The Red Room : Stories of Trauma in Contemporary Korea

Modern Korean fiction is to a large extent a literature of witness to the historic upheavals of twentieth-century Korea. Often inspired by their own experiences, contemporary writers continue to show us how individual Koreans have been traumatized by wartime violence—whether the uprooting of whole families from the ancestral home, life on the road as war refugees, or the violent deaths of loved ones. __The Red Room__ brings together stories by three canonical Korean writers who examine trauma as a simple fact of life. In Pak Wan-so’s "In the Realm of the Buddha," trauma manifests itself as an undigested lump inside the narrator, a mass needing to be purged before it consumes her. The protagonist of O Chong-hui’s "Spirit on the Wind" suffers from an incomprehensible wanderlust—the result of trauma that has escaped her conscious memory. In the title story by Im Ch’or-u, trauma is recycled from torturer to victim when a teacher is arbitrarily detained by unnamed officials. Western readers may find these stories bleak, even chilling, yet they offer restorative truths when viewed in light of the suffering experienced by all victims of war and political violence regardless of place and time.

Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan is a wide-ranging account of how women writers have made sense (and nonsense) of pregnancy in postwar Japan. While earlier authors such as Yosano Akiko had addressed the pain and emotional complexities of childbearing in their poetry and prose, the topic quickly moved into the literary shadows when motherhood became enshrined as a duty to state and sovereign in the 1930s and '40s. This reproductive imperative endured after World War II, spurred by a need to create a new generation of citizens and consumers for a new, peacetime nation. It was only in the 1960s, in the context of a flowering of feminist thought and activism, that more critical and nuanced appraisals of pregnancy and motherhood began to appear.

In her fascinating study, Amanda C. Seaman analyzes the literary manifestations of this new critical approach, in the process introducing readers to a body of work notable for the wide range of genres employed by its authors (including horror and fantasy, short stories, novels, memoir, and manga), the many political, personal, and social concerns informing it, and the diverse creative approaches contained therein. This "pregnancy literature," Seaman argues, serves as an important yet rarely considered forum for exploring and debating not only the particular experiences of the pregnant mother-to-be, but the broader concerns of Japanese women about their bodies, their families, their life choices, and the meaning of motherhood for individuals and for Japanese society. It will be of interest to scholars of modern Japanese literature and women’s history, as well as those concerned with gender studies, feminism, and popular culture in Japan and beyond.

Contents Foreword 1. In the Realm of the Buddha Spirit on the Wind The Red Room Afterword :Trauma in Contemporary Korean Fiction