World Literature Collection (2)
That night, after work, I went to my parents’ house.
I’d been back in Korea for a while, but my schedule had been so packed that I still hadn’t been able to bring over Spring Dream. By the time I arrived, my father already seemed thoroughly pleased with the book I’d finally handed him.
He sat on the sofa, stroking the cover of Spring Dream over and over with his hand. “I wondered when you were coming. I’d been waiting.”
“I got tied up with one thing and another.”
“Hmm. I saw it. There was quite a stir over Spring Dream in Japan.”
“In my own way, I enjoyed it. I crossed over to Osaka before the reporters could swarm me, then came straight home.”
“You’ve got nerves of steel. You know how much the Japanese right-wing likes to make people suffer.” My father flipped through Spring Dream with a soft rustle.
No matter what interpretation I came up with, it wouldn’t change the fact that he loved Spring Dream.
That was how literature worked, after all. However other people chose to look at it, if you liked it yourself, that was enough.
“And I came here to give you this too.” I took The Birth of Paradise manuscript out of my bag and held it out to him.
“What’s this? …Hm? No, why is this…?” My father’s eyes went wide behind his glasses.
From his point of view, it must have seemed like the last thing in the world he’d expect to see coming out of his son’s bag.
I explained what had happened with Wolkwang Publishing and Managing Director Jang.
At that, my father pressed a hand to his forehead and sighed. “Jang Yoon-shik has fallen ill? Good heavens.”
“Unfortunately, yes. He asked me to deliver this to you.”
“....” My father looked quietly down at his own manuscript.
An indescribable bitterness spread across his face. “That man, I swear. When I asked him for it, he wouldn’t give it to me no matter what.”
“You asked him for it?” Though I’d heard part of the story from Managing Director Jang, I asked as if I knew nothing. “Yes. Back when I published The Birth of Paradise. Technically, the contract says manuscripts aren’t to be returned, but back then, if the writer asked, they’d sometimes hand them back. I didn’t want to part with my own manuscript, so I asked for it. And that stubborn old man flat-out refused and said absolutely not.”
“He must have been furious. Given your personality, Father.”
“How could I not be? We even got into a few drunken fights.” Come to think of it, I’d heard that he’d also had a few drinking fights with Editor-in-Chief Im.
What kind of youth had my father lived through, exactly?
“And yet he still wouldn’t give it up. I’m stubborn myself, but I’d never met anyone that stubborn before.”
“....”
“And now he’s giving it to me after all this time… I suppose I should call him tomorrow.”
“He also gave me the World Literature Collection from Wolkwang Publishing. First editions.”
“What? That precious?”
“Yes. I think he wanted you to reinterpret them, the way you did with Spring Dream.”
“Oh...” My father stroked his chin, clearly intrigued. “That won’t be easy.”
“No.”
“But it’s a remarkably high-level task. If you succeed properly, you could leave behind criticism no one else could replace.” As expected, my father understood exactly what I was aiming for.
He said, “When it comes to that kind of reinterpretation, there are two things that matter most. First: does the old work still give you something to say from the perspective of this age? Second: can it actually land in this age?”
I couldn’t have agreed more.
In the end, what mattered was communication between an old work and the present.
“So what work are you planning to start with?”
“I should begin with something certain. At the very least, if I’m going to run a reinterpretation piece in Review, I need to tackle a work everyone knows at first.”
“Then a Korean work would be best.”
“Probably.” Even if Review had started to gain some word-of-mouth attention in Japan, its primary readers were still Korean.
“You’re right, Father. Which work to begin with is the real question.”
The next day, I went down to the basement storage room of Gyeongseong Publishing.
With Yoon Kyungmin, the intern, following behind me while carrying a chair.
The long storage room was packed full of inventory. Compared to Wolkwang Publishing, where books were stacked on staircases and in hallways, Gyeongseong’s system — with its temperature, humidity, and lighting all carefully controlled — could only be called cutting-edge. Director Moon had cleared out a small storage room for the World Literature Collection.
When we got there, the books were already neatly lined up on the shelves.
“Wow… it’s the Wolkwang World Literature Collection. I’ve never seen them all gathered in one place like this. This is really amazing.” Yoon, setting down the chair, stared at the shelves as if spellbound.
“That’s the charm of a collection. You don’t get it when you only read one or two volumes, but once they’re all together, they develop an aura. That’s also why collectors become obsessed with complete sets.” I dragged the chair over and set it in front of the shelves.
All right, then. Time to take stock.
The collection was mostly foreign literature, but there were a few Korean works mixed in here and there.
“Yoon intern.”
“Yes.”
“Could you count how many Korean works are in this collection? And make a list of them too.”
“Ah, yes.” Yoon Kyungmin began starting from volume one. “Should I take the Korean works out and set them aside?”
“No. Just tell me the numbers.” The collection was prettier when everything stayed together. I didn’t want to disturb that.
Works from the Japanese colonial period, the enlightenment era, the liberation period, the Korean War, the postwar years, and the years of economic recovery.
The Korean works here seemed to fall neatly into those historical periods.
There were no works from after the 1990s — in other words, nothing written less than fifty years ago.
Not because they were poor or unworthy, but because history itself hadn’t finished judging them yet.
At least fifty years.
Fifty years of surviving in the literary world.
That was the basic condition for a work to enter a literary collection.
After diligently counting the books, Yoon said, “I’ve sorted everything out. I wrote it on my phone for now — do you want to see?”
“It’s fine. The number of works is thirty, right?”
