The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost

By Sok-pom Kim

A central work of postwar Japanese fiction, The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost incorporates Korean folk tales, ghost stories, and myth into a phenomenal depiction of epic tragedy. Written by a zainichi, a permanent resident of Japan who is not of Japanese ancestry, the novel inventively imagines a long-supressed event in Japanese colonial history-the Cheju Uprising of 1948-and captures in style and substance the predicament of Koreans living under Japanese rule.

Kim Sok-pom tells the story of Mandogi, a young priest living on the island of Cheju-do. Mandogi becomes unwittingly involved in the Four-Three Incident of 1948, in which the South Korean government brutally suppressed an armed peasant uprising and purged Cheju-do of communist sympathizers. Although Mandogi is sentenced to death for his part in the riot, he survives (in a sense) to take revenge on his enemies and fully commit himself to the resistance. Mandogi's indeterminate, shapeshifting character is emblematic of colonialism's outsized impact on both ruler and ruled. One of the most significant zainichi novels to date, The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost relates the trauma of a long-forgotten history and its indelible imprint on Japanese and Korean memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Oct 6, 2010
• ISBN: 9780231526722

Book preview

Translator’s Introduction

In an afterword to the 1991 reprinted edition of Mandogi yūrei kitan (translated here as The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost and originally published in 1970), Kim Sŏk-pŏm writes that "Mandogi went against the current of the Japanese literary establishment from the beginning. The same is true of myself, the writer."¹ He might have stopped at went against the current. Whereas it is true that the novel does not fit neatly into the Japanese literary establishment, neither does it fit neatly into any other category. What strikes me most about Mandogi is its rich and multifaceted nature, each reading revealing a new layer of complexity and meaning. The text could be read fruitfully in any number of ways.

Perhaps the most basic of these methods is to read Mandogi as a historical novel. It takes place on Cheju-do, a volcanic island situated fifty miles off the southwestern coast of the Korean peninsula, and it tells the tale of a dimwitted and innocent temple hand, Mandogi, who is unwittingly dragged into the chaos and tragedy of the Cheju-do Rebellion of 1948. Usually called the Four-Three Incident, the rebellion began on April 3, 1948, when a group of peasant guerrillas attacked some of the island’s police stations, killing several government officials. Though the guerrillas were ostensibly protesting the United Nations’ decision to hold separate elections in North and South Korea, making official the de facto division of the peninsula, the rebellion was treated as a communist insurgency. Over the course of the following year, as the U.S.-backed Syngman Rhee regime made efforts to suppress the rebellion, thousands of lives were lost.²

However, the Four-Three Incident, despite its gravity, has been largely ignored. In fact, the silence surrounding the incident is perhaps one reason for the passion and frequency with which Kim writes about it. Most of his major works of fiction deal in some way with the issue, including Karasu no shi (The death of a crow, 1957), Kazantō (Volcanic island, 1983), and, of course, The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost. However, Cheju-do is important to Kim not only in terms of his career as an author but on a personal level as well. Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1925 to Korean parents recently immigrated from Cheju-do, Kim considers the island his ancestral homeland.

This brings us to a second possible reading of Mandogi, one employed by Christopher Scott in "Ghost Writing: Kim Sok-pom’s Mandogi yūrei kitan, the third chapter of his 2006 doctoral dissertation titled Invisible Men: The Zainichi Korean Presence in Postwar Japanese Culture."³ Scott argues thoughtfully that in many ways, Mandogi and his ghost represent the invisible Korean minority in Japan. While Kim is reexamining an important and underappreciated event in Korea’s past,⁴ he is also examining a situation in the present: the plight of Koreans in Japan, or "zainichi" Koreans. Indeed, whereas Mandogi highlights the horrors and atrocities of the Four-Three incident, the novel also examines issues of identity and belonging, which were facing the Korean population in Japan at the time of the novel’s publication and which continue even today.⁵

Zainichi is a term that refers to those residents of Japan who, like Kim, come from non-Japanese ethnic backgrounds. Most of the time, though, the term is used to refer specifically to those of Korean descent, who constitute the largest ethnic minority in Japan.⁶ Because most first-generation zainichi came to Japan, by choice or by force, during the period of Japan’s colonial rule over Korea (1910–1945), they serve as a constant and perhaps unpleasant reminder of Japan’s imperialistic past. As a result, they have met with various forms of discrimination and marginalization. In addition, ever since the division of the peninsula and the Korean War (1950–1953), zainichi have struggled not only with the question of how to balance their Korean heritage with their Japanese residence, but also with the question of whether to identify as North Korean or South Korean.

