True _007
That Friend _043
Double Writer Chorong _071
When a woman takes the subway _109
A Night Without Tears _153
Murderers' Grave _181
Walk with your knees together _215
The Adventures of Aunt Sand, Mok-gyeong, and Mu-gyeong _273

Commentary | A Perspective on Revolution _313
Jeon Seung-min (literary critic)

Author's Note _349

A novel with a sharp humor that criticizes the ills of our society and culture.

"Hagin" and "That Friend," which are the starting points of Im Sang's novels, are a series of works featuring the husband "Kim" and his wife "Gyu," a couple from the 86 generation who devoted themselves to the student movement, and their friend "Ji-gyeong."
In "Hagin," the narrator, Kim, believes that his daughter, Bominarae, is less intellectually capable than his friends' children, and sends her to study abroad in the United States in order to somehow get her into a good university, but encounters an unexpected situation.
In the process, the latent academic elitism and materialism within 'Kim', a member of the student activist generation, the so-called 'educated generation', rise to the surface.
In this way, "Hagin" is a powerful black comedy that makes people laugh by poking fun at the moral fallacies of characters who appear to be upright on the outside.

If "Hagin" is told through the voice of the male speaker "Kim," "That Friend" is told through the voice of the female speaker "Gyu."
'Gyu' finds out that 'Ji-kyung', a member of the group she goes out with her husband, is having an affair with her husband, 'Kim'.
The novel then compellingly unfolds how 'Gyu', as a fellow woman, tries to view and understand 'Ji-gyeong' and her life.
"That Friend" is a novel with a unique epilogue that challenges the existing male-oriented perspective of student movement literature and symbolizes women's solidarity.

The title piece, "Double Writer Chorong," depicts the plight of a prominent novelist, Chorong, who finds herself in trouble when someone distributes a work she wrote during her early days on the Internet without permission.
Although both works dealt with the same female victim of illegal filming, in her debut work she focused entirely on the inner character of the character, while in her practice work she easily reconciled the victim and the perpetrator, leading to criticism from many who found this duplicity unacceptable. As a result, 'Chorong' was instantly branded as a deceptive writer.
However, as winners of writing contests across the country using the name "Chorong" began to appear one after another, "Chorong," who was considered deserving of burial in the literary world, paradoxically began to dominate the literary world as a large number of anonymous writers.

"Dual Writer Chorong" delivers a satirical catharsis in which 'Chorong', who is in danger of not being able to exist under the name of a specific writer, survives by becoming everyone's name.
By doing so, it is a provocative work that criticizes the current cultural climate that attacks only the obscene aspects while ignoring the essence of the incident, and asks what is truly missing when examining the ethics of writing and representation.

"What kind of novel did Chorong write that people even call it evil? "Auntie's Burnt Pearl Sweater," once easily accessible online? Now difficult to read? Far from being evil, it's a conventional novel.
You will probably be disappointed if you read it.
“Even so, the reason the word ‘evil’ came out that day was not because the novel was evil, but because we were intoxicated by the word ‘evil.’” _Page 74

“The hard-boiled lady starts running.
She's getting faster and faster.
Become numb.
It becomes cruel.
“Become free.”

An indispensable feature of Im Sang's novel world is the feminist perspective that permeates the entire work.
"When a Woman Takes the Subway" is a work that exemplifies such characteristics.
In this novel, which experimentally dramatizes the anxiety and fear that 'Soojin' experiences on the subway, the theatrical monologue that 'Soojin' delivers while splitting into Face I and Face II creates a strange sense of unfamiliarity.
When we think about the misogynistic incidents that have occurred in Korean society in places like the subway, that unfamiliarity is actually a realistic fear and sense of anxiety that any woman who has used the subway has felt at least once.

"The Murderers' Grave" is a work whose charm can be fully appreciated when read in conjunction with "When a Woman Takes the Subway."
This novel delivers a unique thrill by blurring the lines between reality and imagination through the premise that notorious murderers from both home and abroad are buried together in a virtual space called the "Murderers' Graveyard."
In particular, the novel's sharp sense of problem is revealed in the scene where the area where those who killed women are buried is divided into the area where those who killed men are buried, and Aileen Wuornos, who is buried in the area where she is considered "insignificant" (p. 188) among them "just because she is a woman" despite being a serial killer, is called out.
The murderers' repeated declaration, "Aim for a better place to rest!" (p. 189), seems to show, with bizarre imagination and satire, that there is a hierarchy and discrimination between the sexes in the way criminals are viewed.

