by Ko Un
a requisite for students studying abroad.
On October 14, 1945,
a welcoming ceremony was held for General Kim Il-sung
in Pyongyang’s Municipal Stadium.
Two days before,
on October 12,
for the very first time, he proposed to call
Kim Il-sung General Kim Il-sung.
After Han Jae-deok made this proposal,
Kim Il-sung
became known forever
as General Kim Il-sung.
He was always boasting that
he was the one
who made Kim Il-sung a general,
he, Han Jae-deok.
Shortly after the war, Han Jae-deok came South.
He wrote ‘I Accuse Kim Il-sung’
and took charge of theory for the South’s anti-communist movement
He was stoutly built.
If he had met the heavily-built journalist Cheon Gwan-u
they would have vied with one another,
calling each other ‘Younger brother’, ‘Older brother’.
He was just as dark and stout.
In the fifties,
and after that
in the sixties,
in the seventies,
in the eighties,
in the nineties,
he grew old embodying eternal anti-communism in South Korea.
He was dark and stout.
Tachihara Seishu
The thirty-six years under Japanese rule were long for some people.
Short, for some people.
During that time
there were people who were opposed to Japanese imperialism.
There were people who were obedient to Japanese imperialism.
During that time
there were people who enjoyed prosperity under Japanese imperialism.
During that time
there were people
who became completely Japanese,
who deeply worshiped Japan
and Japanese culture.
There were people who every day
forgot completely that they were Koreans.
In Korea, the novelist Yi Gwang-su declared:
‘Koreans should be Japanised
so that when you prick a Korean’s brow with a needle
you find Japanese blood oozing out.’
In Japan, longing to be Japanese,
he wore Japanese costume and clogs
even when he was alone.
The Japanese novelist Tachihara Seishu
had six different names
in his not-so-long lifetime.
Born in Daejang-dong, Seohu-myeon, Andong, North Gyeongsang, Korea,
his name in the family register was Kim Yun-gyu,
which he used for a while
after he went across to Japan.
His new name there was Nomura Shintaro,
or Kim Ingkei,
the Japanese pronunciation of his Korean name, Kim Yun-gyu.
He became Kanai Seishu when he had to be renamed under Japanese rule.
After marrying a Japanese woman
he took his wife’s family name and became
Yonemoto Seishu,
while Tachihara Seishu
was his pen-name as a novelist.
He was officially authorised to register his Japanese name
two months before his life ended.
Then he died.
Born
on January 6, 1926,
his father was Kim Gyeong-mun, a labourer at Bongjeong temple,
in Mount Cheondeung in a valley near Andong
and his mother was Gwon Eum-jeon.
Before Yun-gyu was born
his father had a son
with another woman, Gyu-tae,
whom he entered in the family register with Gwon Eum-jeon as the mother.
When his father died
his mother moved into the town,
then moved far away to Gumi.
From there she crossed over to Japan.
She began a new life in a Japanese slum.
Kim Yun-gyu
went to a commercial high school in Yokohama,
dropped out of Waseda University,
and made his debut as a novelist.
Then his fabrications began.
After the annexation of Korea by Japan, he said,
when the Japanese state policy made Korean noblemen
marry Japanese women,
his father married a Japanese woman.
He was born in the home of his mother’s Nagano family,
in Daegu, North Gyeongsang,
on January 6 1927, the second year of Showa,
but the birth date shown in the family register
was January 6 1926, the fifteenth year of Taisho.
His father was Kanai Keibung,
his mother Nagano Ongko.
At the end of the Joseon dynasty, his father,
born into the noble Yi clan,
was adopted into the Japanese Kanai family.
He served as a soldier, then was discharged.
Since he disliked the world
he eventually became a Zen monk.
While residing at Bongseon temple
on the outskirts of Andong,
he used to come down from the temple once a week.
After his father died
he moved into Andong town.
He attended the Japanese primary school for a time
before transferring to Andong ordinary school for Korean children.
When his mother
remarried into the Japanese Nomura family of Kobe,
he was entrusted to a maternal uncle,
Nagano Tesso, a medical doctor.
He went to Japan
and lived in his aunt’s house in Yokosuka.
