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Set in a small rural village, seemingly everyday events take on a macabre meaning. We follow Kim Miyoung, a relatively new villager and the local primary school teacher, as she is slowly overcome by anxiety, with her daughter at the vulnerable young age of three, a difficult group of schoolboys under her wing and her mother-in-law trying to drag her into house-of-cards village politics. To top it all, she finds herself plagued by the idea of 'son': folklore spirits out to make people's lives miserable. As the village gathers for the annual meju-making day, amid all the hubbub, Miyoung loses sight of her daughter Mina. Despite her cries for help, no one joins her to look for Mina, everyone seems to be against her.
31 pages, Paperback
Published June 16, 2019
About the author
Kang Hwagil
4 books6 followers강 화길 (Kang Hwagil) is a young Korean writer best known for her 2017 novel Dareun Saram (‘Others’) which won her the Hankyoreh Literature Award as well as a Young Authors’ Prize. She was heralded by the Hankyoreh panel as a ‘new voice’ and received much praise for her fearlessly honest portrayal of Korean society, carrying a confrontational message. A champion of feminist writing in her own right, Kang is often mentioned in one breath with Cho Namjoo, whose Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 brought gender equality and #MeToo to the forefront of South-Korea’s national debate, following its publication in 2016. Kang’s hit novel, like Cho’s, seems to have struck a chord also by way of its unembellished style. She excels in sparse, almost understated prose, leaving the reader to appreciate, in its purest form, the gravity of what is being said.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
March 2, 2023
Part of the Yeoyu (여유) series from Strangers Press, eight chapbooks, each featuring a translated short story of around 30 pages, showcasing the best writing from the current generation of Korean authors. For my review of the overall series see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
손 by 강 화길 (Kang Hwagil) has been translated as Demons by Mattho Mandersloot.
This one features two new names in English translation of K-lit - both the author and the publishing debut of the translator, who discusses his background and also the issues of translating the title here:
https://booksandbao.com/2019/05/30/in...
Mandersloot wrote a thesis on Korean Onomatopoeia in Translation: Negotiating Between Meaning and Feeling. In a tweet he describes it as a year spent pondering:
(1) why o why a Korean dog says ‘mong-mong’
(2) whether ‘squidgy’ is equally sound symbolic as ‘말랑말랑’
(3) just how many degrees of ‘suddenly’ there are in Korean [벌떡, 발딱, 뻘떡, 빨딱, 펄떡, 팔딱].
(imho the answer to (2) is 'no' - the repetition swings it for 말랑말랑)
And onomatopoeia play a key role in this story, which opens:
Tok. A noise. I turned to look behind me. Nothing. Misheard, maybe. I faced forward and took another step to reach the front gate. Tok. Again. It sounded like a massive rock thudding against a wall. I turned around, fast as I could. There was something there, something small and short. It disappeared in a flash, slipping back into the alleyway. An eerie sensation washed over me, burying itself into my chest. I hurried to open the gate and entered the garden. Just then, an almost painfully sharp voice pierced my eardrums.
‘Ya! What kept you so long?’
Ah, mother-in-law.
Kang Hwagil has been compared to Cho Nam-joo, author of the best-selling Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982: A Novel (I eagerly await the translation), in terms of writing from a feminist perspective of the pressures of modern Korean society on women, still expected to fulfil their traditional duties, and this novel starts with that slant.
Our narrator has moved to live with her inlaws in a rural town while her husband is on secondment overseas, and work as a teacher in the small village school. The setting - and the culture - is a mixture of the modern and traditional - the villagers collectively make meju (메주: bricks of fermented soybean used as a base for other condiments) for commercial scale, but avoid doing so on 'demon days'.
But the story takes something of a fantastical term (in the Todorovian sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic) - what our narrator sees as the real presence of demons (the 'tok' noise that follows her around), the sinister behaviour of the village children and the mysterious disappearance of her daughter, the villagers see as the delusions of a paranoid and resentful woman.
Very impressive - 4.5 stars, and I hope to see more from both author and a translator.
손 by 강 화길 (Kang Hwagil) has been translated as Demons by Mattho Mandersloot.
This one features two new names in English translation of K-lit - both the author and the publishing debut of the translator, who discusses his background and also the issues of translating the title here:
https://booksandbao.com/2019/05/30/in...
Mandersloot wrote a thesis on Korean Onomatopoeia in Translation: Negotiating Between Meaning and Feeling. In a tweet he describes it as a year spent pondering:
(1) why o why a Korean dog says ‘mong-mong’
(2) whether ‘squidgy’ is equally sound symbolic as ‘말랑말랑’
(3) just how many degrees of ‘suddenly’ there are in Korean [벌떡, 발딱, 뻘떡, 빨딱, 펄떡, 팔딱].
