Spring Dream
The atmosphere in the main house was unchanged.
It was still quiet, and somehow bleak.
Still, if there was one thing that had changed, it was that the bonsai trees and potted plants in the living room were steadily multiplying. After dinner, I looked at the bonsai that had spilled past the veranda and into the living room and said, “Aren’t there too many of them? The living room is starting to look cramped.”
“I just kept bringing them in one by one, and that’s how it turned out.”
Even one by one, they were all meticulously cared for.
The leaves didn’t have a speck of dust on them, which meant someone had been wiping them down and watering them every day.
I didn’t think the housekeeper was the type to fuss over this sort of thing, so it was probably my father’s new hobby. My father and plants.
It was an absurd combination, and yet, in its own way, it suited him. “I didn’t know either, but watering them and trimming the branches really suits my temperament.” My father carried a tray into the living room himself.
Two cups of freshly brewed tea sat on it.
We faced each other on the sofa. “How did you know I was going to Japan?”
“Im Myeong-eul told me.” So Chief Editor Im had filled him in. “Are the two of you close?”
“No.” ...They didn’t look like strangers to me.
Anyway, why had he called me over? “Should I bring you back a souvenir?”
“No need. It’s not that. I just found myself thinking about the old days, so I called you in.”
“The old days?” As far as I knew, my father had never done any literary work in Japan.
When he was young, anti-Japanese sentiment had been so strong that, though he had traveled abroad as an elder statesman of sorts, it had mostly been to Europe and the United States. “You’re going there as a guest, aren’t you? And yet you turned down the Japanese writer who asked you to dinner.”
“That’s how it turned out. It’s not as if I bear any ill will.”
“When I was young,”
“?”
“I was terribly envious of Japanese writers.” My father narrowed his eyes as though lost in old memories and looked out the window. “Do you know what people said when I had just debuted and started my life as a writer? They said Korean literature was at least thirty years behind Japanese literature.” Thirty years.
It might sound painful, but it was true.
When Korea was still struggling to figure out how to keep itself fed after the war, Japan had already produced towering writers whose names were being written into world literature. “Even after the country made money through things like the Saemaul Movement, that cultural level, if you want to call it that, didn’t rise as fast as anyone hoped.”
“Culture usually develops last, after all.” People need a certain degree of material comfort before they can begin to feel things, and once feeling becomes habitual, they can start to enjoy art.
Korea was no different. Cultural development was always tethered to the economy.
Historically, the countries that had once held global hegemony tended to produce good writers for exactly that reason. My father took a sip of tea. “When I was young, there was much more of a collective goal, I suppose, or perhaps patriotic fervor. People kept urging us to catch up to Japanese literature as quickly as possible.
I read a great many Japanese novels then. You can’t catch up without reading, can you? But how should I put it... for me at the time, it was a shock, pure and simple.”
“I imagine it was. They would have been novels shaped by every brilliant work the world had to offer.” Even now, and even more so then, Japan’s impulse to cast off Asia and enter Europe was extraordinary.
If anything, they had become adept at absorbing the best of Western literature and making it their own.
For writers who had mostly encountered foreign culture a beat late through Japan, it must have been an enormous shock.
Yes. That was what a generation was. That was what I thought.
I believed our country’s cultural level had lagged in part because of Japan.
Without the colonial period, we would have entered modernity in a much more materially comfortable position.
Which meant my father’s generation of writers had to work themselves raw, and now it wasn’t thirty years at all, but rather the literary levels of the two countries were neck and neck.
In its own way, it was a satisfying ending. But my father’s generation, the one that had lived through it, was different.
The shock they felt upon seeing Japanese literature then must have curdled into inferiority, and that inferiority would have remained... as a wound.
That was why the older generation of literary figures had such complicated feelings toward Japan.
In one sense, they admired it for the help and influence they had received, and in another, they kept their distance because of all the harm it had caused.
“So I couldn’t be happier that they’re the ones coming to you now.”
“I wouldn’t exactly say they’re coming to get me... but I’m glad you’re happy.”
“Yes. How should I put this... I just feel like I won. Our generation lost no matter what we did, but it’s a childish pleasure, really, to think the children’s generation has turned it around.” My father covered his mouth with his teacup, but he was definitely smiling. “And they’re selling your quarterly journal over there, too.”
My father, looking genuinely delighted, allowed himself to smile openly now.
After he savored that sense of victory for a moment in silence, he seemed to remember something and said to me, “You said earlier you’d bring me back a souvenir, didn’t you?”
“Do you need anything?”
“Bring me back a novel. It’s a book by the writer I read the most and was most influenced by when I was young... but at the time, I was too proud to ever let it show.”
“What book is it?”
“Kazuma Tsuji’s Spring Dream. I’d like to have an original Japanese edition.”
“Ah.” Kazuma Tsuji.
He was a writer who represented Japan’s postwar generation, and he had already won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He mostly wrote bleak stories about human darkness and inescapable fate.
His work became hugely popular in step with the mood of postwar Japanese society.
The problem was that he himself suffered from deep depression.
In the end, he couldn’t overcome it and died by suicide at a young age.
It had been less than two years after winning the Nobel Prize.
Because of that tragic death, people had only come to regard Kazuma as even more of a godlike figure.
