Kim Bo-Young's I'M WAITING FOR YOU AND OTHER STORIES (tr by Sophie Bowman and Sung Ryu)

There is only one story in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and it's a humdinger.

There are only two stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and they're both humdingers.

There are four stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and they're all humdingers.

There are nine stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and they're all humdingers.

There are 37 stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and not all are humdingers but are still very good indeed.

There is only one story.

I sound gimmicky as hell, but those are the kind of thoughts that kept running through my mind as I marveled at what South Korean speculative fiction hot shot Kim Bo-Young and her two translators have achieved here. Including making me marvel at the porousness of the boundaries between the stories within it, how they relate to each other, and how the whole came together as, originally, an engagement gift written for a friend.

I suppose most usefully this book is talked about as a collection of four stories, though the first "I'm Waiting for You" and the final "On My Way to You" are really two point-of-view chapters in a shared story, with the middle "The Prophet of Corruption" and "That One Life" serving as a story and its sequel, though perhaps since "That One Life" is much shorter and more contained, it's really a story and its coda. But even so, not only do they all feel like they're set in the same story universe, they feel like they chiefly concern the same two characters.

I'll explain.

"I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way to You" are each epistolary stories of 15 letters each*, with "I'm Waiting for You" presenting a bridegroom's and "On My Way to You" his bride's experiences as the pair each struggle with the consequences of fateful decisions that displace them in space and time. Our bride embarked on a trip to Alpha Centauri before her wedding that will delay that momentous day by a few months, in her subjective time, but nine years would go by back on Earth. It's the ultimate escape from her family (and there are suggestions that it's an abusive one); they are emigrating to Alpha Centauri and she's riding out with them and then coming straight back because doing so qualifies her somehow for better jobs and there are tax advantages as well, so on paper this seems like a great idea. 

Our bridegroom, for his part, has decided to shorten those months with a spaceship journey of his own, on a sort of voyage to nowhere that is undertaken solely so that people like him who have been Left Behind Because Relativity can keep up with those who have left them. As the bride explains it, 

...you came in with an armful of pamphlets on interstellar marriage and said that if you saved up for about four and a half years, you'd be able to buy a ticket to take what they call the Orbit of Waiting. You explained that it was a ship that circled around the sun at the speed of light so that the passengers could get to the same time as other people traveling in from other stars.

This is already plenty weird and engaging even before things inevitably go wrong on both trips, and not just messages go astray and get out of sync. Poignantly, our groom returns to Earth several times in his struggles to re-sync with his beloved, only to see destruction and decay advancing to the point where he is only able to return to his lonely time-delaying journeys, ultimately aboard a one-man ship, through improbable luck and what sometimes feels like divine help. Which, I'll get to that. 

Meanwhile, in "On My Way to You" his bride has her own struggles more or less re-enacting the story of Aniara, except instead of cults and existential despair she encounters class war and megalomania as the captain of the ship she is rescued by devises a scheme to keep visiting the disintegrating port in Korea, seeding it with families each time until there's a population there that will regard he and the upper echelons of the ship's personnel as gods and will rebuild civilization per His direction.

The other story-pair at first seems to have nothing to do with these most star-crossed of lovers, concerned as it is with a sort of speculative fictionalization of Buddhist ontology. We find ourselves among a protean collection of characters in "a" bardo rather than "the" Bardo that we have occasionally encountered when western SF writers play with these concepts (cough, Kim Stanley Robinson). Each character (and I'm using the term very, very loosely here, as you'll see) has their own bardo in which they reflect on the lessons learned in their most recent lives in the Lower Realm and regain their memories of all of their other lives, all the way back to when they first divided into a small number of individuals from an original single all-encompassing consciousness. Which they can choose to undo at any time if everbody consents except for those occasions on which somebody's consent really isn't necessary because all of this malarkey about separate entities is really just an illusion anyway. I am me, this grass is also me (and I can divide myself into millions of other little entities that are all blades of grass anytime I want, or reabsorb all of those blades of grass on the ground right now that are also really just me).

