A Writer Reminiscent of Spring

Reading Kim Yu-jeong’s short stories, people easily get addicted to spring. Spring can be sensed in every page of the writer’s famous works such as ‘The Camellias’ and ‘Spring Spring.’ The latter is a story about a simple and honest servant who endures many hardships, simply trusting his master’s word that he will be married to the master’s daughter.

Other short stories written by the same author also vividly illustrate the indigenous idiosyncrasies of Korean rural towns. Let’s trace the life of Kim Yu-jeong, a writer reminiscent of spring.


A Reserved Boy’s Sad Life

Kim Yu-jeong was born in Sille Village in Chuncheon, Gangwon Province on February 12, 1908. He was the second son and seventh-born child in a rich and blessed family of two sons and six daughters. Unfortunately, his mother died of disease when he was seven years old and his father passed away two years later. The young Yu-jeong lived in his older brother’s house and missed his parents all the time.

He was a fragile boy and would falter in speaking. His stammer was cured when he was in his second year at Whimoon High School, but he was usually quiet and reserved.

After he watched the performance of famous singer Park Nok-ju in 1928, he came to admire the singer, who had a strong resemblance to his late mother. For two years, he did everything he could to win her love. But the top singer, who was seven years older than he was, never loved Kim, for he had just turned 20 at the time. Tormented by his unrequited love, Kim suffered from pleurisy. He dropped out of Yonhee College, which he entered in 1930, and returned to his hometown at the age of 23.


Yu-jeong Takes up his Pen

Even in his hometown, Kim still felt so lost that he wandered around gold mines. There, he worked as a field supervisor and made friends with peddlers selling liquor to farmers and mine workers.

Facing to the reality of poor people, Kim returned home in 1932 to stage a rural enlightenment campaign and set up a night school named ‘Geumbyeonguisuk’ (금병의숙). There, illiterate people in the village learned how to read and write.

Inspired by the power of the pen, Kim began to write novels. In 1933, he published novels entitled ‘The Passerby at a Mountain Village’ and ‘The Bachelor and the Narrow-Mouthed Toad.’ In the same year, a nine-member literary group called Guinhoe(구인회) was launched. Kim joined the association, which greatly contributed to the establishment of pure literature in the 1930s. He wrote and published a number of novels one after another, including ‘Toad’ and ‘Spring Spring,’ on different magazines.

In 1935, his novel ‘Rain Shower’ won the spring literary contest offered by the Chosun Ilbo newspaper. Another novel ‘Bonanza’ was also selected as a runner-up at the similar contests organized by the Chosun Ilbo and Joongang Ilbo daily. Kim emerged as an icon of Korean literature in the 1930s.


Golgye(Humor) Aesthetics

With his distinctive sense of humor, Kim portrayed rural scenes in the 1930s when Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. His works breathed new life into the Korean literary scene that was in the doldrums following the dissolution of the Korea Proletarian Artist Federation, which described Korean society in the 1920s with outspoken expressions.

Kim’s works reveal structural inconsistencies of society through the lives of lower class people, while reviving the sparkling wit of Korean people with his uniquely indigenous vocabulary and his excellent command of informal and vulgar language.

Sporadically featuring comic elements and the weary lives of local peasants at the same time, his works are filled with the beauty of golgye(골계), meaning humor or jokes entailing a lesson. Kim died from chronic pleurisy and tuberculosis in 1937 at the age of 29.

Although he lived such a short life, he was a prolific writer who left 30 novels, 12 essays, six letters and journals and two translated novels. Today, his works are studied so intensively and a number of relevant research papers are released every year. Although his life was as short as a fleeting spring day, his legacy blossoms and shines brightly in Korean literature.