile imprimatur of an edition in the Criterion Collection. That the release came <a href="https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3002-bong-joon-ho-on-the-housemaid" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3002-bong-joon-ho-on-the-housemaid', 'endorsed by Parasite director Bong Joon-ho');">endorsed by Parasite director Bong Joon-ho</a>, star of <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/bong-joon-hos-biggest-victory-accepting-oscars-korean/">last year&#8217;s Academy Awards ceremony</a>, speaks to Kim&#8217;s lasting influence on Korean cinema. More than 20 years after his death, he lays fair claim to the title of the most important Korean filmmaker of all time.
Though unreservedly melodramatic, The Housemaid exudes an elegance characteristic of South Korea&#8217;s &#8220;Golden Age&#8221; films of the 1960s. Among the many qualities attributed to Korean films of the subsequent decade, however, elegance seldom appears. Losing their audience to television and Hollywood while laboring under political censorship, some filmmakers spent the 1970s cranking out cheaply titillating &#8220;quota quickies&#8221; in shopworn genres. Kim, not apparently averse in any case to onscreen sex and violence, used these conditions to advance a genre all his own. 1977&#8217;s shamanistic nightmare <a href="https://youtu.be/_hCUSqSu6Ho" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/_hCUSqSu6Ho', 'Iodo');">Iodo</a> (이어도) may well be his standout film of the period, but the core of the enterprise comprises Woman of Fire and his other subsequent remakes of The Housemaid, the picture that according to scholar Chris Berry had &#8220;established Kim as an auteur and a brand, with a certain set of obsessions that audiences expected him to manifest repeatedly.&#8221;
In the same essay, included in the reader <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/rediscovering-korean-cinema-academic-look-zombies-mutants-criminals-prostitutes-south-koreas-silver-screen/">Rediscovering Korean Cinema</a>, Berry quotes Kim himself explaining these frequent remakes as an opportunity to &#8220;portray the changes in Korean society and the crisis of the bourgeois family every ten years.&#8221; But it only took him a year to follow up Woman of Fire, the Housemaid of 1971, with The Insect Woman (충녀), the Housemaid of 1972. In each films Youn plays a different young woman named Myeong-ja; in the latter, the death of Myeong-ja&#8217;s father forces her to go to work as a bar &#8220;hostess&#8221; paid to chat with and drink alongside favored members of its middle-aged clientele. Soon she becomes the mistress of Kim Dong-sik (also the name of the head of The Housemaid&#8216;s household), a husband and father rendered impotent by the economically superior position of his wife, the heiress of a trucking company.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15505" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/kb-the-insect-woman-2.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="1426" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/kb-the-insect-woman-2.jpg 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/kb-the-insect-woman-2-210x300.jpg 210w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/kb-the-insect-woman-2-768x1095.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/kb-the-insect-woman-2-718x1024.jpg 718w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
Taking notice of the reinvigoration her husband has undergone as a result of his liaison with the younger woman, Dong-sik&#8217;s vigilant wife goes so far as to explicitly permit their relationship. As long as Myeong-ja keeps Dong-shik in a robust health, as defined by certain parameters of weight and blood pressure, she will be allowed to keep him for half of each day. This is only one of the grotesque turns the film introduces into its story, carried over from The Housemaid and influenced by scandalous headlines of the time. When Myeong-ja starts getting ideas about having a baby, Dong-shik&#8217;s wife drugs him and hustles him into the hospital for a non-consensual vasectomy. Yet when Myeong-ja moves into a freshly built two-story home — paid for by Mrs. Kim — she discovers an abandoned infant in the refrigerator and decides to raise it as her own.
That isn&#8217;t the half of The Insect Woman, a movie better experienced than explained. In that sense it has something in common with the work of a Western director like David Lynch (made though it was years before Lynch&#8217;s feature debut), a comparison made even by Korean critics. Of its many scenes that leave an impression on the mind, perhaps the most memorable is the one shot through the bottom of a glass table covered in marble-like multicolored sweets, on top of which Myeong-ja and Dong-sik have uncomfortable-looking sex. By this point Myeong-ja has transformed from a defeated teenager into a full-fledged seductress, and one destined — as anyone familiar with the implacable moralism of Kim&#8217;s work will foresee — for a flamboyantly grim end. The story&#8217;s end, which leaves Myeong-ja no apparent option but murder-suicide, feels a long way indeed from the sensibility of the K-grandma.
But then nor is Youn&#8217;s character in Minari much like a grandma, as her grandson repeatedly observes. Just as Kim created his own genre, so Youn has created her own type. I&#8217;ve heard her style of performance likened to a hot pepper, both for its spiciness and clean astringency, and that strikes me as a fair description of her work for <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/woman-ran-cinematic-romantic-collaboration-hong-sangsoo-kim-min-hee-evolves/">Hong Sangsoo</a>, four of whose films she&#8217;s appeared in over the past decade. Though it wouldn&#8217;t be wrong to call most of the characters she&#8217;s played for Hong sexless busybodies — hardly an uncommon presence in Korean cinema — she somehow brings an unusual degree of both hardness and compassion to the roles. The same goes for her starring turn as an elderly prostitute-turned-mercy-killer in E J-yong&#8217;s The Bacchus Lady (죽여주는 여자), a spiritual successor of the women she played in the 1970s.
Far from having dedicated herself to such daring parts or idiosyncratic directors, Youn has participated in more than a few conventional film and television productions over the past couple of decades (including Im Sang-soo&#8217;s slick remake of The Housemaid from 2010). Whatever that kind of work has done to keep her a star in Korea, the success of Minari has made her all but inescapable: whether on television, the sides of Seoul buses, or tower-mounted video screens, she now seems to be under advertising contract to about a dozen different products at once. In the Korean entertainment industry, quite unlike the American one, appearing in commercials is the surest sign of having made it; by that standard, Youn must be one of the most successful performers in the country — 30 years after having been seen by some as a washed-up divorcée who used to star in tacky exploitation movies.
Admittedly, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwh2Z1Q8q9o" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwh2Z1Q8q9o', 'the print of The Insect Woman available for viewing on the Korean Film Archive&#8217;s Youtube channel');">the print of The Insect Woman available for viewing on the Korean Film Archive&#8217;s Youtube channel</a> does look as if it&#8217;s spent the past 50 years circulating around the world&#8217;s grindhouses. But this delirious patina, combined with the luridness of the movie itself (though Kim&#8217;s subsequent updates Woman of Fire &#8217;82 and Carnivore go to brazen extremes of their own) make for as rich a viewing experience, in its way, as the immaculately restored Housemaid. Some critics today, even those with an interest in Korean cinema, worry about how to regard such &#8220;outdated&#8221; films, not just in aesthetic sense but a moral one. They flinch from acknowledging that the human impulses — which is to say, the animal impulses — driving the likes of The Insect Woman have dated not at all. Kim surely knew they wouldn&#8217;t, which goes some way to making him a genius director by itself.
 
Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/harrowing-journey-island-women-koreas-psychological-recesses-kim-ki-youngs-iodo-1977/">A Harrowing Journey to an Island of Women, and Into Korea’s Psychological Recesses: Kim Ki-young’s Iodo</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/bong-joon-hos-biggest-victory-accepting-oscars-korean/">Bong Joon-ho’s Biggest Victory: Accepting His Oscars in Korean</a>
<a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/boring-heaven-exciting-hell-kim-soo-yongs-night-journey/">Between Boring Heaven and Exciting Hell: Kim Soo-yong’s Night Journey</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/lets-get-bitter-korean-neorealism-yu-hyun-moks-aimless-bullet/">Let’s Get Out of Here: The Bitter Korean Neorealism of Yu Hyun-Mok’s Aimless Bullet</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-provocateur-harrowing-films-kim-ki-duk-1960-2020/">Korean Provocateur: the Harrowing Films of Kim Ki-duk (1960-2020)</a>
 
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/grandma-minari-grindhouse-femme-fatale-kim-ki-youngs-insect-woman-1972/"></div>

The Grandma from Minari Was a Grindhouse Femme Fatale: Kim Ki-young&#8217;s The Insect Woman (1972)

The Grandma from Minari Was a Grindhouse Femme Fatale: Kim Ki-young&#8217;s The Insect Woman (1972)

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/selling-south-korea-youjeong-ohs-pop-city-reveals-k-pop-k-drama-transformed-homeland/"></div>If you read the Korea Blog regularly, you more than likely have an interest in Korea. And though it&#8217;s far from guaranteed, you may well also be a Westerner of one kind or another. If both of these conditions hold true for you, then the odds say — albeit with plenty of room for exception — that your interest in Korea was sparked by the fruits of the &#8220;Korean Wave,&#8221; which over the past couple of decades has crashed onto many a shore throughout the non-Korean world. Though some definitions encompass film, comics, and literature, the Korean Wave as popularly understood consists primarily of two cultural forms: pop music and television dramas. And as Youjeong Oh argues in <a href="https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501755538/pop-city/#bookTabs=1" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501755538/pop-city/#bookTabs=1', 'Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place');">Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place</a>, their popularity in foreign countries has been powerful enough to alter the landscape of South Korea itself.
The operative phenomenon is, in a word, tourism. From far and wide come both &#8220;K-pop&#8221; fans seeking closer proximity to their singing idols and &#8220;K-drama&#8221; addicts hoping to re-live emotional moments from their favorite shows. Local economies have rapidly adapted to cater to them not just in Seoul, home of all the big entertainment companies and management agencies, but also across the rest of the country, where dramas often film their most memorable scenes. Both types of tourist inevitably encounter disappointments: major K-pop stars are seldom if ever publicly seen when not in concert, and the drama sets maintained as attractions, often in far-flung areas, tend to be smaller and situated in much less romantic contexts than they look on television. Yet the enthusiasts, as their demographics shift with time and their interests change with the trends, have for most of the 21st century kept on coming.
Oh uses a more descriptive term than enthusiast: &#8220;As celebrity involvement is often tantamount to worship,&#8221; she writes, &#8220;visiting a destination associated with the adored star can be perceived as a pilgrimage.&#8221; For many tourists, coming to Korea is an &#8220;overwhelmingly pop culture-focused journey to attend concerts and television shows, to go on pilgrimage tours to entertainment agency buildings and restaurants operated by K-pop stars.&#8221; I won&#8217;t pretend not to have made any such pilgrimages of my own, at least if visiting the pubs and coffee shops that have appeared in <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/woman-ran-cinematic-romantic-collaboration-hong-sangsoo-kim-min-hee-evolves/">Hong Sangsoo</a> movies counts. Such a practice may reflect the fact that I came to my own fascination with Korea through Korean cinema — or that I&#8217;m not a middle-aged Japanese woman, the demographic group who first proved the economic value of the obsessed foreigner not just to the Korean entertainment industry, but to Korean cities as well.
The Korean Wave rose with Winter Sonata (겨울연가), a &#8220;conventional melodrama&#8221; that first aired here in 2002. Soon after its broadcast in Japan the following year, its male leads became living gods in the eyes of women of a certain age in that country, many of whom came to see the locations for themselves. This was a boon to the northeastern provincial capital of Chuncheon where the series happened to be set. &#8220;The drama’s director intentionally chose the lyrical landscapes of winter in Chuncheon as the drama’s controlling image,&#8221; writes Oh. &#8220;The accidental popularity of the drama and the city, however, taught both drama producers and Korean cities about the benefits of preplanned and refined marketing strategies of city placement.&#8221; The Chuncheons of the country, remote and undistinguished in the eyes of most tourists, identified in dramas a way to get out of Seoul&#8217;s shadow.
Before reading Pop City I&#8217;d known of Winter Sonata (as does everyone with an interest in modern Korean culture) and I&#8217;d also enjoyed visiting Chuncheon, but I&#8217;d never associated the two. I now happen to be planning a trip to the even smaller towns of Mungyeong and Chungju, and sure enough, both have also thrown in their lot with the drama industry. In fact, the former pioneered the use of shooting locations as an engine of domestic tourism: in 2000, as Oh tells it, its city government provided the equivalent of $300,000 for the construction of a set for Taejo Wang Geon (태조 왕건), a drama set in the tenth century. Owned by the city, that set has since grown into a complex used for the shooting of many period stories — lack of development being one of the few unambiguous advantages a place like Mungyeong has over Seoul.
In the nearly two decades since Winter Sonata, dramas set in the modern day have also continued to make use of places far from the capital: in 2019, Chungju successfully put in to provide a location for Crash Landing On You (사랑의 불시착), a love story between a South Korean corporate heiress and a North Korean army captain. The series itself was a success, but whether or not Chungju has thus experienced a resulting bump in domestic tourism, few foreign visitors can have come its way since it concluded in February of last year, just as <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/reading-albert-camus-plague-time-coronavirus/">the COVID-19 pandemic</a> all but shut down international travel. Even the eponymous &#8220;international district&#8221; of Seoul featured in <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/coronavirus-breaks-itaewon-gays-foreigners-seoul-neighborhood-celebrated-hit-netflix-drama/">Itaewon Class</a> looks to have benefited little from its celebration in that hit drama, continue to struggle as it has in the aftermath of its own local outbreak of the virus.
For &#8220;marginal&#8221; Korean cities, as Oh explains it, making a deal with the drama industry has always been a long shot. But then so has making dramas, a function performed by countless perpetually cash-strapped independent production companies forced to negotiate with relatively few high-powered television networks. Recent years have no doubt altered this dynamic to an extent, as illustrated by dramas like Crash Landing On You and Itaewon Class. Both of them were carried not by the major networks but by more recently established cable channels, and both were financed in part by Netflix, whose considerable investment in Korean programming suggests a certain confidence in its potential for wider international appeal. A professor of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Oh performed most of Pop City&#8216;s research in the early 2010s: Netflix doesn&#8217;t appear in the book at all, to say nothing of COVID-19.
