The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost

by Sok-pom Kim

  Here, Kim seems to be exploring the idea that humanity could be defined based on an inner sense of morality. Even without a name, without a home, without any of the data required to construct an identity, Mandogi is able to recognize in himself something human, something that refuses to commit an act that might erode that sense of humanity.

  It is interesting to note that the novel allows for the loss of one’s humanity. In one of the its most poignant scenes, Mandogi is picking lice off his body and throwing them into the fire. Eventually, he notices that several of the lice have missed the fire and are now crawling around on the kitchen floor. Watching the surviving lice, he has the following revelation:

  In a world where we’re all reborn as each other, a human has no right to kill a louse, thought Mandogi. But he also thought, it can’t be helped, though. After hundreds of thousands of millions of years, maybe I’ll be reborn as a louse. Then if someone—no, if the louse is reborn as a kongyangju, maybe he’ll throw me in the fire and I’ll go “pop.” Soon, the squirming in his hand started to tickle. The louse moving around on his hand seemed sort of cute to Mandogi. And so, smiling to himself, he picked it up again, and, into the smell of blending sweat and oil on the back of his neck, he returned it to its former home.

  As a Buddhist, Mandogi believes that all forms of life have the potential to become human in a subsequent reincarnation, and that, by the same token, human beings can be reborn into lower forms of life. Because of this, he is unwilling to harm even a louse, a fellow creature with the potential to obtain humanity. To do so would be akin to harming another human being, which, as we have seen, Mandogi is unwilling, perhaps even unable, to do. Leaving aside the novel’s Buddhist rhetoric, the narrative also allows for the loss of humanity even in this life. By the end of the story, Mandogi no longer considers his murderous enemies human. He sees them as nothing more than lice, blood-suckers to be thrown on the fire.

  Perhaps, then, Kim is searching for a definition of humanity that is not so much intrinsic as it is to be earned. In the end, he does not leave us with a clear picture of what it means to be human. Nevertheless, I think that one of the most rewarding ways to read The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost is with questions about humanity and how we define it in mind.

  As I said before, however, this reading is certainly not the only possible one. A different reader might see the novel as a religious text, focusing on Mandogi’s life as a priest. Another might grapple with the abundant and, at times, bizarre sexual imagery in the novel. Yet another might focus on political aspects of the novel, viewing it as a censure of the Rhee regime in particular or of authoritarian regimes in general. One might even read it simply as a memorable and entertaining story. Mandogi does not fit easily into any box into which one might try to force it, and it is not meant to. It breaks down the barriers that surround it and, without denying its own particularity, reaches out for the universal.

  To conclude, I would like to draw once more from Kim’s afterword to the reprinted edition of Mandogi. In it, he writes that Mandogi probably did not attract a wide audience of readers in Japan because it reads like something foreign, like a translation into Japanese, rather than something originally written in Japanese. Kim further explains that readers approach fiction in translation differently from fiction originally written in their own language. When reading a translation, “readers do not simply wait for the text to approach them but expend their own energy that they might approach the text.”17 It is my hope, then, that readers of Mandogi in English will expend the energy to approach the text. But more than that, I hope that they will not have to. With all that it has to offer, The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost is a novel that can approach its readers independent of, and perhaps even in spite of, their own efforts.

  Notes

  1. Kim Sŏk-pŏm, “Hissha kara dokusha e: Ni jū nen,” in Mandogi yūrei kitan·Sagishi, by Kim Sŏk-pŏm (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1991), 280.

  2. For a detailed account of the Four-Three Incident in English, see John Merrill, “The Cheju-do Rebellion,” Journal of Korean Studies 2 (1980): 139–197.

  3. Christopher D. Scott, “Invisible Men: The Zainichi Korean Presence in Postwar Japanese Culture” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2006), 100–142.

  4. In fact, another important aspect of Scott’s argument is that the Four-Three Incident is not simply a part of Korea’s history but is deeply intertwined with Japan’s imperialistic past, not to be dismissed by the Japanese as something foreign or irrelevant. Obviously, the case could also be made that the incident belongs to the history of the United States as well.

