A poet reflects on the lives of the different generations of women around her as she contemplates her own divorce from a socially-engaged photographer; her feelings are complicated by the ethics of public/private, art/life divisions, as well as the country’s contemporary history. The story reveals the raw complexity of gender dynamics in a society still … [Read More]
Publisher / Imprint: Yeoyu (Strangers Press)
Demons
Set in a small rural village, seemingly everyday events take on a macabre meaning. We follow Kim Miyoung, a relatively new villager and the local primary school teacher, as she is slowly overcome by anxiety, with her daughter at the vulnerable young age of three, a difficult group of schoolboys under her wing and her … [Read More]
Old Wrestler
A retired wrestler struggles with amnesia and anxiety after he is invited to return to his home town for an event. Back in once-familiar surroundings, he wrestles to make sense of things as he is confronted by faces, scenes and smells recalled from a celebrated past. [Read More]
Five Preludes and a Fugue
A young woman delves into the circumstances of her mother’s death ahead of her own marriage, interrogating a woman who witnessed her mother’s death and would later come to play a crucial role in her life. An exploration of the human (in)capacity for (self-)deception and knowledge, the story offers a nuanced portrait of contemporary (Korean) … [Read More]
Left’s Right, Right’s Left
The story takes place on a stairwell, all in about a minute’s time, while the narrator’s partner seizes her by the hair. The narrator had gotten caught, after running out of the apartment to try to escape assault. While she tries desperately to avoid falling down the stairs, she has a series of flashbacks about … [Read More]
Europa
Inah has been having nightmares. Nightmares of fish bones, fractals, and a marriage that ended under some unnamed violence. Walking the night streets with a man she has known for years, whose feelings for her are bound up with his intense longing to live as a woman, the fragile bond of their relationship threatens to … [Read More]
Kong’s Garden (Yeoyu)
Imagine Cormac McCarthy writing about the boring lives of clerks and you’ll anticipate something of the dystopic flavour of this gripping but socially bleak short story from Hwang. In a Korean world in which education has historically meant everything, the narrator realizes both that this is not true (through her partner in an essentially loveless … [Read More]
Milena, Milena, Ecstatic
Yun’s meticulously ordered life of reading books and drinking coffee receives a jolt when a mysterious cultural foundation unexpectedly agrees to fund his film proposal: a blend of fiction and documentary, a tone-poem constructed around a lyrical narrative, set around Scythian graves in the High Altai mountains. Desperate to be taken on as his assistant, … [Read More]