"The Adventures of Aunt Sand, Mokgyeong, and Mu-gyeong" is the author's latest work, which keeps readers on the edge of their seats by showing the thriller aspect and feminist message of the previous two works in a unique plot. It is an adventure narrative in which an aunt takes sisters Mokgyeong and Mu-gyeong on a hunting trip into the mountains, and is a pseudo-mother-daughter narrative that perfectly depicts the solidarity that grows between an aunt and her niece.
This novel is also notable for its frame-structured narrative.
The past narratives of the three people, Gomo, Mok-gyeong, and Mu-gyeong, are ‘inside’, and another story surrounds the ‘outside’ of it.
This is a conversation between the author sisters discussing the artistic technique of the novel, “one room,” that is, “a winding path, using sentences sparingly, and then suddenly bursting with an epiphany” (p. 276).
The mutual influence that occurs as the story of the author sisters, located 'outside', passes through the 'inside' stories of Gomo, Mok-gyeong, and Mu-gyeong, disentangles the hierarchy of the text, which has only one center, and conveys the precious virtue of making us listen to the vivid voices of the characters hidden within the subtle folds of the story.

“Starting with your debut, don’t you think it’s strange that you’re a writer from now on, and that you’re really writing from this point on?”

"Walk with your knees together" is an autobiographical story that partially reflects the author's experience of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in Europe, which he went on at the urging of his parents to help him overcome puberty, as revealed in an interview included in the special booklet 'New Face Book' of 'Double Writer Chorong'.
The narrator, 'I', is a writer, and through the first-person plural narrator 'we', he revives the stories of teenage characters who display their lively desires between taboo sex and forced sex.
However, at the end of the work, a reader sends a letter of protest, sharply pointing out that female adolescents face greater dangers than male adolescents in an unfamiliar foreign land, and admitting that 'I' had ignored that difference, attaches the letter as the ending of the novel, thereby elevating the anonymous reader to the position of a 'writer' as well.

Including "Walk with Your Knees Together," there are many characters who write novels in Im Sang's novels.
There are characters who become writers, like 'Chorong' in 'Double Writer Chorong', but there are also characters who aspire to be writers, like 'Sujin' in 'A Night That Doesn't Shine'.
Sujin consistently sends her novels to K Publishing, which accepts submissions from unpublished authors, and the editor of K Publishing, Sujin's only reader, sends her a critically serious rejection email.
Just as Soojin devotes her time to writing novels every night, the editor also engages in the intense labor of reading.
What their time spent writing and reading symbolizes is that even if one is not recognized as a writer, if one continues to write, if what one writes reaches someone, the act itself is 'becoming a writer.'

“Starting with your debut, isn’t it strange that from now on you are a writer, and that from this writing onwards you are a real writer?” (Chorong, the Double Writer, pp. 81-82) Chorong’s question seems to offer a hint as it connects with the world of the work “A Night That Doesn’t Smell.”
If we think about the time when ‘studying’ and ‘reading’ were considered rights reserved for a certain class, generation, and gender, it seems that Im Sang’s novel dreams of a “revolution” (p. 73) that will break down the hierarchy of authority and ultimately bring about free liberation.
The will to remember those who, like 'Sujin', write in their own language somewhere, and the hope that they will not disappear into anonymity.
The author's pen name 'Unknown' seems to reflect his intention to be with such people.
We look forward to Im Sang's next novel, which will surprise us with even fresher works.

“If you think of literature as too big and grand, you become afraid of writing.
But the writing doesn't seem to be that scary.
At least for me.
It may be a childish expression, but I still think writing is like a friend to me” _From the author’s note

“All the arts that have led the times were already subversive in their time.
The power of the novel lies precisely in this literary imagination, the power to provoke and challenge readers, to place them in uncomfortable and awkward situations, and to drive them to live in their own time more than anyone else.
It is a revolutionary force.
I close the novel and realize.
This novel is exactly the one I've been waiting for.
I've really been waiting for a novel like this.
“Literature is freedom.” _ Jeon Seung-min (literary critic), commentary

Lastly, let's point out that the unusual titles characteristic of Im Sang novels provide food for thought by connecting them to the worldview of each work.
The word "그친구" ("그친구"), which is written by combining "그" and "친구," allows us to look into the other side of the way activist men address their wives, and the coined word "지하철하다" ("When a woman takes the subway"), which combines the object "subway" with the verb "하다," also makes us sense the anxiety and struggles of women in that place.
The title, which seems to question the relationship between the three characters by creating a strange rhythm like 'The Adventures of Aunt Sand, Mok-gyeong, and Mu-gyeong', is also unique.
The titles of Im Sang's novels, which remind us that novels are a branch of language art through their unique linguistic formats and, above all, hint at the novel's problematic awareness through them, truly foreshadow the birth of the adjective "Im Sang-sang."