It was also said that Kazuma Tsuji formed the basis of the distinctive lyricism of Japanese literature.
And to some extent, I agreed with that.
If I thought that way, then my father’s generation of writers must have felt it even more intensely.
It would have resonated with the bleakness of Korea’s circumstances at the time as well. “Can you bring me one?”
“Of course. What’s so hard about that? Do you need anything else?”
“No. That will be enough.”
So I promised to buy the book for him and left the main house.
On the way back, I muttered to myself, “Kazuma Tsuji... Spring Dream.”
I’d read it back in college.
No, if you were even a little fond of literature, it was actually harder not to have read it.
I hadn’t felt much of anything at the time... but then again, who knew?
Maybe it would be different if I read it in the original Japanese, just like Acting Class.
─┼
A few days later.
I met film critic Yang Yeon-gyu at Incheon Airport.
We had cleared security early and were passing the time in a cafe tucked into one corner of the duty-free area. He seemed to be in good spirits. “I’d been thinking it would be nice to work on something with Critic Mok, so I never imagined we’d end up going overseas together like this.”
“True enough. It’s a film festival, so you’ll probably have plenty to write about.”
“Mm, well, a lot of the films at festivals are hard for the general public to access. Even if I write about them, it’s difficult to get them into a magazine. I’ll probably just post them on my personal blog. The reporters, though, will certainly have plenty to write about me.” Yang Yeon-gyu made a pointed joke.
He was someone who appeared in the media often, after all.
Wherever he went, articles tended to follow.
“That’s funny. The festival is open, the critic has nowhere to write, and the reporters are thrilled.”
“That’s just how the film world is. If you want to run a lot of pieces, you can just watch a lot of Hollywood movies. But there are hardly any film critics who want that. Everyone is drawn to art films, after all.” Then Yang Yeon-gyu suddenly turned the conversation toward me. “In that sense, I’m really envious of you, Critic Mok.”
“Of what, exactly?”
“You publish your own magazine, don’t you? A critic who builds a structure where whatever he writes can be converted directly into money... I think that’s truly remarkable.”
“Haha. Then why not build one yourself? I could help.” He waved a hand. “I’m already stretched thin just watching films all day. I mean that literally. I don’t even know when you find time to read all those manuscripts and write your pieces.”
That gave me a slight jolt.
Well, if I didn’t have that ability, I wouldn’t even be able to put out [Pyeon].
The amount of writing I had to read through was truly enormous.
“But the Tokyo Film Festival will have a lot of Japanese films, and the subtitles will be in English, won’t they? Will that be all right?”
“I can’t understand Japanese, but I’ll manage with the English subtitles. I’m just going as a visitor, so it doesn’t matter to me. What about you, Yang Critic?”
“Mm. It’s nothing to brag about, but I can understand Japanese pretty well. My grandmother was Japanese.”
Oh? That was welcome news indeed.
I could read and write perfectly well, of course,
but I could barely speak or understand it by ear.
“Then you can speak it too...?”
“To a certain extent.”
Excellent.
I could trust Yang Yeon-gyu with the interpreting in Japan. In any case, we boarded the plane and went to Japan.
As soon as we arrived in Tokyo, the festival staff gave us a warm welcome.
They took us to the hotel they had booked for us.
Yang Yeon-gyu translated their words for me on the spot. “They said we only need to attend the festival starting tomorrow. Today, we should relax and go sightseeing.”
“Nice. Is there anywhere you’d like to go?”
“I come to Japan far too often for that. I was thinking of getting coffee somewhere. What about you, Critic Mok?”
“I’m thinking of going to a bookstore. I need to buy a gift for my father.”
At the mention of a bookstore, Yang Yeon-gyu’s eyes lit up. “I happen to know a bookstore I like. Shall we go there?”
“Sounds good.” After the festival staff left, I followed Yang Yeon-gyu into central Tokyo. Tokyo was... like Seoul, but stretched wide and then stretched wider still.
The roads were broader, the crowds denser, and the buildings larger.
To be honest, because the people looked so much like Koreans and the buildings weren’t all that different in shape, it didn’t feel particularly foreign.
Even the Japanese on the signs was familiar enough to me that I noticed it less than I might have otherwise.
In any case, Yang Yeon-gyu took me to Shinjuku Station.
Leaving the packed main street behind, he turned into a side alley and led me into a shabby little bookstore underground. “I found this place while wandering around Shinjuku by chance. It looks small, but they stock an incredible number of world literature titles. And the owner writes little comments on the books, which is another part of the fun.” As Yang Yeon-gyu said, the bookstore was small.
But every inch of it was packed with literature.
There were many old books, yet hardly any dust had gathered on them.
The owner must have taken excellent care of them.
On the left was English and European literature.
On the right, African and Asian literature.
At the back, literature from the Third World.
And in the center... Japanese literature. This place, with its own evident system, seemed to be run by an elderly man with striking white hair.
His neat, stern appearance suited the shop perfectly. We stood in front of a display where books had been laid flat.
Yang Yeon-gyu asked, “Ah, right. What book are you looking for?” I shrugged. “No need to look. It’s right here.”
There, laid out in the very center of the display, was Spring Dream.
And on the fluorescent card pinned above it, written in marker, were the words: The Number One Most Beloved Novel in Japan.