Awards
Winner of the 2004 Kiriyama Prize for Fiction
Synopses & Reviews
In a remote Manchurian town in the 1930s, a sixteen-year-old girl is more concerned with intimations of her own womanhood than the escalating hostilities between her countrymen and their Japanese occupiers. While still a schoolgirl in braids, she takes her first lover, a dissident student. The more she understands of adult life, however, the more disdainful she is of its deceptions, and the more she loses herself in her one true passion: the ancient game of go.
Incredibly for a teenager and a girl at that she dominates the games in her town. No opponent interests her until she is challenged by a stranger, who reveals himself to us as a Japanese soldier in disguise. They begin a game and continue it for days, rarely speaking but deeply moved by each other's strategies. As the clash of their peoples becomes ever more desperate and inescapable, and as each one's untold life begins to veer wildly off course, the girl and the soldier are absorbed by only one thing the progress of their game, each move of which brings them closer to their shocking fate.
In The Girl Who Played Go, Shan Sa has distilled the piercing emotions of adolescence into an engrossing, austerely beautiful story of love, cruelty and loss of innocence.
Review
"The story is as lovely and delicate as a carved jade flower and can seem as cold to the touch. This is beautiful writing, but it's a bit remote." Library Journal
Review
"Intense, operatic personal tragedy magnified by Sa's sense of history and Eastern culture." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
As the Japanese military invades 1930s Manchuria, a young girl approaches her own sexual coming of age. Drawn into a complex triangle with two boys, she distracts herself from the onslaught of adulthood by playing the game of go with strangers in a public square--and yet the force of desire, like the occupation, proves inevitable. Unbeknownst to the girl who plays go, her most worthy and frequent opponent is a Japanese soldier in disguise. Captivated by her beauty as much as by her bold, unpredictable approach to the strategy game, the soldier finds his loyalties challenged. Is there room on the path to war for that most revolutionary of acts: falling in love?
Synopsis
Young-ha Kim'sand#160;latest novel followsand#160;a North Korean spy, heavily undercover and long dormant in the South, on the day he is suddenly called back to headquarters.
Synopsis
A foreign film importer, Gi-yeong is a family man with a wife and daughter. An aficionado of Heineken, soccer, and sushi, he is also a North Korean spy who has been living among his enemies for twenty-one years.
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Suddenly he receives a mysterious email, a directive seemingly from the home office. He has one day to return to headquarters. He hasnand#8217;t heard from anyone in over ten years. Why is he being called back now? Is this message really from Pyongyang? Is he returning to receive new orders or to be executed for a lack of diligence? Has someone in the South discovered his secret identity? Is this a trap?
Spanning the course of one day, Your Republic Is Calling You is an emotionally taut, psychologically astute, haunting novel that reveals the depth of one particularly gripping family secret and the way in which we sometimes never really know the people we love. Confronting moral questions on small and large scales, it mines the political and cultural transformations that have transformed South Korea since the 1980s. A lament for the fate of a certain kind of man and a certain kind of manhood, it is ultimately a searing study of the long and insidious effects of dividing a nation in two.
About the Author
YOUNG-HA KIMand#8217;s Black Flower won Korea's Dong-in Prize; his first novel,andnbsp;I Have the Right to Destroy Myself wasandnbsp;highly acclaimedandnbsp;upon publication in the United States.andnbsp;He hasandnbsp;earned a reputation as the most talented and prolific Korean writer of his generation, publishing five novels and three collections of short stories.