The Descendants of Cain, and: The Rainy Spell and Other Korean Stories (review)

Hwang Sun-won is modern Korea’s most accomplished writer of short fiction. A good assortment of his stories is available in English translation, but his novels have fared less well. Three have been translated—Trees on the Cliff, The Moving Castle, and Sunlight, Moonlight—but all the translations were published in Korea, none was marketed overseas, and none is a first-rate translation. The Descendants of Cain is the first translation of a Hwang novel to be widely available in the English-speaking world.

The Descendants of Cain is one of the few fictionalized accounts, and certainly the best known in Korea, of one of the more tumultuous events in modern Korean history: the land reform begun in 1946 in the Soviet-occupied northern sector of the peninsula. Hwang and his family were directly affected by the upheaval, fleeing their ancestral home for present-day South Korea. The book’s title refers to the blood spilled between Koreans during the land reform and suggests the internecine conflict that would erupt in the civil war of 1950 to 1953.

The Descendants of Cain vividly describes how the land reformers manipulated traditional class divisions in Korean society to mobilize peasants against landowners. Land reform posed hard choices for the landless tenants. Should they remain loyal to landlords who, though sometimes oppressive, offered them lifetime security? Or should they accept land of their own and with it the challenge to survive without the social safety network that a kind landlord could offer? In North Korea in 1946, this collision between self-interest and mutual benefit was a matter of life and death for some peasants. In one ominous scene in Hwang’s novel, peasants assembled by the reformers raise glinting sickle and axe blades to signify their agreement to brand various landlords as reactionaries.

The Descendants of Cain is also significant for its portrayal of the two protagonists, Pak Hun and Ojaknyo (properly “Ojangnyo”—the rendering of Korean names in this translation and The Rainy Spell and Other Korean Stories frequently deviates from the standard romanization system). Hun is the scion of a landed family, and Ojaknyo is the daughter of the steward of the Pak family’s land. Hun is a delicate, indecisive man. Ojaknyo, by contrast, has a visceral vitality, but in combination with the modesty and reticence traditionally valued in Korean women. Duality is a strong element in Hwang’s worldview, and he does not allow his characters to become stereotyped. Therefore, it does not strain credulity when, at the very end of the novel, Hun, a passive target thus far, burns the deeds to his land and sets out in search of blood. In this and other novels and stories, Hwang creates such pairings as Hun and Ojaknyo to implicitly question traditional Korean gender-role expectations and to comment on the weakened state of the fatherland. During Hwang’s lifetime, the Korean nation has faced continual challenges to its autonomy: colonization by the Japanese from 1910 (five years before Hwang was born) to 1945, military occupation by the Soviets and the Americans, a brutal civil war, and a succession of political and military strongmen. More recently, the economic restructuring imposed on South Korea by the International Monetary Fund in December 1997 not only shattered the illusion of the country’s “economic miracle,” but made South Koreans question their nation’s autonomy.

Despite these political and gender-role dynamics, Hwang’s novel at times reads like a collection of short stories linked by common characters and a common theme. Hwang is a superb storyteller, but some readers may be accustomed to novels with a firmer structure. I would urge such readers to try Hwang’s story collections Shadows of a Sound, The Book of Masks, and The...