Pyeong (2)
59.
The day the winter issue of Gyeongseong Geul was released, the inaugural issue of Pyeong went on sale alongside it.
On the basement level of Gwanghwamun Station, at Kyobo Book Centre, the finest bookstore in South Korea, Gyeongseong Geul and Pyeong lay side by side on the magazine shelf marked “B Section, No. 14.”
Gyeongseong Geul was a perennial bestseller, never losing first place in seasonal quarterly sales.
The bundled promotion with such a magazine made it plain just how hard Gyeongseong Publishing was pushing Pyeong. The area in front of the display shelf was crowded with people.
Half of them had come because they knew Pyeong was launching; the other half had come for Gyeongseong Geul, noticed Pyeong, and started hesitating.
“Mok Hyunsun is the editor-in-chief? I thought he was a critic.”
“He was both a critic and an editor to begin with.”
“No, but why did he suddenly jump to editor-in-chief? Is he maybe the son of Gyeongseong Publishing’s president?”
“As if. Anyway, I heard they mixed his existing criticism with the things he did on Soop and put out Pyeong. Doesn’t that sound interesting?”
“Right. Mok Hyunsun, Soop... Then I’ll buy one. I was disappointed when Soop disappeared.”
“Me too. I was a fan from the start.”
And so they took one copy of Pyeong after another to the register.
A little later, one man said, “Should I buy it or not?”
“Forget it. Why even buy it? It’s criticism, not fiction.”
“Still, it’s Mok Hyunsun.”
“Even if it is Mok Hyunsun, come on. The reason his writing did so well in Gyeongseong Geul was because that magazine already had poetry and fiction. Who buys a magazine just to read criticism?”
“Hmm.”
“Come on, let’s go. My legs hurt.”
“At least let’s skim it, then.”
“God, seriously. Fine. My legs are killing me.”
The two young men began to look through Pyeong.
At first they merely scanned the table of contents and the titles, but then...
...
...
They were drawn in.
Then a woman said to them, with gentle pressure, “Excuse me. I think you’re blocking the shelf for too long...”
“Oh, sorry.”
“Sorry.”
As they stepped aside, the woman immediately picked up Gyeongseong Geul and Pyeong and carried them to the register.
The two young men looked at each other.
The one who had complained earlier spoke first. “...I should buy it.”
“Told you so, right?”
And just like that, the two of them also each took a copy of Pyeong and headed to the register.
Meanwhile, the employee who had manned the register all morning handed over the baton and stepped away.
A colleague came over and said, “The magazine section’s insanely busy today.”
“It’s the day Gyeongseong Geul comes out. And Gyeongseong Publishing is bundling it with a new quarterly launch, so it’s chaos. I was just about to go check the stockroom because I’m already worried we’ll run out.”
“Ah, the book by that famous critic? The one that isn’t just a book, but a quarterly that keeps coming out?”
“Yeah. I don’t know the details, but he must be incredible. One of Gyeongseong Publishing’s sales reps came by the other day and said Mok Hyunsun practically made the whole thing alone. He wrote one hundred percent of the content himself.”
“They say he’s a genius. You could tell from the moment he debuted.”
The colleague glanced at the display shelf.
There were even more people crowded around it than before.
She let out a small laugh. “Still, that opening-day buzz is no joke.”
---
Incheon International Airport.
As always, the place was packed with people. Japan Tokyo Daily reporter Yamada Sato had just finished boarding.
He was from the culture desk, and he had come to Korea to cover the joint Korean-Japanese musical Jungnam and Masako.
The assignment had gone smoothly enough, but after three brutally busy days and two nights, he was worn down to the bone.
He glanced at his wristwatch. There’s still plenty of time before boarding. I might as well grab some coffee.
He shuffled over to a takeaway cafe, then ordered in fluent Korean, mixing in the skills he had picked up during his many trips back and forth across the sea.
“I’d like the largest iced Americano, an extra shot, and lots of ice, please.”
“Yes. Please wait ten minutes. We’ve got a big group order ahead of you.”
Looking to the side, he saw a noisy cluster of Chinese tourists.
They had apparently ordered every dessert and fruit juice under the sun, so it looked as though it would take more than ten minutes.
Yamada, being Japanese, decided to wait quietly.
I should buy a book at the bookstore. There’s nothing much to see at a Korean airport anyway.
There was another reason he was headed to the bookstore, too.
Before coming to Korea, the head of the culture desk had applied a subtle but unmistakable pressure.
If you’re really a capable culture reporter, I think you should be able to make the most of an expensive overseas trip and knock out several pieces at once. Theater, film, literature, entertainment... isn’t everything in that country potential material for an article?
You give me a three-day trip and expect me to do all that? I’d have to meet a theater director, meet investors, meet actors... I didn’t even have time to watch one movie.
He grumbled inwardly as he made his way to the fiction shelves.
Still, he wanted some justification he could use later, something to say along the lines of, “This is what the Korean literary scene is like.”
For that sort of thing, literary magazines are the best.
He asked the clerk, “Excuse me. Where are the literary magazines?”
“Over on that shelf.”
Beside the novels, several literary magazines were lined up in a row.
Yamada pulled out Gyeongseong Geul, the most famous quarterly in Korea, and began to read.
There are a lot of new works in here. They’re probably all good pieces, but good grief, just looking at it makes me tired. Thinking about reading each work closely is already draining me.
In that sense, novels were the same.
Reading fiction demanded a surprising amount of mental stamina.
I wish they’d spoon-feed me a wider variety of works instead. Something that would let me grasp the general mood of Korean literature.
