Jung-myung Lee - The Investigation

WATANABE: Sometimes fiction can reveal more truth than the bare facts. I wanted to speak the truth, but I couldn’t record the truth as I saw it.

HALEY: Do you believe you are innocent?

WATANABE: No, I’m guilty. I didn’t act.

HALEY: Is there anything else you want to say?

WATANABE: Can you open the window? Dong-ju would have loved looking at the sky tonight.

At the end of the nineteenth century many Koreans began to move to Manchuria to avoid the deepening famine in northern Korea. Dong-ju’s great-grandfather moved his family to Manchuria around 1886. On 30 December 1917 Dong-ju, the eldest son of Yun Yeong-seok and Kim Yong, was born in Mingdong village, Helong Prefecture, Jiandao Province, Manchuria.

As a child, Dong-ju showed talent in poetry. In 1935 he transferred to Sungsil Middle School in Pyongyang, which was closed down the following year for its refusal to worship at a Japanese Shinto shrine. Dong-ju returned to Manchuria to finish middle school and began to publish poems in magazines. In 1938 he enrolled in Yonhi College (now Yonsei University) in Seoul. He began to immerse himself in Korean literature, history and the nationalist movement. In 1940 he attended Hyupsung Church and Bible study on the campus of Ewha Woman’s College while continuing to write and publish poems.

In 1941 Dong-ju graduated from Yonhi College. In celebration of that occasion, he gathered nineteen poems into his first volume of poetry, entitled The Sky, the Wind, the Stars and Poetry . However, three of the poems, ‘Cross’, ‘Sad Tribe’ and ‘Another Home’, were censored. Concerned for Dong-ju’s safety, his professor urged him to give up. Dong-ju entrusted his professor, and his friend Jeong Byeong-uk, with copies of the manuscript for safekeeping.

At the end of 1941 his family changed its surname to Hiranuma to assist in Dong-ju’s application to study abroad in Japan. The following year Dong-ju moved to Tokyo and enrolled in the English Literature department at Rikkyo University. He visited his home town for the last time that summer. In the autumn Dong-ju transferred to Doshisha University in Kyoto.

In July 1943 Dong-ju was arrested as a political offender and all of his writings were confiscated. In 1944 he was indicted and sentenced to two years at Fukuoka Prison for the violation of Clause V of the Maintenance of Public Order Act.

On 18 February 1945 Dong-ju’s family received a telegram notifying them of his death. At Fukuoka Prison, Dong-ju’s father and cousin witnessed fifty-odd Korean men standing in front of the infirmary, waiting for infusions. Prison officials told them that Dong-ju died at 3.36 in the morning on 16 February. A young Japanese guard approached them and said, ‘Right before he died, Dong-ju shouted something loudly.’ His body was cremated and brought home, and the family buried him in a church cemetery. ‘Self-Portrait’ and ‘New Path’ were recited at his funeral.

In May 1945 the Yun family erected a tombstone inscribed ‘The Grave of Poet Yun Dong-ju’. On 15 August 1945 Japan was defeated, and Korea became newly independent. In 1947 ‘Easily Composed Poem’ was published for the first time in the newspaper Kyunghyang Sinmun , and in 1948 Dong-ju’s friend Jeong Byeong-uk published the thirty-one poems that the poet had entrusted to him, under the title The Sky, the Wind, the Stars and Poetry.

In 1977 the top-secret document ‘Monthly Report of the Special Higher Police’, published during the Japanese occupation, was obtained, and Dong-ju’s interrogation records were released. Two years later another document was declassified, confirming Dong-ju’s sentence and his participation in the independence movement. In 1982, thirty-seven years after Dong-ju’s death, a copy of the verdict was released. In 1985 a Professor Omura, of Waseda University in Japan, and officials in Yanbian discovered Dong-ju’s grave and tombstone in Longjing, China.

Yun Dong-ju is one of the most well-known and well-respected poets in Korea. His poetry continues to be taught in schools nationwide.

This is a work of fiction. I consulted a variety of records for an accurate description of the times. The poems by Yun Dong-ju are from Dong-ju’s only published book of poetry. The characters’ personalities and actions are entirely fictional; I ask for the understanding of their descendants.

I would not have been able to write this novel without the books about Yun Dong-ju and his body of work, such as The Complete Collection of Yun Dong-ju’s Poetry , ed. Hong Jang-hak (Munhakgwa Jisongsa), Night Counting Stars , ed. Lee Nam-ho (Minumsa World Poetry) and the writings and research materials of countless scholars whose names are too numerous to include, such as The Critical Biography of Yun Dong-ju by Song U-hye (Purun Yeoksa), Yun Dong-ju — 1 Study of Korean Modern Poet by Lee Geon-cheong (Munhak Segyesa) and If Spring Comes to My Star — Yun Dong-ju’s Life and Literature by Go Un-gi (Sanha).

‘Good Night’ by Wilhelm Müller: www.recmusic.org/lieder/get_text.html?TextId =11830. Translation compiled by Arthur Rishi

Selected Poems of Francis Jammes , trans. Barry Gifford and Bettina Dickie (Utah State University Press), 1976

‘Day in Autumn’ by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Mary Kinzie, Poetry magazine, April 2008

German Love: From the Papers of an Alien by Friedrich Max Müller, trans. Susanna Winkworth (Chapman and Hall), 1858

‘Va, pensiero’ lyrics by Giuseppe Verdi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Va, — pensiero

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge , trans. Burton Pike (Dalkey Archive Press), 2008

Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo van Gogh, Arles, Monday 9 or Tuesday 10 July 1888 [638]. Vincent Van Gogh — The Letters , 2009, web edition: Van Gogh Museum and Huygens ING, www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let638/letter.html

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, trans. Constance Garnett, Introduction by Ernest J. Simmons (Dell Publishing), 1959

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, trans. R.D. Boylan (Norilana Books), 2008