Reading Colonial Korea through Fiction: The Ventriloquists is an English translation of a collection of essays written by Kim Chul, one of the most influential Korean scholars of Korean literature. The thirteen essays originally appeared between 2004 and 2007 in the journal Sae Kugŏ Saenghwal, published by the National Institute of Korean Language, and were later issued as a collection by Munhak kwa Chisŏngsa in 2008. This is the first volume of a newly launched project to introduce translated Korean academic works to English-language readers. It seems reasonable to publish Kim Chul's work, which demands the rethinking of commonly accepted approaches to Korean literature, as the opening volume in the series.

Because the essays in Reading Colonial Korea through Fiction initially were published at different times, they do not present one overarching argument, but rather are organically connected with each other in the sense that each chapter questions and complicates various sociocultural values we take for granted regarding Korean language and literature, colonialism, modernity, nationalism, and so forth. The topics of the essays encompass a truly wide range of cultural phenomena, such as train travel, modern law, eroticism, intermarriage between Japanese and Koreans, the postal system, culinary lifestyle, the gold rush of the 1930s, and Korea's liberation from Japanese rule in 1945.

The most central topic, however, is language, including the identities and values that language both entails and complicates. Language becomes the nexus of the diverse discussions the collection delves into. Five of the essays deal with the themes, respectively, of modernity in the Korean language, standard language versus dialect, the birth of the Korean language, English in relation to Korean language and literature, and the meanings and implications of writing in Japanese in colonial Korea. Kim deploys the term “ventriloquist” to explain the complex nature of bilingualism in colonial Korean authors’ writing in Japanese, the empire's language, including the case of pro-Japanese literature produced during the Pacific War. By changing the first Chinese character of the Korean word pokhwasulsa (ventriloquist) from 腹 (stomach) to 複 (double), Kim emphasizes the self-destructive but subversive power of colonial writing, which destabilizes the identity of the mother tongue and the boundaries of national literature.

Albeit short, this collection effectively represents Kim's persistent theoretical interventions in the field of Korean literature, which constantly remind readers of the need to avoid dichotomous or reductionist understandings of sociocultural phenomena, including the formation of “Korean language,” “Korean literature,” and colonial reality. By bracketing teleologically constructed, nationalistic interpretations of literary works, Kim successfully demonstrates the rich textuality of Korean literature and the multifaceted natures of colonialism and nationalism, which have often been flattened out.

Reading Colonial Korea through Fiction is also an invaluable resource because it represents the thoughtful work of multiple parties (or co-authors, in a way). In addition to Kim's preface and essays, the volume carries a foreword and an afterword, which undoubtedly help readers to a great extent in understanding the place of Kim's works in the field. The foreword, written by Theodore Yoo, one of the two editors of the translation series, effectively explicates the trajectories of Kim's personal and academic life in tandem with the sociopolitical climate of his era. An afterword, written by Theodore Hughes, eloquently explains the intellectual contexts for Kim's works and their implications. Another important contributor is the translator of this collection, Yoon Hye-Joon. Enormous effort is required to translate texts like Kim's essays that involve examples in multiple scripts and languages (such as hangul, Sino-Korean or classical Chinese, hiragana, katakana transcriptions of English, Korean transcriptions of Japanese and English, Korean readings of Sino-Japanese, Korean translations of Japanese words, and so forth) and nonstandard speech, including dialects. Readers of this volume will appreciate Yoon's admirable efforts in delivering the complexity of linguistic layers appearing in Korean texts from the late nineteenth century to the end of the colonial period.

One criticism of the book is that footnotes for each essay would have been helpful. The reasoning behind the lack of footnotes is well explained in Kim Chul's preface for the 2008 Korean publication: originally, the Korean essays were written to be accessible to “the common reader” (p. viii) and thus included a minimal number of footnotes. However, the readership changes when the text is translated. The reader of the Korean works might not have minded, but when they travel to English-speaking cultures, such as the United States where I teach Korean literature and culture, most readers who are scholars and students would find well-documented footnotes very helpful.

I have no doubt, though, that many scholars and students, not only in the fields of Korean literature and culture but also in East Asian studies, will greatly benefit from this collection. Reading Colonial Korea through Fiction is inspiring and informative, and it will surely stimulate further discussion of Korean literature and culture in the English-speaking realm, where the study of bilingual works and colonial writing has advanced significantly over the past decade.