Renowned Korean cult writer Jung Young Moon’s latest novel springs from a stay at an artists’ and writers’ residency in small-town Texas. In an attempt to understand what a “true Texan should know,” the author reflects on his outsider experiences in this most unique of places as he learns to two-step and muses on cowboy hats and cowboy churches, blending his observations all the while with a meditative rumination on the events that shaped the history of Texas, from the first settlers to Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald. Accompanied by an invented cast of seven samurai who act as silent companions in a pantomime of existential theater, the author asks of himself and the reader what a novel is and must be. Jung blends fact with imagination, humor with reflection, and meaning with meaninglessness as his meanderings become an absorbing, engaging, quintessential novel of ideas.
PRAISE FOR JUNG YOUNG MOON’S VASELINE BUDDHA
“Reading Vaseline Buddha feels like watching a magician who explains his trick as he performs it and yet still mesmerizes you with his sleight of hand. You simultaneously enter the dream and wake from it … This resistance underpinning the entire exercise makes Jung an heir to Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz, who understood that writing is the documentation of a dance the writer does between form and chaos.”
—Tyler Malone, Los Angeles Times
“The novel raises questions about story, and how stories are created. It muses on where thoughts come from, how they act on us, and how to live a life that doesn’t take itself too seriously, while still earnestly engaging with the world. Jung’s work is as a hybrid of fiction, journal, and philosophical aphorisms. It begins in a place where meaning is of little concern, and ends by asking the reader to build up her own meaning while enjoying Jung’s fragments for the small, precious pleasures they provide.”
—John W.W. Zeiser, Los Angeles Review of Books
“One of South Korea’s more eccentric contemporary writers, Jung could almost be described as a cross between Beckett and Brautigan – his earlier writing was often extremely dark, but recently the balance has tipped towards lightness, of touch as much as of mood. It’s all part of an aesthetic which prizes vagueness, randomness, digression rather than progression.”
—Deborah Smith, translator of The Vegetarian and The White Book
“Jung offers an audacious discourse on creativity, presenting readers with a labyrinth of ideas, images, suggestions, and observations all waiting and available to individual interpretation.”
—Library Journal
ALSO AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH BY JUNG YOUNG MOON
A Contrived World
(translated by Jeffrey Karvonen & Mah Eunji)
A Most Ambiguous Sunday & Other Stories
(translated by Yewon Jung, Inrae You Vinciguerra, Louis Vinciguerra, and Jung Young Moon)
Vaseline Buddha
(translated by Yewon Jung)
Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River
Jung Young Moon
Translated from the Korean by Yewon Jung
Deep Vellum Publishing
Dallas, Texas
Deep Vellum
3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226
deepvellum.org · @deepvellum
Deep Vellum is a 501c3 nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013 with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature.
Copyright © Jung Young Moon, 2018
Originally published as 강물에 떠내려가는 7인의 사무라이 in Seoul, South Korea in 2018
Published by arrangement with Workroom Press
English translation copyright © Yewon Jung, 2019
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER 2019947673
ISBNs: 978-1-941920-85-5 (paperback) | 978-1-941920-86-2 (ebook)
Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River is published under the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).
Cover Design by Anna Zylicz | annazylicz.com
Typesetting by Kirby Gann
Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco
Griffo for Aldo Manuzio’s printing of De Aetna in 1495 in Venice
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free
paper by BookMobile
This book is written with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea and 100 West Corsicana Residency of Texas.
IT’S WINTER NOW, AND I’M IN TEXAS, AND I’M writing this, a story about Texas, but at the same time, a story that deviates from being a story about Texas, a story that does, indeed, go back to being a story about Texas, something that I’m writing in the name of a novel but something that is perhaps unnamable.
As is the case with any place in the world, to someone who hasn’t been to that certain place, hearing the name of that place may or may not bring something to mind. Before coming to Texas, I’d never talked to anyone about Texas, and so I didn’t know what came to people’s minds when you said Texas; but what came to my mind when you said Texas was a notorious Texas, perhaps because of murders that took place there, such as the John F. Kennedy assassination, and perhaps because of movies based on the murders—Bonnie and Clyde, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and No Country for Old Men—some of which actually had taken place while others were only partially true, while yet others were completely fictional, and perhaps the murders that served as a direct motif for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were not the ones that took place in Texas, but in Wisconsin.
I’ve been dividing my time between the Dallas home of D, a novelist, and N, an artist, an American couple who are friends of mine, and a house in C, a small town near Dallas. The house is a 150-year-old Victorian mansion, the kind of house that’s common to the American South, and it’s designated a cultural heritage site of C although there’s nothing special about it, and it has a long L-shaped terrace which is nice to just sit and pass the time on. Having arrived in mid-November, I sat on the terrace from time to time, and when the wind blew I watched acorns fall like hail from the enormous oak trees in the yard, and at night I watched stars through a telescope at the little old observatory in the backyard, and the stars couldn’t be easily observed because of the leaves of the oak trees, but I still saw, through the gaps between the leaves, our fragmented galaxy, as well as parts of other galaxies which, too, had nothing special about them.
