This Won't Do
“This won’t do.”
I listened to Kim Jinhee talk while eating meat.
I had handed her the rough draft about forty minutes earlier. Since the revisions weren’t finished, I asked her to look only at the overall grain of the piece, and she had agreed. Now, over the meal, she was explaining her verdict, and the verdict was no.
Kim Jinhee pressed her fingers to her temple and said, “Novelist Seo Yuja… are you by any chance an anti-warist?”
“I’m not really any kind of -ist yet.”
“Then that makes it even more impossible to publish.”
Anti-warist. Yes, the novel was certainly opposed to war. It had come from the simple question of whether it was even acceptable for a human being to kill another human being, and from the conviction that it was not. I still thought it was rather good. Novelist Jeong Yuru had said she liked it too. But Kim Jinhee…
“No. The writing itself has collapsed.”
I furrowed my brow and turned a piece of meat on the grill. Lunch today was just the two of us. Kim Jinhee had insisted we eat separately from Lee Hanhyuk and Novelist Jeong Yuru—insisted we had to. I still didn’t know why. At least it meant I got to eat meat. Jeong Yuru was vegan; if she had joined us, we never would have come to a place like this.
Eating meat at lunch meant the smell would cling to your clothes and you would get looks back at the office, but we were clearly going to return later than the lunch hour anyway. Maybe Kim Jinhee was the kind of salaried free-loader who simply did not care whose eyes were on her.
Anyway, we kept talking about the novel while the meat cooked. And the longer the conversation went on, the clearer it became that something really was wrong.
“The novel opens by weighing the life of an innocent child against a thousand other lives, and before you even introduce Yuhanjin you write, ‘This is a battlefield, and a choice must be made,’ don’t you?”
“Yes… that’s right…?”
“You cannot escape the choice. Your post is that of a commander. You even went out of your way to write the word for ‘post’ in Chinese characters….”
Every thought showed on Kim Jinhee’s face. Right now the expression was heavy with regret. I knew that look. It was the look professors wore when they could see you were capable of more but found it hard to give the advice that would get you there.
Art was the realm where subjectivity ruled most completely. There was no single right answer; good and bad were for each person to judge, and you could always walk your own path and overturn the verdicts of others. That was exactly why advice was so difficult.
“It’s fine. Please say it.”
“…You write that a choice must be made, and then Yuhanjin ends up making no choice at all. He just resents everything.”
“…Haa….”
Yes. I had left out the most important thing. This was not a novel I had written because I was an anti-warist. I had written it from the belief that you cannot put one life and a thousand lives on a scale. And yet I had also believed that a commander must do exactly that, and I had written from that belief too. So what had my novel actually become? It simply followed orders from above and, at the end, only cursed the person who had given the orders. It only shifted responsibility.
“You can’t do that… The theme has swallowed the novel whole. If you publish it like this, it won’t be shelved as a novel—it’ll be filed under political columns….”
“….”
Almost all the cooked meat had ended up on my plate. Not a single burnt bit was visible. I had watched Kim Jinhee carefully snip away every charred edge with scissors. She was meticulous.
I had not slept last night. My eyes must have been bloodshot. Sleep would have been better. Maybe success had gone to my head too quickly. Debuting with the first novel I wrote after becoming Seo Yuja, signing with a quarterly magazine for the next one, then having heavyweights actually read the one after that—I had grown arrogant and lost all sense of my place.
“I’ll… rewrite it. Completely….”
“All right. I’ll wait and trust you.”
Editor Kim Jinhee handed me a tissue. I had made a pathetic spectacle of myself, cheeks wet.
Then a sudden question surfaced.
“But why did Novelist Jeong Yuru say she liked it?”
“Ah… that….”
Kim Jinhee’s face said she had just put her finger on something. She chose her next words with extreme care.
“Novelist Jeong Yuru is vegan, right? So probably….”
“Ah.”
I should have written that myself. Of course there had been a reason she said what she said. The tears dried up at once.
Having eaten expensive meat and everything, it was finally time to write a real novel. After talking with Editor Kim Jinhee I cut the unnecessary parts without mercy. More precisely, I deleted three-quarters of the manuscript—seventy-four percent of the text, to be exact—and started over from scratch.
