In so many ways, the women of East Asian literature are the prominent voices of their cultures today. The best East Asian writers are women. In Japan and Korea especially, those writers who have the greatest clarity of mind and creative spirits are insightful, fascinating, and imaginative women. Women who speak for the sidelined and …
Korean Literature
Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith Calling it The White Book feels reductive, almost wrong on purpose. Because The White Book is less a book and more an embracing feeling of familiarity. This book is something you live and feel, and all of this is created by its use of empty space. Han Kang …
So many of our greatest stories of terror and the supernatural come from faraway lands. A nation’s laws, customs, traditions, politics, and religion will have a profound effect on what kinds of stories they want to tell. Horror is a magnificent genre that takes heavy themes, chews them up, and spits them out as something …
In 2016 this small Norwich-based indie press by the name of Strangers Press published a selection of chapbooks representing a range of unique Japanese voices in translation known as Keshiki (roughly meaning ‘landscape’). Three years later, they have returned with a new series: Yeoyu. Eight Korean short stories by eight Korean authors, translated by six …
Grass is a starkly beautiful graphic novel which reveals the true-life story of a Korean ‘comfort woman’ during the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. The occupation ended after the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II, following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Grass is a timely and gravely …
Translated from the Korean by Janet Hong More often than not, when a musician finishes an album, their first job is to figure out what order the tracks should be played in. There’s a craft to getting the flow of the album right; do you start with a bang, or a slow crawl? Is there …
Even if The Underground Village were to be underwhelming, it is worth attention for being perhaps the only collection of stories to come out of Japanese-occupied Manchuria (written by a lower-class female Korean communist born in what is now North Korea) that you’ll ever read. Fortunately, thanks in no small part to some witty and …
They say a picture speaks a thousand words, and yet even as a fan of comics and manga I’ve always placed more value in a thousand well-chosen words than a single image. But Bad Friends has taught me that, perhaps, the meaning of the phrase is that sometimes a picture, in complete silence, can say …
It’s troubling to think on what we’ll miss when we’re gone, and what we may never know about what has already passed. How much of history is lost to us? How many wonderful and terrible things will we never live to see? Both of these questions were in mind as I pored through the stories …
It is difficult to know where to start when discussing a book like The Accusation. Smuggled one by one out of North Korea and into China as scribbled manuscripts, and here collected at last as a gorgeous hardcopy. Bandi’s collection of short stories, The Accusation, is not just a valuable insight into ordinary (read: terrifying) …