Author: Jang Ryu-jin
Translated by: Sunnie Chae
Publisher: Asia Publishers, 2020
Original title: 도쿄의 마야
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As this is an Asia Publishers title, it’s pretty difficult to obtain outside of Korea.
Text from the listing on the Kyobo website, fed through the Papago translation engine:
Nothing. Just grow into Maya.
In July 2020, Jang Ryu-jin’s “Maya in Tokyo” was published as the 27th installment of K-fiction.
Jang Ryu-jin’s new short novel, “The Maya of Tokyo,” consists of the story of “Me” and “Gyeonggu-hyung,” a Korean-Japanese. “I” plans to travel to Tokyo with his wife on the birthday of his first wife since marriage, where he meets his close college friend, “Kyung-gu,” his wife and “Maya.” Overcoming the points of “misunderstanding” and “understanding,” which still lie between “I” and “Pyeonggu-hyung,” readers will see a new realization through the ending.
Critic Kim Ji-yoon explains, “The only one who can interpret and edit a person’s identity is himself,” explaining “Tokyo’s Maya.” As Derida said, it is expressed through Maya, a young baby who cannot say anything in “Maya, Tokyo,” a symbolic existence that is concentrated on the possibility of continued hospitality without asking for identification and asking for compensation.