At the beginning of the South Korean writer and director Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 thriller Burning, a movie adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story, a young woman named Haemi invites a childhood acquaintance, Jongsu, to her apartment, which she complains gets natural light for only one moment a day, when the sun bounces off the Seoul Tower to shine in her window. She and Jongsu quickly begin having sex, which Lee shoots from Jongsu’s perspective. The camera’s gaze rises to the wall behind Haemi, where a sunbeam briefly appears. It’s a shot lingering and lovely enough to become the point of the scene, although it carries no identifiable meaning. Is this sex scene a rare moment of light in Jongsu’s and Haemi’s lives, or does it mean more illumination is coming for both of them? Does the glow matter because it’s there, or because it will soon be gone? Somehow, the shot and the questions it creates evoke melancholy and wonder at the same time. The experience isn’t what you get from many thrillers—and, as such, is a reminder that Lee’s not your average thriller-maker, but an internationally recognized master of his craft.
It’s not easy to create an image that, like the shot of sunlight on Haemi’s wall, evokes feelings rather than tells viewers how to feel. On the page, this is even more true than it is on-screen, given that any written description is an explanation. Lee, it would seem, is repelled by the explanatory mode in all his art—which includes fiction. Anglophone readers haven’t had access to his work in this format before, but earlier this year Lee released a story collection, Snowy Day and Other Stories, that was translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl and Yoosup Chang. The four stories and three novellas within it are taken from books Lee published early in his career. He spent a decade writing plays and fiction before turning to screenwriting, and then directing. It seems entirely possible that this trajectory was a flight from explanation and directness: In an interview, he told The New Yorker’s Cressida Leyshon that, to this day, “writing a short story and making a movie are essentially the same for me in terms of trying to communicate,” which he described as his animating goal. “But film is not like literature—it’s much harder to ‘communicate’ through film.”
Many movies, especially commercial ones, overcome this challenge by relying heavily on images that are the opposite of the sun on Haemi’s wall: When you see James Bond taking an Alpine curve in a gorgeous car with a gorgeous woman, you likely know precisely what’s going on and how to feel about it. Lee isn’t interested in telling stories that way. Part of why he sees cinema as harder, he told Leyshon, is that “audiences are consuming more and more movies solely for the sake of entertainment and not for what they might communicate.” Another way to put this could be to say that we frequently watch movies to be told a story, rather than to feel our way into it—a process that requires us to help tell the stories to ourselves. It would seem that this is what Lee means by communication. Across his body of work, he asks viewers and readers to interpret and intuit his meaning, to take part in his project rather than just taking it in.
None of this is to say that Lee’s writing or directing is hard to follow. Snowy Day is full of clear, gripping, and suspenseful plots. They just don’t strike me as the main point. Instead, the stories in this collection seem most interested in evoking the harsh and paranoid political setting from which they emerged—namely, the dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan, whose government’s harsh anti-communist fervor pervaded and dampened South Korean civil society. In his introduction to Snowy Day, Lee notes that he began publishing fiction three years after the 1980 Gwangju massacre of student protesters. He doubted the value of writing profoundly but felt a need to write about his times “as a way to avoid escaping reality.” Rereading those stories now, he adds, “I can feel the air of the streets of those days mixed with the exhaust fumes and tear gas that stung my eyes.” Here, as in the stories themselves, he turns swiftly to evocation: He judges his stories as worth revisiting because they make him feel the time when they were written. Although I hadn’t yet been born in the ’80s and have never visited any of their settings, they did the same for me. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his turn to film, they do so largely through their images, which at times convey ineffable emotions, but also hold the frequently inexpressible—or unsafe to express—losses and humiliations of trying to survive under a repressive regime.
Lee’s gift for imagery is evident from the very start of the collection, in its eponymous opening story. It begins with a run of truly astonishing description—astonishing, I should say, for any writer, but especially so for one at the very start of his career. (Of course, in Snowy Day, this achievement belongs not only to Lee but also to his translators, who are meticulous in their attention to visual detail.) “Snowy Day” is set on a remote military base where class tensions between two soldiers on patrol, exacerbated by one character’s stereotypically masculine drive to assert his superiority through violence, end in tragedy. Running through the story—and through the collection as a whole—is a sense that such machismo, though it may lead to what can seem like animal brutality, is anything but instinctive. Rather, it’s something men absorb: not only from life in the military, but also from life in a militarized society.
