Man-Sik Chae - Peace Under Heaven: A Modern Korean Novel: A Modern Korean Novel

An East Gate Book

First published 1993 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge

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Copyright 1993 Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chae, Man-sik, 19021950

[Taepyng chnha. English]

Peace under heaven / Chae Man-sik : translated by Chun Kyung-Ja

p. cm.

ISBN 1-56324-112-9 ISBN 1-56324-172-2 (pbk.)

I. Title.

PL991.13.M3T313 1992

895.733dc20

92-31807

CIP

Cover illustration by Lee In Su

ISBN 13: 9781563241727 (pbk)

ISBN 13: 9781563241123 (hbk)

__________

The translator would like to thank Professor Kim Sung for his invaluable help without which a number of textual passages in the idioms of the 1930s would have failed to receive faithful interpretations. Thanks also are due to Professor Kevin ORourke for his willingness to comb painstakingly through the entire manuscript twice, offering good suggestions for worthier renderings of many lines of dialogue. Another who deserves mention here is my husband, Dr. James West, whose training as a lawyer did not entirely incapacitate him from aiding me in trying to do justice in English to Chae Man-Siks inimitable style. Thanks as well to the friends who provided encouragement at various stages of the project in 1989 and 1990, to Douglas Merwin of M.E. Sharpe, Inc., to Professor Bruce Cumings of the University of Chicago and to Professor Carter Eckert of Harvard University. Last, but not least, I am grateful to the family of the author, Chae Man-Sik, for their consent to undertake this project back in 1987.

C. K.J.

In Peace Under Heaven Chae Mansik (19021950) has fashioned a brilliant black comedy of many meanings. It is a work that is historically specific to Koreas colonial past and also universal in its human understanding and appeal. It is a work whose concrete and precise descriptions of people, places, and events are suffused with ironies that are simultaneously funny and appalling. It is, not least of all, a tragicomic story of the sudden fall from grace of one of fictions most unforgettable, larger-than-life characters. It is all these things and more.

With so many approaches to this great novel, now splendidly rendered into English by Chun Kyung-ja, it would be presumptuous for me, especially as an historian, to offer anything suggesting an authoritative literary interpretation. Everyone will have his or her own favorite reading, and one of the communal delights to Korean studies in the classrooms and colloquia of the future will be to discuss and debate various aspects of Chaes work. Nevertheless, Peace Under Heaven has given me such unmitigated pleasure that I am unable to resist a brazenly pre-post-modernist attempt at explanation, however personal and impressionistic. Caveat lector. Those readers who wish to keep their minds pure and unconstructed are advised to ignore the following and move on immediately to the actual text.

For the intrepid few who are still with me, let me begin with a couple of observations about Peace Under Heaven as a window into Koreas experience under Japanese colonial rule (19101945). Although Chae was not writing for the benefit of future historians, and the novel neither can nor should be reduced simply to an historical document, it is nevertheless a fascinating source of information to anyone interested in Koreas early twentieth-centuiy past, a period so close in time to our own and yet in so many ways still so hidden and elusive. Chaes novel provides, among other things, a rare glimpse into the urban landscape of the late 1930s, when Seoul was Keij, Shinsegae (Sinsegye) Department Store was Mitsukoshi, and the wealthy classes, including many absentee landlords from the Chlla provinces, were ensconced in Kyedong. It is a world of rickshaws and streetcars, young schoolgirls in blouses and bows, harried busgirls, kisaeng* and kisaeng guilds, prostitutes on Kwanggyo Bridge and in the Tonggwan red-light district, radios and gramophones, Tanpung cigarettes, the Festival of Great Singers at Pumin Hall in front of the Government-General building, the movie Morocco (starring Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper), and extended mahjong parties for the idle rich. The novels authenticity stems not only from its authors North Chlla background and reportorial skills honed during years of writing for various Korean newspapers and magazines, but also from its contemporaneity. The story takes place on September 1011, 1937. The novel was first published as a serial in the monthly magazine Chogwang beginning in January 1938. Without necessarily intending it, what Chae has done is to capture and preserve for us a brief moment of colonial time.

It is also worth noting that Chaes colonial world, described from the inside, is psychologically far more complex and intriguing than the ex post facto colonial history we have been taught and are still teaching today. Accustomed to narratives of poor and heroic Koreans struggling against rich and evil Japanese, we find ourselves suddenly disoriented, even overwhelmed, by the sheer range of Korean personalities and private feelings, by no means always attractive, that Chae lays out before us. Human voices wake us, as Eliot said, and we drown. Chaes work should be a welcome challenge to all of us who write Korean history. It is time we threw out the ideological stick figures who still populate most of the monographs and textbooks on the pre-1945 period and looked more to literature and personal testimony to help flesh out and humanize the existing statistics and documents.

To focus solely on the question of historicity, however, would be to ignore the novels primary value as an important work of literature. Chae Mansik is justly famous in Korea for his satire and irony, and Peace Under Heaven is one of his masterpieces. The immediate object of Chaes formidable wit in the novel is the absentee Chlla landlord and usurer Yun Tusp, better known as Master Yun, who lives in the Kyedong area of Seoul with an extended family consisting largely of women. In the course of the novel Chae takes us on an often hilarious day-and-a-half excursion into the mind and life of his chief protagonist and some of Yuns relatives, retainers, and victims.