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Orphans in the Dark
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18239 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1990 |
3,570 Words |
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Bruce Fulton
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PARAMUI NOK (SPIRIT ON THE WIND)
O Chong-hui
Seoul: Munhakkwa Chisong Publishing Co., 1986
287 pp., 3,200 won ($4.50)
MANCH'WIDANGGI: CHE 20 HOE TONGINMUNHAKSANG
SUSANG-JAKP'UMJIP
(MEMORIES OF MANCH'WI HOUSE: THE TWENTIETH TONGIN LITERATURE PRIZE ANTHOLOGY)
Kim Mun-su and others
Seoul: Choson Daily Publishing Co., 1989
333 pp., 3,900 won ($5.75)
A high school girl rifles the desks of her classmates in their dark, empty classroom. With the proceeds she visits a toy shop and adds to her collection of dozens of plastic self-righting dolls. One day she sees her pregnant mother enter a dance hall and consort with unfamiliar men. The girl stops in the toy shop on her way home and asks the crippled owner if she can stay with her overnight. After a sexual encounter they sleep together.
Thus begins what is surely one of the most remarkable debuts in modern Korean literature - O Chong-hui's “The Toy shop Woman” (1968). Published when O was barely twenty as the prizewinning story in the annual newcomers' literary contest sponsored by the Chungang Daily in Seoul, it is a far cry from the stories of adolescent love and friendship O had written as a middle school student. A precociously morbid study of abandonment and loneliness, it prefigures much of what was to come from the pen of this gifted writer.
It is tempting to view O as a prodigy. By 1986 she had published three collections of stories, captured two of the most prestigious literary prizes in Korea - the Yi Sang Prize for “Evening Game” (1979) and the Tongin Prize “The Bronze Mirror” (1982) - and established herself as one of the most original writers of twentieth-century Korea. Equipped with a fertile imagination, abundant technique, and an intense dedication to her craft, she has proved ever since her debut story to be an author of uncompromising standards.
In the more than two decades since “The Toy shop Woman” appeared, O has published fewer than three dozen stories and a novella - meager output in comparison with that of her contemporaries. But also unlike many of her contemporaries, O has produced literature of consistently high quality - rich, provocative stories, many of them charged with a restrained intensity that is unsettling, sometimes shocking. These are not bedtime stories. They are stories, however, that continue a strong literary tradition in modern Korea.
The Short Story in Modern Korea
O Chong-hui is a short story writer in a country that prides itself on its accomplishments in that genre [see Book Section, THE WORLD & I, March 1990]. Yet it was only in the early decades of this century that Koreans began producing fiction whose style is recognizably Western (but whose atmosphere and themes are often uniquely Korean). Young Koreans had begun studying in Japan by the time of Korea's annexation by that country in 1910, and there they were introduced, in Japanese
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