by T'aejun Yi
He offers Yŏngwŏl a drink, while asking her to sing a kasa. Yŏngwŏl does not refuse, but picks up the drum that she has just pushed to one side and begins to play again.3
“Parting from my love one morning …”
Pak clears his throat and replies with a line from a poem that suits the occasion, even though the melody is a bit off.
“Where the mountains and rivers all end, oh woe … though we want to sing and shout, it’s just too hard …”
Pak finished with a sigh and tears welled up in his eyes.
The room was silent, as if a cold rain had passed through. Kim summoned the boy and ordered him to bring in a gramophone player. At the sound of jazz, the other two kisaeng took turns in dancing with Kim, as if this was now their world.
“Yŏngwŏl?”
Yŏngwŏl quietly moved next to Hyŏn.
“I never thought I’d see you again, I’m really happy.”
“But who would take someone like me away from all this?”
“Are you sure you haven’t set your sights too high?”
“What?”
She couldn’t hear well over the noise of the gramophone player.
“Are you sure you haven’t set your sights too high?”
“Not at all … you don’t look so well.”
“Mmm?”
“You don’t look so well.”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ve missed you …”
“It’s only words, but still …”
“Hah!”
The dance had come to an end. Kim returned to his seat and turned to Hyŏn, “You should dance too, odore!”4
“But I don’t know how. I’ve always despised people who dance with kisaeng.”
“I don’t know anyone else as stubborn as you. If you can’t dance, then why not just say so …”
“Huh! It’s not that I don’t like to give in … [but kisaeng are a Korean national treasure].5 Hugging each other and shaking your bottom, screeching along to those damn popular songs, is that what it means to be a kisaeng, is that really entertainment? I bet our Yŏngwŏl here can’t dance. Perhaps I should say won’t dance, rather than can’t?”
“Oh! Our Yŏngwŏl is a great dancer.”
The other two kisaeng interjected, with a glance toward her.
“So you dance too?”
“I’m not very good.”
“But, regardless of whether you’re good or not?”
“What else can I do? I have to adapt to the tastes of all our different guests.”
“Why is that?”
“I need to make money, of course.”
“And what will you do with all the money you make?”
“A kisaeng needs to have her own money.”
“How come?”
“Well, just think about it.”
“I don’t know. Can’t you just find yourself a rich man?”
“And you think that a rich man will stay with me and not lose interest?”
“Well, why not?”
“A first wife knows that no matter how many affairs her husband has he’ll come back home when he’s old, so she finds her happiness in her children, doesn’t she? But a kisaeng has to rely on just one person, so what happens when he doesn’t come home? What hope does she have? How many kisaeng last long after they’ve set up home with someone? The best thing for a kisaeng is to make her own money and find herself a poor man.”
“Yeah! Am I glad to hear that!”
Pak came and sat down by them. He took hold of Yŏngwŏl’s hand and pulled her toward him, saying, “I don’t have a penny to my name, and now my job is on the line too. My wife is so old she won’t even grumble, so if you have some money, why don’t we set up home together?”
“But pal, Yŏngwŏl belongs to Hyŏn.”
“Well, I guess my only hope now is to find a kisaeng with money …”
And Hyŏn laughed too.
“You’d better skim the cream off the top from now on.” Kim glanced over to observe Hyŏn’s reaction.
[“And how am I supposed to do that?”
“I mean write something that will sell. People have to know to read your stuff, don’t they? Sometimes I give it a go because your name’s on it, but it’s so difficult … I don’t know …”
“Bastard!… I don’t need people like you to read my work. Change my direction … what … who says that writers have to be on the frontlines? That’s shit from you …”
“What?”
Kim exploded. And because of that Hyŏn stopped joking, his eyes glaring.]
“You dirty scoundrel!”
“Hah, no matter how upright you pretend to be …”
“What, you bastard …”
And Hyŏn threw the glass of soda, which he’d been drinking in an attempt to sober up, straight at Kim. It wasn’t only the glass that broke and rolled around. All the kisaeng’s eyes followed it. Even the boy came in.