None of this is clear at the start of “Snowy Day,” and yet even its most beautiful images are full of foreboding. Consider Lee’s description of the base, where “sunbeams shone like spikes of ice above the parade ground, and the barracks beyond were buried in the deep shadow of the mountains—the division between light and dark seemed especially sharp. The tops of pine trees pierced the dark silhouette of the mountains in the low sunlight, glinting like bayonets affixed on rifle barrels.” While this passage in no way tells readers what to be afraid of, it seems clear that we should be scared.
“Snowy Day,” for all its loveliness, isn’t subtle. It reads like a beginner’s story, especially where plot is concerned. But putting it at the start of the collection is a wise decision; as Snowy Day moves on, Lee’s use of imagery—and much else—gets more sophisticated, though the interest in the interplay of light and dark that appears in “Snowy Day,” and is so apparent in Burning and the rest of his movies, doesn’t change. He just seems to learn, as his career progresses, to wield it more surprisingly.
We see this skill in its fullest form in “A Lamp in the Sky,” a phenomenal novella about a young woman, Shinhye, who tries to live quietly as a café waitress in a coal-mining town after getting suspended from college for supposed political agitation—though all she had done, in reality, was convene a group for the sake of “discussing campus issues with the dean’s permission”; she soon gets arrested and brutally interrogated on the false premise that she’s come there as a labor organizer. Lee concentrates on darkness from the moment Shinhye arrives in her new home. Coal dust covers the town, with “everything sunk into the darkest dark as if it had been smeared in black oil pastels. In the pit of that blackness, the lights of the cafés, bars, and inns seemed out of place.” But the town’s blackness isn’t just about coal—or, for that matter, about the police abuse Shinhye suffers there. Instead, Lee turns it into a multipronged metaphor that communicates the difficulty of resisting repression, as well as Shinhye’s personal struggle to see her ideas, desires, and self clearly.
None of this instability emerges until late in the interrogation, which is also late in the novella. Worn out and frightened, Shinhye imagines (or dreams, or hallucinates) her most politically fervent college friend telling her not to “give in to the darkness. We’re still inside the tunnel of history.” Rather than taking comfort in this counsel, Shinhye rebels against it. “When was there ever a time when we weren’t in the tunnel of history?” she thinks. “My whole life I’ve been walking inside a dark tunnel of pain, a tunnel that never ends, with a dim light in the distance, not even knowing if that light is real.” By shifting from the collective perspective of the “tunnel of history” to the more personal one of a “tunnel of pain,” Lee changes not just the image, but the entire novella. Suddenly, it’s no longer clear that its darkness belongs completely to its setting—meaning not just the coal town, but a country run by Chun Doo-hwan. Maybe Shinhye’s unhappiness is solely the product of life under an oppressive government, but maybe some of it is a depression or sense of isolation that would have been hers regardless. Neither she nor the reader can fully tell. From this point on, “A Lamp in the Sky” is about the grief of never knowing, of having lost the right to understand one’s own sadness. It’s a complicated indignity, and one Lee communicates beautifully.
In his translator’s note, Fenkl, who has read Lee’s stories since the start of the latter’s career, writes that the first time he watched one of Lee’s movies, it seemed to him that the film derived much of its force from “the technique of its cinematography,” which he “found to be already present back in the early ’80s in in the language of Lee’s short stories.” Throughout Snowy Day, Lee makes moves that are easy to imagine on-screen. Brief, startling moments of illumination are everywhere in its stories; so are all kinds of optical illusions and distortions. Often, these, too, have a political valence. In “There’s a Lot of Shit in Nokcheon,” Junshik, an apolitical man tormented by envy of his activist half-brother’s certainty, sees “the silhouette of a family walking toward him in the twilight” one evening. His immediate instinct is to covet their happiness. Then he realizes it’s his own wife, daughter, and brother. By the end of the story, he’s committed an act of cruelty that the silhouette moment sets up perfectly: With one brief scene, Lee suggests to his readers that Junshik sees even the people he loves as flat images, not full-fledged human beings such as him.
Such subtlety may not necessarily be what readers—perhaps American readers, in particular—expect from political fiction, which can have a reputation for being didactic and heavy-handed, designed to beat readers over the head, as if anything political were made in the mode of Soviet realism. Snowy Day is an important antidote to this false concept. It’s also a reminder of the degree to which art forms blur together and influence one another. The scene in which Junshik mistakes his family members for lucky strangers would work beautifully in a movie. Many of the most powerful ones in Snowy Day would. Lee has said that he’s not interested in adapting his own works, that he’d always rather choose “a new story to tell.” I’m not generally one to want adaptations, but in this case, I wish he’d change his mind. The images in these stories evoke so much already. I’d like to see them with my eyes as well as my imagination—not to have them explained to me, but because I’m confident they would contain even more.
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