There were so many acorns on the oak trees that, if I stood waiting with patience under a tree, I could get smacked on the head by at least one falling acorn, and, if I was lucky, I could get smacked by two in a row, and, if the wind blew just in time, I could get beaten by many at once, and, after getting smacked on the head by acorns, I could think, It’s quite pleasant to get smacked on the head, on purpose and for no reason, by acorns of all things, and so, when I felt down at night, or when I was having trouble falling asleep and, instead, was feeling a sense of solidarity with insomniacs around the world, but was also thinking there was nothing we could do together, or when I didn’t know what I should do, or when I wanted to be punished severely even though I hadn’t done anything wrong, or when I just wanted to get beaten and come to my senses, I would go and stand under an oak tree.
D was working on his second book on Texas, and N, who painted and did art installations, was making a life-sized bronze canine statue that would be placed on a street at the center of C, and which had been commissioned by the town. The statue was to be a re-creation of the logo of Company W—a brand of chili con carne, a spicy stew with meat—as a life-sized bronze statue. The brand has now been acquired by a large company, and the taste of the chili has changed too, but some private donors wanted to install a statue in C, where the brand had its beginning, in honor of the brand. N
made me do a part of one of the ears of the clay canine she was sculpting, as well as part of the tail, and I contributed part of a fox ear and part of a raccoon tail, both foxes and raccoons being members of the canine family, after which she added clay to the ear and the tail, obliterating the shape I’d created, but, perhaps when the bronze canine statue was finished and placed on a street at the center of C, I could look at it while thinking that inside the statue were parts of the fox ear and the raccoon tail I’d created: parts not existing while existing, or existing while not existing.
We talked about the many statues in small American towns that had been erected in honor of people from those areas, figures holding a baseball bat or glove or a basketball, or a gun or a fishing rod, or a book or an instrument or an invention, or a local product or sowing seeds, or reaping the harvest—all statues that would’ve been better to do without—and we talked about how the canine statue could turn out to be something that, too, was better to do without, and that it could be the most attention-drawing curiosity, and that it could perhaps draw more attention because it was a curiosity; and then we tried to think of things that could be nice to have, but would be better to do without, but we couldn’t come up with anything besides the aforementioned statues, and so we said that the canine statue could be one of those things.
Later, when we were at a Texas-style restaurant eating a dish with chili in it, N said that the founder of Company W had gotten the name from Kaiser Bill, his pet wild canine, and that he used to go around town with the caged animal in the back of the company truck. She also said that soldiers who were sent to battlefields in Europe during the Second World War ate W’s products from their helmets, and that chili was the official food of Texas, and that the headquarters of the (International) Chili Appreciation Society—established to raise the quality of chili in restaurants and circulate Texas-style chili recipes—was located in Dallas.
I pictured the members of the (International) Chili Appreciation Society gathering periodically and talking while eating chili about their life with chili, about a life in which it was difficult to imagine a life without chili, and I was chewing the beans in the chili although I didn’t feel that I was with the members of the (International) Chili Association in that moment, at least, and I hoped that the controversy over whether or not to acknowledge chili with beans as chili—about which no conclusion has yet been made, it seems, even by the (International) Chili Appreciation Society—would go on being the greatest controversy surrounding chili. Perhaps at the core of the controversy was the fact, overlooked by many people, that beans are something that don’t easily entice people to eat them because they aren’t particularly tasty, even though they are good for your health, and also because they put you in a depressed state if you eat too many of them at once, or too often. Personally, I didn’t have a particular stance on the matter, but I hoped that among the members of the (International) Chili Appreciation Society, the controversy over whether or not to acknowledge chili with beans in it as chili—the essence of the controversy—would become confused or marred; that a conclusion may not be reached easily; and that the controversy would continue in difficulty.
The fact that beans were something that could put people in a depressed state could be inferred from the fact that both today and in the past, beans took up a large part of the food served in the cafeterias of many correctional facilities around the world, and that careful consideration was taken by correctional facilities to make sure that, no matter what state the prisoners were in, they would maintain a certain degree or more of depression by continuing to eat beans, even though they were depressed anyway because they were in prison; and that they would be depressed, with tomorrow’s depression showing up in advance of and adding to today’s depression, thinking about the beans they would eat tomorrow, even though they were depressed because they’d eaten beans today as well; and that they would think about the beans they’d go on eating as long as they were in prison, and about how there wasn’t much to eat except beans; and that they’d think about how they’d have to be depressed by these little beans of all things, a fact that would double the already doubled sense of depression; and that they’d think about how of all the emotions felt, depression would take up a large part; and that prisoners wouldn’t eat so many beans that their depression would turn into rage, which would then lead to a riot.
