The Man Who Touches Waves

Claude Monet, Waves Breaking, 1881, oil on canvas. San Francisco: Legion of Honor. Image via WikiArt.

“The Man Who Touches Waves” is a short story that can be read as a sonic map drawn by a man who has gone blind. The narrative follows a nameless narrator who sets off alone one day to find his way to the sea. In Korean braille, the word for “sea” is constructed in four dots, resembling the ellipsis in the English language; this story is infused with ellipses, offering a careful balance between sound and silence, the visual and the tactile. On the way to the sea, there are signposts: familiar sounds and their absence, remembered colors and the felt shapes of objects, and the narrator’s longing to see and to be seen. In fractals, the writing makes intuitive connections between the world and the language with which the narrator reads his way through it.

Written by Kim Soom and first published in full in Korean Literature Now, the story crafts a narrator who remains hypervisible even as the text’s fragmentary structure shreds apart the unity of meaning that we often ascribe to things around us. The story complicates our notions of arrival while showing us another way of reading, and of seeing, the world.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Globals Spotlights

Is it open?
Is it opening?

My face.

Is it in front of me?
Is it behind me?

My face right now.

I’ve seen a green apple. I want to put a green apple on my desk.

Playing on the radio was “Yesterday” by the Beatles. In the fish tank were two goldfish, one red and one pink. I sat at my desk and with a magnifying glass peered into the picture on my junior high school student ID card. I was fourteen then. My chin was sharp…A different My right eye has never seen light. When I was in the incubator, the ventilator supplied too much oxygen, damaging the blood vessels in my retina. I was brought into the world at seven months and was immediately put inside an incubator.