  5. There are a number of books in English on zainichi issues, including Sonia Ryang, ed., Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin (New York: Routledge, 2000); Changsoo Lee and George De Vos, eds., Koreans in Japan: Ethnic Conflict and Accommodation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); and David Chapman, Zainichi Korean Identity and Ethnicity (New York: Routledge, 2008).

  6. According to census statistics from the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, there were over 1.5 million registered aliens in Japan in 2005, a figure that represents 1.2 percent of the total population of Japan. The same census indicates that Koreans in Japan numbered nearly 470,000, accounting for 30 percent of the total foreign population. Census data can be viewed online on the Statistics Bureau Home Page at http://www.stat.go.jp/english/index.htm.

  7. Quoted in Kawamura Minato, “Sakka annai: Kim Sŏk-pŏm,” in Mandogi yūrei kitan·Sagishi, by Kim Sŏk-pŏm (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1991), 300.

  8. Kim Sŏk-pŏm et al., “Nihongo de kaku koto ni tsuite,” in Kotoba no jubaku: “Zainichi Chōsenjin bungaku” to nihongo, ed. Kim Sŏk-pŏm (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1972), 117.

  9. See Melissa Wender, Lamentation as History: Narratives by Koreans in Japan, 1965– 2000 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 32.

  10. Kim Sŏk-pŏm, “Gengo to jiyū,” in Kotoba no jubaku: “Zainichi Chōsenjin bungaku” to nihongo, ed. Kim Sŏk-pŏm (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1972), 96.

  11. Kim Sŏk-pŏm, Kokkyō wo koeru mono: “Zainichi” no bungaku to seiji (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 2004), 197.

  12. Wender, Lamentation as History, 195.

  13. Kawamura Minato refers to Kim as a “1.5-generation” zainichi, citing the fact that Kim, born in 1925, was one of the very first second-generation zainichi, so his age aligns him more with the first generation (“Sakka annai,” 297).

  14. Scott, “Invisible Men,” 115.

  15. Scott, “Invisible Men,” 116–121.

  16. Scott, “Invisible Men,” 119.

  17. Kim, “Hissha kara dokusha e,” 281.

  At Kannon Temple,1 in the heart of a deep valley, there was a young priest who worked in the kitchen, a temple hand, in other words. People called him “dimwit.” When they didn’t call him that, they called him “Mandogi.” And when they didn’t call him that, they called him plain old “temple hand.” Of them all, “Mandogi” was the least insulting, but that was the Buddhist name given to him when he entered the priesthood. If you have a priest’s name, you should still have the secular name you had before you became a priest, but he didn’t have a common name like that. He just had the nickname “Keiton” (meaning “dog shit”),2 and that was it for his names. In other words, he had been nameless since birth. People feel strange around the nameless; they make you wonder what it is to be human. All the same, people didn’t let go of the nickname “Keiton” until long after he was given the name “Mandogi.”

  But it could be said that it’s normal, anytime, anywhere, to not pay much attention to the lineage of people in the lower class. It’s certainly that way in our Korea. In Korea, a temple hand, or let’s say a young priest who works in the kitchen, was just like a farm hand, so because of his lowly birth, people didn’t find Mandogi’s kind of ambiguous identity out of the ordinary. And it isn’t just lineage. In the same way, people don’t really mind if you don’t have a humanlike name. When people see a
beggar on the roadside, do they really care to know his name? “The beggar who sits under the column on the left side of the front entrance of Seoul Station,” or “the crippled beggar and the one-eyed beggar at the entrance to Pagoda Park,” or “the beggar who sits under the cherry trees in Ch’anggyŏng Garden and pulls on your sleeves as you pass” are more than good enough.

  And so, as for people like temple hands (called kongyangju in Korea), if they have a name, that’s fine, and if not, that’s fine too. Since temple hands are made for hard labor, they just need some kind of signal for calling them, like “Hey!” or “Here!” As is the case with common names, you can’t be sure of anything beyond them, like birthplace, parents, or age. So, for example, when they are entered into the book of the dead, the length of time they spent in this corrupt world may not even be clear.