As is the case with the Four-Three Incident, Kim is deeply concerned with these zainichi issues both in his writing and in his personal life. Although technically second-generation zainichi, Kim spent much of his childhood on Cheju-do and in other parts of Korea, so he shares a first-generation affinity toward Korea as the homeland, resisting naturalization and other forms of assimilation into Japan. After the war ended, however, he was not able to return to Korea. In 1945, he wrote, While I greeted the independence of the fatherland with great joy, after the ‘8/15 Liberation,’ I was suddenly empty, and shut myself away inside.⁷ Kim felt trapped between two worlds, unable to return to Korea, yet also unable to feel at home within Japanese society.

Nevertheless, Kim writes almost exclusively in Japanese, a practice adopted by second-generation zainichi writers and resisted by those of the first generation. Kim felt that Korean authors situated in Japan and publishing their works for an audience of Japanese readers had no choice but to write in the Japanese language.⁸ At the same time, however, he felt that it was important for Koreans writing in Japanese to inscribe a Korean flavor into their writing to avoid being too Japanized by writing in Japanese.⁹ He strongly resisted the notion that writing in the language of the Japanese automatically made him Japanese in some way, insisting that regardless of the language in which he chose to write, his individuality would come through in the text. Moreover, Kim thought that because his Korean identity was very much a part of that individuality, his Korean-ness would be apparent in his writing.¹⁰ In fact, Kim rejects the categorization of zainichi literature as Japanese literature and instead refers to it as literature in Japanese, arguing that language alone is not enough to categorize literature as Japanese or Korean, given all the other cultural and historical factors at work.¹¹

The division of the Korean peninsula left Kim similarly straddling a border. Since the normalization of relations between South Korea and Japan, zainichi Koreans have had the option of either taking on South Korean (Kankoku) citizenship or remaining under the designation Korean (Chōsen), which although referring to the old, undivided Korea, is usually associated with the North. Though Kim’s homeland is Cheju-do, which geographically aligns him with the South, he is perhaps ideologically aligned more closely with the North. In the end, however, Kim argues that zainichi Koreans, being in a position to carry on the legacy of a single, unified Korean community, should not be obligated to declare allegiance to either government on the peninsula, but only to an undivided Korean homeland. Kim famously argued this point to another prominent zainichi author, Ri Kaisei, who changed his citizenship to South Korean in 1998 in order to be able to take part in political reforms in the South. Kim attacked Ri’s decision, arguing that Korean citizenship is the only way to establish oneself as a member of the Korean community without acknowledging the division of the peninsula.¹²

Kim’s pattern is to defy categorization. He will not have his identity defined in terms of simple dichotomies, such as Japanese versus Korean, North Korean versus South Korean, or perhaps even first- versus second-generation zainichi;¹³ instead, he chooses to occupy the blurry area between the two. In many ways, The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost highlights such overlapping, in-between areas. As Kim notes in his afterword, novel and author alike are difficult to categorize, so it is no surprise that Scott’s reading is concerned with how the narrative, characters, and events within the novel might be difficult to categorize; in his words, it [focuses] on [the] question of zainichi-ness as it is articulated through Mandogi’s fractured identity and through critical gaps or aporias in the narrative itself.¹⁴

In Ghost Writing, Scott argues that Mandogi’s many different names, the ambiguity surrounding his manhood, and the narrative’s ambiguous status with regard to Mandogi’s ghost render Mandogi a nebulous character, his identity fractured, and therefore representative of the zainichi. Scott’s reading is insightful. It is important to see that in Mandogi, Kim is doing more than simply retelling the Four-Three Incident; he is making an effort to problematize the boundaries that fracture zainichi identity. And yet, there is much more to The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost. The novel goes beyond its effort to tear down these boundaries and seems more concerned with what is left when they are gone. If the zainichi are not quite Korean and not quite Japanese, then what are they? We might call them both, or neither, or something else altogether. Alternatively, we might simply call them human.

Yet another reading of the novel, then, might view it as Kim’s attempt not only to deconstruct the lines that are drawn to place us into categories but also to catch a glimpse of the raw humanity that transcends those categories. Perhaps it is not coincidental that the journal that originally published Mandogi in 1970 is called Ningen toshite: Being Human. I see the novel, more than anything, as an attempt to grasp what it means to be human.