A decade ago, Korean dramas were often still produced &#8220;live,&#8221; a standard operating procedure under which, &#8220;apart from the first few episodes, filming is usually done only a few days in advance of (or on the same day as) the airdate.&#8221; (The last episode of the 2011 medical crime series Sign, Oh chillingly notes, was completed less than an hour before broadcast.) This, combined with the need to put out a feature film&#8217;s worth of new material each week, goes some way to explaining why uninitiated Western viewers might have had trouble getting into Korean dramas at that time. At the constant risk of shoddy, occasionally nonsensical storytelling, the advantage, as industry wisdom then had it, was a greater responsiveness to popular demand. More screen time for a favorite character, a guaranteed happy ending: productions could and would incorporate the audience&#8217;s demands, no matter how philistine.
Oh notes that such seat-of-the-pants production has since gone out of fashion, primarily due to the newly felt pressure to sell complete series in advance to China. But other factors have also diluted Korean dramas&#8217; sense of authorship, which had never been strong to begin with. Here one looks in vain for equivalents of the Davids — Chase of The Sopranos, Simon of The Wire, Milch of Deadwood — whose creations kindled America&#8217;s ongoing &#8220;golden age&#8221; of dramatic television. Oh describes Kim Eun-sook as &#8220;the top drama writer,&#8221; but even her best-known work is shaped by considerations unbecoming of an auteur: Secret Garden, for example, is cited as the prime example of a series conceived to &#8220;attract large-scale sponsorship for the display of luxury cars and designer brands.&#8221; Even tolerant Korean audiences have been moved to complain when a drama becomes &#8220;a collage of commercial advertisements without a solid narrative.&#8221;
As with product placement, so with what Oh calls &#8220;place placement,&#8221; which also &#8220;reconfigures dramas&#8217; story lines, leading to a mutual construction of drama and place.&#8221; Ideally, the story remains essentially plausible and the Chuncheon, Mungyeong, Chungju or wherever it may be gains a new identity as a city worth visiting. &#8220;The underlying political reality is that drama sponsorship costs less than building infrastructure. Moreover, when the sponsored drama is a hit, the gains on investment become exponential.&#8221; Yet though the dramas are many, the hits are few, and any money spent attracting and supporting shoots is money not spent improving the city in ways more immediately beneficial to the people who actually live there. &#8220;Regional cities&#8217; very marginality leads to such speculative ventures,&#8221; as Oh sums it up, &#8220;putting them in an ironic situation in which such speculativeness accentuates or deepens their peripheral status.&#8221;
As Oh tells it, that peripheral status was quickly and deeply entrenched during &#8220;the developmental period from the 1960s to the 1980s,&#8221; when &#8220;local areas were mere utilizable parts with which the central government orchestrated the nation&#8217;s economic development.&#8221; South Koreans couldn&#8217;t even elect their own local governors and mayors until 1995, but by that time of administrative decentralization the capital has already been made the center of the universe — or perhaps made a black hole, insatiably absorbing everything in its orbit. This goes even more so for Gangnam, the southern half of the city (&#8220;Gangnam&#8221; literally means &#8220;south of the river&#8221;) that consisted mostly of bean fields until the mid-1960s. Then a government development scheme dramatically pumped up the value of its land, creating an affluent middle class in the area and relocating to it the prestigious schools and other institutions necessary to perpetuate that class.
Whatever you think of Korean pop music, you most likely know the name of Gangnam because of it. &#8220;Until 2012, Gangnam’s hegemony operated locally,&#8221; Oh writes, &#8220;but in that year Psy’s song &#8216;Gangnam Style&#8217; unexpectedly became a global phenomenon and introduced Gangnam to the world.&#8221; (Oh&#8217;s frequent use of hegemony in various forms reminds you that this is an academic book, as does her readiness to apply labels like &#8220;neoliberal.&#8221;) Since suddenly finding itself in possession of a world-famous brand, the district government has since made attempts to capitalize on its associations with K-pop. None are particularly impressive: Oh examines a stretch of Gangnam street called &#8220;K-Star Road,&#8221; which I&#8217;ve spotted through bus windows but which turns out to amount to a row of cartoonish statues and a handful of businesses with tenuous connections to idol singers. (&#8220;Kamong Café is owned by the sister of one of the EXO members.&#8221;)
At least the center of Gangnam is indeed the center of the K-pop industry, in that the relevant companies have offices there. Less truthful are Gangnam&#8217;s efforts to banner itself a &#8220;global city,&#8221; first because it isn&#8217;t its own city, and second because it isn&#8217;t in any meaningful sense global. It is, admittedly, built in a generic, large-scale international style of urbanism that makes it &#8220;difficult to think of Apgujeongro, where K-Star Road is located, as a &#8216;street,'&#8221; as Oh writes. &#8220;In reality, it is simply a road where car traffic is heavy and fast moving. Interactions between the road and nearby buildings are scant. Few people actually walk along the sidewalk, since upper-class customers mostly use cars to enter shops.&#8221; (Certain parts of Los Angeles come to mind.) But to foreigners — a certain class of foreigners — it offers little more than shopping, <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/ways-seeing-korean-plastic-surgery/">medical tourism</a>, and Korean-Wave diversions.
After the pandemic, the kind of tourists Gangnam desires will return. &#8220;Whether or not the mere attraction of vast numbers of foreign travelers could render Gangnam a global place remains questionable,&#8221; writes Oh, &#8220;a more notable point is this endeavor’s obsession with the foreign.&#8221; South Korea developed through exports, and in decades past, &#8220;the imaginary existence of the foreign gaze was harnessed by the developmental state to mobilize the population to accelerate industrialization.&#8221; Now, Korean cities &#8220;capitalize on the physical presence of foreign bodies to make their areas look more diverse, cosmopolitan, and global.&#8221; As in cities, so in culture: Oh documents the many ways in which creators of K-pop and K-dramas deform their products in order to better conform to what they see as the tastes of the target foreign audience du jour (a practice not unknown in film and even literature), alienating those who came for the Korean-ness.
All this perhaps explains why I now watch Korean dramas from the 1980s, a time before foreign audiences figured into network calculations. Or why I&#8217;ve never considered living in Gangnam, remaining instead in the capital&#8217;s much older and less orderly northern half. Or why I so enjoy the Korean cities that haven&#8217;t become international tourist destinations. The past year has proven an opportune period for domestic travel, but like everyone else, I&#8217;m planning to go abroad as soon I can. Still, last I did so, I found myself in Quebec City watching a pack of Korean girls photographing themselves in front of a red door. It turned out to be famous from Guardian (도깨비), an enormously popular time-travel drama written by none other than Kim Eun-sook. Even when you can fly to the other side of the world, it seems, you can&#8217;t get away from K-culture.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/pansori-disco-leenalchi-new-old-korean-musical-phenomenon-2020-gets-frustrated-tourists-dancing/">Pansori at the Disco: Leenalchi, the New-Old Korean Musical Phenomenon of 2020, Gets Frustrated Tourists Dancing</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/coronavirus-breaks-itaewon-gays-foreigners-seoul-neighborhood-celebrated-hit-netflix-drama/">The Coronavirus Breaks Out in Itaewon, the “Gays-and-Foreigners” Seoul Neighborhood Celebrated in a Hit Netflix Drama</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/travelers-video-seoul-astonishes-official-promotion-korea-embarrasses/">A Traveler’s Video of Seoul Astonishes, while Official Promotion of Korea Embarrasses</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/los-angeles-seoul-tale-two-ugly-cities/">Los Angeles and Seoul, a Tale of Two Ugly Cities</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/finding-korea-osaka/">Finding Korea in Osaka</a>
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/selling-south-korea-youjeong-ohs-pop-city-reveals-k-pop-k-drama-transformed-homeland/"></div>