But he doubted there was a unicorn of a book like that.
Forget it. I don’t need a book. I’ll just zone out and drink my coffee. I can think about getting nagged by the head of the desk later.
He had just resigned himself to that when he glanced at the display shelf and stopped short.
Airport bookstore shelves were usually taken up by three kinds of books:
Korean bestsellers.
Foreign-language translations of those bestsellers.
Magazines light enough to read on a plane.
And among those “magazines,” he found a name that caught his eye.
“...Pyeong?”
Without thinking, Yamada picked up the magazine and flipped through it.
“! A literary criticism magazine?”
It covered a great many works, yet the magazine itself was thin.
Long criticism, short reviews, all of it was there.
Oh. So you can make a magazine like this without even publishing fiction.
It seemed the works it discussed were all new releases, too.
A smile spread across Yamada’s face.
“Right. If I read this whole thing, I’ll be able to hand my boss at least one report.”
He bought Pyeong and then walked off to collect his coffee with light steps.
Besides, this magazine was light, too.
He liked it even more for that.
---
On the plane bound for Tokyo, the roar of the metal beast lifting into the sky was as familiar to Yamada as his own breathing.
Ever since majoring in Korean language at university, he had traveled back and forth to Korea at least twice a year.
Once the aircraft stabilized, he opened the magazine he had bought at the bookstore.
Even if his boss’s glare was petty and absurd, wasn’t it an unfortunate Japanese instinct to obey the chain of command properly, no matter what?
Park Jeong-shin? I don’t know this writer. The title is... Ordan. Fantasy, maybe?
He began reading the magazine casually.
...Interesting.
Ordan clearly seemed like it would be a serious, dark story.
And yet the prose in this magazine was fresh and clean, so there was no burden at all in reading it.
Criticism, even criticism written in a foreign language, feeling this effortless to read...
If this goes well, I might even finish it on the plane.
Japan was a country where critics were even more active than they were in Korea.
Of course, that might simply be because the market for books was several times larger to begin with.
But the role critics had played in producing outstanding novelists such as Nobel laureates Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburo Oe, as well as Osamu Dazai and Soseki Natsume, beloved throughout the world, had been significant.
Japanese pride in their own literature was correspondingly strong.
Yamada also privately thought that, when it came to literature, Japan was still better than Korea.
And yet...
Korea had a writer like this?
That thought came to him just from reading the criticism alone.
If he had seen this criticism even a little earlier, he would have bought Ordan and taken it back to Japan.
And then came Photographic Memory.
As he read the criticism with some expectation, he paused.
It was a detective novel?
A smile tugged at his lips.
Ha. Cute. A Korean detective novel.
Japan was the emperor of Asian detective fiction.
The sense of superiority Japan held over Korea in this genre was not something as faint as an unspoken feeling.
It was an established fact, proved by the numbers in the world detective fiction market themselves.
All right, let’s see what this thing wrote about.
With that playful attitude, he started reading the criticism in earnest.
Then...
“Huh? What the hell.”
The words slipped out of his mouth, and the woman beside him gave him a sidelong glance.
“S-sorry.”
He apologized quickly and went back to the criticism.
“...Oh.”
It’s light, but it doesn’t stay light for long. He’s handling the theory with real precision.
Especially this part:
What matters is how sensuously the detective’s reasoning is made visible.
Yamada thought back to the detective novels he had read and loved all his life.
The critic was exactly right.
All successful detective stories made the process of deduction distinctive and sensory.
And the appeal of Photographic Memory is that it maximizes the first-person perspective, right?
The logic was airtight.
The more he read, the more curious he became about Photographic Memory.
Ugh, this is good, but it’s maddening.
The criticism did not tell him the entire plot of Photographic Memory.
It only offered a rough description of what sort of novel it was.
And yet it did so with such skill that it never felt frustrating, only enticing, managing information with exquisite precision.
But the first person isn’t used only as a device to make the detective work shine.
?
What? What else can first person do in a detective novel?
What followed was truly remarkable.
The detective, it said, expressed feelings of love and trust without ever using those words.
Emotion becomes more certain when it is left unspoken.
This criticism explained that subtle point with extraordinary delicacy.
Still, if he wanted to know exactly how it was done, there was only one way.
He would have to read Photographic Memory.
“Wow.”
When he finished the criticism, he closed the magazine.
The lingering aftertaste of the piece itself.
The anticipation for the detective novel called Photographic Memory.
Those things kept him from even looking at the reviews that followed.
He stared absently at the clouds outside the window.
It was as if he had been bewitched by something.
Maybe this is because I’m not a literary specialist. I honestly can’t tell. Is the criticism good because the novel is good? Or is the critic himself just that talented? Or both?
But above all else, what shocked him most was the fact that such a novel and such criticism existed in a Korean detective fiction world he had so openly dismissed.
A little later, Yamada arrived at Narita International Airport.
He walked briskly off to retrieve his suitcase.
But his feet were moving only by habit.
Not a single thought about his suitcase remained in his head.
Yamada finally came to a dead stop.
Then he looked at the magazine in his hand.
This is not a magazine I can report on to my boss with a few casual lines.
Resolutely, he called someone.
After several rings, a middle-aged man answered.
-Yes? Yamada, is that you?
“Teacher Nashida. It’s been too long.”
Nashida Ito.
Last year’s grand prize winner of the Japan Mystery Writers Association Award, he was the most successful active detective novelist in Japan.
“I have a magazine I absolutely must show you. May I come see you?”