There was Yonemoto Miseyo,
a girl one year below him in Yokosuka middle school,
who was to be his future wife.
He stabbed a student
four years older than himself.
His admission to the school was cancelled.
He transferred to Yokosuka Commercial School.
He attained third grade in kendo.
He stayed in Fukuoka at the invitation of his uncle Nagano,
who had moved to the medical school of Kyushu Imperial University.
In the 18th year of Showa, after four years’ preparation for the entrance exam
he entered the preparatory course at Keijo Imperial University, in Seoul.
Then he went back to Japan.
Thus far all pure lies.
Entered law school, Waseda University.
Mobilised into the labour force during the war.
Married.
Was registered in the register of his wife’s Yonemoto Family.
Had a son and daughter.
Became a writer.
Received the Naoki award.
Wrote many novels,
many short stories.
A man desperately devoted to Japan, the exploiting nation.
A man so infatuated with medieval Japan
that he transformed himself into a medieval Japanese.
A man of fiction calling himself a descendant of nobility,
half noble by blood.
For him Korea did not exist.
At fifty-four he died of oesophageal cancer.
A rare fellow…indeed!
Sang-gwon, Only Son
Venus assaulted the moon.
The People’s Army came down.
The South Korean army moved up.
The Chinese forces came down.
The People’s Army came down.
The South Korean army moved up.
The UN forces moved up.
The armistice line was drawn following the 38th parallel.
One village in Maseok, Gyeonggi province, was almost completely deserted.
All that remained were some maize stalks
and an elderly couple.
They had no news of their son Sang-gwon
who had gone off as a volunteer soldier.
He was good at painting playing cards.
When he painted a portrait of President Syngman Rhee
in third year of middle school
he received a commendation from the provincial education office.
When the communists arrived,
during the summer when he was in the fourth year,
his portrait of Kim Il-sung was hung on the wall
of the local office of the People’s Committee.
Sang-gwon didn’t come back.
Even if he had,
since he had painted the portrait of Kim Il-sung,
he could not live.
There was no news,
no news at all,
of their only son.
Ten Days on the Continent
In 1921, the Pan-Pacific Conference was held in Washington DC, USA.
In response, Lenin held the Conference of the Oppressed of the East in Moscow, USSR.
The Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai was stagnant, split into factions.
To escape this gridlock,
some took the Trans-Siberian at Harbin.
But Yeo Un-hyeong, Kim Gyu-sik and others
left from Zhangjiakou, Beijing,
by way of Kulun in Mongolia,
arriving at Kyakhta on the Soviet border.
After twenty thousand anti-revolutionary White Russian Tsarist troops
led by Baron Ungern-Sternberg had been completely destroyed in Outer Mongolia,
the whole of Outer Mongolia, from which the Chinese were banished,
fell under the control of packs of mounted bandits.
The Korean exiles prepared fur clothing, leather clothing,
boots lined with camel fur,
hats made of sheepskin,
overcoats of animal skins,
celluloid glasses
with frames of furred leather,
sleeping-bags made of old sheepskins,
and supplies of dried mutton,
rifles and pistols.
For ten days they traversed the Mongolian desert.
Minus twenty Celsius.
They arrived at their destination after camping out often in the open desert.
Along the way they caught a sheep
and boiled it in an empty oil barrel.
Even without salt it made a feast.
By way of towns in Mongolia
by way of Sapsk and Udinsk,
eating frozen black bread cut with an axe,
and by way of Irkutzk,
they finally reached Moscow on January 7, 1922.
China, Mongolia, and post-revolution Soviet Union too, all were in utter poverty.
They listened to Zinovyev’s speech at the Third International.
They met Lenin,
Trotsky.
Yeo Un-Hyeong emphasised that
the Korean revolution should be carried out
by supporting, encouraging, and correcting the Provisional Government,
and that, since Korea was an agrarian land with no knowledge of communism,
nationalism should be stressed
and the first objective should be reaching the farmers.
Lenin expressed deep interest in liberation from colonial rule.
Somehow it all seemed so simple.