(imho the answer to (2) is 'no' - the repetition swings it for 말랑말랑)
And onomatopoeia play a key role in this story, which opens:
Tok. A noise. I turned to look behind me. Nothing. Misheard, maybe. I faced forward and took another step to reach the front gate. Tok. Again. It sounded like a massive rock thudding against a wall. I turned around, fast as I could. There was something there, something small and short. It disappeared in a flash, slipping back into the alleyway. An eerie sensation washed over me, burying itself into my chest. I hurried to open the gate and entered the garden. Just then, an almost painfully sharp voice pierced my eardrums.
‘Ya! What kept you so long?’
Ah, mother-in-law.
Kang Hwagil has been compared to Cho Nam-joo, author of the best-selling Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982: A Novel (I eagerly await the translation), in terms of writing from a feminist perspective of the pressures of modern Korean society on women, still expected to fulfil their traditional duties, and this novel starts with that slant.
Our narrator has moved to live with her inlaws in a rural town while her husband is on secondment overseas, and work as a teacher in the small village school. The setting - and the culture - is a mixture of the modern and traditional - the villagers collectively make meju (메주: bricks of fermented soybean used as a base for other condiments) for commercial scale, but avoid doing so on 'demon days'.
But the story takes something of a fantastical term (in the Todorovian sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic) - what our narrator sees as the real presence of demons (the 'tok' noise that follows her around), the sinister behaviour of the village children and the mysterious disappearance of her daughter, the villagers see as the delusions of a paranoid and resentful woman.
Very impressive - 4.5 stars, and I hope to see more from both author and a translator.
August 29, 2020
"We are the generation that learned that both genders are equal from an early age. But facing the reality, that is not true. We have seen rising feminism for years, but in reality, an ordinary woman's life is not easily freed from the deep-rooted patriarchal thinking in society."
– Kang Hwagil
Kang Hwagil’s story Demons is an oblique exploration of motherhood and generational divides played out through her main character’s experience of life in a small village. When her husband leaves to work abroad, teacher Kim Miyoung joins his family’s tight-knit, rural community, so she can work while her mother-in-law cares for her daughter Mina; but the solution to her problems instead becomes a source of growing anxiety, as Kim MiYoung struggles to deal with a difficult, demanding mother-in-law, hostile local children and Mina’s increasingly odd behaviour. What could have laid the ground for a straightforward examination of cultural or domestic conflict swiftly takes an uncanny turn, as a series of strange events begin to overwhelm Kim MiYoung and the villagers prepare an age-old ritual to ward off unwanted spirits. She’s uneasy, fearful but, like James’s The Turn of the Screw, it’s not clear where the real threat is coming from.
Kang Hwagil’s an award-winning South Korean writer, frequently linked to Cho Nam-Joo (Kim Ji Young, Born 1982) whose phenomenal success paved the way for Kang and other female authors with a feminist focus. However, unlike Kim Ji Young, Kang’s women seem to be more ambiguous figures, responding to forms of oppression in unpredictable ways. Demons was a compelling introduction to Kang's work; with its gothic undertones and an unsettling hint of folk horror in its setting and depiction of local superstition - it sometimes reminded me of a less surreal version of Semanta Schweblin's fiction - but the translation was awkward and unbalanced sometimes. Certain words and phrases grated or seemed out of step with the surrounding text. I read an extract from another of Kang’s books from a different translator which had a more consistent tone and distinctive prose style https://koreanliteraturenow.com/ficti...
- although recent debates around English-language versions of Han Kang’s work underline the challenges of translating Korean fiction into English, and consistency doesn’t automatically equal accuracy.
– Kang Hwagil
Kang Hwagil’s story Demons is an oblique exploration of motherhood and generational divides played out through her main character’s experience of life in a small village. When her husband leaves to work abroad, teacher Kim Miyoung joins his family’s tight-knit, rural community, so she can work while her mother-in-law cares for her daughter Mina; but the solution to her problems instead becomes a source of growing anxiety, as Kim MiYoung struggles to deal with a difficult, demanding mother-in-law, hostile local children and Mina’s increasingly odd behaviour. What could have laid the ground for a straightforward examination of cultural or domestic conflict swiftly takes an uncanny turn, as a series of strange events begin to overwhelm Kim MiYoung and the villagers prepare an age-old ritual to ward off unwanted spirits. She’s uneasy, fearful but, like James’s The Turn of the Screw, it’s not clear where the real threat is coming from.
