Kim Ayami is a twenty-eight year old woman and law-school dropout who wants to be an actress, but appears to have been not very good at it, as she has only acted in one production and is now working at a theatre for the blind in Seoul after a number of stints as a waitress. It’s her last day there, though, because the theatre, the only one of its kind, is closing down and Ayami faces the uncertainty of unemployment, as she has no formal qualifications for another job.

It wasn’t as if he thought of her constantly. After a few years had passed, she came less frequently to his mind or to his dreams, and then a whole year might go by without him picturing her face. Buha remembered the poet woman with the greatest intensity whenever someone asked what he dreamed of being, and as he grew older such occasions grew fewer and further between, one could almost say ending completely. All of this is to say, I enjoyed this novel. I can appreciate that it might not be for everyone, especially those who tend towards more concrete plots, but despite its bizarreness I was along for whatever ride Bae Suah took me on. Sometimes you encounter stories you don't understand, know that you don't understand them, and yet still enjoy them; Untold Night and Day is one of those stories. The Owl's Absence) translated as North Station by Deborah Smith: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Kim, is it OK if I sit with you?’ When he told her to go ahead, she said, ‘Just buy me a Coke, I won’t bother you for long.’ Maria’s childish voice stirring some sympathy in him, Buha bought her a Coke as she requested. Though Buha neither read nor wrote poetry, he did sometimes draw. His mother had been an artist. His father, a civil servant, had retired from the Ministry of Culture, and was around fifteen years older than his mother. He was a bigot and conservative in thinking and appearance. On afternoons where she had been starved for conversation Buha's mother would say to her young son: 'What an artist really needs is not a husband but a sponsor.'By one of the boldest and most innovative voices in contemporary Korean literature, and brilliantly realized in English by International Man Booker­–winning translator Deborah Smith, Bae Suah’s hypnotic and wholly original novel asks whether more than one version of ourselves can exist at once, demonstrating the malleable nature of reality as we know it. But doesn’t that leave us incredibly isolated? If we can’t convince a single person, not anyone at all, and if no one has any interest in our graves, you say we can simply turn away and go alone into the wilderness. Without knowing where it is we’re going. We might have to spend our days with only the sheep and stars to gaze at. The stars die and are born again, and it must be the same for the sheep, mustn’t it? You’d say that the world is unchanging. But if we lived like that, and eventually lost even the sad consciousness of our own inability to convince, that would be incredibly lonely, Ayami.’

In this novel, everybody is a ghost, a shadow, a dreamed-up contraption, and life unfolds in strange loops, enigmatic encounters, and unsettling atmospheric disturbances; so in a way, it's a twisted realist novel! :-) Bae Suah throws her readers into a maelstrom of shifting timelines and perspectives, thus creating a puzzling depiction of the title-giving night and day in which multiple existences cumulate at one point in time: "Ayami was her future self or her past self. And she was both, existing at the same time. (...) That was the secret of night and day existing simultaneously."Hedayat was an Iranian writer, and The Blind Owl is his major work. The book is highly regarded, and is a pessimistic, atmospheric work filled with dreams, visions and agonies. In particular, the mysterious repeated statements enhance the sense of the surreal, the fantastical. The radio.’ The German-language teacher’s voice was not dissimilar to the one that had disturbed Ayami. Well, I’m not completely sure it’s coming from a radio.’ Ayami wavered, but she’d started now and felt compelled to carry on. ‘I’m just guessing. In any case, now and then, when the theatre’s very quiet, you can hear something – well, no, I suppose all I can say for a fact is that it feels like you can hear something.’

Except that opening quote isn't about this novel at all, but rather a key text within the novel, the cult novel from Iran The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat, who, like Bae Suah, translated Kafka into his native language. Deborah Smith (@londonkoreanist) was born in Doncaster in 1987. She studied English and then Korean literature in the UK, and has translated several books by Bae Suah and Han Kang. She publishes Asian literatures in translation through Tilted Axis Press, which she founded in 2015. Reading the lips of someone you can’t see, someone on the other end of a phone line – perhaps it was an illusion, after all. Which girlfriend?’ Ayami asked, but she’d already decided to take the director up on his suggestion and go for private German lessons (or French, it didn’t really matter. At any rate, she had the sense not to expect that either would be of any practical use). Alienating, what starts of as a story of a young Korean woman closing up at work evolves into a dreamlike, non-logically emerging story that is hard to reproduce and has many sentences repeated in different settings.

A wealthy aunt!’ the director exclaimed. ‘There’s one in every family. I had one myself, though that was a long time ago. Wealthy, and also incredibly strict. She made us children walk on tiptoe in the house, so there would be “no unnecessary noise”. There were three grand pianos but we didn’t dare touch them, not even to tinkle the keys. For her, you see, even music was “unnecessary noise”. She passed away a long time ago.’ Do you remember the quote, that though a person’s fate can be endowed with its own meaning, a hundred destinies are less significant, and what we call the individual history of thousands and hundreds of thousands is meaningless? Let’s get out of here.’ The director grasped Ayami’s arm. ‘I saw a police station down at the bottom of the hill. Let’s ask there.’ A startling and boundary-pushing novel, Untold Night and Day tells the story of a young woman’s journey through Seoul over the course of a night and a day. It’s 28-year-old Ayami’s final day at her box-office job in Seoul’s audio theater. Her night is spent walking the sweltering streets of the city with her former boss in search of Yeoni, their missing elderly friend, and her day is spent looking after a mysterious, visiting poet. Their conversations take in art, love, food, and the inaccessible country to the north. The bright liquid darkness of a midsummer evening was seeping between the blinds and slowly collecting inside the auditorium.

There must have been a car accident,’ Ayami said eventually and, as she spoke, the shrill sound dwindled into the distance, swallowed by the darkness. This is the 7th book by 배수아 I have read (and the 9th translation by Deborah Smith, including 4 of novels by Han Kang) - see below for the list. Whenever I write a book I come up with several alternative versions. I write down as many as I can, read through them and choose the one I like the best. I didn’t mishear. He was right there on the other side of the glass door. I didn’t open it, of course. What kind of person jokes about killing someone?’

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Some adjectives to describe this book: strange, absurd, bizarre, surreal. Suah's brand of surrealism is defined by her preoccupation with sensory detail: the almost suffocating heat of Seoul in the summer, the texture of a starched fabric, the instinctive panic that comes with being in absolute darkness. Suah quite literally sets the stage for this kind of preoccupation with one of her opening paragraphs: