Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction (review)

BOOK REVIEWS213 Korean archaeology. To me, the author seems to have addressed the issues in Korean archaeology too lightly and perhaps even naively, being limited by too narrow a range of sources. The problems of this volume cannot likely be solved by merely incorporating additional facts in a new edition, since it appears to have originated from the author's failure to appreciate the dynamic situation of archaeological activities in Korea. Seonbok Yi Seoul National University Land ofExile: Contemporary Korean Fiction, translated and edited by Marshall R. Pihl and Bruce & Ju-Chan Fulton. New York: M. E. Sharpe/UNESCO, 1993. UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. 285 pp. $14.95, paper. The publication of a book such as this—fine stories, thoughtfully selected and well translated—should be an occasion for unmitigated pleasure. The selections represent some of the most accomplished Korean writers from the second half of this century, and the quality of the translations is uniformly outstanding , both in terms of their faithfulness to the original texts and their effectiveness as stories in English. The latter point will not be surprising to readers who will recognize in Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton the translating team who recently won a prestigious translation prize in Korea, and in Marshall Pihl, a translator and scholar known for his outstanding work in a broad range of translations from modern and premodern Korean prose. The stories themselves, drawn from a major anthology of post-Liberation Korean literature assembled by Professor Kwön Youngmin of Seoul National University, range across a variety of styles and subjects, from the immediate post-Liberation period piece by Ch'ae Manshik, "The Wife and Children"; to the strangely articulated story of the prolonged encounter between a mountain recluse and a band of guerrilla soldiers, "Mountains" by Hwang Sunwon, the master of the short story form; to the complex and subtle study of old age in O Chönghüi's "The Bronze Mirror." Im Ch'öru's "A Shared Journey," to cite one further example, is a carefully edged reflection on the Kwangju incident of 1980, when Korean military troops were used to subdue an urban uprising and killed hundreds if not thousands of its citizens. The Kwangju incident is clearly a subject having powerful political and human overtones, and the writing of the story, its original publication in 1984, and its inclusion in the present volume are a measure of determination on the author's and publisher's part, and of political change in South Korea as well. Given this story's inclusion in the anthology, which may be taken as a measure 214KOREAN STUDIES, VOL. 19 of some political awareness, the pervading motif of violence against women that runs through so many of the stories is all the more disturbing. The pervasiveness of the motif is particularly troubling because the editors seem not to have noticed it, even though it extends from the title story of the collection into the more distant reaches of stories less directly engaged with the subject of war. At the very center of the title story is an image and an action of grotesque repulsiveness. The protagonist, a soldier in the North Korean army, returns to his quarters and discovers his wife in bed with the commander of his People's Army unit. He kills the commander with a blow to the head and a burst from the man's submachine gun. The woman, meanwhile, tries to escape. In the momentjust passed, she had steadied herself and was crawling on all fours toward the door. His wife's big buttocks loomed before him. The parts exposed between them seemed, like those of a pig, filthy and repulsive. Mansök aimed at the spot and pulled the trigger. Another staccato burst. It would be one thing to include such a piece of bestial misogyny in a collection meant to expose such tendencies, but the overall purpose and design of this book seems to have been to present the best and most representative examples of contemporary Korean fiction, a goal evidently endorsed by the Korean National Commission for UNESCO, which has added the book to its Representative Works series. Since the book was not intended...