The third novel in the ten-volume Library of Korean Literature series is “When Adam Opens His Eyes” by Jang Jung-il. The novel dates back to the early 1990s and begins as follows:

I was nineteen years old, and the things that I most wanted to have were a typewriter, prints of Munch’s paintings and a turntable for playing records. Those things alone were all that I wanted from this world when I was nineteen…

As it says, all that the nineteen-year-old protagonist, nicknamed “Adam,” wanted was three things: a typewriter, prints of Munch paintings and a turntable. The book follows the hero along his journey as he pursues those three objects, regrettably in an antisocial and depraved manner.

For Adam, girls like his close friend Eun-sun, to whom he loses his virginity, and Hyun-jae, who introduces him to the new pleasures of sex and rock & roll, are the “only way out” from a stereotyped society and the monotonous routine of daily life.

Adam, in the end, gets his three desired objects by means of “ways sexual”: he earns the book of Munch’s paintings by taking a part-time job as a nude model and the turntable comes from the gay owner of a small record shop with whom he has a brief affair. He obtains the typewriter from his lover Hyun-jae who eventually ends her life by suicide.

The trials and tribulations of getting his three substitutes for sex are depicted in Jang’s daring and straightforward style of writing.

Through this work, the writer brings to light the fact that the young people who only rush to escape from the world they belong to, which, they think, is a true paradise, will end up finding it only “fake.” Every single pleasure they get is only the fake paradise, not the real one.

Shocked by the death of Hyun-jae, Adam finally finds himself “opening his eyes to the wrong place.” The real world is disguised as a paradise that, on its flip side, is being gnawed away by darkness and corrupted by greed.

Relieved, I finally cried without restraint, sobbing, like Adam opening his eyes to a fake paradise. My Eve was a prostitute. My room was always dark and wet. If I sometimes opened the window to let out the foul smell of books, I saw the world under the neon crosses befouled with greater darkness and corruption than was in my room. Because the fake paradise to which my eyes had opened was so frightening, I sobbed loudly…

When the novel was published in the Japanese literary magazine Shinjo, the Yomiuri Shimbun, a Japanese daily, hailed Jang Jung-il as “an author that embodies human existence in a capitalistic society in a creative way and represents the influences of post-modernism in the 1990s.”

Jang was born in Gyeongsangbuk-do (North Gyeongsang Province) in 1962. He started his career in 1984 when four of his poems, including “Gangjeong ganda,” were published in the third volume of The World of Languages, an encyclopedia of Korean magazine writings. Then in 1987, his play “Interior Drama” won the New Spring Literary Contest hosted by the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper. The same year, the author was awarded the Kim Su-yeong Literature Prize for his collection of poetry “A Meditation on Hamburger.”

Labeled as a poet armed with an urban sensitivity and whose ideas are a bit rebellious, he is believed to have brought a wave of fresh shocks to Korean literature.

He started writing longer pieces with the release of his first novel “Pelican” in the 1988 spring edition of The World’s Literature, a quarterly magazine. Every single one of his novels has garnered lots of attention from readers and critics alike.

His works include a collection of poems, “A Meditation on Hamburger” (1987), plays, “A Long Journey” (1995), short novels, such as “I Send Myself To You” (1992), “Do You Believe In Jazz?” (1994) and “Try Lying To Me” (1996), and, finally, “Jang Jung-il’s Reading Diary,” a collection of his favorite book reviews of other authors’ books.

“When Adam Opens His Eyes” was translated into English by Hwang Sun-Ae and Ewha Womans University Professor Horace Jeffery Hodges. They also translated the eighth novel in the Library of Korean Literature series, “The Soil” written by Yi Kwang-su.

By Sohn JiAe
Korea.net Staff Writer
jiae5853@korea.kr