Novels and short stories quietly filled the first act in the career of Lee Chang-dong, the South Korean writer-director who shot to fame for the offbeat films he began to make in his forties. (He also had a brief cameo in politics, as South Korea’s minister for culture and tourism, in 2003-04.)
Lee’s most recent feature, 2018’s Oscar-nominated Burning (itself adapted from a Haruki Murakami short story), picked up on the discomfiting themes that run throughout Snowy Days and Other Stories, a new collection of his works, ranging from the 1980s to the present day, translated here by Heinz Insu Fenkl and Yoosup Chang.
Unknowability is one of Lee’s biggest character interests, with interlopers and shape-shifters losing and reforming their identities in both families and society. A missing husband in “War Trophy” appears as a ghost to confirm his death, but the apparition is not accepted by all in the family. When grieving parents in “Fire & Dust” go to honour their dead child at the river where they scattered his ashes, they heartbreakingly can’t quite remember the exact spot.
At every turn, Lee faces the darkest truths head-on, all the while in an atmospheric fug of mystery, occasionally tinged with body-shock horror. Dodgy state policemen, portrayed by Lee with hard-boiled, almost schlocky menace, chain-smoke over these lowly citizens’ shoulders against a backdrop of cities expanding and students protesting, sometimes setting themselves on fire in the streets.
In Lee’s state-surveilled world — which is drawn from his personal experience of 1980s South Korea after the Gwangju massacre — the authorities systematically chafe against political freedoms, idly and sometimes viciously. It’s never quite clear whether a joke or a dream or a nightmare is afoot as they prosecute a national paranoia about “reds” and communists in their midst. A student in “A Lamp in the Sky” who tries to escape her past in a backwater coal town faces a typically impossible question: “Look, we already know everything. So just tell us the truth.”
There’s much nuance about what this means to the average citizen. In the novella “There’s a Lot of Shit in Nokcheon”, a long-lost activist brother reunites with his sibling, who then develops an angsty jealousy about his brother’s burgeoning chemistry with his wife, who in the past dismissed student demos as simply “immature”. Somehow all three characters in the triangle end up galvanised to see their lives in a different light. Even the furthest corners of personal privacy — notably sex lives — become entangled in the political.
Part of the brilliance of these stories is also the way in which Lee frames the family unit itself as a riddle, bundling up secrets about who people are, about what has really happened to them to leave them so ashy and broken. In “The Leper”, published in The New Yorker in 2024, a young teacher, Mr Kim, is disappointed by how defeated by life his father appears to be — until one day the police show up, and claim that he was in fact a spy for the “puppet regime” in North Korea.
When the son pushes back on this startling theory, Lee’s acerbic humour is on show, as Mr Kim insists to the policeman: “[Espionage] requires a strong personality and a fierce determination, doesn’t it? My father is weak-willed and . . . also pretty much a failure in life. Anyone who knows him will confirm that.”
In the opening story “Snowy Day”, which appeared in The New Yorker in 2023, a young man on national service is so miserable at home on leave that he returns to his wretched training camp a day early.
Where some of the stories are tense because they ramble down evermore sinister paths, “Snowy Day” shows a tauter side to Lee’s storytelling. Two military guards on a freezing watch end up in a tragic, senseless accident — epitomised by the emptiness that surrounds them: “the only things he can see now are snow and barbed wire. There’s nothing left in the world but barbed wire. Funny — that’s what they’re guarding. The barbed wire.”
In his foreword, Lee describes the earliest works as hailing from a different time, now almost a lost territory in a present-day South Korea that has “changed profoundly”. Assembled together here, the stories have a suffocating suspense, with no one being allowed to fully move forward with their lives — there’s invariably a knock on the door or a phone ringing to question and rewrite the past. It’s a mark of Lee’s skill that these stories leave you, like the characters, unable to look away while instinctively wanting to escape.
Snowy Day and Other Stories by Lee Chang-dong, translated by Yoosup Chang and Heinz Insu Fenkl, Penguin Press $32, 368 pages
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
