Korean literature, the convenience store at the end of the world?

Korea won the Nobel Prize for literature. So what’s next for Korean books?

A decade ago, the Korean translations that made it into English were few and far between. It was easy for a library to own all of them. Now that’s a happy challenge: Overseas releases and sales of Korean titles have soared, and sales of grant-supported translations grew 130 percent year over year, according to new data released by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea last Wednesday.

From casual visits to my favorite bookshops worldwide (Kinokuniya, Kyobo, McNally Jackson, Barnes & Noble and Eslite), a fairly varied and somewhat contradictory portrait of Koreans emerges. Publishers bet big on new Korean self-help. Boatloads of Korean ‘healing literature’ — twee, cozy, saccharine, heartwarming fictions — appeared in the bookshops I saw in Malaysia, Taiwan and New York. Clearly, Korea’s cityscape is being translated and pumped through commercial channels into bookshops worldwide.

On one trip to Kyobo’s flagship store in Gwanghwamun, I counted “The Book of Korean Self-Care,” “The Power of Nunchi,” “How to Live Korean” and “The Korean Book of Happiness.” Privately, I find this bizarre. Korean self-help? Do Koreans have a uniquely better handle on wellness than others? Given the national and diasporic track record on mental health, I found this claim on Koreans’ unique grip on wellness dubious.

In direct contradiction, the latest hits of Asian America in New York City’s Kinokuniya Bryant Park — a superlative bookshop — are memoirs in the achingly American confessional mode, detailing familial or personal traumas and mental health crises of immigrant life and relentless striving.

Nonetheless, we’re getting boatloads of “healing” literature from Korea. Pop inside an Eslite, Taiwan’s national chain, and spot the bright, candy-colored covers of the latest K-fantasy centered around Korean department stores, laundromats or bookshops everywhere.

I admit that I feel rather hollow when I see the glut of these on the table displays or the shelves. I’ve got healing fatigue. It’d be nice to know why we’re all so stressed out and desperate for a cure.

The short answer might be life under capitalism. Facing high costs of living and burnout, squeezed out of the housing market, living with our aging parents and failing to procreate, millennials, zillennials and Zoomers turn to these tales of inner peace and tranquility in the 24-hour convenience stores, laundromats and department stores of our cities. In truth, those spaces exist because there’s relatively less land for dense, urban populations. Healing fiction serves as an escapist read for the burnt-out generation who are essentially on call 24/7, thanks to our smartphones. We still face ridiculously high rent on a planet that rages with ever fiercer wildfires and floods every summer. Can we get some books that consider how Koreans are and have been part of very material conditions and systems?

I wanted to read Korean literature for escapism. The problem was, it’s what I did for a living.

I have a memory of myself as a child inside our neighborhood Barnes & Noble, a national American chain, tucked between a maze of religious and mythology studies and by a wall of test prep books. I’d come across a new shelf of grown-up literature about Asia for the first time. It was the 2000s. They were all on the bottommost shelf, so I had to get on my hands and knees on the carpeted floor to examine the collection of Asian books. I was thrilled to see at least one author with the last name Kim or Park printed on the spine. Three or so books about Korea and Koreans stood next to a foot of Vietnam War books. It was a meager collection. Now the wealth of K-content is astounding.

For proper escapism, I dip into the stories and art of those who lived and died before us. If there are any translation funding bodies, rights departments or agents reading, please take note: Instead of more fantasies, I’d like to see modern women writers like Na Hye-seok and Kang Kyung-ae in gorgeously packaged translations, Oda Makoto’s Beat Generation-inspired travelogue or fictions that delve into Korea’s culture of tower protests.

Lest Korean literature become the convenience store at the end of the world, perhaps the right question’s not only “what’s next” but “what’s old and good and built to last.” To that end, here’s a passage from Choi Myeong-ik’s “Patterns of the Heart,” rendered wonderfully in English by Janet Poole. In the collection’s first short story, “Walking in the Rain,” a restless man wanders the city’s outer limits:

“Pyongil looked up at the old city gate, towering over him like an enormous shadow. He saw the black contours of the eaves, which seemed poised to take flight into the dark sky, and then he gazed once more through the gate at the brilliant city lights, and he tried to conjure up those amazing population figures — one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand!

“They are all preoccupied with their own problems. With this thought, he looked up at the sky once again and watched the bats flit around in the darkness. They were flying out from the black gate tower and disappearing back inside again. It was as if the spirit of the ancient history of the old city gate were still alive and roaming through the night.”

Thankfully, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our convenience stores.

Esther Kim is a writer from New York. She is a guest columnist for The Korea Times. The opinions and the conclusions presented here, though shared with many seekers, are her own.