The last time I visited Korea, I was maybe 7 years old, and I only remember bits and pieces of it. Flashes of Myeong-dong, a street flooded with rain, a brilliant red sunset. When I started reading Mirinae Lee’s 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster, I was sitting on an international flight to Seoul-Incheon airport. I tore through the first three sections of the book, the piece-meal stories driving me to the end of each chapter.
When I got to Korea, something inside me felt at home. The low rolling hills of the Korean landscape moved with me as I lost myself in the book. There was a strange sort of relation that I had with Ms. Mook, knowing that she too felt the loss of a land in her bones. I wandered through a park in Paju, keeping an ear out for North Korean propaganda as the book said. Korea—which had for so long existed as a fiction and a photo in my head—was now a real, tangible thing: the land I could feel beneath my feet, the history I could see in the streets.
I was deeply touched by the story, delight flaring within me when I recognized the Korean words thrown in throughout, having to pause at points and absorb the reality that I had experienced. Mirinae Lee’s prose was powerful and clever, and I noted references to other works of Western literature that fit cohesively into a non-Western story.
Following seven separate but interconnected stories, 8 Lives chases the two wars of Korea, a North Korean spy, a mother, a daughter, a lover, and, at the end of it all, a trickster. The book wends its way across the country, beginning and ending in Paju, just three miles from the North Korean border. By starting and ending near the place where the country itself is rent in two, the eight lives of this century old trickster—Ms. Mook— simultaneously cleave and unify the severed bookends of the story: much like the border itself. And, making up that border, as in the book, are sections of history that have led us to the two Koreas we know today.
Each of these seam chapters drew me in a little further into loving the book, seducing me like a folktale. Each chapter felt like an homage, a nod to the variegated history of Korea’s last century and a half: the hidden, the horror, the little joys. Ms. Mook remained a witty and wicked narrator the whole way through, reminding me of my halmoni (grandmother) with her sharp mind and belly laugh. Reading the stories felt realer somehow, knowing I had seen and set foot in some of the places mentioned in the book, knowing that these are not just stories frozen in time, but lived realities for some. Maybe it was the time and place of where I read it (finishing it on the floor of my grandmother’s apartment, just a few days before Korean Memorial Day), but somehow, 8 Lives of a Century Old Trickster felt like coming home.
