A young married teacher Kang Inho is driving from Seoul, the capital city of South Korea, to Mujin City. He has been unemployed for the past six months in the global economic downturn. The factory where he used to work with a co-owner has already closed. The circumstances are somewhat helped by his wife’s intervention because she is a relative who has ties to the school.
At the same time he is driving down, a 12-year-old boy from the Home of Benevolence, steps in front of a passing train and dies. His is the second death of two students from this school for the deaf-mute learners in two months. The train does not even pause but moves on along its track.
Togani (The Crucible), written by Gong Ji-Young (2009) and translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (2023), opens into a scene of a thick fog rolling in to Mujin from the sea. The fog rolls in like a “colorless beast” obscuring everything. There is a call to Sabbath worship in the ringing of a church bell.
Kang Inho, father of young pre-K-aged daughter Saemi, formerly served in the country’s military. As a young man, he had an affair with a reckless young woman, Myŏnghŭi. Gong writes:
Myŏnghŭi had returned from time to time, and if not for his affair with her, the sex so intense that he had sometimes felt on the verge of strangling her, he might very well have turned his army rifle against others—or himself.
Kang is observant. He has intuitions about people. His sense of Myŏnghŭi proves correct when she acts on her self-destructiveness. His premonitions about Mujin and the Home of Benevolence are also sinister. On the young boy’s body beside the railroad tracks, a bloody scrap is found with two names: Yi Kangsŏk (the school’s principal) and Pak Pohyŏn (a guidance counselor at the student dorms).
Later, Kang sees photos of the school’s founder, who looks to be the father of both men as identical fraternal twins (not biologically possible?). Kang faces some social biases against his being a city person by the local Mujin residents, who are mostly rural. He starts interacting with the students with rudimentary sign language and writing. They come across as suppressed and stressed. They share information that raises his hackles.
He has awkward encounters with the administrators of the Home of Benevolence. He has an ear for when people dissemble. Readers learn of interconnections between the owners of the school, which has both day students and boarders, and local law enforcement.
He also reconnects with a former schoolmate, Sŏ Yujin, who is now a widowed mother of two children, who is living in Mujin. She works as the Director of the Mujin Human Rights Advocacy Center. For all the promise of students in school, as they grow to middle age, there are losses and disappointments. Mujin is a “poverty-stricken, rundown city” that was “once the fountain of democracy”; it is a “dead-end place.”
The society is hierarchical. It is deeply mannered, with social niceties that preclude seeing and addressing societal ills. Kang is pressed into providing a bribe for receiving his temporary job. His wife calls it euphemistically a “development fund.” Still, this practice irks Kang, even as he complies.
He begins investigations of some of his students who’ve communicated something of secrets to him. He starts to realize that the students are dispossessed. Many are not being raised by parents per se. There is severe poverty. When he tries to acquire more information by asking colleagues to help him communicate with his students, all mysteriously do not make themselves available.
Togani raises questions of how modern S. Korean society may deal with the abuse of some of the weakest in society. Who will step up? Who will ignore the need?
Kang serves as a tainted Everyman, who has his own difficult history to contend with. The novel reads:
Heaven knew, if no one else, about the bargirls he had slept with even after his marriage and the income he had underreported, heaven knew he had prayed for the downfall of a classmate who had made a success of himself and liked to tool around in his luxury foreign car, and heaven knew he had lusted after a friend’s wife, tempted by her beauty.
His investigations lead to a Pandora’s box of outcomes and reverberations. This novel touches on how societies learn and advance and perhaps build out some of the legal and other structures that may protect humanity from their own worst impulses and children from exploitation.
Gong Ji-Young’s Togani (2009, 2023) is a wrenching novel in its depictions of human callousness and opportunism, their predation of the young. Readings of the impacts of this novel, though, broaden the aperture and bring hope of constructive changes and oversights.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
