Caroline Kim on Mariko Nagai’s Georgic: Stories

(Guest post by Caroline Kim)

I came across Mariko Nagai’s Georgic: Stories by mistake. During the time I volunteered at Hyphen Magazine, it got sent to me, the fiction editor, instead of to its rightful recipient, the book reviews editor. I had often watched in envy as she received a pile of books at our bimonthly meetings, so when I got my own slim, brown package, I did not hand it over to her right away. I took it home, opened it to the first story, read the beginning paragraphs, and immediately emailed her to ask if I could write a review of it.

Talk about the right book at the right time.

I had been intermittently working on short stories, writing them for myself because I couldn’t imagine anyone else being interested. I was writing characters I didn’t usually see in the books I read, middle-aged Korean immigrants trying to make sense of their lives, Korean American teenagers trying to understand their hybrid identities, as well as stories set during the Korean War and Joseon Dynasty. At the time Nagai’s collection came to me, I was struggling with the stories set in Korea.

The ten short stories in Georgic, all set in a premodern Japan, won the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction in 2009, judged by Jonis Agee. The title refers to a form of poetry that occupied itself with farming and rural life. Although the form comes from a long lineage that began with Virgil’s Georgics in 29 BCE, by the 18th century, it comprised mostly tame poems celebrating the bucolic life of the English countryside. Nagai said she wanted to bring back the Virgilian sense of heightened tension between man and nature, the question of survival always pressing and at the surface. I was attracted to Nagai’s stories because I also wanted to write about distinct times when simply surviving was at stake, although in my case it was the survival of Korea as a nation and Koreans as a people.

With the oft-repeated advice to “write what you know” chittering in my ear, I felt a great deal of insecurity attempting to write a place I knew only from childhood memory, whose history I could only read (with suspicion) in English, often written by non-Korean writers. I was unsure how to relate not only to an unfamiliar history but also to the context of a culture whose values, beliefs, and goals are often contradictory to America’s. And like many other immigrant writers, I also felt a huge responsibility to get things right, because being wrong could lead to problems for everyone else. Despite the popularity of K-pop and K-dramas, not much is really known about Korea by outsiders.

Reading Nagai reminded me in a powerful way that history isn’t something that happens to people but is about people. She doesn’t spend a great deal of time setting us in a historical context, explaining to the reader who the rulers are, how hierarchies got established, what ideologies were ascendant, etc. Take, for example, the first story in the collection, “Grafting,” which is about a village suffering the consequences of a terrible drought. In order to avoid the catastrophe of everybody dying, the villagers must take their aging parents away from the village, up a mountain to die of starvation. Here are the first two paragraphs:

Harvest. Another failure. Third year in a row. Now. The posted sign in the village center: All people unable to work must leave within two weeks. Children exempted.

The summer had been too long. The short rain season followed by overwhelming heat, sucking every drop of moisture, cracking the earth. The ground opened in the field like mouths waiting for water that never came. We waited for rain. It never came. The green wilted before our eyes. We were helpless. And gods did not hear our prayers this summer; the heat had settled too near the earth, sucking our prayers as soon as they came out.  

Nagai begins in a stark and poetic way by stripping things down to the essential—survival. There is no individual yet in the story, just a communal “we” that expresses how dire, how far-reaching the plight is for everyone. And even though the “we” here refers explicitly to these villagers, we hear in it the echoes of the villages radiating out from them, suffering from the same drought, faced with the same difficult choices. The fact that a sign appears with no mention or curiosity of who put it up, and is accepted with no shock, also tells us that this isn’t the first time the village has faced such a situation.  

It’s not shocking, but it’s still terribly painful. We hear it in the brevity and absolute control of the lines. The first four sentences are so short that two of them contain only one word. They seem on the surface factual, neutral, even merely informational, but the lack of emotion in the tone betrays a fear that if even a little emotion is allowed, a swallowing deluge might follow. The terseness in the language also echoes and makes me feel what the villagers must be feeling, that everything must be conserved, even words. 

In the next paragraph, Nagai gives us some background detail and the wonderfully vivid simile of “the ground opened in the field like mouths waiting for water that never came.” She gives details that are specific without being too specific: the “green” that wilts before the villagers’ eyes instead of “cabbage leaves” or “corn stalks”; “gods” with a small “g,” not given a specific name. Sometimes if a story is set in an unfamiliar world, the general is more useful than the specific. Because what’s most important here is not for us to be distracted into thinking about what a wilted cabbage leaf might look like but to feel the desperation of a world where everything green is wilting, dying. 

