[The Typing Baker] Stories of Our Neighbors Facing Life, Death, and Violence

"I wrote this as a neighbor." The novelist Kim Hoon, who wrote The Song of the Sword and Namhan Mountain Fortress, now turns his gaze toward his close neighbors. His distinctive writing style, delicately tracing every fingertip and breath, allows readers to carefully and sometimes passionately observe the lives and deaths of those around him.

In this book, the author depicts the 'lives' of various people, but at the end lies 'death.' How a person is born, how they live, and how they face death. This process is deeply imbued not only with each individual's unique identity but also with the structural contradictions still present in our society.

The form of death that runs through this book is solitary death. In the first episode, "Myeongtae and the Whale," Lee Chun-gae is an ordinary sailor. After accidentally reaching the northern land, he is labeled a spy and spends over a decade in prison. During this time, the state subjects him to indiscriminate violence, torture, and degradation. After his release, he returns home but, having lost both his family and self, ends his own life alone.

There is also a sense of loneliness in Yeon-ok's death by suicide after being sexually assaulted by Cheol-ho in "Hand." The author observes her story from a distance, through the eyes of the perpetrator's parents and the incident records. He said he was inspired by the story of a firefighter who rescued a young girl. The firefighter, Yeon-ok, and the protagonist are connected through "Hand."

The quiet and lonely ends of life are felt in the scenes of elderly nuns facing death in a convent and the lives of old men playing janggi (Korean chess) beside the shade in a park. The stories of civil service exam candidates barely scraping by in the Noryangjin goshiwon (exam preparation dormitory) depict a painfully bitter reality.

State violence, sexual violence, youth unemployment, elderly solitary death... The author leaves clues for society to solve alongside the stories of our neighbors. The story of a 60-year-old water purifier maintenance worker who died alone after surviving on instant porridge and alcohol due to a lack of work, and a 30-year-old youth who chose death in a single-room apartment with a densely filled job-seeking notebook nearby, are all stories recently reported in the news.

The history of state violence, written like an old oral folktale in this book, is also ongoing. Lee Chang-bok, who was wrongfully imprisoned for eight years during the Park Chung-hee regime due to the People's Revolutionary Party Reconstruction Committee incident, was only exempted from repaying state compensation this month. No one took responsibility for the memories of various tortures he endured, the hardships his family faced, or the debts left behind. Victims of the Busan Brothers Home incident, forced admissions to the Samcheong Education Center, and others are all neighbors living around us.

Coexistence is not easy. It means more than simply living in the same space; it means recognizing lives different from mine and striving to live together with them. Through this book, the author maintains a loving gaze toward neighbors living together in this society. And he implies that all these stories of death can naturally become my own story.

Perhaps human death is mostly a lonely thing. That may be why we need each other even more. The author's words about the short story "Alone Over There" leave a lingering impression: "I barely wrote the expressions of people gathered at death's threshold, leaning on each other, fearing and accepting it. Though the writing is insufficient, I felt at ease while writing this and was thinking about the life force living among these pitiful beings."

Alone Over There | Kim Hoon | Munhakdongne | 264 pages | 15,000 KRW