Son of Man, by Yi Mun-yol

Translated by Brother Anthony

(1979, translated 2015)

Library of Korean Literature

(Novel)

Son of Man is a mashup of at least three different ideas. The first and most open-handed goal of the novel is to present a police procedural. A young man, rumored to have been a petty thief, philanderer, and charismatic religious teacher is found dead in a forest. Who stabbed him? Detective Nam, the plodding but determined detective working the case, encounters a number of dead ends. His supervisor orders him off the case, but Nam pursues it on his own, convinced that he will find clues to the crime by reading the manuscript of an unpublished novel of the victim. Not surprisingly, the man who studied in a seminary and considered monasticism was writing a book about the history of Western religion. This second topic, an exhaustive reconstruction of the roots of monotheism and the core stories of the Jews and Christians is the second and much more challenging thrust of the novel. The victim’s voice is both academic and overwrought. His protagonist is a man named Ahusuerus, born at the same time as Jesus but under a different star. Deeply distrustful of the message of the Jews and Christians, he devotes half his life to wandering throughout the great cities of the world trying to reconstruct and find meaning in lost religions. Everywhere he goes he finds disappointment, and late in the novel he returns to challenge Jesus in dialogues at key moments in his life: at Cana, among the lepers, at the distribution of the loaves and the fishes, at the temptation in the desert, in the garden, and at the cross. Detective Nam, no biblical scholar and barely a reader at all, finds references that he believes jibe with facts from the victim’s own life and relationships, and these revelations help him lead to the killer. The author’s final goal is the most damning, though he does not say it out loud. The question that should be nagging the reader the whole novel comes closest to the surface in the thoroughly disappointing chapter where Ahusuerus travels to India. Just as the reader begins to mentally prepare for an exposition on Eastern religions, Yi Mun-yol pulls up short and has his hero deliver what is essentially a cursory, shallow, and ultimately suspicious “Buddhism in a nutshell” lecture.  Why is Western religion and the core of Western philosophy at the center of this Korean murder mystery?  Note that in The Guest, Hwang Sok-yong makes the case that foreign ideologies took root in 20th-century Korea. From Hwang’s perspective, Communism and Christianity swept over the peninsula, disrupting centuries of codes of conduct. Although Hwang is willing to show the benefits of both of those ideologies, he compares them both to what Koreans called the western disease of smallpox: the guest. Likewise, in Son of Man, Yi Mun-yol seems to be making a similar criticism. Can the wholesale abandonment of a nation’s old gods and philosophies come at no cost at all? In this modern world, can the struggle to bring Korean ideologies and Christian ideologies into perfect alignment not lead to madness?

“Muwatallis welcomed Ahusuerus with a depth of feeling that went beyond words. There might have been an element of misdirected affection, made greater by his disappointment with a young son who did not understand him; there was at times a sense of pride at being able to teach a young man from another tribe about his clan’s gods and their religious system. As a result, Ahasuerus was able to study more comfortably and readily than at any other time since leaving home, as he learned about the gods of the Hittites. (105)