“Ah, yes. That’s right.” He looked a little puzzled, as though asking why he’d been made to count if I’d already done the tally myself.
I hadn’t asked him to count so I could check his arithmetic.
I’d asked so he could see it.
“Are you busy these days, Yoon intern?”
“Ah, no. I’m not busy.”
“Then for the works on that list—”
“Yes?”
“Could you gather every criticism and academic paper you can find on them? Don’t miss a single one.”
“Huh? All of them?” He looked flustered.
I looked at Yoon Kyungmin. “Why? Think you won’t be able to find them?”
“Ah, no. Finding them isn’t the problem, but if they’re that famous, there could be dozens of critical essays and papers for each work. That’d be hundreds of pieces total… Are you seriously planning to read them all?”
“Ah.” So that was what he was worried about.
I said it offhandedly. “Yeah. I can read them. So just gather the material properly.”
“Ah… yes. Understood. Then I’ll head back upstairs and get started.” Without asking anything else, Yoon intern left the storage room.
I stayed seated in the chair, looking at the collection on the shelves.
Hundreds of papers would be a lot, no question.
Even if I was confident in my reading speed, it wasn’t the kind of task that came without pressure. But knowing the history of research that had already been done on a work — that was the foundation of this kind of project.
It would, of course, keep me from repeating old interpretations.
More than that, it would give me the basis for forging a new language of my own.
Flip. I pulled out the earliest-numbered Korean work.
Snow Mountain, about the tragic lives of peasants under Japanese colonial rule. I read rapidly, one page after another.
The language poured directly into my head.
The pages turned without hesitation, and in my mind the words kept recombining and dissolving into new shapes.
“Eliminated.”
It was a work I liked, but its limits were equally clear.
Because its anti-Japanese intent was so explicit, there was no room for interpretation in another direction.
That was the way literature often was.
The stronger the author’s intent, the more the roads to alternative readings were blocked.
Still, I didn’t think Snow Mountain had reached the end of its life.
At the very least, the author’s intent remained vivid, and that carried historical value.
It would probably continue to be read for a long time as “resistance literature.”
That was enough. Literature like this had its place in the world too.
I went on reading the Korean works one by one in that manner.
Among them was my father’s work, The Birth of Paradise.
Flip, flip… The thin paper of an old collection turned over beautifully.
My father’s novel was still impressive, even now.
Its sweeping narrative and unflinching descriptions.
Its sharp insight into macho characters and a rapidly changing society.
Ideas for keywords that could open it up in a fresh way as criticism even began to surface.
A plausible piece of criticism was already forming in my head, but...
Let’s keep that one in reserve.
Maybe I was more of a son than I liked to admit.
For some reason, using my father’s novel to open the door to the collection felt like too much pressure.
And I also wanted to hear as little as possible of people grinding their teeth and chattering their displeasure.
Besides, this was just a feeling, but I suspected the criticism for this work would fit better somewhere else.
It was after I’d passed several more books that I finally said, “This time… it’s Maria.”
Maria.
It was an old work by the veteran writer Son Yeong-han.
There had been a time when I published an interpretation of his Gua through the lens of spoons.
I remembered having a meal with Son Yeong-han after that.
Along with film director Kim Byeong-ryul, who was in the middle of adapting Maria for the screen.
It was a memory I’d set aside for a long time.
Suddenly curious about how the project was going, I searched for it on my phone.
[A behind-the-scenes sketch from the final stretch of production on Son Yeong-han’s Maria, the pride of Korean literature.]
[Son Yeong-han’s Maria heads to the screen. After production, scheduling is also moving along smoothly.]
Fortunately, it didn’t seem as though production had hit any major snags. It was such a famous work that I already knew the story inside and out.
Still, the feeling of the first edition would be different.
With a quiet sense of anticipation, I began reading Maria.
Maria was set in a rural village in the 1970s.
For one reason or another, an unmarried woman ended up raising five children.
She had once been the daughter of a prosperous landowner, but now she lived only to preserve what remained of her family’s property, with neither parents nor siblings left.
People looked down on her for raising children instead of marrying, and rumors about her spread wildly. Some even ostracized her openly.
But she never once shrank back.
At a market festival, she would even lead her children in a dance, carrying herself with complete confidence.
And then she sold the land she had inherited and started a business.
The novel focused on how she acted like a true mother to her five adopted children, and how she used her wisdom to rebuild the household from the ground up.
The villagers kept on criticizing her, their jealousy sharpened by her success.
But in the meantime, the children grew up and began helping their adoptive mother, and her household only prospered further.
Still, a crisis eventually came for her.
The biological mothers of the five children appeared.
Their mothers demanded the children back, relentlessly.
Needless to say, the villagers joined that mob.
Now the choice belonged to the five children, who had become adults.
The meaning of a “birth mother” in Korean society at the time.
The affection they felt for the adoptive mother who had raised them.
The five of them agonized fiercely between those two poles.
The novel rendered that conflict with brutal sharpness, and in the end only one child returned to his birth mother while the other four stayed behind.
And even that one child was only able to leave because his birth mother was suffering from a serious illness and could not simply be abandoned.
In practical terms, they all remained by their adoptive mother’s side.
Maria ended with the woman and the four children setting out together in search of a village of their own.
I looked at the commentary attached to the back of the novel.
The title of the commentary was Maria: On the Sublimity of Maternal Love.
As expected.
An ode to motherhood, or to the love of the woman who had raised them. It was the standard interpretation, the kind even textbooks had long since enshrined as correct.
But...
Already, a different story was unfolding in my head.