TL: KSD
「The past sinks quietly like an anchor. It settles at the deep bottom of the heart, rusting, crumbling, and slowly being forgotten.
But sometimes, when a storm comes and the heart is turned upside down, the past becomes a heavier anchor than anything else and crushes you.
Whether the ‘baby’ was an angel of God or a hallucination of a broken brain, one fact was clear. The baby was Min-ha’s past.
The past that had sunk deep beneath the surface watched over Min-ha. It stared silently, without a word.
Even Min-ha, who had breakfast with the baby, went to work, and watched movies, would, in the dead of night, scream as if crushed by a heavy anchor.
“What did I do so wrong!”
Min-ha tearing at her hair was a sight unimaginable to anyone who knew her.
Min-ha, the slightly aloof but warm-hearted daughter, the calm and intelligent colleague, the mysterious old lover from sixteen years ago, finally revealed her true face in front of herself.
Humans are social animals. And this place is not a society. Only the baby and Min-ha existed here. Desperate like an animal, Min-ha struggled to survive.
“Should I have given birth to you? Should I have stubbornly worn a school uniform and had a baby, ruining my entire life?”
The baby watched Min-ha.
“You were nothing back then! Do you know how hard I studied? Huh? A lump of flesh that wouldn’t even resemble a human dares to act like a baby now!”
The baby quietly watched Min-ha.
“Please… please disappear. Just go away! Who are you to ruin my life? Why do I still have to be punished? Why, seriously, why?”
The baby with the crushed face quietly watched Min-ha.
Without answering, it watched quietly.
Min-ha looked quietly at the baby’s face,
And realized that the one who had to answer was not the baby, but herself.
So Min-ha opened the refrigerator, drank some cold barley tea, sat blankly in a chair for about 30 minutes to prevent acid reflux, then went back to bed and closed her eyes.
Anyway, she had to go to work tomorrow.
She had to survive.」
EP 11 – Evening Bell
“Joo-hee? Come over here!”
Because her friend pulled her arm, Ahn Joo-hee closed her book.
But she couldn’t put down the book she had been reading for a while.
Holding ‘Evening Bell’ in her hand, she was dragged by her friend to where the others were huddled in one corner of the bookstore.
“Tada! A Hogwarts music box!”
“……”
Ahn Joo-hee turned around and went back to the book section, ignoring her friends’ playful voices.
Seeing them come to a bookstore and get excited over something like a music box, she thought to herself, her friends were still the same, even in high school.
Ahn Joo-hee’s friends were not literary people. And Ahn Joo-hee couldn’t be friends with literary people. Because to her, literature was competition.
You fight, and you win.
You win awards, and you succeed.
That was what literature meant to Ahn Joo-hee, what she had learned from her parents.
Therefore, the way her friends saw a bookstore and the way Ahn Joo-hee saw a bookstore were different.
To her friends, a bookstore was a place where books were sold. But to Ahn Joo-hee, it was a hall of champions.
A podium where only those who won in fierce competition and got the trophy could stand.
Among the country girls (from Ansan, Gyeonggi-do) excited to visit Seoul after a long time, only Ahn Joo-hee could sense the bloody smell of brutal competition.
Ahn Joo-hee doesn’t just read titles from book titles.
She can read much more.
This book was a repulsive piece that succeeded by blindly following trends without an ounce of creativity, and that book was the fierce debut work of a mid-level writer who had won one of the three major literary prizes.
She could spot the book of a lucky person who had been mentioned on a TV show and reversed the rankings, and a bestseller by a senior writer whose reputation had inflated their actual writing skills.
“……”
But without a doubt, there was a champion in this brutal colosseum.
One copy in Ahn Joo-hee’s hand.
And another at the top left corner of the most crowded bestseller stand in the store.
Ahn Joo-hee looked up at the book that was ranked number one on the bestseller list.
Evening Bell, Moon In.
The undeniable peak of the current literary generation.