Yi Jang-don’s Wife
On January 10, 1951,
amidst the chaos of flight,
on January 25, 1951,
amidst the final chaos of flight
markets were still open.
So long as anyone was alive
markets opened.
In Seoul, once again in the hands of the People’s Army,
so long as anyone at all was around,
markets were still open.
Here and there in the ruins
rice-cakes,
noodles,
makgeolli were for sale.
And bundles of firewood.
And old clothes taken from empty houses.
Even though the bodies of those killed by strafing
lay sprawled in the snow fields,
a market opened nearby. Chickens for sale.
Three-storey houses,
two-storey houses were bombed,
while low single-storey houses survived.
The People’s Committee of Seoul City
began work
in City Hall.
Yi Seung-yeop,
swarthy and with a broad laugh,
came back and presided.
Rallies were held
on air-raid-free evenings
in the City Hall Plaza,
where pools or rainwater formed in bomb craters.
Henceforth, the heroic People’s Army
will never again make a strategic withdrawal,
and so on.
And during those rallies
here and there around the Plaza,
rice-cake,
noodles,
makgeolli were being sold.
After Seoul was first recaptured
Yi Jang-don’s wife,
a strong woman,
sold rice-cakes in the Republic of Korea;
after the retreat
she sold rice-cakes again in the People’s Republic.
Sure enough, in 1953, after Seoul was secured,
she made her way into Nagwon-dong, Seoul
and opened the Obok rice-cake store.
A woman
who always wrapped her head in a towel.
A woman
who never so much as blinked during air-raids.
A woman
who knew nothing of fear, or of anxiety.
A Birth
On the night of January 3, 1951,
flames rose high
all over Seoul:
flames from burning military supplies,
flames from burning food stocks,
flames from burning documents.
On the morning of January 4,
low-flying aircraft
made an announcement from loudspeakers:
Citizens who have not yet evacuated
should do nothing rash.
Take care.
There was nobody left to hear it.
Seoul was just about deserted.
Maybe sixty thousand remained.
Flocks of crows, an uncommon sight,
had free run of Seoul
At dawn that day,
a baby
had just been born,
one of the sixty thousand.
As day was breaking,
communist soldiers in fur hats
marched through the streets.
The baby
was crying.
The mother with almost no milk
was holding her fatherless newborn.
It was a birth at which none rejoiced,
but nobody said it was a birth
that should not have happened.
The mother will grow strong.
The baby too will grow stronger, little by little.
VOLUME 20
The Present
Our lovely land of rivers, mountains!
Ah, did we have such hatred that we took revenge?
Did we have such resentment that we took revenge
and again revenge?
Since Liberation, Korea has been a land of blood.
Every single nook and cranny of our whole peninsula
has become a cursed place
where one is forced to kill another.
Ended now a thousand years of warm hearts in every village.
After 1945
suddenly
Jeong-tae turned from a boy into a young men.
You too
are no longer yourself
but your enemy’s enemy.
You there, America’s enemy? The USSR’s enemy?
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What country are you a descendant of?
When Jeong-tae had been drinking
he longed to see his right-wing father
then if he drank more
he longed to see his left-wing maternal uncle.
The people who’d loved him
when he was a child.
Seven-year-old Nam-ok
In a roadside shack in Osan
lived a brother and sister whose parents had been killed.
The brother was fifteen, and
– the child below him having died –
then came Nam-ok, seven.
Her brother had gone along the railway lines collecting coals;
she was all alone,
having fun playing marbles.
Their land’s sky was completely occupied by American planes.
No Cheon-myeong
‘The deer,
a pathetic animal on account of its long neck.’
The woman who wrote that poem,
had a pointed chin,
wore traditional Korean skirt and jacket,
the skirt short, the jacket-ribbons long.
On June 24, 1950,
she was invited for a convivial supper
at the house of the older poet Mo Yun-suk,
who afterward accompanied her home in a jeep.
After the war broke out on June 25,
Mo Yun-suk hid on Aegi Hill behind Ewha Womans University.
She sent someone to No Cheon-myeong to ask for some food
and two summer jackets.
That woman,
far from sending summer jackets, demanded:
Tell me where Mo Yun-suk is.
If you don’t