The Selling of South Korea: Youjeong Oh&#8217;s Pop City Reveals How K-Pop and K-Drama Have Transformed their Homeland

The Selling of South Korea: Youjeong Oh&#8217;s Pop City Reveals How K-Pop and K-Drama Have Transformed their Homeland

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/can-check-time-want-can-never-leave-first-korean-comfort-woman-novel-kim-sooms-one-left/"></div>When a 92-year-old woman by the name of Lee died at last year, all of South Korea took notice. Her passing reduced to eighteen the official count of surviving Korean &#8220;comfort women,&#8221; who as girls were kept in sexual servitude to the Japanese military during the Second World War. Six months later, University of Washington press published an English translation of a Korean novel that imagines the future, inevitable and surely not far off, when that number falls to one. But an official count is just that, as Kim Soom reminds us with the character of <a href="https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295747668/one-left/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295747668/one-left/', 'One Lef');">One Lef</a><a href="https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295747668/one-left/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295747668/one-left/', 't');">t</a>&#8216;s 93-year-old protagonist P’unggil, a former comfort woman who never registered herself as such with the government. The death of the second-to-last member of the acknowledged group plunges her into an extended recollection of her own experience, which constitutes this &#8220;first Korean novel devoted exclusively to the subject of the comfort women.&#8221;
Georgetown University Korean studies professor emerita Bonnie Oh emphasizes this distinction in her foreword to the English version of One Left (한 명), translated by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton. (Previously on the Korea Blog, we&#8217;ve featured their translations of Kim Sagwa&#8217;s novel <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/making-korean-monster-kim-sagwas-bloody-high-school-novel-mina/">Mina</a> and Yoon Tae-ho&#8217;s comic <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/moss-star-korean-comic-artists-suspenseful-tale-brought-english-literary-translators-serialized-free-online/">Moss</a>, as well as <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/first-comprehensive-introduction-k-lit-past-present-youngmin-kwon-bruce-fultons-korean-literature/">What Is Korean Literature?</a>, a study co-written by Bruce Fulton.) The novel also, she adds, &#8220;rebuts denials of the validity of the comfort women&#8217;s claims by synthesizing an intense personal story with painstaking historical research.&#8221; The idea of a novel as a vehicle for rebuttal, or for argument of any kind, will give some Western readers pause, though it&#8217;s hardly unheard of in Korea. Cho Nam-joo&#8217;s <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/book-jiyoung-explosively-controversial-korean-feminist-novel-comes-english/">Kim Ji-young, Born 1982</a>, which appeared in English last year, was nothing if not a novel-shaped set of claims about the lousy lot of Korean women in the 21st century.
Like Cho&#8217;s book, One Left also comes with citations, and in parts fairly bristles with them. These superscript numerals accompany passages that recount events or provide character detail, functions that will strike most Western readers as having no obvious relationship to statistics, articles, studies, or any other kind of sources usually collected in endnotes:
<blockquote>People have no clue where she’s been or to what she’s been subjected.2
They can only assume that her marriageable years were spent drifting from one housemaid job to another. She never imposed on her family but could never bring herself to spill the truth even to her younger sisters, who considered her a burden and an eyesore: that she hated men; the mere sight of them made her shudder,3 made her wish she had a gun with a silencer so she could exterminate them.4
Any talk of marrying her off sent her ballistic.5</blockquote>
What Kim copiously cites is in fact the testimony given by former comfort women themselves, with whose elements she crafts the experience of P’unggil and the other girls she remembers from her seven years at the &#8220;comfort station.&#8221; During that time &#8220;thirty thousand Japanese soldiers came and went from her body,&#8221; which sounds agonizing enough even without the host of other gruesome details Kim incorporates into the narrative. Yet despite being as viscerally discomfiting as anything I&#8217;ve read, they&#8217;re somewhat blunted by the marks flagging the research that underlies them. This is an irony, given their ostensible emphasis of the fact that these atrocities belong not to imagined fiction but genuine history. Lines like &#8220;She was barely 13 and her underdeveloped genitalia wouldn’t admit him30&#8243; or &#8220;The rods came out with charred flesh stuck to them22&#8243; read as grotesque in more ways than Kim must have intended.
All these qualities made One Left a hard sell to English-language publishing houses, as the Fultons recount in their afterword: &#8220;&#8216;How are we to market this book?&#8217; they asked. As a historical study or as a work of literature?&#8221; Academic publishers suggested they take it to a non-academic publisher; non-academic publishers suggested they take it to an academic publisher. Another factor would have been the potential radioactivity of comfort women as a subject, which only a brave observer of Korea indeed approaches without first determining the currently acceptable frame. Within Korea, scholars of that grim chapter of history have even found themselves taken to court by comfort women or their advocates for publishing, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/seeking-the-true-story-of-the-comfort-women-j-mark-ramseyer" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/seeking-the-true-story-of-the-comfort-women-j-mark-ramseyer', 'as Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen recently put it in The New Yorker');">as Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen recently put it in The New Yorker</a>, &#8220;anything short of a purist story of the Japanese military kidnapping Korean virgins for sex slavery at gunpoint.&#8221;
The occasion for Gersen&#8217;s piece was the International Review of Law and Economics&#8216; publication of &#8220;Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,&#8221; an article by her colleague J. Mark Ramseyer. In it he claims, according to Gersen&#8217;s summary, that &#8220;Korean comfort women &#8216;chose prostitution&#8217; and entered &#8216;multi-year indenture&#8217; agreements with entrepreneurs to work at war-front &#8216;brothels&#8221; in China and Southeast Asia.&#8221; This is a far cry from the experiences included in One Left, with its daughters of the impoverished countryside falsely promised work in places like factories and hospitals — or simply snatched up while drawing water from a well or gathering snails on a riverbank. Not long thereafter, they find themselves hauled up to Manchuria (then &#8220;the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo,&#8221; as it&#8217;s almost invariably described today), confined to a small room with a filthy mattress, and ordered to &#8220;take soldiers&#8221; for the indefinite future.
At issue, clearly, is to what degree comfort women took up their role voluntarily, and the relevant arguments tend instinctively to be perceived as occupying one extreme or the other. Few could come away from One Left believing that any girl would actively sign up to work at a comfort station, no matter how dire her life back in the village. Indeed, Ramseyer&#8217;s article seems mostly to have been persuasive among Japanese ultra-nationalists — a group that needed no persuasion in the first place — many of whom surely encountered its argument at a degree or two of remove. Gersen identifies in its publication evidence of a deeper weakness in legal academia, where specialists &#8220;are often expected to review writing in areas on which they are far from expert, involving historical contexts they have not studied and languages they do not know.&#8221;
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15405" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/kb-one-left-2.jpg" alt="" width="900" height="504" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/kb-one-left-2.jpg 900w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/kb-one-left-2-300x168.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/kb-one-left-2-768x430.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px" />