Throughout the story of Mandogi’s ghost, Kim takes issue with any number of ways in which humanity is defined superficially. Take Mandogi’s names, for example. The novel begins with a discussion of Mandogi’s various names:

At Kannon Temple, in the heart of a deep valley, there was a young priest who worked in the kitchen, a temple hand, in other words. People called him dimwit. When they didn’t call him that, they called him Mandogi. And when they didn’t call him that, they called him plain old temple hand. Of them all, Mandogi was the least insulting, but that was the Buddhist name given to him when he entered the priesthood. If you have a priest’s name, you should still have the secular name you had before you became a priest, but he didn’t have a common name like that. He just had the nickname Keiton (meaning dog shit), and that was it for his names. In other words, he had been nameless since birth. People feel strange around the nameless; they make you wonder what it is to be human.

Scott discusses Mandogi’s names at length in Ghost Writing,¹⁵ focusing largely on the name Mantoku Ichirō, a Japanese moniker that Mandogi is given when he is drafted as a laborer and sent to Japan during the colonial period. Scott points out that here, Kim is clearly criticizing the Japanese policy of sōshi kaimei, an effort to assimilate Japan’s colonial subjects by giving them Japanese names.¹⁶

However, nowhere in Scott’s analysis does he note that, in Mandogi’s case, his Japanese name is meant not only to Japanize him but to humanize him as well. When Mandogi rejects his new Japanese name and insists that his name is still Mandogi, the Japanese official responds by shouting, Idiot! How can you complain, when you don’t even have a name? There is no one without a name in Japan! You have the honor of being given a Japanese name, of being treated like a human being! In this passage, it is clear that Kim is taking issue not only with the notion that a name could define someone as Korean or Japanese, but also, and perhaps more importantly, with the notion that a name is what makes a human being. Furthermore, his criticism of the overemphasis on names is not limited to the Japanese. In the first paragraph of the novel, the narrative says that people [in general] feel strange around the nameless; they make you wonder what it is to be human. Clearly, Kim is concerned with more than just the divisive properties of names. In Mandogi, he is searching for a more intrinsic way to define humanity.

Kim hints at such a definition later in the novel, when Mandogi is ordered by the police to shoot one of the rebels they have captured. Mandogi hearkens back to a similar situation he encountered during his time as a mine laborer in Japan, when all the Korean workers were ordered to take turns beating one of their countrymen who had tried and failed to escape. When Mandogi’s turn came, he found himself unable to strike the body of his fellow man, reduced now to a mangled corpse, barely recognizable as human. The narrative continues: He didn’t have a reason. Mandogi’s body just refused to do it. His stomach, his guts, the whole makeup of his body just didn’t mesh with the white birch rod, sticky with bloody handprints. He translated his feelings into the simple words, ‘This ain’t something a human should do.’

Here, Kim seems to be exploring the idea that humanity could be defined based on an inner sense of morality. Even without a name, without a home, without any of the data required to construct an identity, Mandogi is able to recognize in himself something human, something that refuses to commit an act that might erode that sense of humanity.

It is interesting to note that the novel allows for the loss of one’s humanity. In one of the its most poignant scenes, Mandogi is picking lice off his body and throwing them into the fire. Eventually, he notices that several of the lice have missed the fire and are now crawling around on the kitchen floor. Watching the surviving lice, he has the following revelation:

In a world where we’re all reborn as each other, a human has no right to kill a louse, thought Mandogi. But he also thought, it can’t be helped, though. After hundreds of thousands of millions of years, maybe I’ll be reborn as a louse. Then if someone—no, if the louse is reborn as a kongyangju, maybe he’ll throw me in the fire and I’ll go pop. Soon, the squirming in his hand started to tickle. The louse moving around on his hand seemed sort of cute to Mandogi. And so, smiling to himself, he picked it up again, and, into the smell of blending sweat and oil on the back of his neck, he returned it to its former home.

As a Buddhist, Mandogi believes that all forms of life have the potential to become human in a subsequent reincarnation, and that, by the same token, human beings can be reborn into lower forms of life. Because of this, he is unwilling to harm even a louse, a fellow creature with the potential to obtain humanity. To do so would be akin to harming another human being, which, as we have seen, Mandogi is unwilling, perhaps even unable, to do. Leaving aside the novel’s Buddhist rhetoric, the narrative also allows for the loss of humanity even in this life. By the end of the story, Mandogi no longer considers his murderous enemies human. He sees them as nothing more than lice, blood-suckers to be thrown on the fire.

Perhaps, then, Kim is searching for a definition of humanity that is not so much intrinsic as it is to be earned. In the end, he does not leave us with a clear picture of what it means to be human. Nevertheless, I think that one of the most rewarding ways to read The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost is with questions about humanity and how we define it in mind.

As I said before, however, this reading is certainly not the