Landfill that time forgot

Christopher Harding enjoys a grimy portrait of Seoul that looks past the skyscrapers to its haunted slums

between shanty town, city streets, and an enigmatic family of “Mr Kims”. The city clearly doesn’t want them. Cleaned bodies, new clothes, and some stumbled-on cash in their pockets aren’t enough: they get taken for thieves; shouted at for stinking out the bus. And when the big city comes to them, it does so fleetingly, in the form of a do-gooding, empathy-free church delegation: they hold their noses just long enough to hand over some charity supplies, and snap a few pictures with the younger, cuter children.

The Mr Kims are different. They are dokkaebi: spirits from Korean mythology who appear as points of blue light in the landscape, and sometimes as human-like creatures. They live in the same place as Bugeye and Baldspot, but somehow not in the same world. Theirs, the boys discover, has a clean river, mountains, and “sorghum swaying in a field”. “This is what it was like in the old days,” they say. “This is where we live.”

The boys want to join them – but can it be done? Here is where Hwang offers his food for thought: a deep pessimism, it seems, about his country’s prospects, which some readers will find resonant and others may regard as underplayed.

If the city is the future (computer games and all) and the shanty town a never-changing present, then the dokkaebi seem to hold out hope of something old and soulful, still there to be recovered. Only they can’t wait forever. “Our relatives… moved away long ago,” says one of the Mr Kims. “We’ll probably leave this place someday too.” Eventually what little this place has left to sustain it may be gone: forgotten along with the shanty town’s unwanted rubbish, underneath a covering of dirt.

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