Maninbo (19 page)

During wartime the men die,

the women survive.

Cockerels have their necks twisted and die,

hens sit on eggs.

At Gamak Valley in Yeonsan,

north of Nonsan in South Chungcheong

sharp hills

approach the ridges of Mount Gyeryong.

Fifty men died there, once,

while two men

twisted their hair into topknots and revered Kim Il-bu’s esoteric
Jeongyeok
.

The small room, the door of which is never opened

was pitch dark even at midday.

Yeonsan’s Gamak Valley.

Some forty women survived:

old widows,

young concubine widows,

young widows,

old maids.

If an unfamiliar man appears, their eyes light up.

They each offer a gourd of water with a willow leaf on it.

‘You must be thirsty.’

‘You look thirsty.’

‘You’re thirsty.’

The woman from Buyeo with long cheek-bones,

hastily comes forward.

‘Drink this water.

I have no idea who you are or where you are from,

yet your face looks familiar.

If you are hungry

I will warm some cold rice, so you can eat before you go on.’

The woman from Ganggyeong poured the water out of her gourd, grumbling:

‘Yesterday she was making up to a male dog,

today she’s clinging to a man instead of a beast, that slut.’

Jo Eun-seon,

Jo Sang-yeon's sister in Sinchon,

was so pretty, always quiet and bright

like a rising moon, like moonlight.

Each of the five stalls in the toilets in Sinchon primary school

had the following graffiti:

Jo Eun-seon's mine.

Jo Eun-seon's xx is gold-rimmed.

I want to suck Jo Eun-seon's milk.

Jo Eun-seon is xx

Jo Eun-seon's my wife.

Jo Eun-seon's the sun of our nation.

That Jo Eun-seon was in fourth year of teachers' training college.

Her brother

served as vice-chairman of the local People's Commission.

After the reds withdrew,

she was arrested

and raped by the head of public security.

When the police came in,

the police lieutenant raped her.

The constables

raped her.

Several more people

raped her.

Then

she was buried alive.

Thus ended a schoolgirl's life.

Shin Jang-heon, in his shirt-sleeves,

unfolds the morning paper wide.

He deplores the news, his laments ready-made:

‘Fighting breaking out again… the world's going to the dogs, to the dogs…'

Where did he learn

that the world cannot be made of peace,

that the world cannot be made of love,

that human goodness is all lies,

that human evil alone is not a lie?

‘The world's going to the dogs, to the dogs….'

‘The world is all made up of thieves.'

At the table, lamenting, he had three glasses of wine.

On the front page: twenty-one enemy soldiers killed in combat in Inje.

Page three: smuggling organisations rounded up in Busan, Masan, Yeosu,

and, oh, one mutilation murder.

During the Japanese colonial period

he studied French

at Waseda University, Japan.

He was mad about André Gide:

La Porte Étroite

Symphonie Pastorale.

Then

he fell for socialism,

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.

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!

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.

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.