Bae Suah - Nowhere to Be Found

He parks the car in the lot and says, “What the hell is this? It’s closed!”

The whole world has quieted down because of the rain. Figures of people appear and disappear in the darkness. One woman and two men. The woman is wearing large, baggy pants, and her hair is dyed wine red. The men are wearing basketball shoes. They look rough, like hoodlums. It is so dark out that I see them brushing past the car like ghosts, but he does not. I realize then that I have brought him to the center of my bleak hour. He leaves teeth marks on my arm that will outlast memory. I look at his white hairs. When you die, I’ll have you taxidermied. Then I will have you forever. I will spend the light of morning and the despair of midday and the lunatic peace of evening with you. Never will you lie at rest in a royal tomb.

And that is how I became an absolutely meaningless thing and survived time.

Bae Suah was born in Seoul in 1965. After majoring in chemistry as an undergrad, she became a writer at the relatively late age of twenty-eight. Her first short story, which she wrote while learning how to type on a word processor, was published in a literary magazine. Prior to that, she had never taken any creative writing or literature classes. Highway with Green Apples , published in Korean in 1995 and then in the Day One journal in December 2013 in English, is one of her first works. She continued to publish over the years, and in 2001 she moved to Berlin, where she took a break from writing to learn German. In 2008, she began translating German literature into Korean, beginning with Martin Walser’s Angstblute . She has also translated two works by W. G. Sebald, one of her favorite German writers ( Nach der Natur and Schwindel. Gefuehle , both forthcoming). She is a fan of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa and has translated The Book of Disquiet .

Sora Kim-Russell is a literary translator based in Seoul. Her translations include Shin Kyung-sook’s I’ll Be Right There and Gong Ji-young’s Our Happy Time , as well as Bae Suah’s Highway with Green Apples . She teaches at Ewha Womans University.