Poetry

An Heeyeon Selected Poems

White Space  Write Someone trips on a stone, before your eyes, he’ll brush the dirt off his pants, get up  You watch him standing for ages till he vanishes, and you learn half-drawn faces have even more expressions  He bursts straight into your room,  says the blizzard was fierce, huddles on your floor, asks it for heat, comes back covered in mud, breaks the window, screaming, “Why don’t you know how to think anything happy?”  I want to hear news beyond my power to see: how many fingernail scratches the word cliff contains, how much more that means these submerged stairs must darken  He departs for the poles in my stead, then I imagine the next scene for the people around the table  I want just one book, nothing written inside,  night, open my eyes, ride a swing about to snap,  and every single second make new sides   So Whose Bite Mark Is This? On a clattering train, no memory of boarding,  we trusted we were headed somewhere Each envisioned in our hearts that shooting star  Where the flame began When we buried a white dog in white snow, knell tolling low  Days of nothing but white past the windows dragged on, suspecting what’s real can’t be seen  Someone voiced concerns   Have we jumped the rails?    Was there ever really a meteor?   People demanded proof   Started doubting that whiteness  Their faith  ground the train from dash to halt Doors opened, people poured out Hundreds of huge boulders lay strewn helter-skelter  Plenty of these in our own backyard!   Coming from afar, we thought the winds would shift; the boulders slowly lost the light   The train’s disappearing! someone shouted, alarmed,  and we watched it wide-eyed  Feet firmly grounded   To return, now one had to believe in those black boulders’ beauty   Enormous Life Though I dashed down the stairs I didn’t sprain my ankle Today such things amaze  Do you think unhappiness is easy? The bus came on time but I arrived late, looking up how crackers differ from biscuits  I let two summers stream by Or actually, set just their rainy days adrift It’ll all get caught, so why wonder about the bus stop’s feelings, whether spaces and traces each know the other exists?  When you burn a log, its catching amazes, so I spend a whole evening staring at the fire  It would have been nice had the flame burned only the log, would have been nice had the wind not helped, pot boiling and boiling  Faced with this world’s roiling cadence, I keep missing buses  Mysterious, the woodpecker’s bill, why we count rice in grains, the word ripple  I don’t know what’s in the pot But I rehearse switching amazing’s to mysterious’s as I tend it Not being a quitter matters so much to me   Listening Room We were discussing an island. They say there’s a museum that holds eighty thousand heartbeats. And a forest with little bells dangling from every branch. Imagine standing there some dark windy day. If it were you, where would you want to go first? Want to hear your own heartbeat recorded? Feel a thousand bells shaking at once over your head? You, downcast: Either’s fine for now, but after you die, it’ll all change. I scoop you from the current of thought and seat you on a chair. You know we’re alive right now? Let’s focus on reading the emotion in the sound. We talk again about every kind of sound in the world. Stare at black-and-white photos of a choir. Wish we could hear what they’re singing. Probably not a single one still alive. Taken in the early 1900s. They say sand shifting in the desert sounds like it’s weeping. Know what they use to make it sound like rain when they redub dialogue? You tell me not to answer, cover my mouth. Is it still the sound of rain if you know it’s fake? Don’t you think the sand was crying all the same? Am I broken now? Is this my body? I can’t believe it . . . If you go down that road, there’s no sound in the world that isn’t weeping. Drilling into the earth, chopping fish, trees falling in hurricanes . . . A fire helicopter passes overhead. This room for relistening to every sound in existence. I think there’s a big fire. You take my left arm and feel my pulse, like some quack. Still, I think this sound’s the world’s saddest. Because you can’t overdub this. The sound of blood swirling. Tempo of blood. Where’s the maestro? Overhead once more the chopper flies.   