SEOUL — In a cramped Seoul apartment in 2017, a 69-year-old man sat before a press corps and confessed something few writers dare admit: "I don't have a grand vision, a comprehensive perspective on history, or an integrated worldview. I can't write what I want to write—I can only barely write what I am capable of writing, bit by bit." ("거대한 전망, 시대 전체의 구조, 통합적인 시야가 저에게는 없습니다. 내가 쓰고 싶은 것을 쓰는 것이 아니고 내가 쓸 수 있는 것을 겨우겨우 조금씩 쓸 수밖에 없습니다.")
The speaker was Kim Hoon (김훈, 金薰), born in 1948—the year South Korea declared independence from Japanese colonial rule. His father, Kim Gwang-ju (김광주), was born in 1910, the year Korea lost that independence. Between these two dates lies the architecture of Kim Hoon's literary universe: a century of war, dictatorship, fratricidal violence, and what he calls "the unbearable weight of history that ordinary people could not resist" (역사의 하중을 견디지 못한 자들).
Kim Hoon is not a household name in the Anglophone world. Yet in South Korea, his 2001 novel The Song of the Sword (『칼의 노래』)—a meditation on Admiral Yi Sun-sin, the 16th-century naval commander who saved Korea from Japanese invasion—sold over one million copies, an almost unthinkable feat in a nation of 51 million. His follow-up, Namhansanseong (『남한산성』, 2007), about Korea's humiliating surrender to Qing China in 1636, sold half a million. Both novels share a paradox: they are historical epics written in the voice of defeat (패배의 서사).
"Kim Hoon's characters are never heroic," he told the journalists that winter day. "They hesitate, they look around bewildered, they are chased for no crime they committed. I wanted to speak of the sorrow and suffering of these shabby people." ("나의 등장인물들은 늘 영웅적이지 못합니다. 그들은 머뭇거리고, 두리번거리고, 죄 없이 쫓겨 다닙니다. 나는 이 남루한 사람들의 슬픔과 고통에 대해서 말하고 싶었습니다.")
The Making of a Literary Contrarian
Kim Hoon came to fiction late and sideways. For thirty years, he was a journalist—a "문학저널리스트" (munhak jeonoliseuteu, "literary journalist")—at major Korean newspapers, including Kyunghyang Shinmun (경향신문) and Hankook Ilbo (한국일보). His colleagues remember him as a "problem reporter" who submitted his resignation more than twenty times (20여 번의 사표), only to be refused or persuaded to stay.
His father, Kim Gwang-ju, had been the culture editor and deputy director (문화부장·부국장) of Kyunghyang Shinmun, one of Korea's progressive dailies. He claimed to have worked alongside Kim Gu (김구), the legendary independence fighter, during Korea's anti-Japanese resistance in Shanghai. But Kim Hoon harbors doubts. "My father was not an independence movement leader," he said in a 2017 interview. "He was a wandering youth, one of countless drifters swept into the periphery of a great man's shadow—so far in the periphery that the great man never saw him." ("아버지는 독립운동가라고는 볼 수 없었고, 그냥 나라를 잃고 방황하는 유랑청년이었어요. 김구 선생님의 눈에는 보이지가 않는 아득히 멀리 있는 그런 유랑의 청년들이었죠.")
This skepticism—of heroism, nationalism, and historical mythos (영웅주의, 민족주의, 역사적 신화에 대한 회의)—would become the backbone of his fiction.
The Aesthetics of Austerity: Writing Like a Blade
Ask any Korean reader about Kim Hoon, and they will mention two things: his prose, and his nihilism (그의 문체와 허무주의).
His sentences are surgical—short, blunt, stripped of ornament. He writes in pencil on manuscript paper, pressing down so hard the words indent the page. Admirers call it "prose sharpened like a knife edge" (칼날처럼 벼린 문장). Critics call it "emotionally anesthetized" (감성을 거부하는).
Consider this passage from The Song of the Sword:
"The sea was empty. The corpses had sunk. The blood had dissolved. The wind blew."
("바다는 텅 비어 있었다. 시체는 가라앉았다. 피는 녹아 사라졌다. 바람이 불었다.")
Kim Hoon studied legal codes (법전) to learn how to write without rhetorical fat. "The first rule," he once said, "is not to chatter. Eliminate adjectives. Fight with subjects and verbs." ("수다를 떨지 말아야 한다. 주어와 동사로 승부하라.") His style has been compared to Camus's L'Étranger (카뮈의 『이방인』), to the war dispatches of Ernie Pyle, to the granite terseness of the Annals of Joseon.
The Politics of Resignation
Kim Hoon's worldview is shaped by what he calls "the yoke of history" (역사의 멍에). His protagonists do not rebel against injustice; they endure it. They do not transform society; they are crushed by it (역사에 짓눌린다).
In In the Emptiness, the protagonist Ma Dong-su (마동수) is born in 1910 (like Kim's father), wanders Manchuria during Japanese occupation, returns to Seoul after liberation, survives the Korean War, and dies in 1979—the same year President Park Chung-hee was assassinated. His life is a chronicle of passive suffering (수동적 고통).
Why do you live here? Ma Cha-se asks his brother.
Korea terrifies me, the brother replies. Why do you live there?
Ma Cha-se cannot answer.
("그런데 형은 왜 여기서 살아? / 야, 그런 건 묻지 마. 난 한국이 무섭고 힘들어. 넌 왜 거기서 사니? / 마차세는 대답하지 못했다.")
The Incomplete Archive
At the 2017 press conference, Kim Hoon made another confession: "I originally wanted to write this novel in five volumes. But I didn't have the strength. I wrote what I could, and left out what I could not." ("더 길게 쓰고 싶었지만, 기력이 미치지 못했다. 나는 내가 쓸 수 있는 것을 겨우 쓴 것입니다.")
In the Emptiness was supposed to be a sprawling multi-generational saga. Instead, it is 360 pages—fragmented, elliptical, full of gaps (단편적이고 생략적이며 빈틈투성이). But perhaps incompleteness is the point (불완전성 자체가 요점). Kim Hoon does not claim to narrate history from above. He writes from below—from the perspective of those who cannot see the whole (전체를 볼 수 없는 자들).
"I cannot encompass an entire era," he told the journalists. "So I use snapshots and sketches. I dash in, capture a detail sharply, and dash out. It's a strategy of survival—the only one I have." ("저는 이 시대 전체를 전체로서 묘사할 수는 없었어요. 그래서 어떤 디테일에 갑자기 달려들어서 날카롭게 한 커트 찍어 버리는 스냅적인 기법을 써야겠다고 생각했어요.")
Coda: A Literature of Broken Silence
Today, Kim Hoon is 77. He lives quietly in Seoul, cycling, writing by hand, refusing interviews. He has published eleven novels, countless essays, and sold over two million books. He has won every major Korean literary prize: Dong-in Literary Award (동인문학상, 2001), Yi Sang Literary Award (이상문학상, 2004), Daesan Literary Award (대산문학상, 2007).
In an age of activist literature, he offers passivity. In an age of historical revisionism, he offers amnesia. In an age of noise, he offers silence.
But his silence is not empty. It is the silence of a man who has listened too much (너무 많이 들은 자의 침묵)—to the screams in police interrogation rooms, to the dying words of soldiers, to the mutterings of his father's generation. It is the silence of someone who knows that some truths cannot be spoken, only inscribed (어떤 진실은 말할 수 없고 오직 새겨 넣을 수밖에 없다).
In the end, Kim Hoon may be remembered not as a great novelist, but as a great witness (위대한 증인)—one who refused to lie about what he saw, even when the truth was unbearable.