Yet if every piece of shoddy scholarship were to make the news, humanity could pay attention to nothing else. Whatever its flaws, Ramseyer&#8217;s paper touches a third rail, that of not just comfort women but Korean comfort women, the ones memorialized by the often-controversial <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Peace" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Peace', '&#8220;Statues of Peace&#8221;');">&#8220;Statues of Peace&#8221;</a> installed across from the Japanese embassy in Seoul and around the world (even, to high-profile local Japanese opposition, in Glendale, CA). Estimates of the total number of comfort women range from 20,000 to 400,000, and in One Left Kim makes multiple references to a figure of 200,000 taken from the then-Japanese colony of Korea alone. But history has recorded them as having come also from China, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, and even Japan itself — that last detail being one that puts the country in an even worse light, to my mind, but not one generally admitted into the conversation here.
There could be few entities less sympathetic than the Japanese military in World War II, whose brutality and incompetence (characteristics few Westerners associate with modern Japan) turned into a crazed, nihilistic desperation as defeat began to look inevitable. Most of its soldiers come off in One Left as less human than animal: what else would display such violent eagerness to be one of dozens each day to bed the same barely pubescent female, quite possibly diseased and — as Kim depicts them — almost certainly crawling with fleas? Yet the novel also offers occasional glimpses of relationships that suggest the soldiers and the comfort women have more in common than it may seem. One of P’unggil&#8217;s young compatriots passes on word from a favorite &#8220;regular&#8221;: &#8220;He said they were separated from their parents and siblings just like us and ended up here in Manchuria just to offer up their lives.&#8221;
Others have been legally roughed up for acknowledging this kind of thing. &#8220;In 2015, a Korean academic named Park Yu-ha was sued civilly by comfort women for defamation, and criminally indicted by Korean prosecutors, for the publication of a book that explored the role of Koreans in recruiting the women and the loving relationships that some comfort women developed with Japanese soldiers,&#8221; Gersen writes. And in their afterword to One Left, the Fultons stress that &#8220;those who fear that the novel is a case of Japan bashing should note that among the various characters responsible for coercing the Korean girls into sexual servitude, either through blandishments involving a &#8216;good job&#8217; in a factory or through threats, are Koreans themselves&#8221; — a fact demonstrated, they add with a punctiliousness echoing that of Kim&#8217;s main text, &#8220;through research conducted by Chunghee Sarah Soh for her pioneering study The Comfort Women.&#8221;
One Left was originally published in Korean in 2016. That the book took as long as it did to find a publisher in English perhaps turned out to its advantage, still new as it was when the &#8220;Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War&#8221; controversy erupted. The two works even have an odd complementarity, the unusual form of  rigor evident in Kim&#8217;s novel setting it as far apart from the literary mainstream as the apparent patchiness of Ramseyer&#8217;s article sets it from the scholarly mainstream. Gersen assesses her colleague&#8217;s argument and finds it wanting with a level-headedness as characteristic of her own writing as it has been absent from the reactions so far aired in the Korean media. A typical news broadcast here labeled Ramseyer, Harvard Law&#8217;s Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, as &#8220;the Harvard professor made by the &#8216;war-criminal corporation&#8217; Mitsubishi.&#8221;
Ramseyer&#8217;s paper has drawn so much attention not just because it questions the word of Korean comfort women, but also because of his association with Harvard, which as scholar of Japanese history Tessa Morris-Suzuki says to Gersen &#8220;gives it a degree of prominence and respectability.&#8221; It would be difficult to overstate the value of the Habeodeu brand here in Korea, where the United States&#8217; best-known university has an even greater cachet than it does in the United States; to witness the Ramseyer-versus-comfort-women story enter the South Korean zeitgeist is to witness two powerful currents of public instinct crash directly into one another. In the West, readers not directly invested in the issue (and already told of Japan&#8217;s wartime behavior by bestsellers like Iris Chang&#8217;s The Rape of Nanking, criticized though her scholarship has also been) seem to take the stories of comfort women at face value.
Having heard no credible reason to doubt the comfort women myself, I read One Left as more a historical account than not, accepting its depiction of conditions in the comfort station as not employment, indentured or otherwise, but imprisonment. (&#8220;You can check in any time you want,&#8221; as one girl there jarringly puts it, &#8220;but you can never leave.&#8221;) Though the book certainly fulfills Bonnie Oh&#8217;s claim of its being the first Korean novel devoted exclusively to the subject of the comfort women, the emphasis belongs on the word &#8220;exclusively.&#8221; Apart from some reflections on P’unggil&#8217;s mostly abandoned neighborhood and the urban redevelopment that may or may not come for it (a motif shared, coincidentally, with Kim Hyun-seok&#8217;s 2017 comfort-woman comedy <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/language-lessons-sex-slavery-koreas-new-comfort-woman-comedy-can-speak/">I Can Speak</a>), this narrative is about one thing, and all the way through it exudes a reluctance to depart for long from the horrors of wartime sex slavery.
What would have resulted if, dealing with these same themes, Kim had chosen to labor under a lighter burden of conveying the specific experiences remembered by real comfort women? An experienced and acclaimed novelist hardly unacquainted with the power of imagination, she first made her name in a realm well apart from realism. Only in recent years has she taken the turn toward direct confrontation with historical and political matters that has produced both One Left and L&#8217;s Sneakers (L의 운동화), a novel about the life of Lee Han-yeol, a Yonsei University student martyred in the pro-democracy demonstrations of <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-cinema-looks-back-1987-students-died-democracy-born/">1987</a>. The 1980s and the 1940s both constitute relatively recent chapters in the history of Korea, and as such, subjects that require careful choice of words. An unconventional approach may still be necessary for writing about events in living memory, even those fast slipping out of it.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/language-lessons-sex-slavery-koreas-new-comfort-woman-comedy-can-speak/">From Language Lessons to Sex Slavery: Korea’s New Comfort-Woman Comedy I Can Speak</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/liberation-day-protest-raises-question-anti-japanese-korea-really/">A Liberation Day Protest Raises the Question: How Anti-Japanese Is Korea, Really?</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/stoked-racist-ad-k-pop-sex-scandal-anti-communist-massacre-can-korean-demand-apology-ever-satiated/">Stoked by a Racist Ad, a K-Pop Sex Scandal, and an Anti-Communist Massacre, Can the Korean Demand for Apology Ever Be Satiated?</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/book-jiyoung-explosively-controversial-korean-feminist-novel-comes-english/">The Book of Jiyoung: An Explosively Controversial Korean Feminist Novel Comes Out in English</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/making-korean-monster-kim-sagwas-bloody-high-school-novel-mina/">The Making of a Korean Monster: Kim Sagwa’s Bloody High-School Novel Mina</a>
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
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You Can Check in Any Time You Want, But You Can Never Leave: The First Korean &#8220;Comfort Woman&#8221; Novel, Kim Soom&#8217;s One Left