  As for Mandogi, his life was short, but even so, nobody knows exactly how old he was. His entry in the executioner’s log says that he was twenty-four, but that can’t be exact. Even Mandogi himself wasn’t positive about his age. The reckoning that made him twenty-four began a few years back, toward the end of the Japanese annexation, when he was taken from this lone island of Cheju and drafted to labor in the chromium mines of Hokkaido. He had been nameless since birth, with no family register, so when he was asked for his name, age, parents’ names, and permanent residence, he didn’t have a good answer. This kind of person, the kind without any distinguishing data, became a nuisance for the draft officials making the lists. The vagabonds with no addresses were no problem, as they could be arrested and sent straight to the work camps, but those without definite birth dates, and especially those without definite names, were even difficult to put on the draft list. And so, at the time, the officials attached the Japanese given name “Ichirō” to the name “Mandogi,” making his given name “Mandogi” into his surname, and they gave him the strange name “Mantoku Ichirō.” But Mandogi couldn’t understand a word of Japanese. “I ain’t Mantoku Ichirō. That’s not my name. My name’s not Mantoku, but the priest’s name, ‘Man … dogi.’ ” Licking the pencil, he painstakingly wrote down the two Chinese characters and showed the page to the official.

  “Idiot! How can you complain, when you don’t even have a name? There is no one without a name in Japan! You have the honor of being given a Japanese name, of being treated like a human being!” said the officer, through an interpreter. Even so, Mandogi kept insisting that he didn’t know nobody named “Mantoku Ichirō.” No matter how they told him, “You’re Japanese now,” and no matter how much they shouted, “You are Japanese!” he had no idea what that meant. They told him, “You are a loyal subject of the Japanese Empire, and therefore you are Japanese,” but deep down, he could never feel “Japanese.” Anyway, while they were at it, they also made up an age for him. If you started counting from there, he would have been twenty-four.

  You might say it’s the same just about anywhere for people of humble birth. Beggars, farm hands, paekjŏng (one of the lowest social classes, including people employed as butchers and such), temple hands, they all generally fall into that category. If you take Mandogi, for example, even if he were never given the name Mandogi, “kongyangju” or “temple hand” would have sufficed. Society would blame that kind of lowly birth on saju p’alja. Saju p’alja takes the four signs of your birth year, month, day, and hour, the saju (as in the year of the Yang Wood Rat, the month of the Yin Wood Ox, the day of the Yang Fire Tiger, and the hour of the Yin Fire Rabbit), and combines them with the corresponding zodiac signs of the saju to make eight Chinese characters, or p’alja. Basically, these could predict people’s fortunes over their lifetimes, and they served to reinforce people’s ideas about karma. In other words, from the spectacular p’alja of kings and ministers down to those of poor and lowly birth like Mandogi, all fates could be attributed only to the stars. Indeed, saju p’alja was a kind of opiate of the masses, so over the years it must have been very convenient at times for the statesmen of this country.

  Funny, then, that a village wise man, white-haired, filthy, and emaciated, whose appearance made it clear that he could have nothing to do with good fortune, told the fortunes of others. A meter-long pipe sticking out between his mustache and beard, he interpreted the signs with a little abacus and Zhuge Liang’s book for interpreting ancient secrets. Then, out of the blue, he would begin to explain the person’s current and lifetime fortunes. “Mmhmm, this sign, it means you don’t have a single relative under the sun, no one to depend on, but if you become a traveler, then a savior will appear. It’s that kind of sign. That is, out on the wide ocean, if your little boat should meet wind, you’ll go north, you’ll go south, you’ll lift up your head and see no one familiar. Mmhmm, if you distance yourself from both north and south, praying and laughing all the more … it’s that kind of sign,” and so on.

  “Right, right, he’s exactly right! Maybe that’s why I’m so poor,” they would think, following the social convention. But before long, people started laughing out loud at the wise man. How could his predictions, based on the year, month, day, and hour of one’s birth, make any sense for those who didn’t even know what year they were born, much less the month, day, and hour?