She does this again later when she’s offering details of the drought, giving us a mix of what’s familiar to everyone—dead cattle, muddy puddles drying up—mixed with less familiar ones—communal rice bins—that we can easily imagine in context even if we’ve never seen such a thing. Reading Nagai made me realize I didn’t need to do a lot of historical throat-clearing at the beginning of a story if it’s set outside America. After all, in the end, human beings are the same everywhere, especially when they’re facing a crisis. 

We’re only on the second page of this story, and yet we already understand the crisis, the setting, and the characters. As the story progresses, it moves from a “we” to an “I,” the voice of the midwife of the village, herself the daughter of the previous midwife, now gone out of reach by dementia. This makes what she has to do both easier and more difficult. The villagers come to her, one by one, asking what they should do, wanting a kind of blessing from her, wanting to be absolved from responsibility even though they know it’s not possible. When they do take their fathers, mothers, uncles, and aunts out of the village, they do so singly, taking separate paths up the mountain, wanting to be alone with their shame. 

The story I was working on at the time I read Georgic was set during the Korean War and eventually called “Seoul.” All my life, I knew that the war had affected me profoundly (would I have ended up in America otherwise?) but not in any way I could articulate. It almost never came up in conversations except in brief and startling ways. Once my mother told us in an offhand way how my grandfather had hidden beneath their house in Seoul for months until he turned ghostly white; another time that when the Communists arrived in her hometown (now part of North Korea), they’d immediately taken the mayor, my great-grandfather, into the town center and shot him. Further questions were not welcomed or answered. 

By the time I started writing “Seoul,” I had read a large number of books about the war, dry histories and fascinating first-hand accounts, but they were all from the point of view of Western historians and English-speaking soldiers. I hungered for Korean perspectives but felt shut out by my ignorance of the Korean language. Frustrated, I set out to write my own, but I was bogged down by everything I had read, everything I felt I didn’t fully understand. It felt massive and unapproachable, yet my obsession wouldn’t let me leave it alone. I started with facts, too many facts.  

Later, no doubt influenced by Nagai, I realized that what was missing in those first couple of pages was an individual voice. Because what’s important is not what happens (drought, famine, war), but how it affects people and determines their actions. So I went back and started describing the first day of the war more closely through the perspective of my main character, a twelve year old boy: 

What Sung remembered most about that first day of the war was the rain. It was June 1950, monsoon season. For two days there had been just the steady but muffled sound of rain as it beat down on the straw roof, creating a growing pit of mud filled with tadpoles in front of his house. Later, he would say he also felt the reverberations of the long line of T-34 tanks and open-backed trucks carrying the KPA, the Korean People’s Army, on the road to Seoul. And that he even saw the glint of Soviet-made planes as they flew overhead. What he really felt was a rumbling in his stomach that was equal parts fear and excitement.

The story became possible for me to write after I made that change. It was no longer just about the war and how people were forced to move, hide, lie, and survive in any way they could, but also about a boy who saw the war as an adventure, who looked forward to living in a big city, riding on cable cars, and making money from the thousands of soldiers who had suddenly appeared, foreign and fascinating. The Korean War as subject was too big for me to write about, but as context, it helped me see the people who lived through it.

There’s a wonderful, terrible moment at the end of “Grafting” when the narrator, having strapped her mother onto her back and carried her up the mountain, must now leave her. She does this by pretending to play a game of hide-and-seek. As her mother counts aloud, the narrator runs away before stopping at one point:

I close my eyes. I am no different from the villagers. I can say that I am different, that I am not like them. The villagers who can sell their daughters to survive for a season, a mere season; the villagers who can abandon their old parents. How different am I? My story is like theirs. Our stories are the same. I am no different. I am here, where they are. Or, have been. In the mountain. With my mother. I am no different.

I am no different. When I write, especially when I write historical stories, I try to remember that I’m no different from the characters I’m writing about, that faced with the same difficulties, I might make the same awful, human choices.

Caroline Kim is the author of a collection of short stories about the Korean diaspora, The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories, which won the 2020 Drue Heinz Prize in Literature, was a finalist for a Northern California Book Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in Fiction, and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and The Story Prize. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Story, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Carve, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. Find her at carolinekim.net and @carolinewriting.