Kang Hwagil’s an award-winning South Korean writer, frequently linked to Cho Nam-Joo (Kim Ji Young, Born 1982) whose phenomenal success paved the way for Kang and other female authors with a feminist focus. However, unlike Kim Ji Young, Kang’s women seem to be more ambiguous figures, responding to forms of oppression in unpredictable ways. Demons was a compelling introduction to Kang's work; with its gothic undertones and an unsettling hint of folk horror in its setting and depiction of local superstition - it sometimes reminded me of a less surreal version of Semanta Schweblin's fiction - but the translation was awkward and unbalanced sometimes. Certain words and phrases grated or seemed out of step with the surrounding text. I read an extract from another of Kang’s books from a different translator which had a more consistent tone and distinctive prose style https://koreanliteraturenow.com/ficti...
- although recent debates around English-language versions of Han Kang’s work underline the challenges of translating Korean fiction into English, and consistency doesn’t automatically equal accuracy.
July 30, 2023
I'm currently working my way through the eight-chapbook Yeoyu set, the new voices of Korea Series from Strangers Press.
This is an unsettling little story.
This is an unsettling little story.
December 5, 2019
What struck me most in Demons was the atmosphere. It was eerie, spooky and uncanny.
https://elifthereader.com/books/demon...
https://elifthereader.com/books/demon...
November 23, 2020
A similar sense of unease to Fever Dream, in a very compact and claustrophobic story.
August 18, 2024
3 1/2 stars rounded up. I really wish this had been a full length book. This was really intriguing and creepy and would have really benefited from more backstory and more of an explanation at the end.
May 5, 2023
very eerie and unpleasant setting overall, which is the exact ambiance i expected judging from the title and synopsis alone. i’ve never read kang hwagil’s other short stories, but demons is a 30-page story that manages to discuss multiple themes in a claustrophobic and gothic-like manner.
through kim miyoung’s perspective, there are elements of the integral part of youth, which is influence. it is so easy for children to be influenced by the people around them, the actions and words spoken carelessly without realizing the impact they would have on the youngsters. there’s also the generational differences in mentality and societal values, which is distinct between miyoung and her mother in law. the dysfunctional family or marriage trope is also applied to miyoung’s personal life as she struggles to raise her daughter, mina, alone. her husband is often far away in other countries for work, or in all honesty, to avoid his role in the relationship.
miyoung is a victim of hallucinations courtesy of the demons that the villagers believe in. she has to deal with multiple problems at once—her judgmental and demanding mother in law, her badly influenced daughter, her students being bullies, and the overall isolation she faces from the villagers who treat her as a foreigner. it is a creepy short story, and i think it would’ve made a better impression for me if the translation wasn’t a little awkward or stiff.
i do appreciate the originality of korean words not being translated such as meju. but i wish we were given more context to these korean words because i had to google what meju is instead of knowing what it is from the story itself. meju is a brick of dried fermented soybeans, btw.
i would definitely read more stories by kang hwagil, but perhaps from a different translator.
through kim miyoung’s perspective, there are elements of the integral part of youth, which is influence. it is so easy for children to be influenced by the people around them, the actions and words spoken carelessly without realizing the impact they would have on the youngsters. there’s also the generational differences in mentality and societal values, which is distinct between miyoung and her mother in law. the dysfunctional family or marriage trope is also applied to miyoung’s personal life as she struggles to raise her daughter, mina, alone. her husband is often far away in other countries for work, or in all honesty, to avoid his role in the relationship.
miyoung is a victim of hallucinations courtesy of the demons that the villagers believe in. she has to deal with multiple problems at once—her judgmental and demanding mother in law, her badly influenced daughter, her students being bullies, and the overall isolation she faces from the villagers who treat her as a foreigner. it is a creepy short story, and i think it would’ve made a better impression for me if the translation wasn’t a little awkward or stiff.
i do appreciate the originality of korean words not being translated such as meju. but i wish we were given more context to these korean words because i had to google what meju is instead of knowing what it is from the story itself. meju is a brick of dried fermented soybeans, btw.
i would definitely read more stories by kang hwagil, but perhaps from a different translator.
January 11, 2023
This seventh book is probably my favourite after Five Preludes and a Fugue. It recounts the story of Minyoung, a teacher and mother of a three year-old girl, Mina. Alone to raise her in a small village in the countryside, Minyoung feels suddenly pressured by the children at the school she teaches and by the elderly, among whom is her mother-in-law. Minyoung is a victim of hallucinations about the local demons who haunt the locals' houses if they don't make meju—a brick of dried fermented soybean. I won't go too much into details for this short story, but I enjoyed the surrealism of it, the worries of a woman for young children, and how they are easily influenced and impacted by violence these days. I also liked that the theme of fragmented family was tackled, with Minyoung raising Mina alone while her husband pretends to face the difficulties of work to avoid his role.
