Of Voice and Men: Kim Hoon Rewrites History as His Story

Kim Hoon's novel Song of the Sword opens as Naval Commander-in-Chief Yi Sun-sin, released after weeks of flogging by the royal prosecutors in the capital, arrives back at his post on the southern coast of the Chosŏn kingdom. It is spring of 1597, five years into Japan's campaign to take over the Korean peninsula and expand into the continent, and the air is drenched in the stench of corpses. Interrogations had not proven Yi's charges of contempt, but nevertheless Yi has received a sentencing, to serve in the war as a foot soldier, "stripped of rank and gear, wearing the white garb of a commoner."

We of course know, as twenty-first-century readers, how history unfolded. As Japanese aggression continued to escalate, Yi was quickly restored to his position and, with only twelve vessels under his command, succeeded in protecting Chosŏn, achieving a military triumph so crucial in Korean history that Yi's statue still stands guard today over Seoul's city center.

In recounting this celebrated story, however, Kim Hoon does not allow history to guide the narrative. Yi Sun-sin's first-person voice, the sole filter through which we experience the war, retains the same austere stance throughout, stripped not only of mythical heroism but also of the external trappings of status and obligation within the Neo-Confucian social order. It is a voice that seems capable of stepping outside of its medieval surroundings to acquire a modern sense of being.

This naked voice was what drew me to Kim Hoon's work, first as a reader, then as translator. It was a male voice that I, as a woman, had rarely encountered, not only in real-life contemporary Korea but also in literature. Much of modern Korean fiction has been told from the point of view of men, of course, and to me, their voice seemed bound and defined by society. Even when a story or a novel deeply moved me, I did not quite feel that the male narrator or protagonist had spoken to me or for me: Yŏng-su, the eldest son in Cho Se-hui's The Dwarf, delivered to me the heartbreaking story of his working-class family yet I never learned of his personal dreams or longing; the narrator of Kim Sŭng-ok's "Journey to Mujin" laid open to me his existential pain as a pharmaceutical executive working under his father-in-law, but as the title suggests, the voice itself is shrouded in fog; the men in Hwang Sok-yong's fiction were verbally agile and astute when it came to social injustice and absurdities, but far less so about their personal inner truths.

But Kim's Yi Sun-sin somehow spoke to me. In telling his story of a year and a half spent at sea defending the kingdom of Chosŏn against the invading Japanese, he spoke not of loyalty or patriotism but of what he had or did not have to feed his soldiers and how foreign his enemies were to his eyes and ears. Yi's voice was strong yet vulnerable, reticent yet frank, probing yet matter-of-fact, stoic yet pedestrian, specifically medieval yet modern.

At the time of the novel's publication in 2001, I had been away from Korea for five years, during which time I had lost my brother less than a year after the passing of my father, given birth to my son, and separated from my husband. This upheaval in my male relations was one of the reasons I began seeking my own voice in English and pondering the possibility that I had found my adoptive mother tongue, if there was such a thing. This new linguistic kinship seemed like the only way for me to break free from the grief and guilt related to my previous life in my homeland, with its history as a patriarchal stronghold, a breeding ground for military dictatorships.

So how unlikely it was that the voice that I would choose to lend my English to belonged to a naval hero clad in armor, his sword at his side, who, in my mind at the time was a mere statue erected by a fascist president, a totem for nationalism.

I sat alone all day. After learning of Myŏn's death, the commanders and officers stayed out of my sight. In the next room, Assistant Commander Kim Su-ch'ŏl rustled through the pages of a report and outside, a guardsman stood by the stone terrace with a spear in his hand. In the evening, I left my room and walked out to the salt field on the estuary shore. I fought off the offer from the assistant commander and the officer on duty to accompany me and went alone. Old salt storage sheds stood soaking in the sunset. I entered one of the sheds. I laid myself face-down on a straw mat and finally wept, hushed and low. The enemies did not come today.

In this passage, from a chapter in Song of the Sword that follows those excerpted in these pages, Yi recollects the day that he receives word of his son's death at the hands of Japanese soldiers seeking revenge for their defeated general. The way the narrative voice maintains such taut control while gradually exposing emotion creates an unexpected intimacy, to great effect. The unadorned sentences form a dense mass of a paragraph, each sentence shifting into the next with what Kim Hoon himself calls "high-voltage" tension. Kim credits Yi Sun-sin himself for this voice, which, as he explains in his essay "Recollections," he encountered in Wartime Journal, Yi's personal account of the seven-year war. Kim was an English literature major in college at the time, intensely drawn to the Romantic poets, yet he found Yi's writing more electrifying. "They were sentences that only a soldier could write," Kim observes, "focused on a precise presentation of facts, devoid of rhetoric or modifiers." Yi left nothing out; was never redundant. Kim found these 16th-century sentences, written in Chinese characters, and the man behind them, completely stunning.

