K-Book Review: Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah

Writer: Jayati Bhardwaj (Delhi, India)

Editor: Divya Sonawane (Pune, Maharashtra, India)

Untold Night and Day (알려지지 않은 밤과 하루), written by Bae Suah (배수아), was initially published in 2013 and was later translated by Deborah Smith and published worldwide in 2020. It is a surrealist narrative that is multi-layered with numerous symbols. It explores magical realism, philosophical and metaphysical themes — including the idea of dreams and reality (and their differences), an identity-focused investigation, and perspectives on how we are perceived from different standpoints, as well as deception.

Untold Night and Day is a very clever piece of work and certainly quite disorienting — one has to give all the attention they have to understand it and what it is trying to tell. Despite being a small book, about 150 pages long with four chapters, this book is demanding. However, I am completely in awe of how Bae Suah has conveyed the rich details while maintaining a dream’s vividness and overlapping blurriness. To understand what the storyline is trying to convey, one must remember the obscurity and disorientation of dreams and seek an understanding through the redundant symbols, a lot of them influenced by Korean culture and history.

Ayami is the protagonist of the book. She is a law school dropout and a former actress working at an audio theatre for the visually impaired. However, the theatre is about to shut down for good. The first chapter is from Ayami’s perspective, and it explores the relationship and conversations between Ayami and her German teacher, Yeoni. Yeoni is also friends with the theatre director with whom Ayami works. Yeoni asks Ayami to help a writer visiting Korea for the first time. After her last day at the theatre, Ayami goes to an invisible restaurant to have dinner with the director; later, these two go to Yeoni’s place, but she is missing. Hence, they started looking for her.

Another thing to note about this book is that it is mainly filled with conversations between the characters. It reminds me of one of my favourite movies, Waking Life (2001).

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The second chapter is from Buha’s (부하) perspective. Buha is a delivery person who delivers medicines; he is obsessed with poetry and one particular poet with whom he is in love. Through one of his customers, he learns that the poet speaks German and contacts Yeoni to find out about the poet. Only to realize that she passed away at the age of forty-nine a few years ago.

Buha then goes to the theatre where the poet works and says, “We’ve known each other for a long time.” The storyline becomes more surreal and disorienting as specific imagery, objects, dialogues, and vocabulary start to reappear.

Furthermore, the line of difference between the characters starts to blur as they begin to swap identities, creating their new past narratives and circling back to commonalities.

In the third chapter, the German writer arrives in Korea, and Ayami is his interpreter. The writer, Wolpi, writes mystery novels and follows Ayami around, mistaking her for Yeoni. Ayami then goes to a photo exhibition where she meets poet Kim Chul-bok; later, Ayami and Wolpi watch a family search program on the square screen. The recounted pictures and the erratic characters spiral further with this section.

In this chapter, Ayami and the theatre director drink wine together in the square, where the director shares that he used to drive the bus in the past. The bus has been mentioned before. However, it reappears in this conversation, but in a different light this time; this is an instance of how certain things circle back with newfound meaning to move the plot flow further.

The exciting thing about this book is that everything will linger identically, even if one tries to read it from any section, say if one reads sections 1, 2, 4, and 3. The main crux of the story will remain the same. Everything comes back and is visited differently; the characters have different anecdotes and positions, which keep altering and adjusting. It is challenging to build and boil them down to specific attributes because, at times, it is difficult to understand if it is the same person being talked about that you think it is or if this person is entirely different from another.

For instance, the theatre director was once a bus driver, a poet, a pharmacist in a village, Ayami’s father, a fruit peddler, and the German writer Wolpi. Confusing!

Untold Night and Day is dense, with many folded narratives — I remember someone calling this book a “corridor of mirrors” because of the repeated distortion of the already formed characters and context, as they change meaning with the progressing storyline; I agree because after a point, it becomes difficult to differentiate between reality and dream, and how much of the dream is real and how much of the reality is a dream.

As a philosophy major, I loved this book. I could write an entire thesis on it because of its rich symbolism. My mind and heart are filled with happiness to read such an incredible work. I have developed a newfound appreciation for the Hallyu wave, which has allowed me to read and explore more Korean literature.

What begins as a narrative about a young Korean woman who is now unemployed turns into a surreal, non-logically evolving story. As a result, rather than a genuinely understandable plot, there is a profusion of options and interpretations of a meta-story.

This book, as I have mentioned earlier, is not for everyone. Some words that can be used to describe this book are eccentric, absurd, unorthodox, and surreal. Throughout the plotline, the boundaries created are lucid; they are easily penetrable, leading the characters, objects, and events to move through it further, creating a blurred effect of the attributes and essences.

The book raises more questions than it gives answers, or maybe there are answers that I might find when I come back to it again, which I will.

I recommend this book to anyone who loves reading philosophical and surreal themes. And I’d suggest all of you read the translator’s note at the beginning to understand what you’ll read in a more nuanced way since Bae Suah’s writing here is more on the circular side than unbent.

Have you read this book? What’s your favorite Korean book?