“You bastard? Whether it’s right or not, we, we … look we … [are artists! Art comes before everything. You bastard …]”
Tears welled up in Hyŏn’s wide eyes.
“What are you doing in a place like this … you’re drunk, get some fresh air.”
Pak led Hyŏn out of the chaotic room and into the corridor, where Hyŏn took out a cigarette.
“What are you doing? Do you have to take offense at Kim’s every word?”
“Phew …”
“What’s the point in that …”
“I think I’ve drunk too much … I’m … Perhaps I’m sick of Kim? … You should go back in …”
Hyŏn leant on the railing for a while, and then he walked down to the riverside, still wearing his slippers. Not a single boat was on the water. He felt a chill down his spine, although there was no breeze. Frost was forming on the leaves scattered on the riverbank, and they sparkled like silver paper. He tried stepping on each leaf that sparkled.
“Step on frost and a hard ice soon follows …”
He suddenly recalled these words from the Book of Changes. The point was that ice follows upon frost. Hyŏn suddenly sobered up. He pulled the flaps of his jacket around him, but a cold air had pierced right into his chest. He wanted to smoke, but couldn’t find a match.
“Step on frost and a hard ice soon follows.… Step on frost and a hard ice soon follows …”
The nighttime river was as cold and silent as a corpse.
—The Eighth Day of the Eleventh Month of
the Year of the Wood Ox
First published in 1938;
translated from Yi T’aejun tanp’yŏnjip (Chosŏn mun’go, 1941), with additions from 1938 version
1. In March 1938 the Government General announced a third revision to the Chōsen Education Code in which Korean language was recategorized as a mere elective language at schools on the peninsula. This would have a major impact on teachers of the Korean language, such as the character Pak.
2. Kim’s frequent injection of Japanese words into conversation is not simply a sign of the times but indicative of his opportunistic collusion with the modernizing policies of the Government General. Here hiyakashi means “to mock” or “to tease."
3. Yŏngwŏl begins singing a line from a long narrative poetic form that developed during the Chosŏn dynasty, known as a kasa. Pak replies with lines from a poem written in classical Chinese by the one-time anarchist and early twentieth-century nationalist historian Sin Ch’aeho.
4. Kim urges Hyŏn to dance in Japanese.
5. Brackets mark phrases dropped from Yi T’aejun’s first version of 1938 when the story was republished in a collection in 1941.
A TALE OF RABBITS
Before he could even rub the sleep from his eyes, Hyŏn fumbled around his pillow in search of the porcelain bowl full of rice water, which had stood there overnight. It tasted colder and sweeter than any beer steeped in ice. He recalled the way Sŏhae used to tease him, “Hyŏn, when you really start to drink, you’l
l discover the true taste of water.” If Sŏhae were still here they would enjoy a drink together. But more than ten years must have passed now since his death.
Hyŏn stretched out his arms and stared at the flies circling the ceiling.
Back then he was working at the Chungwoe Daily Newspaper. It would already be dark by the time they managed to squeeze a hundred won out of the business department on payday and divvy out three to five won each, but even that would disappear before the shutters had been closed and rickshaws hailed when they passed down the line of bread, rice, and clothes merchants who waited outside the doors. Hyŏn was still a bachelor back then and had eked out a living for a couple of years, but Sŏhae, who lived with his mother, wife, and children in rented lodgings, could not feed his family on friendship and loyalty alone.
“I’m moving to the Maeil. Why don’t you send us something from time to time? I know you don’t have a family, but you still have to pay your landlady.”
