Creative-nonfiction slices of life in Korea captured
The world around us “play[s] host to a million daily dramas, whether we witness them or not.” So writes Frank Dax, who has captured some of those daily dramas in Korea in his new book, titled “Real Toads, Imagined Garden,” published last December.
“Real Toads, Imagined Garden” is a pleasing and leisurely stroll through a “lived” Korea, not a stage-managed country as we are often presented. The book takes us on a journey to seek what today’s Korea is about, and there are some magic-in-the-mundane sights and sounds along the way.
Dax, came to Korea from the U.S. about 10 years ago, blends the boundaries of prose and poetry together. The end result is an eclectic collection, classifiable as “sliceof-life” essays. The time period, it seems, is primarily the late 2010s (for there is a lack of any hint of the pandemic).
The book’s implicit question is: “What is life in Korea about?” No, maybe that’s not fully it; it’s probably just as much this: “What is life about, in Korea?” Everything around you is of interest, “if only you look long enough, probe hard enough,” the author narrates at one point.
“Real Toads, Imagined Garden” assembles armchair sociological investigations, short travel stories, personal sketches, the special quirks of Seoul and the people who inhabit it, landscapes and cityscapes, all done with a light touch and never preachily. Intercultural comparisons and literary homages occur throughout, and there is also a philosophical-spiritual element here. The reader is really following a mix of: an oldtime newsman out looking for stories, a sociologist out collecting field observations and a poet out seeking inspiration. It is only occasionally mentioned that the author is none of those things, at least not according to his “day job” (he is a teacher).
One thing absent from the book is axe-grinding for any political cause. The author gracefully sidesteps such things, if they come up at all. At one point, for example, he describes an encounter with an apparently homeless man in an alley. We hear the man chanting “the name of the president” in a menacing manner. Which president’s name? It could be any of the past three, given the author’s length of residence. We are not told, and we cannot guess. Time itself is suspended. The book makes no use of years, and rarely mentions dates. And, more importantly, the “Korea” that Dax is seeking to show us is one for which it does not matter which president it was. The author quickly makes a getaway from the homeless man, away from politics and towards greener pastures of the mind.
What the author is interested in is donning the cap of the “flaneur.” A word he uses to allude indirectly to himself, a flaneur is an ambulatory observer who “takes things in” at a pace, physical and mental, that is leisurely enough for meaningful thoughts to form. We get closeup views of specific people, places, things, ideas and moods of late 2010s Seoul. This “Seoul flaneur” literary tradition dates back to “A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist” (1934). The author of that now-classic work, Park Tae-won, was a thoughtful young man who set out to describe early-1930s Seoul life around him exactly as it was, with success. The written-word medium to convey these things captures something that other media, including social media or short-video formats, cannot.
One downside to “Real Toads, Imagined Garden,” which may be inherent in its format, is that interesting threads and characters are dropped quickly. We catch glimpses of dozens of individuals, all of them apparently real people as observed by the author. But we get close to none of them.
But “capturing” things is difficult, especially if things are always changing in Korea, and Seoul specifically. Ephemerality may be the biggest single theme of this book. We feel it throughout, with the framing device of the passing seasons; we feel it with the constant intrusion of construction. “[A] new building goes up and, for the life of you, you can’t recall the old one that went away,” we read at one point.
If life seems so ephemeral, what is an individual to do? A tried-andtrue method is to record something of it, to “solidify a liquid moment in time,” as the author puts it. He gives us a few hundred such ‘solidified’ liquid-moments in time, across the 93 entries in the book.
An active participation in life by a morally serious observer is admirable. It generates positivity in this book, often seemingly about Korea but really about life itself. We see such sidebar comments in the book as: “[T]hough I’m a mere minor figure in it, there’s a thrill to being a part of it — this great big messy theater of modern life!” and “Soak it all up, I say, wondering who said it takes a lifetime to learn to love the world.”
The essays in “Real Toads, Imagined Garden” are grouped chronologically under chapters according to the divisions of the traditional Korean climate calendar. Just as one season yields to the next, life moves on. All things seem ephemeral, or maybe cyclical.
As a book, “Real Toads, Imagined Garden” will appeal to a certain type of literary-minded person interested in Korean “lived life” (not the glamorous, alluring worlds of K-pop and K-dramas). It will likewise appeal to those interested in creative nonfiction in general, and those who may seek inspiration for trying their own hand at this kind of disciplined, observation-based writing. Both reading and writing this kind of material is a good habit to get into. In an age of social media distraction and shallowness in communication, it may be needed more than ever.