and, so, all i’ve wanted to read this summer has been korean literature-in-translation, with some japanese lit-in-translation thrown in there. part of this is also tonal — i’m working on my second book, and there’s a certain tone i’m trying to pull through the prose that is inspired from what you find in literature specifically translated from korean and japanese. i struggle, still, to explain this adequately, and it isn’t a shortcoming of translation but a natural byproduct of flipping a language from one to another, especially two languages as different as korean and english. korean and english have different grammatical structures. korean is not nearly as dependent on pronouns or gender as english is. korean also allows for more room for long, poetic rambling, and korean also has more words for more concepts and feelings than exist in english.
so, here’s a bit about translated books i’ve been reading.
my favorite book this year has been cho yeeun’s NEW SEOUL PARK JELLY MASSACRE, translated by yewon jung (honford press, 2024), and i am obsessed with it. in my head, i still keep calling it new seoul jelly park, and i don’t really want to give away many details because it is a strange book, which, to me, is delightful. you just have to embrace the weird and lean into the fact that you won’t get clear answers, but there’s a lot of heart in this book, questions about love, family, and loneliness.
another favorite thus far has been kang hwagil’s ANOTHER PERSON, translated by clare richards (pushkin press, 2023) — and this also makes me ask why translators are not just, by default, being listed on the covers of their books, here in the year 2024. ANOTHER PERSON is enraging — the novel hops around different characters, but it centers on jina, a twenty-something woman who has had to leave her job and retreat from society after she filed a claim against her ex-boyfriend (ex-coworker) for domestic violence. she’s been harassed at work and on the internet, even though he’s the one who physically assaulted her, and, as she hides away in her apartment, she comes across a tweet that sets off a particular memory of her college years and sends her down to her college town.
ANOTHER PERSON ultimately pulls back to tell us the story of three women who went to the same college and experienced sexual assault, each in different ways. what i particularly appreciated about the novel is that kang refuses to let the reader look away, not from the violence or from the ways men write off and dismiss violence against women (and, most of the time, rationalize it by blaming the victim) or, even, most uniquely and importantly, from how internalized misogyny affects and harms women. one of the core problems with the misogynistic patriarchal world we live in, whether in the U.S. or in korea, is double-fold — that men are encouraged to be violent to get what they believe they are entitled to (the bodies of women) and that women are made to accept and internalize that abusive misogyny.
this is another novel i think has a great nonfiction pairing — hawon jung’s FLOWERS OF FIRE (benbella books, 2023), a nonfiction book that looks at the #metoo movement in korea and the gender, in general, in the last five to ten years. the chapters are super short, and jung’s writing is incredibly readable, imparting a lot of information in a digestible way, so the book goes fairly quickly. i highly recommend both.
one specific thing that has been delighting me about korean and japanese literature is structure. korean and japanese authors play with structure and form in really creative, thoughtful ways that we just don’t see in english-language fiction. like, hiroki kawakami’s UNDER THE EYE OF THE BIG BIRD, translated by asa yoneda (soft skull, 2024), which is another book i won’t say much about because i think you just need to read it — the way the stories unfold is incredible.
kwon yeo-sun’s LEMON, translated by janet hong (other press, 2021), also plays with structure and narration, in this case to discuss the murder of a girl, hae-on, in high school. we never hear from hae-on as it has now been years since her unsolved murder, and, instead, the novel is told from three women who each knew hae-on in some way. this is another of those books that doesn’t have clear answers; it’s about a murder, yes; but it isn’t a murder mystery, which i think is totally clear from the start.
in my reading, i did also dip my toe into the world of cozy fiction, which is really not my thing at all. i was, however, very pleasantly surprised by hwang boreum’s WELCOME TO THE HYUNAM-DONG BOOKSHOP, translated by shanna tan (bloomsbury, 2024) — i read this at the end of last year, during a period of my life when i was feeling blue, and i found the book to be very warm, thoughtful, wise, a slice-of-life novel about a bookstore in a quiet neighborhood in seoul. HYUNAM-DONG asks questions of being a human in the rat race, and some of it is unique to life in hell joseon, but i think there’s universal wisdom to take about the value in slowing down and choosing to abstain from what society tells us is important, especially when those arbitrary markers of success suck us dry.
i liked HYUNAM-DONG so much, i also picked up lee miye’s THE DALLERGUT DREAM DEPARTMENT STORE, translated by sandy joosun lee (hanover square press, 2024). (i also wanted it because i love this UK cover; it makes me think of IU.) the world in DALLERGUT is lovely, but the novel ultimately fell very flat for me because all the characters are, well, flat, each clearly meant to play a specific part in the world, instead of being a three-dimensional, developed character. it didn’t surprise me to learn that lee is an engineer, which maybe is an unfair stereotypical statement for me to make, but i was very much impressed by the mechanisms behind the world in DALLERGUT. i just wish lee had spent as much time and care in fleshing out her characters and lingering more in the day-to-day — it was clear that lee wanted dallergut (the owner of the department store) to be this quirky, wise character and that the dreams she focuses on are meant to impart wisdom, but, because the book zips along too quickly and superficially, these potential moments of insight and poignanch feel heavy-handed instead. i do wish someone would make a drama out of DALLERGUT, though, because, again, the world itself is vibrant and colorful, and i think it would be really fun to watch.
