Bae Suah

A seductive, disorienting, and wholly original story about parallel lives, unfolding over a day and a night in the sweltering heat of Seoul's summer. For two years, 28-year-old Kim Ayami has worked at Seoul's only audio theatre for the blind. But Ayami has just been made redundant, and thinking about the future feels like staring into the unknown. Open to anything, Ayami spends a night in the company of her former boss, searching for a mutual friend who has disappeared, and the following day looking after a visiting poet who turns out to be not what he seems. Walking the streets of the city with each man in turn, Ayami talks about art, love and the inaccessible country to the north. But in the sweltering heat of Seoul at the height of the summer, order gives way to chaos and the edges of reality start to fray, with Ayami becoming an unwitting guide to its increasingly tangled threads. For readers of Han Kang's The Vegetarian and Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream, Untold Night and Day asks whether more than one version of ourselves can exist at once – and shows why Bae Suah is considered one of the boldest and most important voices in Korean literature today.

"Bae Suah offers the chance to un-know—to see the every-day afresh and be defamiliarized with what we believe we know—which is no small offering."—Music & Literature The meeting between a group of emigrants and a mysterious, wandering actress in an empty train station sets the stage for Recitation, a fragmentary yet lyrical meditation on language, travel, and memory by South Korea's most prominent contemporary female author. As the actress recounts the fascinating story of her stateless existence, an unreliable narrator and the interruptions of her audience challenge traditional notions of storytelling and identity.

A nameless narrator passes through her life, searching for meaning and connection in experiences she barely feels. For her, time and identity blur, and all action is reaction. She can’t quite understand what motivates others to take life seriously enough to focus on anything—for her existence is a loosely woven tapestry of fleeting concepts. From losing her virginity to mindless jobs and a splintered, unsupportive family, the lessons learned have less to do with the reality we all share and more to do with the truth of the imagination, which is where the narrator focuses to discover herself.

This story was originally published in Day One, a weekly literary journal dedicated to short fiction and poetry from emerging writers. Award-winning Korean writer Bae Suah tells the story of a young woman in search of meaning as she considers her fate in modern Seoul. For this aspiring artist, there seems to be no escape from life’s monotony. After leaving her family under the pretense of having fallen in love, she resigns herself to a solitary life rather than succumb to the relentless cultural pressure she feels to exchange her freedom for marriage. Numb to sex and unmoved by love, she begins to lose her grip on reality as those around her fall short of their own aspirations. Confused about the interplay between past and present and unsure of her own desire to live into the future, Highway with Green Apples is a surreal and mesmerizing tale of a young life slowly unraveling.