The World Literature Collection (1)
I thought I'd misheard him.
"You're giving me the whole collection here?"
The 300-volume Wolkwang Publishing World Literature Collection—and first editions, at that.
There were more collectors of first-edition novels than people realized, and if you sold them to the right buyers, they could bring in serious money. But even setting the money aside, these books meant an enormous amount to Director Jang.
Why on earth was he offering them to me, of all people, when we had only just met today?
"Yes. I want you to take them."
There was not the slightest tremor in his eyes. If I accepted, I would benefit beyond measure. Not just benefit, either.
I had no intention of selling them, but their value as a collection alone was staggering. Whether you were a publisher, a writer, or a critic, it was hard not to want them.
"Why, exactly, do you want to give these to me?"
"I read the criticism you wrote about Spring Dream in Japan."
"But there still isn't an official translation."
Of course, my criticism had been translated and was circulating on the community boards. I simply hadn't thought the old man would go looking for it.
"Even at my age, I can handle Japanese well enough."
"Ah."
"As someone from an older generation, I also knew a fair bit of kanji, and when we first started publishing world literature, we often had to dig up drafts in Japan. So I learned it the hard way."
Fair enough.
Like many humanities books in those days, foreign literature had mostly come into Korea through Japan, and the process was usually just a matter of translating Japanese editions into Korean.
"In any case... it was astonishingly good. Spring Dream is one of the canonical texts that defined our generation. We couldn't possibly feel warmly toward Japan, and yet Spring Dream was something we admired in secret. It influenced us enormously."
"That makes sense. My father even asked me to buy him the original Japanese edition this time."
"But your criticism changed my lifelong understanding of Spring Dream in an instant."
!
"In our generation, no outstanding writer or critic could have arrived at that interpretation. So I had always just thought Spring Dream was a story about human kindness, and that Kazuma was simply a great writer who knew how to love the weak. But..." He drew in a breath and paused. "It turned out to be nothing more than Kazuma's own shame and sense of debt."
Then Director Jang's eyes shone with genuine astonishment. "Isn't that remarkable? Why didn't I see it? That sense of debt was sitting there in plain sight, and yet... why didn't I understand it until you explained it?"
"Some meanings are obscured by the circumstances of their time. The 'sensibility of the era' is different, too. In your generation, that reading would have fit much more naturally."
"Even so. All the same. You really did uncover something extraordinary."
With a wrinkled finger, he pointed straight at me.
"When I read that criticism, it felt as though someone had struck me in the head with a hammer. I nearly cried at the thought that I'd live long enough to read something this good before I died. And then I made up my mind." Director Jang pointed at the shelves. "I want to give my treasure to someone who can actually use it, rather than to money or to some collector. Read this again. And, just as you did with Spring Dream... find the things we've missed until now and show them to the world."
He meant he wanted me to reinterpret the works in the complete collection the way I'd done with Spring Dream.
"Then even if I die, couldn't I still keep the value of this collection alive?"
...Keeping the value of the collection alive. It was a grand phrase.
The Wolkwang Publishing collection had already been sentenced to death in the market.
Perhaps the only way it could survive was through the hands of a critic like me.
One thing did line up neatly: I had already been planning to make the theme of the third issue of Pyeong a reexamination of world literature.
Of course... I hadn't imagined anything quite this ambitious.
I hesitated for a moment.
Even if everything fit together perfectly, this was too significant a collection to accept with a simple, "Of course!"
It was a collection Director Jang had built with his whole life.
Unless I was at least somewhat confident, refusing it might actually be the right thing to do.
Swallow. I gulped down a mouthful of dry saliva.
The first editions were terribly tempting, and yet at the same time I was afraid.
"Won't do, then?"
The impatient Director Jang asked again.
I couldn't even spare the time to answer. I just stared at the collection and sank into thought. Then, suddenly, an idea struck me.
I turned my head and looked at the boxes of authors' handwritten manuscripts. Maybe those manuscripts...
"Director Jang."
"Yes. Go ahead."
"If you're going to give me the collection, then please include the handwritten manuscripts as well."
"The handwritten... manuscripts? I was planning to give those back to the authors."
"If they have to be returned, I'll track down the authors after I've 'used' them and return them myself."
He looked at the boxes as though he couldn't quite understand.
Those handwritten manuscripts were probably treasures to him no less than the collection itself. But he seemed to have lost all interest in clutching treasures for their own sake.
"Fine. If that's what you want, take them all."
He agreed more readily than I'd expected.
But even at the very end, he held on to my hand and pressed one last plea into me.
"But you must use them properly. Make sure you do."
After I agreed to receive Wolkwang Publishing's collection, I started thinking about where I was going to keep it.
I had enough space at home, so I could have stored it there. But if I was thinking about the work ahead, it seemed better to keep it at Gyeongseong Publishing.
And the person who solved that problem for me was Director Moon. I had gone to his office to discuss storage for the collection.
"Keep it in our basement. The handwritten manuscripts, too."
"Would that really be all right?"
