Un-Su Kim's THE CABINET (tr by Sean Lin Halbert)

The office worker hero, Mr. Kong, of Un-Su Kim's The Cabinet graduated from college just a few years after I did, with a liberal arts degree of uncertain occupational utility, as I did, but unlike me, when he couldn't find a job, he took all of the money he inherited from his mother (who died the same year he graduated) and spent it on 450 cases of beer and spent 178 days in his apartment drinking it, eating peanuts, and ignoring bill collectors on the phone. I nominate Mr. Kong for Most Generation X Literary Hero, Maybe Ever.

He doesn't share this Important and Popular Fact about himself until midway through the novel, by which time I had spent several hours envying him just a little, for not only did he eventually find a job, he found the Gen X dream job: one in which he is expected to do very, very little, under next to no supervision, one in which he is basically working for free and getting paid to wait around and do you know how many books you could read in a year with a job like that? I do. It's approximately 200. Ask me how I know.

Being male and not-me in lots of other ways, though, perhaps stereotypically but hey, including living in South Korea and having grown up in that system, Mr. Kong feels bad about his dream job, though, too bad to read or otherwise amuse himself, so he spends his work hours staring out the window at a lacklustre cityscape until one day, after trying to convince his nominal boss to please give him something useful to do (denied!) he wanders upstairs to discover the titular Cabinet.

This Cabinet, Cabinet 13, contains some 40 years of files on people all over the world who have exhibited bizarre abilities or whose bodies have gotten inexplicably and improbably strange. Like growing a lizard in place of your tongue strange. Like suddenly falling deeply asleep and staying that way for hundreds of days straight and waking up really refreshed and rarin' to go. Like suddenly growing a gingko tree out of his hand. He meets the professor who has been curating these files and becomes his assistant and starts taking phone calls from these people, most of whom are not just inconvenienced by their weird abilities and experiences but are seriously suffering from them, which is why they are referred to as "Symptomers."

The first half of the novel is mostly a catalog of these sufferers until Kong is moved to take a trip with one of them, not exactly a Symptomer but one who has been calling the Symptomer hotline for years because he is absolutely convinced that the only way his life could ever be worth living is if he can be transformed into a cat. The trip is to see a magician (because why not? After seven some years of reading about and talking to people whose prosthetic fingers have started merging into their flesh as though they were becoming real, would you be sure that a magician can't do what he claims he can?) who might be able to help Kong's poor companion realize his feline dream. It doesn't go that well, and Kong actually, finally gets in trouble. For trying to help. Because this is a Freak of the Week TV show as refracted through a Kafka novel.

I mean, the novel isn't named for the Symptomers. It's named for the Cabinet. And its central concern, if there is one, is with who will take over its management after the professor, who is quite elderly and goes into a terminal coma not long after we "meet" him, is no more. The professor hopes Kong will; another party, The Syndicate, hopes someone else, of their choosing, will.

Translator Sean Lin Halbert and narrator Jun Hwang combine to deliver the stories from the cabinet and Kong's own story in a flat and monotonous tone and style that perfectly drives home the bureacracy + bizarre formula that makes The Cabinet worth opening. Even when Hwang makes an awkward-sounding pause in the middle of the sentence that might be a product of his actual Korean accent, the effect of the pause conveys that unimpressed can't-be-bothered-to-emote-over-this-tedious-stuff tone one expects of a seasoned bureaucrat who's seen it all, even the little lizard eyes peeking out at him from a lady's mouth.

The effect is often quite funny in the way similar scenes in Terry Gilliam's Brazil are quite funny, but there's more than a little Juzo Itami funny to be had as well, as when Kong takes a young woman out to dinner and she binge eats sushi, gets drunk on sake, and then causes a minor scene in the restaurant when he pays the bill; she wants to pay it, she was the pig, she operatically shrieks! The whole thing would fit wonderfully as a scene in Tampopo.* This is quickly followed by the funniest kidnapping scene since Blackadder was kidnapped by the henchmen of Evil Prince Ludwig.**

It gets very difficult to keep track of The Cabinet's sparse plot, though, at least in audio form, as scenes from Kong's life drift into new narratives from the files and are frequently peppered with imagined conversations between Kong and the files' subjects. I suspect this is deliberate on both Kim's, Halbert's and Hwang's parts, creating a form of magical realism that blurs into enjoyable confusion. Just let the weirdness wash over you. It's a short novel. You can enjoy it again anytime you want, and I suspect it will be pretty different each time you do.

I look forward to finding out.

*And I'm not crossing cultures here; the restaurant serves both Korean and Japanese style sushi and the chef is a former sumo wrestler, and thus the scene could happen as readily in Tokyo as in Seoul. So there.

**There, I've moved forward in my references from 1985 to 1986.