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Bae Suah (author), Deborah Smith (translator), Untold Night and Day, Jonathan Cape, 2020. 155 pgs.

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (1897-1898) is Paul Gauguin’s largest painting. These questions are used as the title of an amateur photography exhibition in Bae Suah’s phantasmagorical Untold Night and Day (hereafter Untold); they are also drawn verbatim from Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, a Persian novel that is referenced throughout Untold and additionally lends some of its twisting, unstable narrative techniques to Bae’s tale. In the novel’s search for answers, identities of characters shift; life stories are interpolated. Past and present, dream and reality, night and day—these conflicting dichotomies, in the world of Untold, can be experienced simultaneously.

Such is the environment that Ayami, Untold’s apparent protagonist, finds herself in. In a city whose “hidden name” is “secret”, Ayami is an actress who has put her career on pause, the sole employee of an audio theatre about to close down, and on the verge of taking a temporary interpretation job for a visiting novelist—that these are all descriptions of liminality and transit is no mistake. We can’t be sure if Ayami is a single, discernible character, not when a long, detailed description of her appearance is used to intermittently to describe many other female characters. The exact same phrasing about her clothes, shoes, and sunken eyes are repeated throughout the book, suggesting to the reader the same phenomenon while dreaming, when one must recite something important to oneself in order to remember, lest one forget and lose hold of it entirely. Is Ayami all of these girls and women, or none of them? Self is a concept that, in Bae’s deft hands, becomes thick, slurry, vague. Facts get moved around and already-established chronologies are rearranged like a tangram to form new pictures. Most notably, the haze of heat weighs heavily over the entire landscape. Deborah Smith, who had previously translated the equally uncanny The Vegetarian, adeptly renders the strangeness of Untold’s atmosphere into English. In one my favourite passages, she writes, “In dreams Ayami would clutch a huge parrot to her breast, and in reality, she would crawl into a non-existent bathtub brimming with cold water and fall asleep.” One line is suffused with iterations of contradiction, pulling the reader in and out of a stable image while still maintaining the same, rhythmic tone.

What Bae and Smith achieve with their precision in language is an uneasy atmosphere that hangs like heavy heat over Untold. The city named “secret” is draped in malaise, not so much of dread and despair, but rather the illness of ennui. Its residents circle around each other, desiring connection but remaining isolated and lonely. Untold’s surrealism is not just for purposes of destabilising the reader—it touches on the uncomfortable alienation of modern life, particularly in Korea. In Smith’s translator’s note at the end of the book, she mentions that Bae was criticised for the “un-Korean” quality of her work, and yet, as Smith demonstrates, with enough context, the extent to which Untold speaks about the current Korea unfolds. In one time-warping passage, Bae writes, “Ayami was her future self or her past self. And she was both, existing at the same time… That was the secret of night and day existing simultaneously.” The city in Untold reminds Smith of the Seoul of the 70s and 80s that she remembers, a place now disappearing to gentrification. And modern Korea still remains halved by an unresolved war, one that looms over all its citizens with a charged danger. A present where past and future reside. Smith asks of this impossible stasis, “When is peace hazardous?”

Even in the confusing and tragic muck of their realities, the characters in Untold attempt to make sense of their lives. Capitalism continues undeterred; Ayami’s current boss, the director of the audio theatre, tries to set Ayami on the path of a practical job, so that she doesn’t join him in “the category of invisible people… people who can’t be successful, who can’t convince others”. Even though Untold was published in 2013, Ayami’s situation is disturbingly relevant to our modern tenuous job market. The search for meaning and fulfillment in a society that treats us as tools, cogs, and products is often pursued through art—but as Bae demonstrates, art is also a tool of artifice and performance. Ayami, herself an actress, is reiterated again and again in the image of different women: a poet-woman, a blind girl wearing a hanbok, her missing German-language teacher Yeoni. And when the visiting writer Wolfi attends the amateur photography exhibit, he notes that “every photograph is a unique proof of identity, firmly declaring that human beings are ghosts”. Yet the one whose photography is on display, the poet Kim Cheol-seok, is someone the director claims also “never once managed to convince another person of anything”. There is a sense here that, despite our best efforts to make ourselves permanent, the project is futile. We all exist at the edge of impermanence, whether by the knife of capitalism, war, nature, or fate itself.

Far from devaluing art, however, Untold feels like a celebration of it. Bae’s characters continue to love and make art, in their own ways, in the face of effacing. She is able to tread the unique balance between emotional enlightenment and quiet devastation, such that when you reach the end of its short read, you feel as though you’ve just woken from an endless dream. You are left grasping, with each of her characters, not for the meaning of life but the presence of soul, something truer and deeper than our conscious world can ever perceive.

How to cite: Wu, Jonah. “At the Edge of Impermanence: Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 23 Mar. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/03/23/untold.

Jonah Wu is a queer and trans Chinese American writer whose politics are oriented against imperialism, colonialism, and genocide, and he believes that Palestine will be free. Currently, they are Assistant Fiction Editor at ANMLY and Editor-in-Chief at eggplant tears. They are a three-time Pushcart nominee and winner of Brave New Weird: The Best New Weird Horror of 2022. Find his work in Longleaf Review, beestung, Jellyfish Review, Bright Wall/Dark Room, The Seventh Wave, smoke and mold, and the Los Suelos anthology. In cyberspace, he is @rabblerouses.

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