You Can Check in Any Time You Want, But You Can Never Leave: The First Korean &#8220;Comfort Woman&#8221; Novel, Kim Soom&#8217;s One Left

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/seoul-stars-journey-indie-synth-electro-k-pop-queen-neon-bunny/"></div>From time to time since the 1960s, South Korea and North Korea have blared propaganda at one another through hulking stacks of loudspeakers aimed into the Demilitarized Zone. <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-43958366" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-43958366', 'These border blasters came down in 2018');">These border blasters came down in 2018</a>, during a <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/interested-north-korea/">period of thaw</a> in North-South relations, but in the years leading up to that point the mutual sonic provocation had become unusually aggressive. This provided fodder to many an odd-news corner in the West, which seized especially upon the fact that the South had been mixing <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/k-pop-classic-rock/">K-pop</a> songs in with its denunciations of the Kim Jong Un regime. &#8220;Now, they haven’t said exactly what music they’ve been playing, but I hope it’s some of the better K-pop stuff,&#8221; said comedian-commentator John Oliver on a 2015 broadcast of his show Last Week Tonight. As examples he rattled off names surely unfamiliar to most HBO viewers at home: Uhm Jung-hwa, Jo Sung-mo, TVXQ, Neon Bunny.
How avidly Oliver really listens Korean music isn&#8217;t clear, though he did heap praise last year on a member of boy-band BTS, the highest-profile pop singers ever to come out of this country. &#8220;It’s frankly shame-inducing that K-pop has produced him, while American pop fans are stuck with Adam Levine,&#8221; said Oliver (undiminished though Korea&#8217;s own enthusiasm seems for the likes of Maroon 5). Just this month, BTS chalked up a couple more achievements that attest to their rise in the global zeitgeist: a performance at the Grammy Awards, followed by <a href="https://entertainment.theonion.com/bts-thanks-horrifyingly-exploitative-system-that-got-th-1846467567" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://entertainment.theonion.com/bts-thanks-horrifyingly-exploitative-system-that-got-th-1846467567', 'a report in the Onion');">a report in the Onion</a> in which they thank the &#8220;Horrifyingly Exploitative System That Got Them Where They Are Today.&#8221; The latter purports to quote one of the BTS boys expressing the group&#8217;s &#8220;heartfelt appreciation to the corporations and shareholders who never gave up on draining us of all personality and remaking us us into easily interchangeable commercial objects.&#8221;
BTS&#8217;s vast self-described &#8220;ARMY&#8221; of fans, a demographic not known for its sense of irony, took great exception to this bit of satire, and not wholly without cause. Among successful K-pop boy-bands and girl-groups, one could indeed find much clearer-cut examples of standardized industrial production. But the article nevertheless reflects a persistent distaste felt by many Western holdouts against the &#8220;Korean wave&#8221;: while the United States of America may have invented the pop star all but genetically engineered to meet consumer demand, Korea appears — as with other adopted foreign practices — to have taken it too far. And as has been argued elsewhere, Korea&#8217;s hit machine absorbs so great an amount of resources financial, cultural, and attentional within the country that other kinds of music, even other kinds of pop music, go begging. Or in the case of performers like Neon Bunny, one of Oliver&#8217;s picks, they go crowdfunding.
Neon Bunny (야광토끼) isn&#8217;t a band but a solo act, a 38-year-old singer-songwriter-producer named Lim Yoo-jin who&#8217;s put out three albums so far. Her most recent, Kosmos, came out last month, the fruit of labors that began with a campaign <a href="https://tumblbug.com/neonbunny" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://tumblbug.com/neonbunny', 'on the Kickstarter-like crowdfunding platform Tumblbug');">on the Kickstarter-like crowdfunding platform Tumblbug</a>. Its predecessors seem to have been more or less equally D.I.Y. productions, one quality that has endeared her to Western listeners, susceptible as we are to signals of artisanal &#8220;authenticity.&#8221; Over the past 15 years, in scenes all over the world, such small-scale production has converged with the lush, large-scale sounds made possible by consumer synthesizers and other electronic-music technologies. Neon Bunny stands squarely in that convergence; soon after releasing her debut album in 2011, she drew acclaim as a maker of &#8220;bedroom pop,&#8221; &#8220;synth-pop,&#8221; and/or &#8220;electro-pop&#8221; by Vice, Pitchfork, and other Western outlets invested in these trends.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15353" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/kb-neon-bunnys-kosmos-2.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="563" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/kb-neon-bunnys-kosmos-2.jpg 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/kb-neon-bunnys-kosmos-2-300x169.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/kb-neon-bunnys-kosmos-2-768x432.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
As Lim has explained, the title of that debut, Seoulight, is a double reference: to the light of Seoul, but also to the state of being a &#8220;Seoulite.&#8221; The city, she said during <a href="https://www.ebs.co.kr/space/broadcast/2825/player?lectId=3108834&amp;dno=3501" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.ebs.co.kr/space/broadcast/2825/player?lectId=3108834&amp;dno=3501', 'a 2012 performance on EBS television');">a 2012 performance on EBS television</a>, &#8220;feels like a warm man who&#8217;s always waiting for me.&#8221; But to appreciate his warmth, it seems she had to spend time away: the early 2000s, specifically, when she lived in Boston to study jazz piano at the Berklee College of Music. This strikes a somehow dispiriting note in her biography, as it does in those of the surprisingly many Korean cultural figures who undergo education abroad, and especially in the West, as not just a perk but a near-absolute requirement. (This isn&#8217;t so much the case in, for example, Japan, where music, film, architecture, and other cultures besides feel that much more homegrown as a result.)
But if not for her Berklee sojourn, Lim may never have become Neon Bunny. There she found her way into the East Coast D.I.Y. music scene and connected with fellow Korean musician Jo Hyu-il, an indie rocker who would go on to perform under the banner of The Black Skirts (검정치마). As The Black Skirts&#8217; keyboard player back in the homeland, Im also founded a Seoul arts collective called Doggyrich, showing the kind of self-motivation needed to launch a solo career outside the mainstream in Korea, and even more so to sustain it. Four years after following Seoulight up with the EP Happy Ending she released Stay Gold, an album even more deeply rooted in the South Korean capital — though it many not be nearby Tokyo, as she sings on the opener &#8220;Romance in Seoul,&#8221; nor splendid London, nor New York with its tall buildings.
This despite the fact that New York has fewer <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/living-vertical-life-seoul/">tall buildings</a> than Seoul, which the following track&#8217;s title calls a &#8220;Forest of Skyscrapers.&#8221; That song comes with a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KbvUmR6zkg" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KbvUmR6zkg', 'psychedlic cyberpunk music video');">psychedlic cyberpunk music video</a>, but its visuals are rendered superfluous by the enveloping sound world created on the album itself. (Not that I was displeased by the fragmentary views of Seoul in the video for <a href="https://youtu.be/Y-muW8zyaNc" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/Y-muW8zyaNc', '&#8220;It&#8217;s You,&#8221;');">&#8220;It&#8217;s You,&#8221;</a> including a glimpse of the now-vanished <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/looking-mexican-food-seoul-strange-case-hoover-taco/">KrissKo, home of the West Coast &#8220;Taco.&#8221;</a>) Seoulight and Happy Ending are more than competent records, to be sure, and they came as water in the desert to many Westerners with an ear on Korean pop music, but on them Stay Gold marks an astonishing sonic enrichment. This owes its many interwoven electronic layers, of course, but also to elements drawn from less likely sources, such as the gayageum, a traditional Korean stringed instrument, heard on &#8220;Romance in Seoul.&#8221;