I wondered if something that could be called a sort of bean therapy had ever been attempted at a mental hospital somewhere, a therapy based on a simple principle that seemed to have a rationale but didn’t: the principle that feeding only beans—which would probably have made you have a psychotic break if you kept eating them—to someone who’d had a psychotic break would make that person have another psychotic break, thus reverting said person to his or her normal self. The therapy could be effective for a patient who had an extreme dislike for beans, or who had unspeakable feelings of animosity toward beans, or who hated beans more than anyone or anything else in the world, and, among those who had reverted to their normal selves, as if nothing had ever happened, could be those who’d turned into a different person, someone who liked and ate beans as if he or she had never harbored a dislike in the first place.
Perhaps the person who made tofu—known to have been made for the first time during the Han dynasty of China—also had ambivalent feelings about beans. Perhaps he knew that beans were good for your body, and thought he should eat a lot of beans, and yet he didn’t like eating beans in their natural form, and so he sighed whenever he simply had to look at cooked beans, little and round and yellow, different from the kind that went in chili. And so perhaps he thought that he should find a way to eat beans so that it almost wouldn’t occur to you that you were eating them, even though you were, and that, to do so, he should rid them of their natural form and make them look no longer like beans; and that the easiest way to make this happen was to grind them up; and—having realized this fact with difficulty after thinking about beans for a long time—he finally went ahead and did so; and in doing so, he discovered that ground-up beans somehow curdled and took on the form of tofu, thus giving birth to tofu, without realizing how it would change the lives of many people.
It seemed that Benjamin Franklin, who was the first to discover or invent a number of things, saw tofu—which had originated in China, a country he’d never been to—for the first time in 1770 in London, and marveled at the astonishing transformation of beans, which seemed almost like a trick, and then he thought something like that ought to be shared with someone, and, after wondering whom he should tell, he thought of John Bartram, an eighteenth-century American botanist, horticulturalist, and explorer, and talked about tofu in a letter he sent him, thus becoming the first American known to have mentioned tofu. I’ve talked about Franklin in another novel of mine, and I hoped that I would have another opportunity to talk about him, and here I’ve come to talk about him again, and I hope that I’ll have yet another opportunity to talk about him sometime, perhaps by saying something about a fireplace whose thermal efficiency is raised by improving the air circulation inside, which is called the Franklin fireplace, since it was invented by him.
I told my friends in Texas that, in Korea in the past, going to prison was referred to as “going off to eat rice with beans,” and that tofu was given to eat before anything else to someone who was released from prison, which my friends found fascinating. I didn’t know how the tradition began, and I was sure that it began with good intent, and yet giving tofu before anything else to someone who was released from prison, who’d eaten beans in prison until he got sick of them, could bring to his mind, at once, all the bad things he’d gone through in prison, which brought him no good memory to begin with. Perhaps the person who first came up with the idea had made his friend who’d been released from prison eat tofu as a practical joke, and the friend, who’d wanted to eat anything but beans, felt upset, thinking that again he’d eaten something made with beans, which reminded him at once of all the bad thing
s he’d gone through in prison; and yet the tofu—which he ate after having eaten beans until he was sick of them—was so good that, after he ate it, all his ill feelings were dispelled, which didn’t necessarily make him feel that only good things lay in his future, but he did feel that some good things lay in his future, along with some bad things, or at least that not only bad things were in his future. And he and the other man talked about this, and they told people about it, and then word spread among people, and people began to feed tofu to people who were released from prison, which, unexpectedly, became quite popular as a trend, and so everyone released from prison wanted tofu, and some of them didn’t even know why they wanted tofu, but they felt they’d been truly released from prison only once they’d eaten tofu, and they felt, too, that anything would do, so long as it wasn’t food served in prison—and so feeding tofu to someone who was released from prison took root as a sort of distinct cultural tradition. My friends in Texas said that at present no one they knew was in prison, but if someone did go to prison and was released, they’d feed him tofu.
Later—while dining at a restaurant in Dallas not far from where John F. Kennedy was assassinated—we talked about Kennedy as well. It was the Kennedy assassination that had made Dallas world-famous, and that had branded it as a city of hate for decades, and, although there were various conspiracy theories and interesting facts surrounding the incident, what I found the most interesting was the fact that Jack Ruby—who went to kill Lee Oswald, who’d assassinated Kennedy while he was visiting Dallas, and who at the time was in custody at the Dallas Police Department—had two dogs in his car when he went on this mission. A booklet D had given me, written by Robert Trammell—an old friend of his and a Texan poet who’d passed away—titled Jack Ruby and the Origins of the Avant-Garde in Dallas, also talked about this, and I’d thought that I could think about it from different angles, and I had, in fact, thought about it from different angles.
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