In-Ear The current quickens · I’m heading toward Saneum · Ringed by five mountains, with a name meaning rich in shadow, whenever I say Saneum, Saneum aloud, I end up guessing the height I can scale when I go looking for that um tone · Even wondering, Does a height like that really exist, because San is San, -eum is -eum, with the current, with the current, I wanted to unfurl the road from San to -eum · I imagine a fire unquenched even underwater, believe in my buoyancy, comprehend derivation, and soon after, the current picks up · The mountains birth shade, shade births chill, and every gap in the night I clung to a boulder slightly smaller than me, waited for permission to just plop down, that it’s fine to love · Saneum, Saneum, imagined planting a tangerine tree there, sketching a railroad · Won’t something run down those rails? · Won’t a world be made? · Days dreaming of landing, straightaway a light gleams, warning not to deviate from the route · The current quickens · A locomotive called Morning’s spurred ceaselessly on · I lean on a boulder smaller than me, watching Saneum receding · The wind’s mouth blowing out every lit candle, torrential downpour, raking both cheeks, landscape of five mountains sinking into the sea · I don’t know how to slow this current, and Saneum fades to a sound that can never return, and as I clasp this boulder smaller than me, it and I, I and it, I wonder who’s really the smaller · Only paper, knowing the press of my pen, remembers I’m here · Sheet music notates each day that floats off on the current, but only the sound of treading the floor and returning becomes a glance piercing paper · But I am headed for Saneum · I’ll convince you why a tangerine tree shakes in my navel every time Saneum comes to mind · To shake your own tangerine with the sound only my ear hears, and by shaking, show you your Saneum ·   Gooseberry, Gooseberry I imagine wearing white sneakers, running full speed ahead  To deliver them to you on your gooseberry farm  Today, too, you receive a cold glare and bored, slice gooseberries in half  Too sour to eat raw, hand-stinging  From here to there heaped mountain-high, freighting carts, starting all over again  You mutter, No one’s rescuing me I hope the world ends and you dream if you close your eyes opening them will bring you an ungooseberried world  I kick off my shoes, lace them on you When I tell you to get them filthy as you want, you crush with the toe box one beadlike berry that fell to the floor You loathe how they squelch when you squish them  This world barely cares when someone goes missing, and I mimic you, halving a berry, and then you advance like a bloodhound  Those were great shoes You came back You did  And as your back walks toward the orchard the seabed’s story makes you quake  Gooseberry, gooseberry, growing in ripe Though beg you not ripen we may Gooseberries grow only on gooseberry trees And dreaming of others is vain  To those who ask why on earth you’re humming, you answer, I’m back from world’s end The deep-sea fish swimming in your pocket, no one would believe  Tonguing * Because I can’t believe I exist, I walk  And walking I discover a deep black part,  so truly black The moment I peer at it I feel like my body has caught on fire  The zebra’s stripes, the pony’s smallness— are they cold? Are they hot?  