★ Featuring "Vineyard Cemetery," the 2022 Kim Seung-ok Literary Award Grand Prize winner ★
A New Horizon in Pyun Hye-young's Career — A New Story Collection in 5 Years
How a Warm Pessimist Views Our Lives

Author Pyun Hye-young has returned to us with a new story collection, The Sociality of Birds — a charming and highly accomplished work that refreshes her literary world to date. This collection comes five years after Maybe Twenty Times (which captured life's unpredictability, like a grand mystery novel, in tense, clipped sentences), and contains eight short stories that reveal a noticeable shift from her previous work.

From the short story collection The Future of Adults, which captures the moment when a peaceful, quiet everyday suddenly transforms into a chilling place that tightens our hearts, suspense and mystery have been key keywords for exploring Pyun Hye-young's fictional universe. But with this new collection, we encounter a side of Pyun Hye-young we have never seen before. The judging commentary for "Vineyard Cemetery" — which won the 2022 Kim Seung-ok Literary Award Grand Prize with overwhelming support from the judges — reads: "It astonishingly reminds us that there are still many moments left for us to marvel at the writer Pyun Hye-young." This is another expression of that very new face.

The eight stories in The Sociality of Birds follow each character's desperate struggle to pass through the difficulties cast over their lives. Through these moments of striving, they depict the overwhelming weight of life that remains far from resolved, and yet the faint hope and friendship that cannot be given up — evoking a tenderness and sorrow that Pyun Hye-young's previous novels did not easily allow.

A significant feature of this collection is that the author's gaze toward her characters has begun to shine with warmth, humor, and composure. For a writer who has built a solid literary world, winning numerous domestic and international literary awards, The Sociality of Birds is less a radical departure than an expansion — broadening the embrace of her fiction while staying true to her established world.

Just as one can only gauge the depth of life by descending to the very bottom of pain, there is a glimmer of hope that can only be glimpsed through the eyes of pessimism. That is the sensibility of life that the warm pessimist Pyun Hye-young offers us — and it is why this book stands as a towering achievement even within the trajectory of a writer who has built an extraordinary career on works of unflagging quality.

Pyun Hye-young began her literary career in 2000 when her work won the Seoul Shinmun Spring Literary Contest. Her works include the short story collections Aoi Garden, Toward the Breeding Ground, Evening's Courtship, The Night Passes, Boy Is, and Maybe Twenty Times; the novels Ash and Red, Went to the Western Forest, The Law of Goodness, Hole, and Let the Dead; and the short-short story collection The Future of Adults.

She has received numerous literary awards, including the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, the Lee Hyo-seok Literary Award, the Today's Young Artist Award, the Dong-in Literary Award, the Yi Sang Literary Award, the Hyundai Literary Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Kim Yu-jeong Literary Award, the Grand Prize of the Kim Seung-ok Literary Award, and the 1st Young Writer Award.

She is currently a professor in the Department of Literary Creative Writing at Myongji University.

Life's young beginners, for whom luck rarely seems to follow —
and within that fragility, the friendship and movement of being alive that they cannot finally give up.

This story collection primarily depicts the stories of young people placed in socially, psychologically, and economically vulnerable positions.

The first story, "The Place We're Going," is an intriguing and original tale that shows just how far that vulnerability can drive a person. There is a woman who, driven to a dead end in life, believes that the only way to "live" is to carry out a "voluntary disappearance" — that is, to "evaporate." What she needs is the help of a person known as a "disappearance agent." That agent used to help people who desperately wanted to break away from their current lives to disappear from the world — by staging the disappearance of a cram-school instructor on his way home from work, or by disguising a car that had fallen in a forest as a traffic accident. But that was all a long time ago. The agent has now closed up shop and is clearing out the office. It is to this agent's office that the woman comes, confesses her situation, and says: "I don't want to die." (p. 26) The agent, who initially seems cynical and cold-hearted, finds himself "unable" to turn down the woman's proposal — and so the unexpected journey of the two, who plan an evaporation together, begins.

There is another pair who set out on the road together. "The Sociality of Birds" features two high school classmates who reunite after a long time. But their reunion is far from the heartwarming kind that most reunions bring — because the place where they meet again is the police station. The narrator, who has barely managed to land an internship at a pharmaceutical company's marketing team, keeps showing up to work even though there is almost no chance of being hired as a regular employee. The problem is that she is expected to attend every frequent company dinner without fail, and the expenses are always split equally. That day, the narrator goes to a bank ATM to withdraw money and sees a red wallet left on the machine. Even after some time passes, the owner does not return, and the narrator's bank balance is only about 110,000 won. Taking advantage of a moment when no one is watching, the narrator slips 30,000 won from the wallet. "It's not like not having that 30,000 won will ruin me right away. I'll just think of it as bad luck." (p. 56) Then, after being reported for "embezzlement of lost property" and arriving at the police station, the narrator realizes that she has fallen into a trap — because the reporter smirks and tells her that the wallet had not 30,000 won in it, but 1,000,000 won. And that reporter is none other than the narrator's high school classmate, "Shin-do." The two, reunited as suspect and victim, find themselves bound together by "debt" and begin an "inescapable" journey together. Where will that journey lead them?

The expression "the sociality of birds," which is also the title of the book, refers to how vulnerable characters stick together — like flocks of birds flying in V-formation across the sky — so as not to appear weak. Does this sociality, which one inevitably learns while living one's life, really only stem from the fragility of birds?

"Vineyard Cemetery" tells the story of four people who have been together since their days at a commercial high school through their early years in the workforce, having witnessed every moment of each other's frustration and struggle — and who are therefore eternal friends. Only one of the four went to university, and even she attended night school while working at a bank during the day — as if to show that their parents all had the simple mindset that "since things aren't easy, it's enough to get them through high school." Thus, these characters are forced to "adapt to the minimum future" (p. 82). Nevertheless, they constantly strive to expand even a little bit of their future possibilities, and "Vineyard Cemetery" writes down, with unwavering sentences and letter by letter, what kind of results that striving brings. And by the time we reach the end of the story, we find our eyes turning toward the society itself that created the sociality of birds.

As literary critic In A-yeong writes, "If naming the hidden pain of workers is the work of social movements, then giving a story to that pain might be the work of literature." (Afterword, "Saving the Lives That Survive," p. 259) In this sense, Pyun Hye-young's new collection is thickened by the stories of people who repeat their daily labor and live on within society — people for whom "livelihood and labor had never once been a laughing matter" ("Apartment," p. 154).

"There were many reasons to become cold toward life,
but the reason I didn't was because of that memory."

"She" in "The One Who Remains," who suffers from terrible pain from burns on her legs, thinks that "life surely wouldn't see it that way, but it has always taken more" (p. 230). What about "Jeong-seo" in "Sisters"? When her older sister — whom she had trusted and followed like a guardian — suddenly calls, Jeong-seo, rather than being greatly surprised, is certain that something serious has happened to her sister. That is because, for Jeong-seo, who grew up under oppressive and indifferent parents throughout her childhood, a "future that is not unhappy" is difficult to imagine — it is simply a natural flow of thought for her.

But surprisingly, The Sociality of Birds does not stop at stories of characters merely being pessimistic about or enduring the situations before them. In "Bath," the narrator constantly feels the pressure of sales performance and the harshness of corporate life, but through her father's death, she comes to learn a side of him she had never known before, and in doing so, gains a new perspective on labor and life. It is not to look at a manual coffee mill — once used during wartime when food was scarce to grind barley for soup — and say, "People are nothing much, just practical beings, always putting food and survival first." It is to readily exclaim with admiration: "But people are like that, aren't they? That's what makes them so amazing." (p. 187)

The narrator of "Green Sweater," who had experienced repeated failures in friendship and love and grown fearful of forming relationships, also watches as her mother and her mother's friends — who had once drifted apart — find the courage to come back together. Through them, she comes to accept in her heart that relationships do not have to be perfect from beginning to end; even if they go astray in the middle, they can be readjusted and mended. This overlaps with the advice given about knitting: "Don't be afraid to make mistakes in your knitting; if you're wrong, just knit it again, and if you mess up, unravel it." (p. 133) When her mother's friend holds her hand tightly and says to visit again, that touch reminds her of the hand her mother had held before she was taken to the emergency room — her mother who passed away after a long illness.

In this way, this story collection holds more life and death within a single hand than ever before. In lives where what was desired was ultimately not obtained — in lives where what was yearned for could not be reached — what is it that keeps us from feeling only sorrow? What takes our hand so that we do not grow cold toward life? That is the achievement that The Sociality of Birds has arduously reached, and it is the new face of Pyun Hye-young that we will remember for a long time.

"With its precise details, appropriate symbols, empathetic gaze, and deep resonance, this collection astonishingly tells us that there are still many moments left for us to marvel at the writer Pyun Hye-young." For "Vineyard Cemetery" — which can be called the author's retrospective response to our era, summarized by the words "exam meritocracy" and "academic-clan status society" — to be awarded a literary prize named after Kim Seung-ok, who was more sensitive than anyone to the shadows cast over the lives of today's young people, seems entirely fitting.

— From the Kim Seung-ok Literary Award judging commentary

"Our lives, even if not 'important,' can still be 'remarkable.' No, to put it more precisely, we can feel that life is 'remarkable' before we even argue whether it is 'important.'" If there is, within Pyun Hye-young's coolly designed and meticulously crafted fiction, a rare admiration for life, it does not come from profound ideas, grand words, or extraordinary individuals — it comes from trivial memories, daily labor, and ordinary people.

— In A-yeong (Literary Critic)