Our main character in these is a being called, most of the time, Naban, who being one of the small number of original entities that were the result of the first division, has a lot of power and responsibility. Naban interacts with several others at this level as they try to figure out a source of corruption that has emerged in the Dark Realm (where the bardos are), with "corruption" essentially being defined as "persisting in the belief that separate things are actually separate things". At first it seems that the problem rests with one of Naban's original "children" (also called "students"), Aman, who really digs being their own being, resists merging or sharing, and has persuaded all of their own children that the Lower Realm is real and their separateness is real and Differences Matter -- and seems to be in the process of convincing many of the other Aman-level and even maybe some Naban-level beings of the same. But is Aman really the source of corruption, or, since Naban originally "created" Aman, is the ultimate corruptor Naban? All of this is explored in a series of sort-of-chapters that could almost stand as stories in their own right, some of which, as Naban deals with yet another possibly corrupted entity, take place on a bardo formed as a spaceship that is later docked on an asteroid (and an asteroid impact on Earth seems to have been part of the problems besetting the world in "I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way to You". Hmm. There are lots of little motifs like this that unite the stories artistically), and have Naban considering the use of lasers and torpedos to get through to that stubborn Aman. Who is Naban. And yet doesn't think they're Naban. Or anything but Aman and Aman's children. Who are not Aman. Except they are.

Really, this story gave me a bit of a headache, but it never gets boring if you're willing to meet it at its level, which is, as you see, incredibly heady and challenging and rich. I had to take a day off after reading it before I proceeded with "That One Life", which takes Naban down into our own Lower Realm, but one in which the corruption from the Dark Realm and the Lower Realm have developed a wicked feedback loop and a whole lot seems to be going wrong. Naban themself is exhibiting this in their very nature in the Lower Realm as they've incarnated as a 15-year-old-girl who is immortal, the better to watch the corruption and decay, and the better, also, to continuously pursue Aman through many incarnations in which Aman is Naban's spouse or child or friend or lover or boss or commander, until one of their fellow entities, Tushita steps in and explains what Naban has forgotten from the previous story and it all sort of works out?

For I am Naban, one who remembers the beginning of time. For I know nothing in the universe is not me. For I know that no one part of a whole is more valuable than another; one is simply larger or smaller. For I know corruption arises when one tries to exclude another from a world. For I am not corrupt now.

I mean, this would be a great lesson for all the people who are least likely to take up a speculative fiction short story collection written by a Korean woman that was also translated by women** (and while both translators have done a beautiful job -- Sophie Bowman helps give both the bridegroom and bride distinctive voices in "I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way To You" -- I'm really just stunned at how Sung Ryu handled all this to-me-incredibly-unfamiliar material and made me feel, at least while I was reading it, that of course I understood it and it just felt like a neat spec fic story until I was done and it punched me in the brain). But it's not really much fun to read for all the feeling that one has earned some kind of merit for doing so.

At least it's not very much fun until you realize how the piquant Buddhist ontological filling of this speculative fiction sandwich really informs and is almost just another iteration of soft and tasty starship-crossed lovers bread. I find myself now, having read the whole thing, feeling like the bridegroom and bride are Naban and Aman in one of their lives. Possibly more than one of their lives. Because everything is Naban and Aman, and it's only dumb decisions and silly delusions that ever keep them apart, right?

I did not go into this book expecting a giant profound take on St. John-of-the-Cross (Songs Between the Soul and the Bridegroom)****, but I sure did get it!

Clicking around on the internet, I see that Kim Bo-Young has actually been tickling my brain for quite some time, as she worked on a little old hit film that became a TV series called Snowpiercer, and that this is far from Kim Bo-Young's first collection, and isn't even her first collection in English. She's already a Big Deal in Korea, and deserves to be one everywhere else, too.

I think I'll be attempting to merge with some of her other books very soon in This Life.

*And yes, each of these letters feels like it's own little story. See what I did there in that ridiculous introduction to this piece?

**And hey, by the way, August is Women in Translation Month! And bonus: there is an exchange of letters between the two translators (as well as a lot of cool other supplementary material, including a glossary of terms and names in "The Prophet of Corruption" and "The One Life) that gives us a glimpse of their relationship with one another as real life friends, and the interesting challenges posed by Kim Bo-Young's work, including matters of gender and the prayer-like cadences of some passages, that are super fascinating reading for fans of translated literature.

***I wonder how this, my favorite bit from that, in an old translation by Roy Campbell, would come across in Korean: 

Diffusing showers of grace
In haste among these groves his path he took,
And only with his face.
Glancing around the place,
Has clothed them in his beauty with a look.