I too have spots only I can see Small specks caging the elephant of sadness  I’m practicing my fingering Tonguing, tonguing When I lift my hand the sound of the beast weeping seeps out I might close, might open, might dam up, might flow, through force of will, my will  What kind of performer will you be? To answer the world’s question I go on from fire to embers, embers to ash I exist, and therefore, noise  I exist, and therefore, sheet music  When I pull myself out from within me the birds perched on the wire fly off  My instrument’s stored in its case Ready to take out at any time but not to resound any louder  Its sound when shut alone in its box Torn summer wings secretly mended A road toward that sound with neither ash nor trace remaining The further it goes, the lusher the recording * Use of the tongue to control the flow of air when playing a wind instrument   Dimensions Variable I’m contacted for evidence I have a soul  and stand up Today I shall cook bell pepper  Left alone, it’d go ghastlily rotten, yet plated it’s something to stare at,  so I prep the equipment Just a plastic bread knife  Fine if there’s no other options! Even if the knife cuts with bumps The key’s not misreading boll for bell And trusting when you slice there’ll be a time when it slices  Like a caramel tree quakes in the wind  What does a pepper become when sliced? Sliced pepper And what becomes of sliced pepper? A pepper you were going to do something with And what of that something you were going to do?A pointless pepper And what awaits a pointless pepper? What is not bell pepper becomes non-bell pepper And then? And then?  Sings, like a caramel tree quakes in the wind  I love peppers’ vegetal scent, their lack of heat for a capsicum Do you know the plant bears blossoms? They symbolize waste-of-breath Every time I get a dunning call to prove I have a soul I love my pepper blinking its big eyes, rolling to hide in corners  What did you make? What is its genre?  Well, this, this is my soul . . .  Before I even start explaining, the door bangs shut, the ringing won’t quit  Despair builds no stairs when it comes   Toward Saneum 1. Terrified each night by buglers popping up,  outpacing me, the rising intervals’ blaring shriek at my back,  the trumpets’ cry, their cry, I plugged my ears, wanted to go back to being unborn  Toward Saneum *where I first started, um, um, searching for a story not yet spun into words,  I plunged into the water  2. It took time to get used to the watery dark, passing the vaguening gaps from yesterday to today to tomorrow Did I know what I was looking for? I harbored doubts,  but as a coral reef neared I finally realized what I’d been looking for, wanted to find  I shot out questions, How much can you hide me? Can you blot out my stripes, my colors?  The colorful corals told me I was large, so large they couldn’t conceal me  3. I needed to find a bigger reef  I want to hide That’s how I’ll come to understand myself, light passing through my hair  Here, each time their too-many names touch my fingertips, they tickle awake  I stand once more before the corals Are you the reef that can put up with me? —this time unspooling when all color’s leached from these bone-bundlelike bright white corals  . . . um, a note, a tone, tale of how I waited for those corals I faced to be rediscovered and got this deep eye-gleam  One tone, spark hanging from its tail, circles beneath the surface and disappears  4. White vase, white paper, white chalk, I think of clean white things  Close my eyes, hold my breath, feeling nothing but ocean and me existing,  submerged with neither an end nor even a drop of water  All this happened though I merely jotted Saneum on a blank sheet of paper  That moment, blank paper adrift on the sea became a white bird and flew off * Name of the place where my parents first met. It no longer exists.   Walking the Carrot Field Here to there’s all your land, he said. I’ve never had so much. I close, then open my eyes. There it is.  What’ll I plant? Hope whatever I do’s harmless. I blink, and something starts growing. I’m a grower.  A warm color, orange. Gives vim, vigor. He said it won’t be long before I harvest the carrots. I was mulling whether I even want carrots and stumbled a second but  trusted the spillage so small no one would notice.  But the carrots were watching. The gleam in my eyes. Shining, cutting through me.  My carrots dug into the soil, took in a mole. It had eyes.  I’ll give you a bag. Take as many as you like. Too good to eat alone. I relished the crop, then gave up the land, on which  Now I face the mole’s eyes  Here I am  Carrot patch unfurling under moonlight  A long story only beginning as a short one draws to an end    