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Kim was born in 1948, during that narrow niche between Korea's liberation from Japanese occupation and the breakout of the Korean War. His father, Kim Kwang-ju, was a writer of martial-arts novels who was perennially absent from family life until he became bedridden with cancer, during which time he would dictate entire books to his teenage son. Kim, the father, would point out where a comma was needed and where a new paragraph should begin. These sessions perhaps served as Kim Hoon's first intensive training in writing.

But it would take Kim three decades to finally summon, as inspiration for his first novel, the life and writings of Yi Sunsin. Unable to afford tuition after his father's death, Kim had been compelled to drop out of college and found work writing for a newspaper. Through the 1970s and 1980s, during which time Kim raised a family and made a name for himself as a literary critic, Korea was in political turmoil as one dictator was replaced by yet another military regime. For reporters, this meant media guidelines and censorship. A presidential assassination, a coup, a massacre—in the face of such seismic events in the real world, the press was controlled and silenced. A "precise presentation of facts" was an unattainable luxury, especially for journalists like Kim who had chosen employment over prison. Kim has written of his experience delivering daily proofs to military censors, returning with chunks cut out from the pages, and filling them with sentences that were devoid of context and meaning, and of doing this day after day so that the paper could go to press.

By the time Kim published Song of the Sword in 2001 at age fifty-three, Korea had witnessed its third democratically elected president win the Nobel Peace Prize for seeking reconciliation with North Korea. Its economy, however, had yet to recover from the devastating financial crisis of 1997, which had left many lives damaged and defeated. South Koreans had believed that the political oppression they endured under military dictatorships was the price they paid for the economic growth they had attained—the "Miracle on the Han"—but now a new millennium had arrived amidst a financial ruin that nobody had seen coming.

It was against this post-crisis, post-ideological backdrop that Kim Hoon's first novel was published and, to everyone's surprise, went on to sell 1.3 million copies nationwide. Even before the readers encountered Admiral Yi on the pages, the opening lines of Kim's prologue alone struck a deep chord with all those who had suffered loss and indignity throughout Korea's tumultuous century.

In fall of 2000, once again I returned to the remote wilds. I bid farewell to the world of the righteous. I was unable to affirm any of the values that have been upheld in my time. My men, are you sustaining on the power of hope? I have no hope or faith to share with you. Thus you and I shall forever remain as the other, in mutual blessing.

The tragic tone of this nihilistic, seemingly esoteric declaration was what resonated in the public psyche at the time, allowing the readers to immediately identify with Kim Hoon and also the protagonist Yi Sun-sin as dignified, isolated everymen who face attacks, both real and imagined, from enemies both external and internal.

The story that Kim delivered was that of a simple man of duty who is betrayed, tortured, shamed, then faced with the implausible, seemingly impossible, mission of defending an entire kingdom with twelve vessels. He triumphs but dies while in combat with the retreating enemy forces, his last words a command to his officer not to speak of his death while the battle continues.

Over the course of seven novels that followed Song of the Sword, Yi Sun-sin's narrative voice evolved into Kim's own authorial voice, utterly recognizable and singularly stylistic.

Three of those seven books are based on historical characters and events, ranging from court musician Urŭk of sixth-century Kaya (Song of Strings) to a forty-seven-day standoff between the Chosŏn king and the invading Qing Chinese forces in 1637 (Fortress on Mt. Namhan) and the brutal persecution of Catholics in nineteenth-century Korea (Black Island). His four other novels, although set in contemporary times, ironically do not feel quite as vivid, or as lived-in, as the ones inspired by events that took place hundreds of years ago; none of them has garnered the acclaim or the readership that Kim's historical novels have.

Song of Strings, Fortress on Mt. Namhan, and Black Island are all polyphonic third-person narratives, a clear departure from the intensely interior voice of Song of the Sword, widening the scope of the storytelling to make room for more plot, more texture, and more perspectives.

Among them, Black Island, also excerpted here, is the story of Chŏng Yak-chŏn, a reform-minded scholar in late Chosŏn who discovers a new way of looking at this world through Catholicism, at a time when following the religion, deemed heretical by the royal court, could cost one's life. Much like Yi Sun-sin, Chŏng possesses a practical mind, but as a scholar: His duty is to inquire and to seek answers, which pushes him toward a Western worldview, but upon arrest, he chooses life over faith, even as many other believers, including Chŏng's own brother, to whom Chŏng himself had introduced the faith, become martyrs. Throughout 19th-century Chosŏn, over 10,000 Catholics lost their lives on charges of heresy.