"Those are books with literary-historical value. Of course they should be stored under proper conditions."
By "proper conditions," he meant temperature and humidity control, along with protection from the sunlight that would ruin the books.
Gyeongseong Publishing's basement naturally had exactly that kind of environment.
"So what are you planning to do with them?"
"I have two ideas. The first I can do on my own, but the second will require a lot of cooperation from other people."
"Cooperation..."
Sharp as ever, Director Moon had already sensed something.
What kind of trouble are you about to cause now? Even that wary look of his carried a thread of anticipation.
"So what's the first idea?"
"A regular series in Pyeong where we reread world literature. And the source texts would be Wolkwang's collection."
"Hmm—that's meaningful. Especially with foreign novels, the translator changes, so which publisher's edition you use matters."
In ordinary circumstances, I should have been writing criticism on Gyeongseong Publishing's World Literature Collection, hoping my review would boost its sales.
But Gyeongseong Publishing was not the sort of house that needed to feel threatened by Wolkwang over something like that.
"Then what's the second idea?"
"Gyeongseong Publishing would put out a special revised edition of Wolkwang Publishing's World Literature Collection. With new criticism attached."
"..."
Director Moon said nothing.
It was only natural.
No matter how much one admired Wolkwang Publishing, Gyeongseong Publishing still had its own World Literature Collection.
In a way, that was exactly why I'd said it would require a lot of cooperation.
A big bet always needed a lot of people willing to take on a big challenge.
"Let's say we publish Wolkwang's collection ourselves. But how would it differ from Gyeongseong Publishing's own World Literature Collection?"
"For one thing, we'd be able to attach new criticism."
"To all 300 volumes?"
"Yes. Otherwise there's no reason to bring out a new collection."
"300 pieces of criticism... You're not suggesting you'd rewrite all of them yourself, are you?"
As if.
"Of course we'd commission other writers too. But there will definitely be key works I have to write myself."
And I knew exactly what those works would be.
Director Moon did too.
"Like Spring Dream."
"Ah."
Director Moon let out an involuntary sigh of admiration.
"I see."
To put it a little more dramatically, I was telling him to think of the Spring Dream I had shown Japan as if it were becoming a complete collection.
Director Moon's fingertips twitched.
Whatever else, even he couldn't ignore the sales surge Spring Dream had caused.
"And one more thing."
"?"
"In one way or another, I'd like to make use of the handwritten manuscripts from the first editions Wolkwang Publishing preserved."
Even for the same work, things changed little by little as time went on.
There was a famous anecdote about a writer who had penned a division-era novel important enough to be included in school textbooks.
Decades later, he discovered an error in the facts and only then changed a crucial part of the novel.
What's funny is that after that, the earlier version of the work sold like crazy.
That was similar to why people fought so hard to get first editions.
The raw text as it first came out.
Even if it had many mistakes, people wanted the version closest to the author's own breath.
I had found my answer in that instinct.
"An author changes a great deal when revising a single word, a single sentence, sometimes even a whole story. But what people are drawn to is the original text. Translations are even more complicated. If the foreign author has died, that's one thing; if not, they keep revising the work, and so do the translators."
"In that sense, Wolkwang Publishing really is extraordinary. They ended up with the very first manuscripts of those stellar writers."
"..."
"So I thought we might release those originals anew through Gyeongseong Publishing's collection. As a way of honoring Wolkwang Publishing."
When I'd told Director Jang that yesterday, he'd reacted the same way at first.
"...Would that really be possible? If it is, I can't think of anything I'd want more."
What had I said then?
"The odds of making it happen aren't high, but if we do pull it off... Wolkwang Publishing's collection will get a new life."
And in that new collection, my commentary would appear alongside it.
But in any case, this proposal was impossible without Gyeongseong Publishing's help.
Producing a new complete collection cost a great deal of money.
"To me, it feels like either a hit or a miss. If it goes well, then Wolkwang Publishing wins, and Gyeongseong Publishing gets to own a collection no other publisher can even imitate. Since it would be a special edition and only the existing 300 works would be included, the long-term burden would be small as well. But..."
"But?"
"If it fails—in other words, if it doesn't end up being meaningfully different from the existing collection—it'll be ridiculed mercilessly. No, not just ridiculed. It'll be condemned for trying to exploit a dying Wolkwang Publishing."
I agreed with that.
So yes... this was something that required courage.
I had simply been the first to show mine.
"If the second idea feels too burdensome, there's no need to proceed. I can just include one literary essay after another in Pyeong on Wolkwang Publishing's works."
I wasn't trying to force him.
For someone who would be handling that much money, you had to give him time.
Investing at that scale could only move at a giant's pace.
"I'll think it over. I'll need to talk it through with the other board members as well."
So it wasn't a no, at least.
"Yes. I'll wait."
I had no intention of wasting the time while I waited. There was too much to do.
Whether we went with the first idea or the second, the fact remained the same—
I was going to have to go through Wolkwang Publishing's collection from top to bottom starting now.