by An Hee-yeon

LTI Korea Now

Second Chances

This past April, I joined a delegation sponsored by LTI Korea and traveled to France with fellow novelist Kang Jiyoung to participate in several literary events in Paris and Lyon. I felt nervous—not only were these events held halfway across the world, but there’s something inherently awkward about them in general. Writing is, to some degree, a solitary act. Unlike actors or singers, whose very presence onstage is an artistic moment, for writers, book events feel like embracing a cold body drained of all its passion. No matter how hard you try to warm it up, you can’t force its heart to beat again. At the same time, part of me wants to see my lover, my book, in someone else’s arms, to watch the life rush back into it—I feel a secret joy and sorrow in introducing the dead body of my work to readers. This contradiction is what made me fall in love with literature— the gap and passageway through which pain and light readily seep in. Despite my complicated feelings, I approached these events with a very clear-cut mindset.  Before meeting readers in France, I tempered my expectations. I hoped that, while I am considered a bit of an unusual writer in Korea, my story would resonate with French readers. However, knowing that great hopes often lead to great disappointments, I repeated to myself: “Just being published is an honor.” On the other hand (as embarrassing as it is to admit), I’ll confess that deep down I prayed my novel Holy Boy would fare better in translation. After all, it had earned a second chance through translation. The efforts of my two excellent French translators put an end to my worries. As I met readers nonstop over the course of five days, I realized that I had never needed to lower my expectations after all.  Most of the attendees at “La nuit du POLAR Franco-coréen,” held with writers Meï Lepage and Thomas Weaver in Paris, had read my book beforehand. There was an endless line of people eager to talk with me and ask all sorts of questions about my novel. I was reminded that the true hallmarks of this country weren’t the elaborate artifacts housed in the Louvre, but rather the power of asking questions and engaging in discussion.  The shy readers I met at Librairie Le Phénix, a Parisian bookstore specializing in Asian literature, were a different story. Because Holy Boy features K-pop fans, these readers were drawn to my novel not only for literary reasons, but also out of curiosity about K-pop itself. I took a special delight in posing for pictures in a foreign country while holding up idol photocards.  Meeting readers at Quais du Polar, Lyon’s crime fiction festival and the largest of its kind in Europe, was a new kind of thrill. Seeing readers pick up copy after copy of my book from the stacks I had set out was the kindest welcome I could have received, a gesture so warm I could practically feel it on my skin. I could see that their smiles were genuine, even though I could hardly communicate with them due to my limited English. As I wandered through a maze of uninterpretable words, I was constantly aware of class and rank. (Mastering a foreign language in Korea is often a sign of higher education and status.) Nevertheless, the fact that so many readers came to see me was like a lantern that dispelled my anxiety. For now, I plan to move forward in the darkness, holding onto this little light all the while.  I also had some interesting interactions with my two translators. My encounters with Cécilia Castelli and Bee-ah Lee made me realize that even language that has been revised multiple times may still require explanation. Holy Boy features three characters who took part in social movements in the 1990s. They are not the kind of admirable figures that spring to mind when we think of people in pursuit of noble causes. In fact, they are insignificant people hoping to better their own lives through activism. The translators explained that there had been much debate over how to best render the word  “undong”—whether it should be translated as “movement” or “exercise.” The controversy arose because Bee-ah, who had been involved in the student movements of that era, couldn’t wrap her head around what I had written. Bee-ah personally had never devoted herself to a cause out of personal greed or the pursuit of glory. Even as the proofreading and revision processes remove overly self-indulgent passages and clarify unintended ambiguities, lived experience leads to different readings of the text. Once again, I was reminded of the obvious truth that the real second chances in literature lie in the hands of each reader.  Although essays are inherently written from a first-person perspective, I realize now that I have only talked about myself. My lack of foreign language skills surely plays a part in this. Without mastering an imperial language, communication is so limited! That is why, despite all the time we spent together, I couldn’t ask my fellow writers which works left a mark on them. I could only ever pose such intimate questions in my native language. At the same time, there were certain things I could see precisely because I was an observer. For example, the feminist sticker I spotted on Camille’s phone; the look of pride that passed over Pierre’s face as he showed me a photo of his daughter; and the warmth in Benoît’s eyes as he told me about his travel plans with his husband. These are the things I can take with me from beyond the realm of language.  As a child, I was a loner. I found other people fascinating and wanted to capture their allure in my own way, so I began to write. One by one, the sentences I wrote found their way to France. Now I was sitting in their company, no longer a loner, looking around at the world.  It took traveling halfway across the world for me to realize that.

by Lee Heejoo

Book Cart

The Green Light of That Day / Blackout / Matches and Green Apples / Ghost Hippocampus

