For fans of Korean film, the uncompromising film director Lee Chang-dong needs little introductions. With a brief but powerful filmography of six films made between 1997 and 2018, he has braved controversial topics to critical acclaim. Burning, his 2018 comeback film after an eight-year hiatus, was shortlisted for an Oscar and won numerous other awards. Lee also served as South Korea’s Minister of Culture from 2003 to 2004. Less known is that Lee began his career as a writer, penning novellas and short stories for literary magazines. Translator Heinz Insu Fenkl has been working on Lee’s writing since 2007, and two of the stories collected here appeared in the New Yorker magazine. Fenkl has worked with fellow translator Yoosup Chang to produce Snowy Day, collecting several of Lee’s stories in English for the first time.

While writing fiction is often talked about as an escape, Lee however explains in his brief introduction that he was determined not to escape the harsh realities and contradictions of 1980s Korea, but to confront them head on in his writing. He portrays the era, a military dictatorship under President Chun Doo-hwan, as dull routine punctuated by violence. A sentence from the opening sentence of his story “Fire and Dust” is “the weather was typical for May and tear gas still swirled in the streets.” Daily life, in all its quotidian detail, goes on around mass rallies and upheaval.
 

“Fire and Dust” is one of the slighter additions to the collection, and though it is harrowing, it is not as fully-developed as the other stories. It deals with a man grieving his son’s death. The title story, which begins the volume, on the other hand, pits a university-educated soldier against his working-class commanding officer at a military base in the dead of winter. Lee draws here on his own experience of the Korean military, in which all men must serve two years’ service. The differing backgrounds of the two protagonists explore the intersection of—not just his own dignity, but dignity in the abstract, even in a brutal and bullying situation, at tremendous cost.

“War Trophy” was Lee’s debut story as a professional writer. A longer piece, it deals with a man contacting an old acquaintance to tell her their mutual friend has been killed. As in “Fire and Dust”, an atmosphere of grief pervades “War Trophy”, but here the protagonist’s duty is complicated by the powerful lust that he feels for his acquaintance.

In “The Leper”, a young teacher is summoned by the authorities because his father stands accused of spying for North Korea. The teacher now goes by the name Kim Youngjin, but we soon discover he was given the name Maksu at birth. With its two syllables, Maksu seems like it could be a Korean name, but it is in fact a Koreanization of “Marx”, further evidence of his father’s leftist sensibilities. The story explores both the often exaggerated threat of communism in the South, and its inter-generational conflict: here it’s between an older generation and a younger one, often referred to as the “7080 generation” due to coming of age in the 1970s and 80s; a generation keen on reform and democracy.

The evocatively titled “There’s a Lot of Shit in Nokcheon”, takes us to the nondescript northern Seoul suburb of Nokcheon, where Lee grew up. In this story two brothers are estranged, again due to one’s involvement in anti-government movement. Though it looks as though the brothers may reconcile, the story’s climax shows that the excrement mentioned in the title is literal, not figurative. One can feel Lee’s bitterness and anger, as one can at many points throughout this collection.

“Burning Paper” also concerns itself with subversive activity and a police officer visiting a family who are under suspicion. “Reading too many books can be trouble, too,” the officer tells the family’s grandmother. In simple, daily vignettes, Lee creates atmospheres of palpable paranoia.
 

The volume ends with the longest piece, the novella-length “A Lamp in the Sky”. This is structured around a young woman, again accused not only of subversion, but prostitution too. Her political activities have seen her expelled from university, and she is offered the chance to become an informant. Double binds appear in more than one story in the collection, but this one is the one with the strongest overtones of raw power and sadism.

In several of these stories, Lee seems to be asking whether the often dubious behaviour of the protagonists is the cause of the dictatorship, or the result of living under it. Although there is not much optimism or hope in Snowy Day, Lee gives us at least one protagonist determined to do the right thing. Even here, the consequences of doing the right thing are not easy. With Snowy Day Lee shows he has always been an uncompromising storyteller, willing to mine uncomfortable emotions and no-win situations.

With the recent attempt to impose martial law in South Korea prominent in the international news, Snowy Day has received a timely release. These stories create a powerful impression of a highly militarized and paranoid era that will unexpectedly find a new resonance with contemporary readers.

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John A Riley is a writer and former university lecturer based in Newcastle, UK.