The novel traces Chŏng as he is banished for life to the small remote island of Hŭksan, where he gradually rebuilds his life. Haunted by the memories of those who have been sacrificed, he has been left with a spiritual vacuum. But on this island of exile, he also discovers a world that he had never before encountered.

Ch'ang-dae opened up for Chŏng Yak-chŏn the world of fish and crabs and birds. At the break of dawn, as a full moon set, Yak-chŏn stepped outside by the water and gazed down at the crabs. They moved around in packs, their shimmer the pattern of the waves. Yak-chŏn did not dare approach the world of the crabs. You can never return, there is nowhere you can return to, the crabs were telling him.

Out on this island on the outermost edge of a secluded kingdom, banished from the only life he had known, Chŏng comes face to face with myriad lives and voices and perspectives that make up the diversity of the universe. It is befitting that the narrative is delivered not only from Chŏng's point of view but from a range of multiple characters, from a young devout on the run, to the power-thirsty Queen Dowager, and a slave horseman torn between his faith and his own freedom, presenting a panoramic polyphony that feels cinematic and contemporary.

Kim Hoon's biggest contribution to Korean literature, in my view, is that he made storytelling aesthetically exciting.

Kim's novels arrived in the new millennium after a decade of fiction writing in Korea that focused on individual urban lives dissociated from family, nationality, and history. Fiction had suddenly became a cool, youthful genre, no longer the territory of traditional realism that had dominated the country's postwar novels for the second half of the twentieth century. Against this backdrop, a middle-aged former journalist's novel about Admiral Yi Sun-sin was as unexpected and unfashionable as one could get, but Kim quickly came to be acknowledged as a school of his own. His novels revived character-driven storytelling but were also inventive in form, whereas under the reign of realism, "style" was considered frivolous. The judges who awarded Kim with the Dongin Literature Prize in 2002 famously referred to him as "a blessing that has struck the literary scene like a bolt of lightning."

While Kim Hoon's style has been widely admired and copied, his novels have been denounced by some critics as ahistorical, even anti-historical, for presenting a diluted and distilled version of history and using it merely as a backdrop for the interior narrative of the individual.

In his book, Deleuze, Kafka, and Kim Hoon, Jang Sok-ju defines Song of the Sword as a confessional narrative of how the state infiltrates and oppresses the individual and argues that Kim's Yi Sun-sin is "not a historical hero but merely a symbol of the nomadic man, deterritorialized from central power."

But how is Kim Hoon's intent to rewrite historical events as stories of individual human experience anti-historical, I wonder, unless we believe in validating only History with a capital H? Kim's critics seem to still possess great loyalty to realism, which has long been held up as the doctrine for narrating Korean lives, so deeply affected by politics for so long.

My own reading of Kim's historical novels is that they are allegories for the Korean experience. What Kim seems most intent on is to tell the story of individuals and their relationship with the world that they find themselves in but do not feel they belong to or fit in. The world according to Kim Hoon—be it the idealistic yet corruptible Neo-Confucian social order of Chosŏn, or the kingdom of Kaya that could not remain in union despite its might and wealth, or Catholicism, with its suspended promises of advanced civilization and redemption—is an imperfect shelter that asks from its people for more than it gives. It is no coincidence that both Song of the Sword and Black Island open with a recounting of tortures that have been ordered by the king. No social system or belief can protect the individual, not the monarchy, the patriarchy, not even monotheism. As the narratological creator, Kim Hoon is equally incapable of saving his characters. What he does is give voice to them. This allows Yi Sun-sin, Chŏng Yak-chŏn, and other figures from the public realm of history, both the victorious and the defeated, the major and the minor, to reveal their personal interiors and validate themselves as individual beings. To lend voice might be all that a writer can do to help his characters confront and come to terms with the limitations of their beautiful, brutal world. Kim Hoon's critics—and admirers—label this writerly attitude as nihilist, but I am sure I know of a more realistic way of looking at the human condition.

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In his short fiction, Kim Hoon has made bolder attempts in lending his voice to contemporary characters. His collection, Rivers and Mountains Without End, brings together a range of ordinary people with one common obstacle to confront: mortality.

The title story, included in this issue, is narrated by a divorced clothing industry executive nearing retirement who, upon being diagnosed with late-stage cancer, sets out to order his assets and relations, as methodically as one would tend to a job. The plot is spare but at the same time layered, albeit monotonously, like the traditional ink painting of a seemingly infinite landscape referred to in the title.

