Life, earlier works of Park Kyung-ni

The death of novelist Park Kyung-ni stunned Koreans on Monday (May 5). The funeral hall at Asan Medical Center was full of flowers mourning her death. Park, one of the country's most respected writers, left a landmark legacy in Korea's contemporary literature with her writing career spanning more than 50 years.

Born in Tongyeong, South Gyeongsang Province, in 1926, she graduated from Jinju Girls' High School in 1948 and married Kim Haeng-do. However, misfortune struck when she lost her baby son and her husband went missing during the Korean War (1950-1953).

Park debuted on the local literary scene in 1956 with the publication of two short stories – 'Calculations' and 'Black is Black, White is White,' while raising her daughter Kim Young-ju.

Her other writings in the 1950s, including 'The Age of Distrust' (1957), 'The Road Without a Guidepost' (1958), and ‘The Age of Darkness' (1958), reflect the dark days of Korean society through the eyes of the bereft, particularly for women who find themselves with neither material support nor spiritual consolation for their existence. In 'Drifting Island' (1959), the author also depicts the intense loneliness and uncertainty of a woman trapped in a hard life that reveals the reality of post-war Korean society.

Shifting away from her earlier works, Park showed her new viewpoint in life in 'The Curse of Kim's Daughers' ('Daughters of Pharmacist Kim' in Korean) (1962) where she details the tragedy of pharmacist Kim's five daughters. In 'Marketplace and the Battlefield' (1964), however, Park returns to the subject of the trauma of war by depicting the two different kinds of characters -- Gi-hun, who seeks to maintain an everyday existence, and his teacher Seoksan, who is engaged in the ideologies of the war.

Land or Toji, landmark epic

Her insight into the multi-layered development of history through diverse characters shone through in her 16-volume saga 'Land' (1969-94), which took Park 25 years to write. Also called 'Toji' in Korean, 'Land' is often considered the country's best contemporary novel. It features a cast of up to 700 characters in diverse locations, such as Manchuria, Busan, and Tokyo. Strictly based on historical facts, the story depicts the turbulent history of modern Korean through the main character Seo-hee, an heiress of a clan of the Choe families who are wealthy landowners in Hadong, South Gyeongsang Province. It covers a period from the late days of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), through colonization by Japan (1910-1945) to the division of the peninsula in 1945.

The fiction shows Seo-hee's quest to win back family land stolen by a relative. The novel also contains various subplots, including a secret affair between Seo-hee's stepbrother and his sister-in-law; Seo-hee's marriage, a maid who tries to seduce Seo-hee's father to win possession of his property but later murders him. Seo-hee eventually reclaims the property but only after she learns that land can never be the possession of a human, rather, it is the land that possesses humans. The novel ends when she hears news from her daughter about Japan's surrender in 1945.

The saga has been translated into English, Japanese, and French, and made into a TV drama series, a movie and an opera. Despite all her trials and tribulations and unhealed scars from cancer operations, Park did not stop writing, which makes the novel all the more meaningful. Regarded as a masterpiece of contemporary Korean literature, ‘Land' was later included in the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works in 1997.

Toji Culture Center

Since the opening of the Toji Culture Center in 1991 in Wonju, Gangwon Province, Park lived in her personal residence within the center until she was moved to a hospital. Park also served as chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the Toji Culture Foundation, established in 1996 to promote and preserve active literary thought as a means of fostering and nurturing creative lifestyles among today's youth. The writer was buried in her hometown of Tongyeong on Friday.


By Yoon Sojung
Korea.net Staff writer