March 1, 2023

Lee Woo-cheol wants to compete in the Olympics, but because he lives in 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, he would have to run under Japan's flag. Decades later, when his Japan-based granddaughter plans to run a marathon, she asks Korean shamans to perform a ritual connecting her to his ghost. The author's Tokyo Ueno Station won the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Prepub Alert.

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June 1, 2023
A multigenerational saga about small-town Korean life under Japanese imperialism. Yu's novel, first published in Japan in 2004, likely appears in translation nearly two decades later for two reasons. First is the success of her novel Tokyo Ueno Station (2020), which won the National Book Award for Translated Literature; second is the success of Min Jin Lee's novel Pachinko (2017), a similar epic about Korea under Japanese rule. Readers may find this novel less immediately engaging than those, opening as it does with an extended section of dense family history and religious rituals with invocations of ghosts. But in time three lead characters come into clear focus: Lee Woo-cheol and Lee Woo-gun, siblings in the town of Miryang who are both talented distance runners but who have their Olympic ambitions stymied thanks to World War II; and Eiko, a neighborhood girl who at 13 is abducted with a promise she'd work at a uniform factory but is instead sent to China to serve as a "comfort woman" to Japanese soldiers. Woo-cheol's and Woo-gun's stories reveal the Korean folkways that were suppressed and warped under Japanese rule--Yu explores birth, marriage, and funeral rituals in depth as well as efforts by resistance groups like the Heroic Corps to disrupt Japan. Meanwhile, Eiko's brutal ordeal is a troubling portrait of extended sexual violence, including serial rape, forced hysterectomies, and murder. Translator Giles leaves many Korean terms relating to family and rituals untranslated, which creates an immersive effect and underscores the theme of an instinct to preserve one's culture when another attempts to erase it. (Koreans were forced to change their names by the Japanese.) The book is overlong, but Yu's passion for rescuing history from violence is palpable on every page. A baggy but commanding study of oppression at the individual and national levels.

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June 26, 2023
Yu (Tokyo Ueno Station) draws on her Korean Japanese family history in this resonant if overstuffed saga. In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-cheol jogs every morning to train for the 1940 Tokyo Olympics. In the present day, his granddaughter, Yu Miri, is living in Japan, where she trains to run a marathon and wrestles with her dual heritage (“When I can’t express my feelings I speak Korean”). Adding to the autobiographical elements are intriguing slices of history, such as the Korean Heroic Corps, a resistance movement founded in 1919 by Kim Won-bong, and the “comfort women” who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during WWII. Central to it all are themes of Korean defiance and alienation, glued together by the bittersweet story of Woo-cheol, who’d hoped to bring glory to Korea in the Olympics before Japan’s invasion and the Games’ eventual cancellation. Some readers will certainly wonder if they can go the distance, but the prose is artful and kinetic (“My breath is a whip in my heart a red horse running around inside me/ each drop of sweat becomes a shout and is shaken off”). Though it doesn’t reach the height of Yu’s previous work in translation, this has a power of its own. Agent: Michael Staley, Michael Staley Agency.

Starred review from July 1, 2023
Multifaceted playwright, novelist, and essayist Yu intricately layers her own Korean Japanese background into her latest anglophoned import, appearing as a pivotal character who calls her ancestors into being with the help of traditional Korean shamans. Lee Woo-cheol, born in 1912 in Japanese- occupied Korea in Miryang, north of Busan, was a promising long-distance runner who should have gone to the Olympics but was stymied by colonial and international conflicts. He trained his younger brother, who chose to represent his country more subversively. Despite devastating familial consequences caused by their father's philandering, Woo-cheol, too, is incapable of marital fidelity, entangling fates with multiple women and their children. He flees political persecution in Korea, ironically settling in Japan. Decades later, his Japanese-born granddaughter, Yu Miri, is training for a marathon; she's "running to write," seeking insight into her complicated identity. Curiously, a posthumous wedding will be necessary to assuage suffering souls. Yu brilliantly combines almost a century of onerous history, peripatetic family drama, and wondrous storytelling. The epic translation, requiring intimate knowledge of Japanese, Korean, and English, is a brilliant polyglot achievement by Tokyo-based Giles, who translated Yu's 2020 National Book Award-winning Tokyo Ueno Station. Hauntingly punctuated throughout with "in-hale ex-hale"--with all the implications of breathing, gasping, panting, enduring, and surviving--Yu's metafiction proves to be an exceptional triumph.

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