Diary of a Murderer and Other Stories

By Kim Young-ha

Translated by Krys Lee

2013, translated 2019

Mariner Books

(Short Stories)

Kim Young-ha is the author of the novels Black Flower and Your Republic is Calling You; both the product of deep research. The four stories in this collection, “Diary of a Murderer,” “Origin of Life,” “Missing Child,” and “The Writer” are self-reflexive works of the imagination that tease out modern ideas on the nature of storytelling, narration, and the difference between the stories we tell ourselves in order to bring order and reason to our lives –and how — or if — those stories match the stories others use to understand who or why we are. There is a doubleness to each of the tales and flashes of the games the author is playing, but Kim’s experiments are hardly cold or unremittingly cerebral. Several of the works target popular theories perpetuated by critics, academics, and philosophers. But even as he appropriates these rhetorical strategies, he manages to play a double game, exploring a new theory of the relationship between the writer, story, and audience while undercutting the exercise with complications that often lead to open laughter or quiet, heart-warming surprise. Having said that, the stories are not for the weak of heart. The first, “Diary of a Murderer” is about an elderly man who is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. His adult daughter, his only family, struggles to assist him as his disease progresses. She urges him to be active, take a poetry class, and keep notebooks to record his questions and his experiences. For his part, the old man is willing to accept the disease as a god’s punishment for the secret life he once lived as a serial killer, when he murdered scores of people during the rule of Park Chung-hee. His only anxiety is that he does not wish to be a burden on his daughter. And it certainly seems that the old man is more than capable of taking his own life until a fender bender alerts him to the presence of a man whom he intuits is almost certainly someone like him: another serial killer. That possibility is confirmed when the news and the police began investigating the murders of young women in the vicinity of the narrator’s home. And when the man he met on a rained-slicked road near where a body was found starts dating his daughter, the old man becomes desperate to hold onto his mind long enough to free his daughter from danger. 

The other stories in the collection are equally captivating, somewhat outlandish in their plots, and full of twists and turns. “Origin of Life” is a tale of middle school crushes who rekindle their romance after meeting many years later. They begin a long, illicit affair, but is their new relationship capable of bringing to life the passions they once harbored for one another?. “Missing Child” chronicles the catastrophic impact on a marriage when someone kidnaps their two-year-old son, while “The Writer” most explicitly confirms that this collection is all about the practicality, madness, and magic involved in storytelling.

There is a film based on Diary of a Murderer: Memoirs of Murder, directed by Won Shin-yun in 2017.

The translator, Krys Lee, is a writer in her own right. She was born in South Korea and then lived for many years in the Pacific Northwest. She finished her studies in the United Kindom and published a collection of short stories called Drifting House. She also wrote the novel, How I Became a North Korean. She now lives in Seoul, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Yonsei College.

“One of my walls is covered with notes. The multicolored notes stay where you stick them, and though I don’t know where they came from, I stick them all over the house. Maybe Eun-hui bought them to help my memory. These notes have a special name but I can’t remember it right now. The north wall is plastered with them too, but they don’t help much. I don’t remember sticking them on the wall in the first place. Like the one saying, ‘Things you must tell Eun-hui.’ What was it I meant to tell her?” from “Diary of a Murderer”