Hwang Sok-yong - Princess Bari

Once I was over the bridge I saw that the sun was shining there, and everything was strangely quiet. A wide field filled with fresh grass stretched away evenly, and a delicate breeze stirred the wildflowers. Grandmother pointed to a zelkova tree at the far end of the field.

When you get closer to that tree, your guide will appear. Hurry off now.

Grandma, aren’t you coming with me?

I can’t. My world ends here.

What about Chilsung?

He slowly wagged his tail and didn’t answer. Grandmother held out her hand.

Take these with you. It’ll help.

She dropped three peony blossoms into my palm. I put them in my pocket and floated over to the tree, bobbing gently as if carried there on a current. The tree was enormous; it had to have been as tall as a three or four-storey building. The branches were completely bare, though it wasn’t winter. The closer I got to that tree, with its countless branches twisting out of its thick trunk in all directions, the scarier it looked. On one of the lower branches perched a magpie, flicking its tail. When it saw me it rubbed its beak against the tree several times and then addressed me.

Hey, Stupidhead, where you think you’re goin’? Oughta give you what for.

What did I do wrong? I asked angrily. Despite everything that had happened to me up until that point, I had submitted to all of it meekly, without a single word of blame or complaint, sorrow or frustration, so I truly felt this was uncalled-for. The bird opened its beak wide and laughed at me. Then it said:

You’re still a long way from bringing back the life-giving water. How the living do suffer, do suffer!

I clamped down on my anger.

Show me the way to the western sky , I said.

Follow me, follow me.

The little featherbrain spread his wings and took off from the tip of the branch, circled overhead several times and flew straight into the side of the enormous tree trunk as if to crush his own skull.

Serves you right , I thought . Now you’re dead of a busted skull.

But the trunk opened like a yawning mouth, and the bird disappeared into it. I placed one foot inside the shadowy hollow, and the rest of my body was sucked inside. I slid down, down, down. When I reached the bottom, the top of the tree hovered far above my head and I saw a road stretching out in five directions: north, south, east, west and centre. In the middle of the road stood an envoy from the otherworld, dressed all in black and wearing a black horsehair hat. He clutched a folding fan with both hands. Where are you going? he asked.

I’d been wondering the same thing, so I had no response at first. But then I said the first thing that came to mind:

They told me to come over for dinner.

The envoy considered this for a moment and then asked: The great kings?

I didn’t know what else to do, so I nodded. He pointed to one of the paths with his fan. I walked for a long time and eventually reached a large plaza with torchlight glowing on all sides. The same envoy appeared again and dragged me to the centre. A huge, towering platform, like a judge’s bench, appeared along the opposite wall. Seated atop the platform were ten great kings, each with a different type of crown: a horned crown; an ornament-covered crown that stuck straight up like a chimney and gradually widened; a round crown; a wide, flat crown; a crown that bulged out on the sides. The great kings seemed to stir, and then the one seated in the middle wearing the horned crown glared fiercely at me from above his black beard. He called out:

Loathsome worm! You’re not dead, yet you dare call us forth in your dreams?

The great king with a white beard and a crown with triangular horns yelled:

You lied and said we invited you here!

The great king with the flat crown said:

We cannot send you back to the flesh you abandoned!

Another said:

An insignificant speck like you arrogantly vows to take the life-giving water from the ends of the Earth?!

The great kings of the otherworld called out my crimes each in turn, and at the very end the king with the round crown said:

You are guilty of abandoning your starving kinsmen. Even if you spend the rest of your life offering food and reciting sutras to the spirits of these dead, you will never wash away your sin!

The ten kings called out their judgment in unison:

Seven by seven is forty-nine. If you can endure forty-nine days of penance, you will be permitted to return.

As soon as their judgment came down, the envoy grabbed me by the nape of the neck, dragged me to the edge of a cliff and tossed me over. At the bottom of the cliff was a blazing inferno. I screamed long and loud as my body tumbled like a piece of straw down toward the flames, which wriggled like the jaws of a creature intent on swallowing me whole. Just then I remembered the flowers my grandmother had given me. I took one peony from my pocket and tossed it down. With a loud pop! the fire vanished, and something like a warm blanket or a cloud wrapped around me. I drifted slowly down through the air.

When I alighted onto the ground, the air filled with a faint blue light and grey smoke billowed all around. A clump of smoke wafted over to me and moaned as it brushed past.

Feed me. Just one bite. Please.

Another clump of smoke coiled around me.

Just one little gaetteok . Or even some porridge or thin gruel will do.

The smoke began to fill the large hollow; each clump bore the face it had worn in life. I saw the woman and two children I’d met in the village near Gomusan, as well as the old woman I’d come across at the train station. Countless other faces I’d never seen, and did not know crowded around me. There were three or four little urchins who’d slept under stairwells in a night market in Yanji, and even babies joined the throng as tiny puffs cleaving to mother clouds. Their eyes were dark, their cheeks sunken and their throats strangely long and thin. Their mumbling sounded like magic spells: Hungry, hungry, hungry. Feed me, feed me, feed me.

I couldn’t breathe, my chest was heavy and my eardrums felt like they were going to burst. I covered my ears with my hands and squatted down on my heels. Then, without thinking about it, I pulled out another peony and tossed it upward. The air filled with wooden bowls packed with steaming hot rice, freshly cooked rice cakes piled high with mashed sweet red beans, every kind of fish and meat, fritters and savoury pancakes, wild greens, stews and soups of every flavour and colour and variety, plates and dishes and platters and saucers galore. All around me I heard the sound of lips smacking and teeth chomping.

Words — half-song, half-incantation — burst out of me, and even in the midst of singing, I recognized them as Hwangcheon muga , the shaman song to console the spirits of the dead. It was from the story my grandmother used to tell me about Princess Bari:

Aah, aah, deceased spirits!

At this open door between our worlds,

I pray, I pray.

To the mountains, to the rivers

you prayed, you prayed.

Hungry ghosts, starved spirits,

what became of the bodies you wore only yesterday?

Return! Return!

Go to Paradise, come back to life.

You are without sin;

lay down your burdens.

When the song ended, the smoke retreated, low to the ground, and vanished. Suddenly the floor of the hollow tree split in two to reveal a fog-covered pond. A breeze lifted the fog and the glassy, mirror-like surface of the water appeared. The water was the blue-green of moss, and under it a shadow was moving. Against this solid blue screen, images slowly began to take shape: