Untold Night and Day

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The 2nd section is narrated from the perspective of Buha (부하), who is obsessed with poetry, and one particular poet in particular, except he has no desire to read or write it: No.’ Ayami shook her head, but stopped as soon as she realised the pointlessness of such a gesture. But that’s only temporary! And this so-called poet, apparently coming from abroad, has provided no contract stating how much you’ll be paid and when. What if he arrives at the airport, looks around, says, “Hmm, I don’t fancy this place after all, I’d prefer to go elsewhere,” then what’ll you do?’

There is not much time left, so from now on he who has a wife must live as though he does not, and he who has sadness must live as though he does not.’

The Owl's Absence) translated as North Station by Deborah Smith: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... At points, Untold Night and Day reminded me of Iain Reid's I’m Thinking of Ending Things and Hiromi Kawakami's Record of a Night Too Brief; while it shares with these novels a slippery, dreamlike quality, it's too distinctive to be truly comparable to anything else. As with the Kawakami book, the resolute weirdness sometimes gets a bit wearing, but the overall effect is pleasing. I finished it wanting to read more and know more about Ayami, yet also feeling satisfied with this odd snapshot of her life.

So I came to Untold Night and Day with spectacularly low expectations, persuaded grudgingly to buy the thing by the fact that according to the cognoscenti it was meant to be The One. The Best Thing she has ever written. For me, this was make-or-break. Either I would get to the end of the book this time or I would never read another thing by her ever again.But then she herself is given to statements such as: Around this time of year I dream of clutching an enormous parrot to my chest and crawling into a non-existent bathtub brimming with cold water. No, Ayami, you’ve misunderstood me. As I said, the issue wasn’t what they were wearing. They all seemed to have chosen outfits they hoped would make them look very conservative, very civilised. As they did, in most cases.’ Possibly,’ the voice replied, somewhat curtly. ‘There was one woman always by his side but apparently she was his wife, not his secretary. So today, when I saw all those poets gathered in one place – there must have been dozens of them, all in the same room – I couldn’t tell they were poets at first. Because more than half of them … it’s not easy to put into words, maybe this was a subjective impression, but more than half, most, in fact, if I’d passed them on the street I would have taken them for someone self-employed who’d gone bankrupt after the IMF crisis, wandering around with no home and no family. I wouldn’t have been all that surprised if they’d asked me for a little money, just to buy something to eat; that was how they looked to me. But … no, it wasn’t their appearance exactly, it would be more precise to say that they followed a physical mould, which made me feel a certain way towards them.’ The text also repeats other descriptions, including the humid weather (“hot air heavier than a sodden quilt . . . clogging your pours like the wet slap of raw meat”); a woman’s legs (“skinny calves corded with stringy muscle, pathetically small feet, and shoes that gleamed like new yet looked like cast-offs”); and a murder that may or may not have happened (“a nail driven into the crown of his head while he slept . . . and his corpse was hidden in the space between the ceiling and the roof”). In the two years she’d worked there, Ayami had never taken a holiday, outside the one week in August when the theatre officially closed. For that week, when the humidity was generally at its peak, the foundation suspended all its various operations, disconnected its telephone lines, and gave every one of its employees the full seven days off. At this time of year, the city was like an animal being slowly smothered beneath a heap of steaming earth.

Someone I know will be arriving at the airport very early in the morning. Could you go and meet them? It’s their first time in Korea.’ The German-language teacher paused, then, with a sudden earnest intensity, said, ‘There’s no one else I can ask, Blind Owl.’ But - as the opening quote suggests - the story becomes increasingly surreal, with certain images, objects and phrases reoccuring, and characters swapping identities and changing histories. Weather forecast. For. Sailors. At sea. A south-easterly. Waves. 2.5 metres. Further out at sea. A south-westerly. Some. Cloud. To the south. A faint. Rainbow. Localised. Rain showers. Hailstorm. North-easterly. 2. 35. 7. 81 … There must have been a car accident,’ Ayami said eventually and, as she spoke, the shrill sound dwindled into the distance, swallowed by the darkness. And we are here as on a darkling plain, Swept with confused alarums of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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To be honest, whether the sound’s coming from a radio, or some kind of shadow like you say, it’s not actually that loud. Even if it were to switch itself on during a performance, the sound effects would probably cover it up.’ Though Buha neither read nor wrote poetry, he did sometimes draw. His mother had been an artist. His father, a civil servant, had retired from the Ministry of Culture, and was around fifteen years older than his mother. He was a bigot and conservative in thinking and appearance. On afternoons where she had been starved for conversation Buha's mother would say to her young son: 'What an artist really needs is not a husband but a sponsor.' So, what sort of fairy tale do you want to write?’ the director asked, as though the question had just occurred to him. Rather than being some state-of-the-art space, the ‘audio-appreciation room’ consisted of a CD tower and a pair of headphones over on one side of the library. People would stand and listen to recordings before deciding whether to borrow them or not; nothing that really warranted such a grand title as ‘audio appreciation’.

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Ayami has an appointment for 8 p.m. at a nearby restaurant. Recalling this, she wakes from her false death.They hailed a taxi, which took them through the deep night streets. As though photographed at a slow shutter speed, the city lights were elongated into multicoloured ribbons, streaming past the window. The library phone rang. Ayami took a moment to register that it really was the phone ringing, and not the mysterious radio, before she went over to the desk and answered the call. It was the usual enquiry, about the performance schedule for the coming week. A seductive, disorienting, & wholly original story about parallel lives, unfolding over a day & a night in the sweltering heat of Seoul's summer. And you usually hear this sound in the evenings, after the performance is over and the sound equipment’s been switched off?’ Bae Suah was born in Seoul in 1965. She studied chemistry at university and wrote her first short story as a way of practising her typing on a new word program. Since 1993 she has published fourteen story collections and six novels. Untold Night and Day is her first book to be published in the UK.