Hyŏn stayed at the Chungwoe, but from then on his landlady’s complaints would be silenced by manuscript fees from the Government General-funded Maeil News. When the Chungwoe Daily finally closed down, Hyŏn dismissed it as a time waster and resolved to throw himself into his own studies: he began to reread the classics from the West, which he had not fully appreciated as a student, all the while paying for his board by writing a few short stories and trivial pieces for Sŏhae. Yet whenever someone gains a break, they are apt to set their sights on something even greater. Although Hyŏn had asked himself more than once whether he could inflict his lifestyle on anyone else, he ended up getting married with neither a job nor a home to his name. Supporting a wife turned out to be a burden, which sapped all of his strength and energy. His studies and art came a distant second and third. There was little choice but to return to what he knew, and that meant a newspaper company. Fortunately, he had procured a salaried position at the Tonga Daily before his first child was born. By writing serialized novels on the side, he managed to ease his housing worries with the purchase of a shack set on a two-hundred-p’yŏng plot. It was a twenty-minute walk from the tram to be sure, but back then one p’yŏng only cost two or three won. Later, when his land was absorbed into the prefecture and prices rose, he sold off half the plot and built a proper tiled house more than ten kan in area.
“Now that we have our own home, we just need to feed and clothe ourselves …”
Hyŏn’s wife had taken a fancy to housekeeping. Just as they had paid off the monthly installments on a sewing machine and enrolled in life insurance, they heard that the neighbors had bought a phonograph player and promptly purchased one on installments the very next day. But if Hyŏn were to bring home a record or two, his wife would chide him.
“Why on earth did you spend three won on each of those … can we feed ourselves on music? You should give me that kind of money.”
To ease his guilt at roaming here and there by himself all summer—thanks to his pass—Hyŏn would save up twenty won and tell his wife to take the children out for the day to somewhere nearby, such as Inch’ŏn. She would set off en route to Inch’ŏn but invariably stop off at Chin’gogae, have lunch at a department store, and return with the children carrying the pots, kettles, and other kitchen equipment she had bought.
This wife of Hyŏn’s had graduated from the literature department of M Girls’ School, which was located just over the hill from where they now lived. Even back in the days of the shack she had installed glass in each window, which she draped with flower-patterned curtains, hung Millet’s Angelus on the wall, and arranged flowerpots morning and night. Sometimes she would sing the lullaby from Jocelyn to their sleeping children, or take a silk-covered book from the bookcase and recite Browning. But after their second child had been born, and especially after rows of those Kŏnyangsa houses had cropped up all over the place, she grew to dislike the frequent visits of her classmates from the nearby school, and buried herself in floor plans with the hope of pulling down that shack and building a solid new tiled house. Despite the dust on the Angelus and shriveling flowers, her daily schedule seemed full of things that were far more pressing.
Hyŏn would have one novel serialized in the newspaper each year. His ambitions did not really lie in serialized novels. He wanted to cultivate himself as a writer and exhaust himself with the kind of creative work that would satisfy his artistic desires, even if that meant a mere short story. He harbored a secret dream to go one step further and produce a major work that would forge a bridge onto the main literary thoroughfare from the minor path on which the new literature of this place still seemed to be lost. If he thought of a good name for a character, he would carefully write it down, and if he saw an interesting actor in a movie, he would take a cutting with a photograph to keep.
Yet all these things remained mere fancy as another year passed with him absorbed in the writing of a serialized novel.
Hyŏn’s wife was even more delighted than his readers whenever he began a new novel. The pressure of unpaid bills would ease, and their household would feel quite flush with the unexpected cash, especially if the novel appeared as a single volume and, as sometimes happened, was even reprinted.
“I’m going on forty, the so-called age of decisiveness! Why am I wasting day after day like this? Wake up, go to the office, translate a dispatch or two … at best serialize a novel …”
Just as Hyŏn was reaching this resolute conclusion, the vernacular papers were shut down.
“Be bright!” “Be healthy!” Loudspeakers shouted out the new era. Hyŏn had returned home drunk the past several nights, bewildered and unable to hold himself together.
The rice water had freshened him up on the inside, but his head still felt heavy.
“Really start to drink and discover the true taste of water … umm, have I achieved anything during ten years at the newspaper other than discover the true taste of water?”
He picked up the bowl again but only the dregs were left. He knocked on the kitchen wall to summon his wife.
“Did you sleep well?”
“Some water, please.”
She good-naturedly fetched some water and sat down. Then she stretched out her neck and burped, as if she had been the one drinking. Her breathing was already heavy. This was her fourth pregnancy, following upon the daughter and two sons, which they had believed to be perfectly sufficient already.
