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Praise for Bae Suah
“Bae Suah offers the chance to unknow—to see the everyday afresh and be defamiliarized with what we believe we know—which is no small offering.”
—Music & Literature
“With concise, evocative prose, Bae merges the mundane with the strange in a way that leaves the reader fulfilled yet bewildered, pondering how exactly the author managed to pull this all off.”
—Korean Literature Now
“A compact, personal account of anomie and withdrawal in a time of rapid social and economic change. . . . An easily digested short book that nevertheless feels much very substantial—a very full story. Impressive, and well worthwhile.”
—The Complete Review
“The mystery, like the achievement of [Nowhere to Be Found], occurs not in space, but in time.”
—The National
Also by Bae Suah
A Greater Music
Nowhere to Be Found
Recitation
Copyright © 2010 by Bae Suah
Originally published in Korea by Changbi Publishers, Inc.
All rights reserved
Translation copyright © 2017 by Deborah Smith
English edition is published by arrangement with Changbi Publishers, Inc.
First edition, 2017
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Pae, Su-a, 1965- author. | Smith, Deborah, 1987- translator.
Title: North station / by Bae Suah; translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith.
Description: First edition. | Rochester, NY: Open Letter, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017022257 (print) | LCCN 2017032524 (ebook) | ISBN 9781940953700 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Pae, Su-a, 1965—Translations into English. | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | GSAFD: Short stories.
Classification: LCC PL992.6.S83 (ebook) | LCC PL992.6.S83 A2 2017 (print) | DDC 895.73/5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022257
This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea)
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Dewey Hall 1-219, Box 278968, Rochester, NY 14627
Contents
Dignified Kiss of Paris Streets
How Can One Day Be Different from the Rest?
Yang had had countless harsh words thrown at him over the course of his life, and as these had tended to culminate in a curse on his very existence, whenever he discovered that one of his castigators was no happier once they were rid of him, in other words that there was no correlation between their misery and Yang himself, and that this lack of correlation might have been all that ever lay between them, his timid heart found it strange, and faintly baffling. For example, there was the letter that Mira, one of these castigators, sent him one day; sighing that her days were like a ruin—though her entire life had been just that—she said that she was planning to spend a few days in the city where Yang lived, and that they had to meet. Though my entire life has been just that; this noncommittal expression seemed to Yang like a prideful, ultimate desire, which Mira deliberately underlined in her letter to make him hear it as a shout, and it was as though he really did hear Mira’s voice, commanding him to recognize the truth of this claim. But Mira’s voice, that was something that he had forgotten long ago, and in fact he could picture her only faintly, and had to acknowledge that all he remembered of her was so vague that he doubted he could tell her apart from her mother. Having said that, it wasn’t, of course, that he had absolutely no memory of the being known as Mira, simply that this “memory” was now only worth as much as any general, conventional expression related to human beings.
Though my entire life has been that. To Yang, this seemed to impose upon him the responsibility of having as exhaustive a knowledge of Mira’s life as he did of his own, and on top of taking it as a warning not to act as though he didn’t possess such knowledge, never mind whether or not he actually did, he also read into it a form of implicit criticism that was close to mockery; because there was no way for him to know even a fraction of what constituted this “entire life” of hers, any more than he could guess whether this life warranted the label, redolent as it was of melancholic previous-century lyricism, of a “ruin.” Sufficient time had passed for their relationship to lose its validity—it had already been over eight years since they’d last seen each other, had any form of contact, or even had so much as a mutual friend who might happen to let them know, just by the by, how the other was doing—and so, rather than their friendship being one wherein Yang had once had a vast store of detailed information regarding her, but which he had now forgotten, each had from the start shown a complete lack of interest in the minutiae of the other’s life, a life that was after all unrelated to their own and could be called absolute and unvarying—in that, at least, Yang could feel confident in his own memory—yet none of this was to suggest that they were indifferent to one another. It was just that the Mira Yang had known, Mira as she had been back then, had never once thrown that expression “entire life” at him. To Mira—or indeed, he thought, to anyone else—Yang was not someone who warranted deploying such a term. Back then, Mira had never even written “my life,” or mentioned plain “life” in casual conversation, where its appearance would have gone unnoticed. Not only would such expressions, which comprehend time and human beings as a single, indivisible whole, have been inappropriate for Mira as an individual living a present