The Green Light of That Day by Kim YongtaekChangbi, 2026, 124 pagesBlackout by Yuni HaamMunhakdongne, 2026, 324 pagesThe Green Light of That Day is the newest poetry collection by Kim Yongtaek, one of Korea’s leading lyric poets. This collection of forty-four poems is an invitation into the richly contemplative artistic world Kim has built over his forty-four-year career. He captures his reverence for life through spare language and his characteristically clear, pure voice, reflecting on what it means to exist in a state of mindful waiting and adaptation. In the titular poem, Kim alludes to Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” and Pablo Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist” as part of his stream-of-consciousness narration that creates a simultaneously grounded and meditative tone.Winner of the 2025 Munhakdongne Novel Award, Blackout is Yuni Haam’s first full-length novel. It tells the story of Mak, a college student who takes a factory job when she is no longer able to afford tuition after her father’s business goes bankrupt. She meets and develops feelings for a fellow worker named Lahiru, but he is injured on the job and unceremoniously terminated. When other efforts to help him fail, she remembers her high school friend Eundan, who once confessed to having the supernatural ability to cut off electrical currents with a literal blink of an eye. Mak devises a plan to enlist Eundan’s help in causing a factory-wide blackout, one she hopes will cause great financial damage to the company. In this novel about labor and love, Haam explores what people are capable of when pushed to the brink.Matches and Green Applesby DanyoWisdom House, 2026, 424 pagesGhost Hippocampusby Mokha MoonArzak Livres, 2026, 352 pagesDanyo, a prolific writer of both adult and young adult fiction, is back with the novel Matches and Green Apples. Seonjae, who has lost his parents in the September 11 attacks, returns to Korea with a disability in one leg. He is passed from relative to relative before settling in South Gyeongsang Province. His young relative, fifteen-year-old Geonu, watches his father kill his mother and then himself. Soon, the two survivors find themselves grappling with their trauma together—Seonjae as an adult who has lived through the unthinkable, and Geonu as a teenager in the throes of grief and self-loathing. Through Seonjae and Geonu’s story, Danyo demonstrates the healing power of quiet companionship.In the world of Ghost Hippocampus, hippocampi are AI entities that remember every human action, which they use to inform their own decisions. As all-knowing entities, they can change their physical forms at will and reach places humans can’t, serving in search and rescue operations. When one of these hippocampi is reunited with Mijeong, a girl it saved decades ago who has now grown into a reporter and activist, it realizes that while it remembers everything about humanity, there’s one problem it can’t solve with memory alone. Mokha Moon weaves an epic tale of love, courage, and the power and limitations of memory while keeping readers engaged with a second-person narration that gives us a glimpse into a hippocampus’s inner workings. 

by Sarah K. H. Yoo

Reviews

[ENGLISH] Fans on the Run

Holy Boy Lee Heejoo’s first novel, Phantom Pain, explored K-pop fan culture and the lives of women in their twenties. Holy Boy, her first novel translated into English by Joheun Lee, is a darkly comic thriller that furthers her investigation of fandom and where it can lead. “Some people fall in love with a figure in an old painting while strolling through an art gallery,” the narrator observes early in Holy Boy. “Compared to them, I would say I’m lucky.” The nature of that luck is complicated: four women kidnap Yosep, a pop idol, and hold him captive in a mansion full of taxidermy and secret rooms. They tell him he was in a car accident—that’s why his memory is missing—and needs to heal. The women worshipfully feed him soup, tend to his body, and keep him drugged. They cherish even his waste: “Don’t you think even Yosep’s excretions make him beautiful?” one says. Despite that intimacy, Yosep remains an ideal with different meanings for each woman. Lee focuses on their competing fantasies and how far the women will go to maintain them. The ringleader, Ahnna, is a woman in her forties with a history of consorting with younger men. Mihee is a superfan who became homeless while following Yosep’s band. Nami is a spiritual seeker who, with mechanical precision, “creates her own prophecies and makes them come true.” And Heeae is Yosep’s birth mother—or so she believes. In Lee’s narration, Yosep is both central and secondary; he’s a screen for the women’s projections. This kind of fandom, the novel suggests, can’t withstand reality. “Don’t roses wither when plucked, and sparkling jewels turn to pebbles when held in the hand?” Mihee reflects. Through madcap twists that continue to the final page, Lee also shows how pop music sheds light on society. The characters colorfully reveal many facets of Korea in the 1990s. There’s Yosep’s manager, Park, who stays one step ahead in business and takes care of packages from desperate fans: from roses to death threats, from decapitated dolls to poems written in blood. There’s Seongwuk, Ahnna’s nephew who shows up at the mansion with a gang of joyriding wannabe revolutionaries, and there are the sex workers who hustle among the down-and-out. Particularly in Park, Lee offers a portrait of discreet queerness that contrasts with the public desires of Mihee and other obsessive fans. This wide cast of characters showcases the fictional seaside town of Eungrang. When asked about the choice to set Holy Boy in a fictional location in northern South Korea, Lee noted in an interview with Foyles bookshop that the imaginary place helped to create “more room for wilder imaginations.” The setting also emphasizes the “coexistence of entertainment and fear” in a landscape dotted with both vacation homes and military bases. Lee remarked that this place can “reveal South Korea’s duality: the birthplace of K-pop, yet a nation still living under a ceasefire.” Eungrang provides a subtle and eerie backdrop, at once fantastical and rundown. People are accustomed to bodies washing ashore, and there’s constant rain “like the noise in old Western films” which soaks “an arid land not with water but blood.” In such phrases, Joheun Lee’s translation conveys a tone that moves between screwball and noir. It’s fitting for the high jinks and horrors of the plot, especially as the women turn on one another and fight to keep Yosep hostage a little longer. The translation is vivid yet unobtrusive, as in this phrase, in which “clear water” is a gently surreal term for “tears”: “A light headache swarmed over him, and clear water streamed down from his eyes.” This tonal range matches the novel’s formal modulations, from interview-style chapters to extended internal monologues and direct addresses to the reader. Holy Boy first appeared in serialized form in the webzine Weekly Munhakdongne. Its episodic quality makes the most of surprising shifts that feel like enthusiastic improvisations. Lee is a writer who is able to suggest that the entire tale may have been a hallucination, or a lie, in ways that also affirm the reality of her characters and the trouble they keep getting into. She shows how “those in love plunge to their lowest place” with folly that readers will find both chilling and fun.