asako yuzuki’s BUTTER, translated by polly barton (ecco, 2024), and yoko ogawa’s MINA’S MATCHBOX, translated by stephen b. snyder (pantheon, 2024), were both quiet books, and i particularly enjoyed BUTTER, which ostensibly is the story of a journalist trying to get a murderess to talk. the murderess is in jail, and she’s all about food and luxury, and she sends the journalist essentially on missions to eat something and experience it in a specific way, but this isn’t tantalizing or sensational. BUTTER, instead, is a thoughtful book about loneliness, friendship, and, yes, the role food plays in our lives.
two other quiet books i enjoyed were by kim hye-jin, CONCERNING MY DAUGHTER (restless books, 2022) and COUNSEL CULTURE (restless books, 2024), both translated by jamie chang. DAUGHTER, particularly, got to me — it’s narrated by an ajumma in her sixties who works at a senior care facility and has her life upended when her thirty-something-year-old daughter moves back in … with her female partner. the daughter is an adjunct professor who also attends protests demanding a more equal society for queer people, and the mother doesn’t understand any of this. the book isn’t an easy one to read; kim doesn’t try to make the mother a sympathetic character; but neither is she unfair. the mother is a product of her times, a woman who struggled to raise her daughter alone after her husband passed away, who grew up in very heteronormative korea, who just wants her daughter to live a stable, safe life, and there is deep poignancy and resonance in her struggle to understand her daughter. i appreciated kim’s realistic portrayal of this ajumma’s journey — she doesn’t reach the ending we might hope for, but CONCERNING MY DAUGHTER is a great depiction of how the journey is what matters, that we at least make the effort to see beyond the narrow scopes of our upbringing.
i did also quite like COUNSEL CULTURE, which is about a therapist who says something thoughtlessly about an actor on a TV program then is blamed, months later, for his death by suicide. she ends up divorced and jobless and gets drawn into a mission to trap an injured stray cat and find him a home, collaborating with a loneliness grade school student with divorced parents. the book is a thoughtful look at perception and the ways we have all cast ourselves as commentators thanks to the internet.
to shift gears, kazuki kaneshiro’s GO, translated by takami nieda (amazon crossing, 2018), is an example of when exposition works in a novel. kaneshiro is a zainichi korean, and his YA novel builds off the story of a zainichi korean kid developing a romance with his japanese classmate to explore the complications of being a zainichi korean, which requires a fair amount of history background and explained social context — but kaneshiro manages to provide all this without feeling pedantic or taking us out of the story, which i think is a feat. i also enjoyed park soyoung’s SNOW GLOBE, translated by joungmin lee comfort (delacorte press, 2024), which takes place in a frozen dystopia and was a fun read that has quite a few twists that keep it from being predictable.
finally, paek nom-nyong’s FRIEND, translated by immanuel kim (columbia university press, 2020), was wildly informative, not so much because of anything it says explicitly about life in north korea but because of how much propaganda is implicitly in it. paek is a north korean author — like, he isn’t a refugee, and he hasn’t left north korea — he writes in the north. FRIEND was published in the north in 1988, then published in the south in 1992, so this isn’t a novel that wasn’t smuggled out.
the novel is incredibly readable despite feeling dated, and it follows a judge who has to decide upon an application for divorce that has landed on his desk. this isn’t unique in and of itself; people get divorced. the wife, in this case, is a singer, the husband a lathe operator at a factory. the wife also started as a factory worker, which is how they met, before she became a singer after they married, becoming something of a celebrity. they have a young son. she thinks they are not well-matched — she has grown and developed through their marriage, but her husband seems content as a mere lathe operator, ignoring her pleas to get a degree in engineering and absorbing her contempt as his attempted inventions amount to nothing.
the novel is meandering as the judge meets the couple and interacts with other couples, reflecting on those marriages as well as his own, and we drift along people’s memories as they look back on the early years of their marriages and think about the challenges they have faced along the way. it’s a pretty poignant, thoughtful book, obviously absent the tropes we see in the west when it comes to north korea, though it’s hard to say how much we should take from FRIEND about life in the north. i mean, there’s no way for us to know, and we do also have to consider that the book was published in north korea, maybe not a state-sanctioned novel but one that clearly was permitted publication, but, as i read this book, i hoped that there was some truth to it — and i did believe that there was some truth to the world paek presents because north korea is an actual place with actual people, and, where there are people, even in isolated, repressive regimes, there is still love.