Stay Gold leaves no doubt as to where in the world it comes from. One instrumental, &#8220;Bugaksanlo&#8221; (북악산로), is named for a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVXkD7-bimY" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVXkD7-bimY', 'winding mountain road');">winding mountain road</a> in the north of Seoul. (The closest Los Angeles equivalent would be Mulholland Drive.) Nearly all its lyrics are in Korean, apart from the occasional English chorus, which makes for a welcome contrast to the tendencies of K-pop today. Though I&#8217;ll never be a member of the BTS ARMY, I have nothing but respect for the group&#8217;s achievement of scoring stateside hits while singing in their own language. But &#8220;Dynamite,&#8221; the currently inescapable number <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp2vYwuH9-M" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp2vYwuH9-M', 'they performed at the Grammys');">they performed at the Grammys</a>, is 100 percent English, an unwelcome development to my ear however catchy the music. And not only was the song written without the band members&#8217; participation — unusual, in BTS&#8217; process — it was commissioned from a pair of English songwriters.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15352" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/kb-neon-bunnys-kosmos-3.png" alt="" width="1000" height="562" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/kb-neon-bunnys-kosmos-3.png 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/kb-neon-bunnys-kosmos-3-300x169.png 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/kb-neon-bunnys-kosmos-3-768x432.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
&#8220;Dynamite,&#8221; in other words, is placeless pop in just the way most of Neon Bunny&#8217;s oeuvre isn&#8217;t. If placefulness, so to speak, emerges as one of the defining qualities of an album like Stay Gold, so does its unreserved femininity. Early in her solo career Im spoke of writing songs with which women can sympathize, and whether or not she still considers that a priority, her musical persona remains unaffected by the insistent brashness now hardened into a trope among many female pop stars in the West. (Those who watched this year&#8217;s Grammys in full will have seen it on grotesque display.) Happy Ending&#8216;s kiss-off song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0STGIblwgU" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0STGIblwgU', '&#8220;Oh My Prince&#8221;');">&#8220;Oh My Prince&#8221;</a> (왕자님) went about as far as Neon Bunny could go in that direction: despite its amusing ridicule of raised-abroad rich kids — including the suggestion that they re-learn Korean — its attitude seemed a vaguely ill fit.
Neon Bunny&#8217;s new album <a href="https://neonbunny.bandcamp.com/album/kosmos" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://neonbunny.bandcamp.com/album/kosmos', 'Kosmos');">Kosmos</a> (also <a href="https://youtu.be/hmRJaAdkvT0" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/hmRJaAdkvT0', 'available for listening on Youtube');">available for listening on Youtube</a>) goes quite the other way. Devoid of any trace of sarcasm or petulance, its songs are instead heavy on breathy declarations of lifelong devotion. Some of these declarations Lim delivers in English, as when she sings, &#8220;Let me be the one for you / be the one that will love &#8217;til the end of time.&#8221; This invites the occasional such unwonted cliché into this album&#8217;s songs, two of which, by my count, are Neon Bunny&#8217;s first written entirely in English. Given the judgments I&#8217;ve aired already, this should perhaps disappoint me more than it does, but the usage here is just askew enough to bolster the album&#8217;s communiqué-from-a-distant-satellite aesthetic, other elements of which include elongated echo and reverb, smeary strings and choral voices, muted analog-sounding synthesizers, deliberately applied hiss and fuzz, and difficult-to-place samples from vintage soul records.
On the whole, Lim&#8217;s use of English remains relatively restrained, especially in light of the temptation it must present to an artist with a Western listenership at least as strong as her domestic one. But as a Westerner in her listenership myself — albeit one living in Korea, with a sense of what she means when she sings about Seoul&#8217;s sky as seen from her apartment — what interests me more is her new album&#8217;s inversion of intensity, its thoroughgoing sedateness where Stay Gold was driving. Not for nothing has &#8220;chillwave&#8221; begun to appear among the subgenres under which she gets filed, and it puts her in good company with a few of the non-Koreans alongside her in my heavy Spotify rotation — <a href="https://youtu.be/9rPOuZ4vY50" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/9rPOuZ4vY50', 'Toro y Moi');">Toro y Moi</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/BbbIBBVl_fI" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://youtu.be/BbbIBBVl_fI', 'Neon Indian');">Neon Indian</a>, and more similarly, fellow electronic bedroom-pop singer-songwriter-producer <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hITh8fBfejk" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hITh8fBfejk', 'Jessy Lanza');">Jessy Lanza</a> — all of whom get critics casting about for labels: &#8220;glo-fi,&#8221; &#8220;vaporwave,&#8221; &#8220;hypnagogic pop.&#8221;
Like its predecessors, Kosmos only lasts about half an hour. But throughout that short runtime come a few surprises, including Neon Bunny&#8217;s first acoustic-guitar ballad, unadorned except (I suspect) for a bit of of processing to make it feel as if it was recorded in a literal bedroom. In its other, more elaborate songs, the sound now and again takes faint but perceptible turns toward the sinister, which complicates my conception of Kosmos&#8216; having been constructed as a brief galactic-romantic journey best taken in a state of altered consciousness. If present, such a design would primarily serve fans abroad, given the unavailability of consciousness-altering substances here. Last year <a href="https://www.nknews.org/2020/06/north-korea-brings-back-anti-south-propaganda-loudspeakers-to-border-report/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.nknews.org/2020/06/north-korea-brings-back-anti-south-propaganda-loudspeakers-to-border-report/', 'North Korea began reinstalling its propaganda loudspeakers');">North Korea began reinstalling its propaganda loudspeakers</a> along the border, and if South Korea responds in kind, it should play the Northerners not BTS&#8217; latest album but Neon Bunny&#8217;s; I&#8217;ve heard cannabis is easier to come by up there.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/pansori-disco-leenalchi-new-old-korean-musical-phenomenon-2020-gets-frustrated-tourists-dancing/">Pansori at the Disco: Leenalchi, the New-Old Korean Musical Phenomenon of 2020, Gets Frustrated Tourists Dancing</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/listen-seoul-1980s-real-imagined-streaming-mixes-korean-city-pop/">Listen to the Seoul of the 1980s, Real or Imagined, with Streaming Mixes of Korean “City Pop”</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/yoo-jae-k-pop-masterpiece-love-30-years-untimely-death/">Yoo Jae-ha’s K-Pop Masterpiece Because I Love You, 30 Years After His Untimely Death</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-punk-indie-rock-k-pop-world/">Korean Punk and Indie Rock in a K-Pop World</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/k-pop-classic-rock/">Why K-Pop is the Same as Classic Rock</a>
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/seoul-stars-journey-indie-synth-electro-k-pop-queen-neon-bunny/"></div>

