Park Wan-Suh (1931–) began her career in the early 1970s, relatively late in life, and soon became one of the most prolific, popular writers of the 1970s and 1980s. During these decades when the South Korean literary establishment was still heavily male dominated, Park made her mark as one of the few women writers on the scene, writing about women's lives and concerns and thus rewriting history from women's point of view. In the course of her long career, spanning forty years, she has produced close to twenty volumes of novels and numerous collections of short stories and essays. Park's works began to receive the full critical attention and reexamination they deserved when an emergent group of South Korean feminist literary critics and historians turned their attention to her large oeuvre in the 1990s. Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein's new translation, Who Ate Up All the Shinga? Park's best-selling novel from 1992, is an excellent choice that rounds out the canon of Park's works in English translation.

While Park's other works, most notably in “Mother's Stake, I,” also are set in the colonial period, the current translation indicates a significant shift in reconceptualizing the memory and legacy of Japanese colonization, not only in Park's literary world, but also in postliberation South Korean literature as a whole. If colonial rule remains an unobtrusive background, for example, in “Mother's Stake, I,” the memory of the occupation, insofar as it affected the everyday lives of colonized Koreans, takes the center stage in Who Ate Up All the Shinga? The autobiographical novel, beginning with the narrator's nostalgic recollection of her childhood in her rural hometown near Kaesŏng, moves temporally up all the way up to the outbreak of the Korean War. However, more than two-thirds of the novel is devoted to the memory of the late 1930s, the first half of the 1940s under the total mobilization policy during the Asia-Pacific War, and the withdrawal of the Japanese in 1945 and the immediate aftermath. The novel's representation of the memories of this period, both long suppressed and heavily appropriated for multiple ideological purposes in postliberation South Korea, is pared down, offering a portrait of the day-to-day lives of a family, straightforwardly and candidly.

Until very recently, the late colonial period in South Korean cultural productions of all kinds—scholarly, literary, and popular—tended to remain either a blank spot or a “dark period” of unrelenting exploitation and oppression of Koreans by Japanese. Starting in the mid-1990s, this paradigm began to change, giving way to a much more complex depiction of this era and a critical reexamination of Japanese colonial rule in general. Park's novel rewrites aspects of the lives of colonized Koreans during the late colonial period—those that would have been condemned simply as acts of “collaboration” in the earlier decades in South Korea—into a complex historical narrative of submission, compromise, and assimilation, on the one hand, and survival and resistance, on the other, under converging and conflicting pressures of the era.

Agreeing with a group of South Korean historians and literary critics who have set one of the most pressing tasks as that of reassessing the grand narrative of anticolonial nationalism of the authoritarian developmentalist era, I would argue that Park's novel contributes to this critical enterprise, in which resistance to Japanese colonialism in Korea can be conceptualized extranationally, transnationally, and subnationally. If the mythology of South Korean nationalism relied on misremembering and disremembering life under the Japanese rule, Who Ate Up All the Shinga? helps us take another important step toward a critical rethinking of the postcolonial history of South Korea.

Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is clearly a volume that should be added to the growing staple of works taught in Korean literature, culture, and history courses. The novel would also serve as an excellent example of Korean literature in Asian studies courses that deal with issues of colonialism, race, and the Asia-Pacific War. Most readers of Park in Korean readily would agree that she is one of the most difficult writers to translate because of her extreme facility in manipulating the most idiomatic of idiomatic expressions in the Korean language. Yu and Epstein's translation has met this challenge superbly and splendidly. The novel in English translation reads beautifully, as if we were listening to one of the familiar voices of Park's narrators in Korean. Epstein's introduction offers valuable answers to a series of key questions that the reader/teacher/student would ask. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? significantly expands the possibility of how we might think about and teach colonial and postcolonial Korea, and Asia more broadly, differently and otherwise.