Oh Jung-Hee :: “Wayfarer”

I have a weak spot for mysteries that offer an answer and leave me puzzling over the question. The final pages become a source of relief, not just resolution. Oh Jung-Hee’s “Wayfarer” works like this– and it is all the more formidable for its extreme brevity and emotional thrust.

The desolation faced by Hye-Ja– at the hands of her family, former colleagues, the Korean justice system, and prevailing ideas of mental health/rehabilitation– reminds me of Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark.

Lessing’s protagonist finds herself with some free time during her summer holidays. She makes a series of un-ladylike decisions that are particularly unbecoming of a married, middle-aged parent of adult children. Yet her responses seem intuitive– almost imperative. And as a result, the expectations she’s up against are implicitly condemned.

In “Wayfarer,” individual agency is much more problematic. Hye-Ja displays precious little of it, and yet she is dismissed for that “precious little” by a specific and conflicting set of cultural mores which cannot be easily dismissed. For reasons beyond Hye-Ja’s control, both action and inaction work against her. From the final pages:

What she had seen then was not the man’s face but her own nearly naked body. It was pure terror [...]. (80-81)

I don’t want to reveal too much about the context of this passage. But nothing else does such an efficient job of conveying what Hye-Ja is up against. The moment she is exposed, she is already damned. An outside party invades her sphere, but the circumstances are of little consequence. Once she considers herself, the damage is irreparable. Her decision to independently defend her sphere is ultimately what destroys it.

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