“Tch……”
But Ahn Joo-hee wanted to deny it.
Since his debut, Moon In has been the embodiment of noise marketing, dragging the mass media around like a swarm.
He sells books by attaching pitiful stories to them, a fairytale protagonist manufactured by producers obsessed with ratings.
‘Evening Bell’ is no different.
As soon as it was published, the book was laid out at the entrance of every Baekhak Publishing store nationwide, and fan clubs that follow Moon In swarmed in. Wouldn’t it be stranger if it didn’t hit number one on the bestseller list?
If that’s the standard, even Ahn Joo-hee could hit number one on the bestseller list. Therefore, Moon In was the final boss Ahn Joo-hee would have to defeat one day.
A superstar author protected by a major corporation.
The crowned prince of the literary world, with nowhere higher to climb…
But even Ahn Joo-hee wasn’t sure if she was truly looking at Moon In straight.
Her gaze was distorted by her own sense of inferiority. Ahn Joo-hee knew that.
No one sees at the ‘real’ Moon In.
This was true even on the back cover of the book Moon In wrote.
<The past sometimes approaches with a grotesque form. ‘Evening Bell’ vividly portrays a human trapped in the past through a distorted illusion. Life, conception, abortion. The final bell tolls as the sanctity overlaid on life is stripped away. Now is the time to struggle to live.> – Gu Yubin
<A self wandering between judgment and illusion stares intently at sin. The distinction between sin and trial is unclear, and the judgments of myself, society, law, and heaven are equally ambiguous. The driving force of this novel is the relentless gaze toward the judge of an eternally ongoing trial.> – Cheong In-ha
The embarrassingly grand tributes to ‘Evening Bell’ came from people who didn’t know what ‘Evening Bell’ really was.
Following those tributes, Ahn Joo-hee read through countless online reviews layered on top of each other.
-Abortion is a sin? That’s such a simplistic view, like something only a naive child would believe. Really disappointed, Moon In.
-Typical of those born-again Christians, bringing up the Bible verse that says women who abort should be stoned to death, ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ disgusting, I’m done with this.
-Where in the book does it say abortion is a sin? Did you even read it properly before saying that?
-Sigh… did he really have to release a book like this during election season…
-The very idea of showing a woman who’s experienced abortion an illusion of a baby’s corpse-like figure is just too violent. This crosses the line.
-Do these moron bastards really not know the difference between fiction and reality?
-Here comes the Moon In fan club again ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ tell Baekhak Publishing’s comment trolls to give it a rest. We’re not allowed to criticize a shitty book now?
-The abortion depicted in ‘Evening Bell’ isn’t a crime but more like a hardship from the past,,, if you actually read it properly, you’d know it’s not really related to social discourse.
-Wow, the news is already going nuts over it.
Despite all the heated debates surrounding ‘Evening Bell’, the real image of Moon In was nowhere to be seen.
Everyone interpreted Moon In and ‘Evening Bell’ however they wanted, based on their own needs.
To Ahn Joo-hee, ‘Evening Bell’ was an irritating novel that secured bestseller status through corporate promotion. To someone else, it was an insult to women’s rights. To another, it was one of the greatest masterpieces of their life. And to yet another, it was a decent piece of kindling ahead of the election.
Not long ago, a genius boy who had won the Hugo Award was suddenly caught in the whirlwind of public opinion, and it was an interesting issue. ‘Evening Bell’ too was being swept up in that current, consumed sensationally and aimlessly drifting about.
All in all, it was the same as it had always been.
Ordinarily, Ahn Joo-hee would have satisfied her dark desires by leaving a malicious comment online like, <I knew it from the moment he rigged the Hugo Award, Moon In is only hype tsk tsk>.
Because things like that were all just… a kind of ‘game’ from the beginning.
It wasn’t like the malicious comment would reach Moon In himself, and even if it did, it wouldn’t really mean anything. It was just a light prank to vent feelings for a moment.
But Ahn Joo-hee couldn’t do it.