by Zach Savich

Reviews

[ENGLISH] Miracles Turn Costly in Shift

Shift What if you had the power to “shift” one person’s disease into the body of someone else? What if you knew someone with that power who could help you heal a terminally ill loved one? Would you ask or influence that person to use that power even if it made someone else sick? Shift, award-winning science fiction and fantasy author Cho Yeeun’s 2017 supernatural mystery, newly available in English, poses these intriguing moral quandaries in a page-turner that moves like a Hollywood blockbuster with all its sinister villains and plot twists. However, readers seeking characters who rise beyond detective novel archetypes to seriously examine the larger philosophical questions the book poses will be left wanting.  Detective Yi Chang is introduced as a classic world-weary gumshoe. He’s “inordinately late for work” and looks “like a homeless man who’d been dragged there after a drunken tantrum.” Yi Chang has been assigned to investigate a corpse found on a beach, lying in a pool of blood. The dead man is the pastor of a religious cult named The Heavenly Revival Assembly. Twist number one: Ten years earlier, the cult miraculously healed Yi Chang’s terminally ill sister, who eventually died in a car accident. Yi Chang now raises his sister’s daughter, who has unfortunately inherited her mother’s terminal cancer.  Given the premise of the novel, there’s a lot left for the characters to unpack: the whimsical nature of life and death, our inability to control outcomes even when it’s tempting to believe we can, and fate versus free will. But the novel charges forward, as dictated by the requirements of the genre, without the characters reflecting much, if at all, about these strange turns in their lives. Yi Chang’s investigation leads him to a suspect named Lan. The detective believes Lan healed his sister, only to learn that it was Lan’s late brother Chan who cured her by shifting her illness to someone else.  The book then “shifts” from Yi Chang’s story to that of Lan and Chan. The author’s portrayal of tight sibling bonds forms the emotional backbone of the novel. Just as Yi Chang feels survivor guilt over his sister’s passing, Lan feels responsible for Chan’s violent death. We also learn that the dead pastor and his brother, the villainous Hans, have their own backstories.  Eventually, Yi Chang’s sense of duty to his niece leads him to ask Lan to shift her terminal cancer to his body. In this passage, he realizes that life offers no free lunches. He’d searched so desperately for a straightforward miracle, but what he’d stumbled upon was a cold, bizarre truth: he had to stake his life for the cure. Miracles came at a price. What he felt now was a sense of emptiness, inertia, occasional anger, lethargy, and a faint hope sprouting from resignation. What a miracle required was simple: if you want something, you have to give something in return. It was an exchange, not a blessing.  What’s unclear is why Yi Chang realizes this many years after his sister received a miracle cure but died anyway, paying her own ultimate price for a miracle.  The book’s grisly climax happens by a dark, foreboding sea, where an evocation of baptism intends to resolve the novel’s many conflicts. Still, I couldn’t help wanting to know more about our gruff detective Yi Chang and his wants and needs as a person, a caretaker, and a surrogate parent. I wanted to know more about Lan as well, the young man burdened with unexplained powers and ineffable grief. The plot requires him to be consumed by a desire for revenge, but could he not do something else with his healing powers? Was Lan ever tempted to heal good strangers while punishing bad ones? Was he even conscious that he, as a former cult member, was also playing God?  Alas, these tougher questions are for a different, less cinematic book. For readers wanting an entertaining detective mystery with a fantastical twist, Shift will keep you shifting in your seats.

