An anthology of ten short stories by one of Korea's foremost living writers. Pak Wanso is the author of five novels, including The Naked Tree, and of several best-selling volumes of short prose. Her works have sold millions of copies in Korea, where the public and critics alike have applauded Pak as a masterful realist.
The literary world of Pak depicts the trials of the Korean War and the subsequent three decades of upheaval during which Korea was transformed from a military dictatorship and an agriculturally based society to an urban industrialized, albeit troubled, democracy. Pak offers a searching woman's perspective on radical changes in Korean family structures and social values, exposing the cruelty and hypocrisy of Korea's Confucian traditions, which have subjugated women for centuries. Her realistic prose also portrays the dehumanizing impacts of the capitalist market order that characterizes Korea today.
With rich insight, Pak presents moral ambiguities inherent in Korea's society today and encourages her readers to question the injustices that prevail in the more impersonal and often alienated world emerging in a "globalized" Korea.

My Very Last Possession and Other Stories

Literature & Fiction

Pak, Wan-sŏ

Chun, Kyung-Ja

History & Criticism

Routledge

My Very Last Possession and Other Stories (And Other Stories by Pak Wanso)

Peace Under Heaven: A Modern Korean Novel

Originally published in Seoul in 1938, soon after the outbreak of the Pacific War, "Peace Under Heaven" is a satirical novel centering on the household of a Korean landlord during the Japanese colonial occupation. Master Yun, embodying the traditional ambitions of a standard Korean paterfamilias, by being projected fast forward into a modern urban environment, caricatures the increasing irrelevance of Confucian mores to 20th-century social reality. Depicting the anomic lives of the Yun household in colonial Seoul, Chase Man-Sik, one of modern Korea's best-known writers, uses black comedy to underscore the collapse of ritualistic traditional values in the face of capitalist modernisation. The decadence of the nouveau riche pseudo-aristocrat Master Yun is interwoven with insights into the customary bases of oppression of Korean women into the self-deceptions underlying collaboration by Koreans with the Japanese oppressor. The savage hilarity of Chae's style lends force and historical relevance to his insight into the attitudes of the milieu in which his narrative is set.

Peace Under Heaven: A Modern Korean Novel: A Modern Korean Novel

Chae, Man-Sik

From the children of a dwarf whose house is torn down by the government to a young man selling his blood for money, the first-person narrators of the stories collected in The Voice of the Governor-General and Other Stories of Modern Korea take us into the heart of turbulent twentieth-century Korean history. This history includes colonization by the Japanese, the devastation of the Korean War, and a program of rapid industrialization that exacted the heaviest sacrifice from those already at the economic and political margins of society. 
The title story, chillingly told in the voice of the former Japanese governor-general of Korea who dreams of the day when the Japanese empire will flourish again, is a disturbingly acute diagnosis of a society in transition. Throughout these stories we witness the reality of division in Korea and the alienation of man in a society of machines in parallel tales of displaced old men. We experience powerful accounts, from the inside, of people whose lives have been overlooked in the drive for progress. A sense of aloofness in one story contrasts with the bitter humor of another, highlighting the despair of the survivors. This volume is a startling blend of satire, realism, and comedy in the twentieth century. 
"The works [of these authors], as expressions of society in the pangs of modernization and industrialism, are indispensable for understanding modern Korean literature as well as modern Korean history, and also present exemplary case studies for many other societies under the compounded pressure of dictatorship, capital industrialism and imperialism throughout the world.

The Voice of the Governor-General and Other Stories of Modern Korea

Cho, Se-hŭi

Hwang, Suk-Young

Yoon Hueng-Gil

Choi In-Hoon

EastBridge, a nonprofit corporation

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