“I need to talk to you.”
Hyŏn’s wife was not one to scold normally, but from time to time she would become serious.
“It’s not that I don’t know how you’re feeling lately. But this is the fourth day in a row that you’ve come home drunk …”
Hyŏn frowned as he silently ran his fingers through his thick hair.
“This resentment or anger of yours … if just a few drinks can make you forget, then why pretend to be angry or resentful in the first place? We women find nothing more disgusting and worrying than watching Korean men behave like this. We can’t live on alcohol, can we? And you’re not the only ones at home, are you? Just think about it, you’ve got a wife and all these children, now you have no job and there isn’t even anywhere you could serialize a novel … can’t you pull yourself together?”
“Oh shut up,” Hyŏn grumbled and crawled back under the quilt. He returned home slam drunk that day and the next, perhaps as a kind of reaction. But to tell the truth, his wife’s words had hit home; he knew that just because he was drunk did not mean the whole world would join him, and he could not keep on drinking alone forever.
Hyŏn agreed to his wife’s request to set themselves up as rabbit breeders using the severance pay that had brought a chill to his heart, as if it had been stolen from the pocket of a corpse.
First, his wife had returned from someone’s house, having seen for herself how just two rabbits had, within one year, reproduced so much that a fifty-p’yŏng yard could no longer hold them all. Then, she returned from someone else’s house, where a couple had started with just two hundred won but
were earning an average of seventy to eighty won each month just within a couple of years. And then, one evening Hyŏn had read a book on rabbit breeding, which his wife had acquired for him, and discovered that, although breeding rabbits would require his daily attention, it seemed far less of a burden than writing a serialized novel each day; and that, whereas writing a serialized novel left him no time to work on a serious novel, breeding rabbits would leave him with enough energy to read and work on the kind of novels he wanted to write, even if this meant only one every ten years. When he realized that this would also amount to the kind of bright and healthy life that the loudspeakers were screaming at him to live, Hyŏn’s resolve to breed rabbits hardened still further. He accompanied his wife on a visit to her former classmate, who was now making seventy to eighty won a month on an investment of two hundred won.
The husband had once been a well-known pianist, whose photograph had taken up two columns in the Tonga Daily some years previous and whose performances several newspaper companies had been keen to sponsor. He greeted Hyŏn and his wife with rough, grass-stained hands unbecoming to a pianist. Once inside the courtyard they were surrounded by an uncomfortably warm smell, which reminded Hyŏn more of fetid flesh than manure. The rabbit cages looked like the boxes you leave your clothes in at the bathhouse: they were stacked in rows and together made a small yet tallish building that circled the yard. White rabbits crouched at intervals, their ears barely visible, rolling soft pink eyes and twitching their mouths. Hyŏn immediately thought of his children at home. This was the world of fairy tales. It seemed like a sideline more suitable to a children’s fiction writer. Hyŏn and his wife listened for more than two hours to the pianist and his wife’s various tales of raising rabbits before returning home with increased confidence. Soon they sent an order to the Kanebo rabbit-breeding division for twenty meriken rabbits, which were supposed to be the easiest to look after. They called the carpenter and had him build rabbit cages. Before he’d even finished, a telegram arrived to notify them that the rabbits had been dispatched. Hyŏn took the children up the hill to pick grass and acacia leaves. Then they got hold of leftover residue from the bean curd maker. They also ordered some dried food, because apparently the rabbits would get sick if fed only on wet food. Three days later the twenty tiny new members of Hyŏn’s household arrived safe and sound in boxes with wire lids. They were breathing rapidly in the heat, otherwise their only movement was a calm twitching of their muzzles while they avoided watching what was going on around them. They seemed to feel safer in their boxes. They looked more like some kind of chemical concoction created in a test tube than natural animals. While his wife and children rushed to unpack them with glee, Hyŏn stood back and felt guilty, ashamed even, to think that responsibility for the livelihood of five to six strong human beings was being placed upon these tiny, cute animals, which were as soft and white as the flowers on a gourd plant.