Thoughts on Kim E-Whan’s ‘Your Metamorphosis’, as translated from the Korean by Sophie Bowman (Koreana Winter 2014 issue)


It all starts with Cloud Atlas. Those familiar with David Mitchell’s 2004 novel will have found a vision of a South Korean future where its most prominent city was a sci-fi landscape teeming with cloned slaves. Curiously, more recent novels on Korea by British and American writers have decided to continue with such science-fiction renderings of the country, regardless of their present day settings. Time travel, resizing and more cloning can be found in novels such as Kingdoms in the Sun by Ian James, Enormity by W.G. Marshall, and Naomi Foyle’s Seoul Survivors. My own Seoul-set novel Funereal has been described as speculative fiction, even though everything in the book already has precedent in present day South Korea, such as live burials as for the depressed, and cosmetic surgeries as routine as they are risky .



It’s only fair to assume then that Korea lends itself as a sort of SF playground to foreign writers. Many of those who come to the country are immediately struck by its comforts of 5G data, ultra-modern medical tech and fast-moving subways, things which must seem futuristic to the outsider, even ones from as close by as Japan and Singapore. Proving this is how hard-pressed you’d be to find an English novel on modern Korea that doesn’t swim in sci-fi circles. By contrast, you’d be lucky to find a Korean writer using science-fiction to talk about his or her country. As author Gord Sellar notes, ‘Korean society is a society in which SF is not a major genre, and it has yet to spring to life as a native literature.’


Even harder to find would be a piece of Korean fiction focused around LGBT themes, so when one story manages to combine both queer fiction with science fiction, then you have no choice but to sit up and pay notice, especially when it comes with artwork like this:


Your Metamorphosis is a short story byKim E-Whan, one of Korea’s best up and coming writers. Originally published in 2010, it tells the story of a man who goes in for increasingly extreme cosmetic surgeries whilst his helpless boyfriend watches on, narrating to us the gradual change over time of his lover’s body.

Body is a key word here, used as it is in the story as a landscape where not only do lovers play, but doctors also choose to play God. The choice of a homosexual couple as protagonists starts us off on a reminder of how bodies define sexuality. A lover in a straight body is the same as a lover in a gay one, after all. It is only how the body expresses love and passion that differs, and it is the body which the more conservative of us fixate upon, somehow forgetting what’s inside us all, right there beneath the skin and bones.


Kim’s depiction of a gay relationship is actually the only ‘norm’ in the whole story, and it is how the story anchors us to the real world before erotica of the body turns into body horror on the strangest scale. When the lovers have sex, we are focused not on their sexuality, but on the power status between the pair — one cries in bed, and the other does not. Exemplified here is the power struggle between lovers of all sexuality the world over, and a power status which soon reverses once the crying lover begins to renovate his body, desperate to ‘match up’ to his partner, and show that he is indeed deserving of all his love.


Amidst this domestic upset is a changing world order, revealed to us in story clippings and news reports, as people worldwide begin to manipulate their bodies into increasingly bizarre formations:

‘In America, a pro league for footballers with four legs is already hugely popular, and in Japan, a pro wrestler with six arms is appearing in the ring….’

‘The CEO of R Refrigerator Company announces, “I wanted to show consumers that our products are the best. So I’ve had my brain transplanted behind the fridge compartment. My voice? It’s coming out through the keypad in the door. Having lived as a refrigerator I can safely say that our refrigerators are the best.’


Such excerpts may suggest that Your Metamorphosis is set in some far-off future like Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Instead though, like the English novels mentioned earlier, it is set in a Seoul very similar to the one today, something exemplified in the boyfriend’s initially matter-of-fact narration, linking his partner’s story to the normal state of affairs which it arises from. Around him in the city, we eavesdrop on women casually deciding on double jaw surgery over coffee, and are told how old ID card photos look so very different to those they’re supposed to depict.



Soon, it seems that only the narrator is questioning how bizarre the bodies around him are becoming as more and more go under the knife of a new generation of Doctor Frankensteins. Your Metamorphosis is therefore satire of the most surreal kind, up there with UK comedian Chris Morris’s radio show Blue Jam, which mixed body horror with very unsettling laughs back in the late 90s. Both Morris and Kim take a suspicious view of the surgeons behind these ‘miracle’ transformations, with Kim’s own Frankenstein eventually trapping the insecure lover in a most bizarre medical experiment, all for the sake of a ‘large reward’ now that the man has gone bankrupt through all the various surgeries he’s been paying for.

Ironically, our narrator has long been forgotten by this point in the story, despite having served as catalyst for his ex’s transformation. Their relationship has been left in the dust by the self-absorbed lover’s never-ending quest for perfection.




It should be pointed out how the main subject of these many treatments is a man, and not one of the chatty, socialite women shown to us in the coffee shop (and in my own novel at certain points, for that matter). This shouldn’t be a surprise for cosmetic surgery in Korea is common for both sexes, a concept perhaps alien and futuristic to writers outside of the country, yet altogether normal for those within. That said, E-Whan is showing us just how alien procedures such as double jaw surgery really are, no matter how commonplace they may be in his homeland. After all, are they really more necessary than attaching extra arms to your body, or moving one’s brain to the fridge? Is one’s appearance and reputation really worth the risk and cost involved?



Perhaps this is the status quo in Korea. Still, despite all its forward-thinking attitudes to beauty, the country remains a conservative one at heart, which is why it’s a surprise to find queer fiction like this, especially in translated form (it should also be noted that genre fiction is rarely translated from Korean into English). Just recently, for example, the annual gay pride march in Seoul was denied permission for the first time in 16 years, whilst new sex education guidelines have omitted any mention of homosexuality in schools. Bodies have once again become point of contention, it seems.




Bios:



Kim E-Whan (김이환) has covered a variety of writing styles to date, but other English translations of his are yet to be published. Your Metamorphosis was winner of the 2010 Young Writers’ Award in Korea.




Giacomo Lee hails from London, and his new novel Funereal is out now on Signal 8 Press, taking a dark look at fake funerals for the living in the land of the morning calm. Read more at giacomolee.com

