The Guest: A Novel

"Earlier I mentioned that our number-one criterion for translating a novel was that it should somehow make a difference. But we couple that with what we believe to be an appropriate literary style for the subject matter. On the surface, this book would be about a disturbing aspect of civil war—a massacre, or what you might call an ideological cleansing. This novel is based on a historical incident that took place about two months after the June 1950 outbreak of the war. This incident took place in a small city in present-day North Korea. North Korean historians blamed it on United Nations forces pushing north—those UN forces were primarily US military. But subsequent research revealed that the UN forces had nothing to do with those killings; their advance was used as pretext by hardline communists to purge those who were found to be lacking in commitment to the People’s Army and to the ‘Dear Leader.’ So, a disturbing but not uncommon historical incident. So how does the author handle this material? Simple historical description is going to be of little use, because to anyone with any first-hand experience of the atrocities of the Korean War this will be nothing new. It will be a sad reminder of tragedy and possibly personal loss. So Hwang resorted to native Korean spirituality; this is significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, the practitioner of Korean spirituality, the mudang —often called a shaman in the west, although I don’t like that term— is by definition female. So, in a society with a traditional, patriarchal class system, it’s significant that practitioners of native spirituality are female. “Until about 500 years ago, Korea did not have a script of its own. For those who were literate, the literary language was classical Chinese” One of the most important functions of a mudang is to mediate between those of us still here on Earth and the souls of those who have died prematurely or unnaturally, who are thought to be floating up there somewhere, unable to journey to their final resting place. The practitioner will perform a ritual in which she tells a story, and part of that story involves the voices of the souls who are floating around there; the mudang will channel those voices as part of her performance. This has long been an aspect of Korean culture. But what Hwang Sok-Yong has done is to allow the protagonist, who was separated from his brother in North Korea, to find out exactly what happened in this small city, to effect reconciliation with his brother and with those whom he left behind. The way this happens is that somehow he begins to hear these voices. There’s no mudang; instead the author is playing the role of mudang by allowing the protagonist—and us the readers—to hear the stories of the people who were massacred. The stories are not woeful, emotive, hysterical, they are told in a very calm, factual way. There was animosity, a misunderstanding. The UN soldiers were not involved. And once the various souls are satisfied their stories have been heard—they gather together and perform a kind of triumphant finale—they can journey to the afterlife. That’s what makes this novel really brilliant. We might say that not only do the victims of wartime atrocities have a chance to reclaim their identity, but the very practice of being spiritual in Korea is once again reclaiming a fundamental place in Korean literary expression."