Waxen Wings: The Acta Koreana Anthology of Short Fiction from Korea ed. by Bruce Fulton (review)

This anthology offers a collection of Korean short stories in English translation, broadly ranging in themes and time of composition from the early twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. A short introduction guides the reader through the major phases of development of the Korean short story and each story, in turn, comes with the translator's note—a short reference to the writer's life and work relevant to the selected piece. As the introduction suggests, the anthology's title reflects the editor's intent to promote Korea's fiction in its ascent on the world literary stage, following in the wake of the Korean wave that conquered global markets for visual and music culture.

The collection includes translations of nine stories that come from very different authors and have very different historical backgrounds. What could be seen as a unifying theme, if any, is the exploration of the spectrum of feelings of disengagement, disenchantment and loss, and the search for new home and meaning; what matters is not so much that these problems are resolved but that they are openly broached. In this manner, these works provide snapshots of the structures of feeling that defined people's experiences during Korea's most intense historical moments—the colonial era, the immediate aftermath of liberation, the years that followed the Korean War, the quickly-paced economic growth of the 1970s, and, finally, the 1990s and early 2000s—the decades of aggravated urban solitude.

Here are a few strands of meaning that help to situate this collection. The rupture between the social and economical environment and one's inner being is explored very differently by Yi Hyosŏk in his short story "In the Mountains" (1930s) and in Kim Chunghyŏk's "The Glass Shield" (2006). If Yi's protagonist, a farmhand at a local village, finds nature to be the space of ultimate respite and retreat, Kim's story centers on two main protagonists who turn job interviews into carnivalesque performances that place under ironic scrutiny the flows of a disciplined workforce in modern capitalist society.

An attempt to disarticulate the coherence of the social and moral categories can be seen in Ch'ae Mansik's story "Constable Maeng" (1946), "We Teach Shame" (1974) by Pak Wansŏ, and "Prison of the Heart" (1990) written by Kim Wŏnil. Addressing very different historical moments—the immediate post-liberation milieu, the Korean War and the 1960 April Revolution, respectively— each story probes into the boundaries and lines of cohesion between multiple roles and identities that an individual assumes and negotiates at complex moments. That multiple identities achieve at best ambiguous, and sometimes utterly tragic, consequences is shown through the lives of a police constable with a questionable understanding of his own moral stance before and after liberation, in the mid-life search for the self by a woman whose desire to survive the Korean War and the trying postwar years had suspended the question of her inner authenticity, and finally in the testimony of a middle-class intellectual who, witnessing the demise of his own brother from a terminal illness, recalls the purity of the passion that drove the minds and bodies of students during the April Revolution, only to be dissolved in the mundane comforts of a newly-improved lifestyle.

The theme of the inarticulable nature of the self, of fissuring, and emptying out is explored in the four following works: "Weaver Woman" (1970) by O Chŏnghŭi, "The Pager" (1996) by Kim Yŏngha, "Waxen Wings" (1999) by Ha Sŏngnan and P'yŏn Hyeyŏng's "Corpses" (2004). A crippling, inexplicable absence in the protagonists' lives prohibits each of them from attaining any coherent self-identification. Such is the case of the barren woman protagonist in O's short story, who is an impossible feminine body, illegible according to the traditional gendered vocabulary. The failed gymnast in Ha...