Novelist Jeong Yuru must have finished eating with Lee Hanhyuk and gone home. I wrote in the silence, savoring it. But this time I did not write carelessly. I typed slowly on the laptop. Whenever a snag appeared in my thinking I refused to force the words; I opened a notebook instead and sat with the problem for a long time.
When the story had begun to take shape, someone knocked on the door of the workroom. I looked up to find Lee Hanhyuk and Editor Kim Jinhee.
“We’re heading out. You’re coming with us, right?”
“Ah… is it already that late?”
“Shall I treat you to dinner?”
Lee Hanhyuk pulled out his card as he spoke. I considered just going home to eat, then decided I wanted to talk with Editor Kim Jinhee a little longer and accepted. As we gathered our things and left, I mentioned that I had already eaten meat for lunch. Lee Hanhyuk looked disappointed.
“I was craving pork and soju….”
“We have Novelist Yuja with us, so alcohol’s out of the question.”
“Is that so….”
Despite those words, we ended up at a street stall for dinner. With a little alcohol on the side. For a moment I thought I might naturally be offered a drink too, but of course that was not the case. At the stall I happily picked at tteokbokki and sundae. Becoming a woman had made this kind of food taste even better than before—hormones, maybe, or the fact that my taste buds had recovered after not taking a single drag of the cigarettes I used to smoke as a man.
Editor Kim Jinhee speared a piece of sundae with a look of mild surprise.
“I didn’t know the department head liked places like this….”
“What else is a publishing department head supposed to like, then?”
Lee Hanhyuk poured soju as he answered. I wanted a glass myself, but I deliberately did not. It was fortunate I had forgotten the taste of alcohol; if I started with one glass I would want to keep going without end.
Today seemed to be revealing new sides of Editor Kim Jinhee. First of all, she was even more meticulous than I had thought. When I first saw how neat she was I had assumed she would be careful, but then her every thought showed on her face and I decided she was less meticulous than she looked. I had been wrong. She was extremely meticulous—the kind of person who snipped away every tiny burnt edge of meat. She read novels the same way.
Lee Hanhyuk turned out to be more easygoing than expected. I had seen him wear a necktie to work exactly once; after that he always left the top button of his shirt undone, which made him look like a man who took everything lightly. A bit of a free spirit, you could say.
“Ahh… I’m getting drunk….”
…He was supposed to drive me home. Come to think of it, he had never actually said that. I had simply taken it for granted. Lately I had always ridden to Manin’s Creation in his car.
Lee Hanhyuk looked straight at me.
“Yuja-yang, how about a glass?”
“Department Head, you know you’ve crossed a line this time, right?”
“I… know.”
Wow. So that was what anger looked like on a face that showed every thought. She was smiling, and yet it was absolutely not a smile. I felt something cold rise behind me. …I just kept picking at the tteokbokki.
“This place holds my years. From staffer to assistant manager to manager, I’d come here for a glass of soju and then go home….”
“That must have been nice.”
“It wasn’t particularly nice, Jinhee.”
Lee Hanhyuk stared into his glass. I could not immediately read those eyes. I had never worn that expression myself.
“What’s so good about drinking alone.”
For a moment Lee Hanhyuk looked pitiful. He had seemed like a free spirit, so why did pity suddenly wash over me? I could not quite name the reason.
Every person carries one world inside them. I had already written that sentence once. Yet I still did not seem to understand what it truly meant. The department head was probably in his forties. His face looked a little younger than the years, but up close you could see the age. What had happened across those forty years? I suddenly wanted to know.
“So like I was saying, when I was an assistant manager I tore up a contract and then….”
“That’s enough.”
I did not particularly want to hear a “back in my day” lecture. I did not want a long, drawn-out past either. But Lee Hanhyuk’s loneliness was still visible, so I spoke while still in my school uniform.
“When I turn twenty, I’ll have my first drink here with the team leader.”
“Really? Is that okay?”
I had already done the countdown-and-drink-myself-silly thing once when I turned twenty. There was no reason to do it again. Lee Hanhyuk looked at me with moved eyes.
“We’ll have to talk about contracts again around then anyway.”
“Heh… kids these days really are the scariest.”
“Still, I’ll give you the honor of sharing my first drink at twenty.”
“Wait, you’re not leaving me out of that, right?”
Lee Hanhyuk, Editor Kim Jinhee, and I—the three of us had far too much fun at the street stall. And when I got home I was interrogated for quite a while about smelling of alcohol.