At least this time, she couldn’t.
Instead of joining in on the latest issue burning through the literary world, Ahn Joo-hee calmly stared at the cover of ‘Evening Bell’ in her hand.
And beyond that, she quietly gazed at the novel itself, and even deeper, at the novelist called “Moon In” who lay beyond it.
“……”
The boy was in a burger joint with a good view of the sunset.
***
“Min-ha is me, and the baby is literature.”
Ahn Joo-hee, a two-time student council president and an established political figure, belonged to the highest social class of the student society in Ansan, Gyeonggi-do.
Ahn Joo-hee, a promising talent in the literary world, the pride of her school, and the only daughter of a wealthy family, didn’t need to hang out with delinquents to get her hands on cigarettes.
This is a world where anyone can buy drugs if they want to. So how hard could it be to get cigarettes?
Adolescents naturally harbor a vague romanticism about smoking, and for Ahn Joo-hee, who lived intoxicated by her artistic self and sense of superiority, picking up cigarettes wasn’t all that strange.
Even that had been quite a while ago now, so she had learned to smoke with a fairly convincing posture. One day, she saw the novelist Moon In, whom she had long admired, sniffing around cigarette butts on a park path.
At the very least, as a smoker, Ahn Joo-hee felt the pleasure of being superior to Moon In, and she thought maybe she had caught him at a weak point. Pushing one step further, she considered the idea of getting closer to Moon In through cigarettes and possibly even making him her boyfriend, so she invited him to dinner.
And Moon In came to a hamburger joint.
Annoyed, Ahn Joo-hee began venting all her frustration by cursing out ‘Evening Bell’, which, of course, led to a string of literary criticisms toward the novel.
What the hell was he thinking when he wrote that kind of crap?
Then Moon In answered.
Ahn Joo-hee couldn’t accept that light response right away.
She couldn’t believe her ears and asked again.
“…What?”
Moon In, chewing his burger leisurely, swallowed his food and repeated his answer calmly.
“Min-ha is me, and the baby is literature.”
“Wait, wait, what does that even mean?”
“More precisely, it’s the literature of my past.”
“Saying it like that doesn’t help! Explain it in more detail!”
Though it was nearly a command, Ahn Joo-hee, caught in the throes of literary excitement, couldn’t bother to mind her tone.
Fortunately, Moon In wasn’t the kind of person who cared about tone, and he still remembered that Ahn Joo-hee had been a fairly good writer in a past life.
“Sigh…”
So Moon In began to speak.
“For me, literature was a vent for sadness.”
“Huh?”
“Sadness from being born an orphan, sadness from being bullied by others, it was my struggle to process that.”
Moon In rolled up the wrapper of his finished hamburger and placed it at the corner of the tray.
Then he wiped his mouth with a napkin and took a sip of cola to cleanse his palate.
At last, he slumped into his chair and let out a long, deep sigh.
“Sigh…”
For some reason, in that sigh, Ahn Joo-hee felt something more grown-up than the cigarettes she puffed away at.
In the hamburger joint where the sunset spilled through the window, even though his hands were dirty with hamburger sauce and fries, the Moon In before her now looked more mature than any version of him she had seen before.
“I never wrote stories to please others, only to vent my own sorrow…”
Ahn Joo-hee couldn’t interject with her usual biting comments in front of Moon In as he opened up about his struggles.
She didn’t know what kind of novels made others happy, nor did she understand what kind of writing was meant to lament sorrow.
She was just a child who only knew how to write stories that would please the judges’ tastes. For someone like her to open her mouth now, Moon In was speaking of something too far beyond her reach.
“I tried to move forward, to write about the world instead of myself… but all I realized was that I couldn’t escape my past.”
“……”
“So this time, I wrote a story that looked into that past.”
At that very moment, Ahn Joo-hee realized.
“Ah.”
She was now facing the literature of the ‘real’ Moon In, something no one else in the world knew.
*****
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