by Leland Cheuk

Reviews

[JAPANESE] Between the Living and the Dead: Voices and Their Absence

心の浮力  The original title of Lee Seung-U’s short story collection is Moksori-deul, or Voices. As the title suggests, many of the stories revolve around voices—or their absence—and the roles they play in human relationships, memory, and loss.  In “The Buoyancy of the Heart,” the title story of the Japanese edition, a younger brother, who lives a steady and conscientious life as a civil servant, mourns his older brother, an artistic figure who died without a stable job or family. Their voices are nearly identical, to the point that even their mother frequently mistakes one for the other. The younger brother harbors a faint envy for his brother’s freedom, yet also believes that he himself was the object of their mother’s favoritism. He is haunted by the possibility that he may somehow have taken something essential from his brother. The similarity of their voices blurs the boundary between the living and the dead, especially for their mother, whose advancing dementia prevents her from distinguishing between them.  In “I Should (Not) Have Answered the Phone,” voice again forms a fragile bridge between life and death. The narrator reflects on a younger colleague, who looked up to him as an older brother, and who was later investigated for alleged harassment. Listening to the final voice message the colleague left him, the narrator is overcome with regret, wondering whether he might have intervened. The recorded voice becomes both a remnant of presence and a reminder of irreversible absence.  Language is our primary means of understanding others, yet its limits are repeatedly exposed. In “When I Turned the Valve of the Fire Hydrant, Water Overflowed,” an elderly woman opens a fire hydrant and floods the street. Repeated warnings from police officers fail to get through to her because she cannot speak and seems unable to hear. Like the uncontrollable stream of water, something seems to overflow within her. Even if, as one character suggests, it could be a form of prayer, it remains unheard because it is never articulated. The story points to the tragic isolation that arises when inner experience cannot be translated into communicable voice.  “The Vacant House” explores how the absence of voice invites misinterpretation. A quiet woman is persistently misunderstood, as those around her fill her silence with their own assumptions that suit their own needs. Unable to endure this frustration, she leaves home and collapses in front of an abandoned house. She is rescued by a man who once lived there. He recalls how, in his childhood, his father—an adherent of a cult—confined him and his mother to a small room and forced them to listen to and memorize the words of a “seer.” Here, voice is not a medium of connection but a form of oppression: when saturated with excessive meaning, it suffocates the listener and destroys relationships.  In “Voices,” two characters deliver opposing monologues about a man’s death. One, the mother’s, blames the daughter for not answering a desperate call for help; the other, the daughter’s, accuses the mother of having rejected her son through gestures and attitudes, even without words. What emerges most powerfully is the absence of the dead man’s voice. The truth remains inaccessible because the one who could speak it is gone forever.  Across the collection, when voice links the living and the dead, it often carries regret, grief, and guilt. Characters are haunted by the realization that they failed to listen when it mattered most. Voice becomes a site not of reconciliation but of belated recognition.  Only “Homecoming” offers a different perspective. Set in a depopulated area awaiting redevelopment, the story follows a man who returns to an abandoned house where his mother once lived. A watchman repeatedly warns him that he is trespassing, but the man does not respond, having been deaf since birth. As he silently cleans the house and the garbage-strewn alley, his actions seem to constitute a kind of voice—one that resonates in a space emptied of human presence. In the final scene, the watchman, holding two coffee mugs, suggests the possibility of connection between the living and the recovery of shared memory. In this quiet gesture, the story intimates a form of communication beyond spoken language. It is, in a sense, an image of literature itself: a medium through which voices, even in their absence, continue to reach us.

by Masatsugu Ono