Evening Glow

By Kim Won-il

Translated by Agnita M. Tennant

1978/1997, translated 2003

Asian Humanities Press

An Imprint of Jain Publishing Company

Kim Won-il’s Evening Glow is a compact, violent, and unforgettable window into the Korean Civil War, when, following the retreat of the Japanese colonizers, a new set of outsiders moved in to deal with the Japanese surrender and evacuation, with the Americans managing the south and the Russians the north. Evening Glow is a novel of the pain, chaos, and barbarity of division and separation. Kim Won-il was intimately affected by the politics of the time: he lost all contact with his father when he was trapped north of the 38th Parallel. It should not surprise us then that the separation is told through the eyes of a child or that the author and Kim’s boy hero share a common name. Kim’s novel follows 40-year-old Kim Kapsu, a dour, taciturn business man, who is called back to his childhood home to attend the funeral of an uncle. Muddling his way through Korea in the 1980s, he seems overwhelmed by the modern and the complexity of life under capitalism and martial law. Travelling back to his distant country home, Chinyong, we can feel him shedding the burdens of his many obligations and duties, while also sensing the anxiety that his journey entails. Kim Kapsu was born to the poorest family in a poverty-stricken village. His father was a butcher, and because of taboos about his trade, the entire community abused him and his family. Adults called him “Dog Samjo” to his face and children referred to him as “Dog’s Thing Samjo.” His younger self was shoeless, filthy, and perpetually hungry. Though just a child, he was attuned to the slightest thrum of tension between his mother and father, and willing to throw himself between his clearly insane and ultraviolent father and his haggard, nearly defeated mother.  As much as Kim wants to avoid his memories of the horrors of his youth, grieving relatives, elderly villagers, and former village leaders draw Kim into an investigation as to why and how their community erupted into fratricidal violence in 1948, when communist partisans came down from the mountains, attacking the police station, setting fire to the property of the chief landowner., and establishing a court to prosecute citizens who were deemed reactionaries. The survivors of that frenzy of inhumanity provide their perspective of the riot, conjuring up memories Kim Kapsu has long suppressed. Ultimately, he is once again a lost boy wandering from flashpoint to flashpoint in the battlefield he called his home, trying to locate his younger brother, begging his mother to flee before his father can murder her, and searching for his father, who, in the most absurd twists of fate, has become a hero of the revolution. 

“The reason we chose Chinyŏng and put it on the chopping board as a test case lies in its peculiar neutrality between a farming community and a town. How far we can draw the explosive power of the people, single-mindedly, into our purpose; and by what means we can draw them into the action—this is the real purpose of our test. This is an important centre of transport. Here production and consumption are well balanced, and it is breaking away from being merely a farming community. In other words, this is a progressive community. In choosing this place as the vanguard, headquarters has given us a task of enormous significance. Traders such as pedlars and hawkers could be just the ones that we can make use of. They possess a singular inclination to take the lead more than anyone else in the unscrupulous pillage that could come in the early stages of the uprising.”