No One Writes Back (2009, translation 2013)

By Jang Eun-Jin (f.)

Translated Jung Yewon

(Novel)

In No One Writes Back, Ms. Jang creates a most vivid, eccentric, and oddly engaging first-person narrator. The young, twenty-something man notified his family that he was leaving home three years ago and hasn’t returned since. He carries only an MP3 player, the clothes on his back, a book, a bank card, and his blind seeing-eye dog. He’s been traveling ever since, economizing by taking public transportation and staying in the type of hotels that ask him if he is there to rest or to stay the night—a distinction that indicates these are “love hotels.” He has struggled with communication his entire life. He spent years suffering a terrible stutter, a condition that caused other children to mock and ostracize him. He has conquered the stutter, and he has become more social—though he is very much a puzzling person. For example, although he can recall each of the people he has met and had conversations with over the years, he only refers to these people by a number, and he is very much a creature of obsessive routine. For example, each night he enters a new hotel he strips naked, washes his underwear in the sink, and writes his name on the underside of the wash basin. Then he composes and addresses a letter to one of the people he met on his journey. On occasion, he will also write to his brother, who is something of a genius, and his sister, who is tragically obsessed with her beauty. It appears he has never been in a relationship with anyone in his life until a series of coincidences bring him into regular contact with a woman writer who travels from town to town selling her novel, Toothpaste and Soap, out of a shopping cart. The pair stay in separate rooms at “The Moon and Sixpence,” a motel that features themes dedicated to modern artists—a décor that allows the narrator to consider himself in a new light.

“Hopper was someone who knew what a real city was. He painted real cities. No matter how many people came flocking to the city, and no matter how many people he laughed and chatted and talked with, he could only see one person. That one person, with the same expression on his face and in the same posture, was always looking off in a different direction: out the window, at a book, at a coffee cup, or into himself. He was probably looking at his own self. True loneliness comes not from being alone, but from being with someone else. There didn’t seem to be much of a difference between myself, standing in the middle of a motel room, and the figures in Hopper’s paintings. Paintings that knew better than anyone where I was at this point in my life.”