From Seoul to the Stars: The Journey of Indie Synth-Electro-K-Pop Queen Neon Bunny

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/live-building-turned-society-vertiginously-satirical-sci-fi-bae-myung-hoons-tower/"></div>Bae Myung-hoon&#8217;s Tower (타워) comprises six interlinked stories, which take place almost entirely within a single building inhabited by 500,000 people. To that setting I imagine Western readers reacting with the look of the stunned distaste I sometimes receive when, back in the United States, I describe the standard form of middle-class housing in Seoul: clusters of 10, 20, 30 buildings, rising to 20, 30, 40 stories each. That <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/living-vertical-life-seoul/">verticality</a> alone signals dystopia to many Americans, but to no few English as well — most notably J.G. Ballard, whose 1975 novel High-Rise dramatizes the swift and total breakdown of society that occurs in, and is seemingly caused by, a luxury apartment complex of the titular form. No such fate befalls Beanstalk, the 674-story tower imagined by Bae, though it does experience a few close calls, subject as it seemingly is to constant threat from within and without.
Beanstalk isn&#8217;t just a building but a sovereign nation unto itself, locked in an ongoing Oceania-and-Eastasia-style geopolitical conflict with the distant country of Cosmomafia. This perhaps reflects the interests of the Seoul National University international-relations scholar Bae was when he began to build a readership as a writer of fiction. But in just over 250 pages, he also describes or alludes to aspects of Beanstalk and life within it in a range wide enough to reflect active fascinations with structural engineering, urban development, terrorism and antiterrorism, geographic information systems, literature, military strategy, Machiavellian politics, and Buddhism. The state of nirvana is invoked several times, once as a fighter pilot downed in a vast desert feels death&#8217;s approach (little knowing that the Beanstalkians have banded together to comb through satellite photos, facilitating his rescue), and again when an Indian elephant plunges from a 321st-story window.
The elephant is called Amitabh, a name borrowed (as Bae revealed in a recent podcast appearance) from Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan. Show business bears more directly on the life a celebrity dog known as Film Actor P, another of Tower&#8216;s non-human characters, who not only figures into several of its stories but turns up again in the last of its appendices to give an &#8220;interview.&#8221; You may at this point suspect the book of an unconventional structure, either by the standards of novels or those of short-story collections. Nor is it formally homogenous, with one epistolary story breaking up the omniscient third-person voice and two of the appendices constituting excerpts of texts referred to in the foregoing narratives: a sociological study of one of Beanstalk&#8217;s floors and a myth-like tale of a polar bear (who eventually does manage to attain nirvana) ostensibly by &#8220;Writer K,&#8221; star of the second story.
Writer K once accepted a bribe that provided him with not just a house in Málaga but a house in Málaga and a robot through which to survey the property remotely from Beanstalk. We thus know that Beanstalk isn&#8217;t in Spain, though where in the world it does stand Bae never makes explicit. That the pilot crashes in China&#8217;s Taklamakan Desert suggests east Asia, and many elements of Tower&#8216;s stories invite comparisons to Bae&#8217;s homeland of South Korea. Here the sort of politico-cultural palm-greasing in which K gets involved is barely concealed, and the kind of disengaged nature-appreciation he cranks out when the political heat turns up constitutes a time-honored literary tradition. Amitabh is brought into Beanstalk as a unit of its riot police, in an effort to contain increasingly forceful protests in front of city hall — <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/protest-korean-style/">the like of which I witnessed</a> not long after coming to Seoul.
As in Seoul, some of Beanstalk&#8217;s unrest erupts in response to large-scale redevelopment: here neighborhoods have been emptied out and scraped away to make room for the aforementioned high-rise apartment complexes, whereas in Beanstalk it happens to floors or sections of floors. Beanstalk&#8217;s countless elevators are subject to the same kind of controversies that attend the operation, maintenance, and extension of the Seoul Metro, and the building&#8217;s spatial nature has also given rise its to its own abstract and tendentious ideological labels: the &#8220;verticalists&#8221; prioritize the machinery and capital needed to move people and things from one floor to another, while the &#8220;horizontalists&#8221; prioritize the labor and muscle needed to traverse the floors themselves. The former seem more represented on the affluent, more recently built upper floors, while the latter tend to occupy the humbler, older ones below — a somewhat predictable objective correlative of having and having not.
However high or low their status within the structure, all Beanstalkians appear to be better off than the people of the poorer unnamed country that surrounds them. After more than six decades into their building-turned-country&#8217;s existence, some have developed &#8220;terraphobia,&#8221; a fear and loathing of descending to the first floor, let alone stepping outside. (This condition strikes me as opposite to that which afflicts a writer friend of mine in Los Angeles, who eschews high-rise life because &#8220;humans were meant to live on the ground.&#8221;) Whether they hail from Beanstalk or the land that enclaves it, most of Tower&#8216;s characters have Korean-sounding names: Professor Jung, Doctor Song, Kim Minso, Choi Sinhak. Does this mountainous building stand, then, for greater Seoul, which with half the population of South Korea (as well as most of its important institutions) often does indeed feel like a city-state within the country?
Bae includes one human character from farther afield: Şehriban. a Muslim (and given her name, presumably Turkish) agent of Cosmomafia resident in Beanstalk under the professional cover of working as an interpreter. Despite having warmed to the Beanstalkians in her years among them, she doesn&#8217;t hesitate to carry out the Cosmomafian orders she receives one day: purchase a series of properties within the building pre-rigged with bombs during its construction, and prime those bombs to detonate at the appointed hour. The passages on Şehriban&#8217;s background and motivations read as if somehow hollowed out on the way to the book&#8217;s English version, which does at least include the self-justifying sentiments of her predecessors in this elaborate long-term operation: &#8220;Watching Beanstalk add floor after floor, they had naturally associated it with the tower of Babel. Look how massive it is. It&#8217;s got human vanity written all over it. It&#8217;ll be another Babel.&#8221;
As with the movie-star dog, references to Babel arise throughout the book. But is the apter comparison between Beanstalk&#8217;s condition and the immoral disunion that befalls the city of the Bible (Bae has described himself as a Christian, his narrative use of Buddhism notwithstanding), or between Beanstalk&#8217;s construction and that of the Tower of Babel, whose heavenward rise causes humanity so much trouble? The punishment of hubris has in any case proven a reliable theme for Korean stories, from novels to major motion pictures: take by Kim Ji-hoon&#8217;s The Tower (also originally 타워), a visual effects-laden Korean update of The Towering Inferno set in a fictional 120-story complex on the Han River. That building&#8217;s conflagration is set off when a helicopter crashes into it in a windstorm, having been hired to sprinkle snow outside the windows for the delight of rich tenants gathered at an exclusive Christmas party.
Certain of Bae&#8217;s characters, too, sense the most severe threat in wealth and the isolation it encourages. An Intelligence Bureau officer believes that, whatever Cosmomafia gets up to with its bombs, &#8220;Beanstalk was already under attack, an attack mounted by those who did not see Beanstalk as a place where people lived but simply as a real estate market&#8221; — a demographic as powerful as it is insatiable, one whose demands have visited developmental grotesqueries (resulting in the occasional genuine disaster) on Seoul and other world capitals. On a smaller scale, one appendix, an &#8220;excerpt from the introduction to A Study on Level 520,&#8221; illustrates the processes by which a neighborhood loses its informal social institutions, in this case a <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/coffee-life-korea/">coffee shop</a>, and thus ceases to be a neighborhood at all: &#8220;In just one year we had gone from being people of Level 520 to people of Beanstalk.&#8221;
Whatever such depredations affect the life of Seoul&#8217;s neighborhoods, they&#8217;ve had more than a decade to worsen since the book first came out. Originally published in 2009, it appeared in a new edition just last year, reaching the much larger readership Bae had cultivated in the meantime by prolifically mounting his own satirical social, political, and economic critiques within the parameters of science fiction. That genre hasn&#8217;t been abundantly served by Korean literature, much less by Korean literature in translation (though the effort on this book from translator <a href="https://sungryu.asuscomm.com/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://sungryu.asuscomm.com/', 'Sung Ryu');">Sung Ryu</a> and British press <a href="https://www.honfordstar.com/shop/tower-by-bae-myung-hoon" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.honfordstar.com/shop/tower-by-bae-myung-hoon', 'Honford Star');">Honford Star</a> may begin to change that). For this relative dearth I&#8217;ve often heard the same explanation given: South Koreans hardly need stories of high-tech dystopias when they already live in a real one. That reason may not be entirely plausible, but then neither is Beanstalk, and Tower certainly doesn&#8217;t suffer for it.
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Related Korea Blog posts:
<a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/living-vertical-life-seoul/">Living the Vertical Life in Seoul</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/blade-runner-2049-los-angeles-korean-future/">Blade Runner 2049 and Los Angeles’ Korean Future</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/seoul-next-great-cyberpunk-city/">Could Seoul Be the Next Great Cyberpunk City?</a>
<a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/ajossi-robot-korean-film-dramatizes-disaster/">An Ajeossi and His Robot (or, How Korean Film Dramatizes Disaster)</a>
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin&#8217;s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://blog.colinmarshall.org/', 'his web site');">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://twitter.com/colinmarshall', '@colinmarshall');">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist', 'Facebook');">Facebook</a>.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/live-building-turned-society-vertiginously-satirical-sci-fi-bae-myung-hoons-tower/"></div>

We Live in a Building-Turned-Society: The Vertiginously Satirical Sci-Fi of Bae Myung-Hoon&#8217;s Tower

We Live in a Building-Turned-Society: The Vertiginously Satirical Sci-Fi of Bae Myung-Hoon&#8217;s Tower

Lingo

Babel

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin's Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/">his web site</a>, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, or on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook</a>.

Colin Marshall

What Do They Know of English, Who Only English Know? On Gaston Dorren’s “Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages” and “Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages”

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Around the World

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

"Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors." — Simone Weil

Cultural Studies

London Review of Books: An Incomplete History

Something New: The “LRB” Turns 40

"Writing only leads to more writing." — Colette

Literary Criticism

How Words Make Things Happen

From the Age of Persuasion to the Age of Offense

Education

"You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." — Molly Ivins

Politics

The Useless French Language and Why We Learn It

Will We Ever Talk Pretty?: David Sedaris and the American Struggle with Foreign Languages

The Fall of Language in the Age of English

Forget English!

Down with the English Language!

Absolutely on Music

Music Meets Writing: On Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

"I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds." — Dizzy Gillespie

Music

Ways of Seeing Japan: Roland Barthes’s Tokyo, 50 Years Later

Ametora

How Japan Invented Los Angeles — and Reinvented American Style

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history." — George Bernard Shaw

History

The Inland Sea

In Search of the “Real” Japan

Dana Goodyear is a staff writer at&nbsp;The New Yorker&nbsp;and the author of two collections of poems, Honey and Junk and The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard. Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture, a work of nonfiction, came out in 2013. Her work has been nominated for a National Magazine Award, and she has twice won the James Beard Foundation Award for journalism. She lives in Venice, California.&nbsp;

Dana Goodyear

Bonnie McFarlane, is a Canadian-American stand-up comedian, writer, and co-host of the podcast My Wife Hates Me. Her memoir is called You're Better Than Me, published by ECCO/Anthony Bourdain Books in 2016.

Bonnie McFarlane

Andy Bowers, the creator and executive producer of Slate podcasts, is the co-founder and chief content officer of Panoply.

Andy Bowers

Seth Greenland’s first memoir, A Kingdom of Tender Colors, will be published in 2020 by Europa Editions. He is the author of five novels. His 1997 play Jungle Rot won the Kennedy Center/American Express Fund for New American Plays Award and the American Theater Critics Association Award. He was a writer-producer on the Emmy-nominated HBO series Big Love.

Seth Greenland

<h4>Tom Lutz is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His latest book is&nbsp;<a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Born-Slippy-Tom-Lutz/dp/1912248646/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=born+slippy&amp;qid=1574435254&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-1">Born Slippy: A Novel.</a></h4>
For more, go to <a href="https://www.tomlutzwriter.com/">tomlutzwriter.com</a>

&nbsp;

Tom Lutz

Laurie Winer is a longtime journalist who has been on staff at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. She is a founding editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.