The other stories all center on characters past their prime, not only in age but also in drive and ambition, standing witness to what life has to offer—"Buddha's disciples" is the term that critic Shin Su-jeong gave the resigned yet resilient adults in these narratives, which, compared to Kim's novels, are less voice driven and more philosophical in nature.

One work that stands out from this collection is "Sister at Menopause." Told from the first-person perspective of a middle-aged woman, it is a rare exploration by Kim into the psyche of the other sex. If fiction writing is about engaging with and understanding "the other," this story would be Kim's extreme attempt as a male writer, not only writing from a female point of view but about the bond shared by women and about womanhood coming to an end. It is a difficult endeavor, and not an altogether successful one, prompting questions that were previously raised with regard to the depiction of his female characters, which often involve bodily smells and urinating. Is Kim trying to give voice to his female characters, or is he simply objectifying them? Are his near-fetishistic depictions necessary or gratuitous to his narrative aesthetics?

As a translator, one of the instances that I found uncomfortable is the chapter in Song of the Sword (included in the excerpt that follows here) involving the courtesan Yŏ-jin, who comes and offers herself to Yi Sun-sin. The character was taken directly from Admiral Yi's journals, which mention a visit by a woman of this name, but Kim's account is a fictional one, which, to the contemporary reader, does far less to achieve verisimilitude about medieval life than clumsily resort to the cliché of the "hooker with a heart of gold." It is ironic that, in his attempt to overcome his limitations, Kim has confirmed them.

So perhaps it was inevitable that Kim, at the height of the "MeToo" exposés in Korea, was attacked for writing in one of his novels about a father's observations of his infant daughter's genitalia. In the end, this incident seemed less about Kim's pornographic or voyeuristic intents and more about how readers have come to identify Kim's authorial voice as representative of Korean maleness.

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To translate is to carry an armful of text across the deep, murky water that flows between two languages and, once on the other shore, caress the drenched text back to life, word by word, even if it now barely looks or sounds the way it did before the crossing. The more the translator appreciates her load, the bigger the risk, since there is more to lose.

My own appreciation of Kim Hoon's writing coincided with my own personal reckoning as I headed back to Korea. What had I left behind and what had been lost? What awaited me that I feared, or longed for? As a woman and a single mother, I feared that returning home would mean re-submitting myself to a patriarchal order under very different circumstances. What had remained of my paternal ties had been dissolved or severed. Had I been liberated … or left out in the cold?

It was while pondering these questions that I discovered the distinctively male voice in Kim Hoon's work. I was captivated. Looking back, perhaps I was nurturing a fantasy that this stoic voice awaited me, this male voice that remained dignified in the face of betrayal and banishment; that spoke outside of his public identity to articulate how he experienced the universe as an individual; that could reveal the vulnerable benevolence that lay beneath the hard reticence.

The past I had left behind was a history of defeat and loss, both personal and collective, both difficult to tell. The trauma of history could not be erased, but when told in this fantasy male voice perhaps it could be rendered valid, speakable. Perhaps that would be a reconciliation or sorts. While history itself cannot be changed, we can reconstruct the most difficult experiences through language, create beauty out of history through language. And this was another way that Kim Hoon helped my return home, by reminding me of the beauty of the Korean language and letters, which I had also left behind.

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The last piece of writing by Kim Hoon featured in this issue is the essay, "As I Boil Ramyŏn," a perfect coda to our survey of his oeuvre. The essay is perhaps the form where Kim, a long-time journalist, is able to show off his prose with greatest ease and panache, sometimes even with a touch of humor.

It was with his collection of travel essays, Bicycle Journeys, that Kim established his name as a bestselling writer before turning to novels. Many pieces in the book served as field notes for his fiction and now make interesting companion reading. Kim's attentive gaze can create a sense of nostalgic pathos even for all the places where one has never stepped foot, one of which for me is the outhouse at the temple Sŏnam-sa in Sunchŏn. In praise of this nature-friendly facility, Kim weaves a philosophical, often funny, meditation on bowel movements, ending with the line: "My beloved, my forlorn days, in our next life, let us meet again at the outhouse of Sŏnam-sa."

"As I Boil Ramyŏn" is an ode to the most banal and ubiquitous Korean dish, a bowl of instant noodles. Keenly observed and panoramic in breadth, the piece sheds light on Korea's postwar history through ramyŏn, at once an enticing product of industrialization; a sad, impoverished, solitary meal; and the ultimate universal comfort food.

After all, home is where history stares you in the face, even from a quick bowl of factory-made noodles. And this is where we return. Time and again.