The translation was very good in my eyes. However, for some words such as "Ommo" or "ya", I questioned their importance in the English version. To be honest, it's the first time I encounter those in a Korean to English translation (by a non-korean), and while it doesn't particularly shock me as a European, I would be curious to have a Korean translator's opinion on that point. I would have liked to have some context and definition for words like meju, which I had to look up on the internet because I didn't know its meaning.
I will gladly re-read this short story.
The translation was very good in my eyes. However, for some words such as "Ommo" or "ya", I questioned their importance in the English version. To be honest, it's the first time I encounter those in a Korean to English translation (by a non-korean), and while it doesn't particularly shock me as a European, I would be curious to have a Korean translator's opinion on that point. I would have liked to have some context and definition for words like meju, which I had to look up on the internet because I didn't know its meaning.
I will gladly re-read this short story.
April 19, 2023
Another great entry into UEA Press' series of short stories. This is the first I've read of their Korean author series, having enjoyed many of their previous Japanese author run and I wasn't disappointed.
The perfect length for quick read, it sows just enough to get you hooked while remaining utterly mysterious and captivating.
The perfect length for quick read, it sows just enough to get you hooked while remaining utterly mysterious and captivating.
February 25, 2024
2.5* there’s fear, and then there’s unexplained fear–ubiquitous and without a source. the closer it got to the meju-making day, the more that unseen feeling grew in kim minyoung.
the underlying tone of unease and restlessness was set from the beginning of the book, especially because it felt like i had abruptly dropped into minyoung’s life without any introduction. minyoung did not have it easy; she was grappling with problematic kids at school, a frustrating mother-in-law, a toddler subjected to all sorts of influences, and an unavailable husband. on top of those mundane yet no less heavy issues, spirits bent on causing havoc seemed to lurk in every corner, which chipped away at minyoung's sanity bit by bit.
this book made me feel a little disorientated and confused. i understood the premise, but the story seemed discordant and somewhat mild. i feel like almost every part of it could be amplified. yes, it was uncanny and eerie, but not enough to evoke a reaction or leave an impression on me. i wanted more. i also wished there was more depth to the folklore surrounding the 'demons'. overall, i have to say that i was disappointed because the synopsis sounded promising, and perhaps my expectations were too high, but i think it had the potential to be a better story.
the underlying tone of unease and restlessness was set from the beginning of the book, especially because it felt like i had abruptly dropped into minyoung’s life without any introduction. minyoung did not have it easy; she was grappling with problematic kids at school, a frustrating mother-in-law, a toddler subjected to all sorts of influences, and an unavailable husband. on top of those mundane yet no less heavy issues, spirits bent on causing havoc seemed to lurk in every corner, which chipped away at minyoung's sanity bit by bit.
this book made me feel a little disorientated and confused. i understood the premise, but the story seemed discordant and somewhat mild. i feel like almost every part of it could be amplified. yes, it was uncanny and eerie, but not enough to evoke a reaction or leave an impression on me. i wanted more. i also wished there was more depth to the folklore surrounding the 'demons'. overall, i have to say that i was disappointed because the synopsis sounded promising, and perhaps my expectations were too high, but i think it had the potential to be a better story.
August 30, 2020
Very unpleasantly creepy.
March 6, 2021
im so confused 😅💫 i loved the writing, id definitely pick up this author! i think i can also say good translation 😊
May 16, 2023
One of my favourites from the collection so far.
RTC
RTC
August 20, 2023
3.5 stars
July 1, 2019
Hämmentävä ja painostava novelli naisesta, joka muuttaa pieneen kylään tyttärensä kanssa. Kyläläiset käyttäytyvät kuitenkin oudosti ja nainen alkaa itsekin kuulla kummallisia ääniä. Mikä on vialla? Parasta tässä oli tunnelma, jonka paino kasaantui rinnan päälle pikkuhiljaa. Novelli jättää hienosti tulkinnanvaraa.
July 6, 2019
Mattho is the king of onomatopoeia
He also likes to sing Under The Sea yeah
His friends Bridget and Kate
Are pretty darn great
Can’t wait til the next time we see ya
#tightsandwich
He also likes to sing Under The Sea yeah
His friends Bridget and Kate
Are pretty darn great
Can’t wait til the next time we see ya
#tightsandwich
August 5, 2019
I loved how spooky the atmosphere of the story was.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews