River of Fire is only the second book of literary fiction by the brilliant South Korean author O Chŏng-hŭi to be translated into English. This collection of her writing, translated with great artistry by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, gives a selection of her short stories from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Attractively produced by the East Asian literature series at Columbia University Press, the book also contains an afterword by the translators that serves as a useful introduction to this extraordinarily clever and subtle writer. Despite having received several of South Korea's most prestigious literary awards, O Chŏng-hŭi was marginal to the streams of political writing that dominated fiction in this time. Her recent reevaluation as one of the grandes dames of Korean fiction makes this collection all the more welcome.

Although a writer with great appeal to women, O Chŏng-hŭi does not fit into the publisher's category of “women's fiction.” In One Spring Day the relations between the sexes are characterized by deep wellsprings of mutual contempt. The civil war, which she lived through as a child, flits in and out of these stories. In the author's first published story, The Toyshop Woman, included in this anthology, the adolescent narrator seesaws between self-hatred and a fierce drive for pleasure. Here we have something of a template for one of O Chŏng-hŭi's recurring themes: from domestic wreckage a girl or woman ventures furtively into the world. The Release is about two widows, mother and daughter, unable to communicate their grief. Instead an emotional prosthetic is used: trapped fish are released into the river to escape a stupid death. In this and other stories the author shares with us her own sympathy for her characters' prosthetics: the cigarettes, wheelchairs, and bottles of Coke that propel her plots and release her characters' tension. If she displays sympathy for her characters, it is immediately leavened by the cold, acute observations of someone determined to reach for emotional truth. Her critiques, when they arrive, are stunning. In Lake Paro a community of Korean graduate students studying in America illustrate O Chŏng-hŭi's mistrust of the assumed righteousness of dissidents and exiles in this era (the story was published in 1989). The narrator's husband is a social science teacher sacked for improper views who moves his family to America. He is a victim of the regime but also a “timid malcontent” according to his wife, who is grappling with her own ambition to be that “useless thing,” a writer. O Chŏng-hŭi subjects the narrator to the same devastating observations that all her characters receive. But the stakes are higher in Lake Paro: her critique of actors, all actors trying to effect change, alerts us as to why her reputation dipped in esteem in these years of political turmoil.

This same eviscerating critique, this intolerance of romance, is also what makes O Chŏng-hŭi's writing so refreshing. My favorite O Chŏng-hŭi story, Yahoe (The party), not included in this collection but available online, is a scorching read. The drunk and vomiting young mother at the academic party is not a side character but the narrator herself, our guide through the soirees of upper middle-class Seoul. Part of O Chŏng-hŭi's longevity is this skill she has at ruthlessly skimming away the facades of all actors, narrator (and reader) included. She presents a world with no moral anchor, no redemptive arc, and no refuge in an imagined self.

In the title story River of Fire, the narrator details the layers of history and destruction that have gone into building the modern Seoul. Horror stories of massacres of refugees in the war are replaced by new atrocities of girls drowning their newborn babies in the Han River. The narrator's cold, fatalistic judgment on these events, as well as the early death of her own child, contrasts jarringly with her husband's urgent passion for arson. In this story favorite occupations of O Chŏng-hŭi's female narrators make their appearance: cigarettes, liquor, and a fondness for city strolls by night. It is part of O Chŏng-hŭi's virtuosity that she can make a city catch fire with such quiet and menacing assurance.

This anthology contains more stories that display O Chŏng-hŭi's range and originality. Fireworks, about three generations of a village family from the end of colonial rule until the early 1980s, conveys a large historical narrative through intimate first-person accounts of childhood abandonment, sexual violence, banal patriotism, and the ideological casualties of division. The anthology's closing story, The Old Well, has a middle-aged housewife retreat to her apartment in the hills to spend time with the passionate ghosts of her past. This is a splendid book for undergraduate and graduate students of East Asian literature and all lovers of fiction, and is highly recommended.