  At any rate, as long as they aren’t heroes, I think that human beings want to die peacefully in their beds if they can. Of course, Mandogi, a plain old temple hand, was no hero, and he wouldn’t have thought it improper to die in his sleep. All the same, he never got the chance. If you had asked the wise man, he would have said that Mandogi had bad saju p’alja.

  Mandogi never knew his parents. And not just his parents. He didn’t even know his own name. In a society where people must respect their family names as much, if not more than, their own parents, as a subject of the “Eastern Kingdom of Virtue,” as it were, it was quite natural for Mandogi to be deprived of his citizens’ rights. This alone meant that he could never associate with respectable people. But none of this was Mandogi’s fault. He was just born the way nature intended. “Mandogi” wasn’t the name he had from the beginning. He could only remember being called “Keiton” (dog shit) when he was young. “Keiton” was a nickname usually given to boys among the common folk who might as well have been princes. In other words, if many of the children had died and only one son survived, the parents would pray for him and give him that name. Or if he were the only son in a family full of daughters, or if he were born a weakling, his parents would give him that name. Calling a child “Keiton,” meaning “a mangy cur’s shit,” was actually a way of praying for his health and happiness, a way of expressing heartfelt love for him. So, because of Mandogi’s childhood name “Keiton,” you can imagine the kind of love his parents had for him.

  Of course, Mandogi had put “Keiton” behind him by now. But even so, his childhood would only reawaken and take shape with the sound of someone’s voice calling, “Keiton.” It was probably the voice of someone vaguely motherlike. Then, he would see himself, still a toddler on his mother’s back, struggling up a mountain trail to a temple in the heart of a deep valley. He could remember being made to walk and tripping along the way as his mother’s small hand pulled on his while she called, “Keiton! Keiton!” His mother seemed to be mute, so he could never catch anything else she said. He only had memories of times she said, “Keiton!” He could remember an old man with a very long, white beard, and being held on his lap while he quietly stroked his head. But even this memory was only rekindled along with a motherlike woman’s voice somewhere nearby, incessantly calling, “Keiton! Keiton!”

  Mandogi had in fact been brought up the mountain to Kannon Temple by his mother, just as he had in his faded memory. His young mother, nearly mute, her face round like the moon, knelt before the old priest and told him that she had come all the way from Japan. Using mostly hand gestures, she told him that she wanted to give the child to the temple or, rather, to leave the child to the temple. Holding the child, who didn’t even know how to cry, the priest asked, “Who is his father?”
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br />   She smiled to herself and shook her head, “I don’t know.”

  “Mmhmm.” He asked, “What happened?”

  Again, she smiled quietly, and said, “I don’t know.” At last, in a very nasal voice, she stammered out, “I heard a voice saying, ‘Come, come.’ I went into the closet, and the next thing I knew, I was pregnant.”

  “But, what do you mean?” the old priest asked.

  “My child—my child—” she trailed off, smiling quietly, her expression so innocent you could have called it idiotic. In short, she had Keiton while she worked as a kitchen maid—a kongyangju— at a brand-new Korean temple near the Korean district of Osaka. One day, as she was working in the kitchen by herself, a man she had met once before came in unexpectedly. Once they had started chatting, he stood up and opened the closet, looked inside, and then went in. Before long, his voice beckoned to her, saying, “Won’t you come in? Come here, come here!” Knowing nothing but trust, she wiped her wet hands and did as she was told. They say that when she bent over and crawled into the closet, the man closed the door, and everything went pitch black. The man left, of course, and she had to leave the temple with child. She had survived the worst of it, and she said she had raised the child up to where he was starting to be able to walk. Now that he was out of diapers, she had come back home to Mount Halla. She wanted to give her child to the temple, hoping that somehow, by the power of the Buddha, he could become a great man. She gave her bundle of tattered clothes and broken toys, along with a little money, to the priest, but he wouldn’t take the money. After three days, she left the temple and headed back to Japan, and was never heard from again. When she left the temple, she put black hard candy wrapped in white paper in Keiton’s hand, and he never shed a tear as he watched her walk away.