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Part 2_083
Part 3_153
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Part 5_295

Author's Note _339

"The Greater Power of Sorrow that Comforts and Embraces Grief" _ Oh Jeong-hee (novelist)

A story that came to me through my great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother.
Just as life is transmitted to me, can I, too, reach them now?
Just as countless past selves came together to create the present me
Will I, too, be able to meet countless past selves?

Jiyeon, 32 years old, packs up her life in Seoul and leaves for Heeryeong.
It was about a month after I divorced my cheating husband that I saw the job posting for a researcher at the Heeryeong Astronomical Observatory.
Jiyeon, who cannot easily recover from the shock of her husband's betrayal, decides to move as if running away.
Heeryeong, a small seaside town, is an unfamiliar place I have never been to except when I visited my grandmother's house when I was ten years old.

One weekend, while continuing her life in Heeryeong, spending time “unable to readily answer yes to the question, ‘Are things getting better?’” (page 15), Jiyeon meets an old woman on the hill on her way home.
He was a person who lived in the same apartment complex as Jiyeon and would always look happy whenever we ran into each other.
On a hill with a gentle breeze blowing and a view of the sea sparkling in the afternoon sunlight, the grandmother says something unexpected.


“Young lady, you look like my granddaughter.
I last saw him when he was ten.
“She’s my daughter’s daughter.”
After saying that, my grandmother looked at me quietly.
“My granddaughter’s name is Jiyeon, Lee Jiyeon.
“My daughter’s name is Gilmi-seon.”
I looked into my grandmother's face.
My grandmother was saying my mother's and my name.
(…)
We stood awkwardly on the hill, looking at each other.
A playful expression appeared on my grandmother's face, and I thought she had recognized me from the start.
"grandma."
Grandma nodded at my words.
“Long time no see.” (pp. 20-21)

For some reason, the relationship between the grandmother and the mother became estranged, and so the grandmother, whom Jiyeon had not seen for over twenty years, appears in front of her.
Jiyeon feels awkward and has difficulty reuniting with her grandmother, but she is also curious about the “faint friendship that underlies such feelings” (p. 23).
And Jiyeon, who visited her grandmother's house as a result of that meeting, talks to her grandmother in a cautious yet warm atmosphere and receives a photo.
In the photo, two women wearing white blouses and black skirts are smiling, one of whom bears a striking resemblance to Jiyeon.
The grandmother points to the woman and says.
This person is his mother.
Then, the story begins to unfold about how Jiyeon's great-grandmother, who was born the daughter of a Baekjeong in Samcheon, Hwanghae-do and lived a life of persecution, met her great-grandfather, the son of a commoner, and what kind of life she lived and came to come to Huiryeong.

Starting with that, 『Bright Night』 unfolds with the present-day story of Jiyeon continuing her new life in Heeryeong intersecting with the past story told by her grandmother.
What is special about this story format is that the story of the past is not told directly through the grandmother's mouth, but is reconstructed by Jiyeon based on what she heard from her grandmother.
In other words, it is a story that unfolds from the perspective of the person who is delaying the time span of nearly a hundred years, starting from the great-grandmother's story set in the 1930s and reaching the present day.
In this way, 『Bright Night』 moves back and forth between the two stories, bringing people from long ago who only existed in photographs and memories back to life in the present by portraying them as concrete figures.

“Love touched a heart that even insult or hurt could not touch.”
The origin of love discovered by tracing the trajectory that led me to it now

Contrary to her ex-husband's belief that "time is not a flowing river, but a frozen river" and that "the past, present, and future exist simultaneously" (p. 173), the story revived through Jiyeon's reconstruction is not fixed as a story of the past or present, but rather blends smoothly into each other's stories.
The scene where the great-grandmother, who was born the daughter of a butcher and was not welcomed by anyone, meets ‘Aunt Saebi’ and shares her friendship for the first time flows out of the 1930s and flows into the dark times of the present for Ji-yeon, and as the grandmother, who is nearing her eighties, goes through Ji-yeon’s story, she is not an old woman with deep wrinkles and difficulty bending over, but comes back to life as a gentle baby who “did not complain about what to eat and did not whine even when her baby teeth came in” (p. 74).
In this way, the characters are not reborn as fixed figures of the present, but as figures that contain numerous 'selves'.


And the fact that it is none other than the 'stories' that they tell each other that make this possible seems to confirm author Choi Eun-young's belief in and affection for the novel format.
As the grandmother says, “Because you listen to my story, Uncle Saebi lives that much longer” (page 81), the story of the past continues to be passed down to Jiyeon through her great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother, and the story that arrives after passing through many layers in this way brings about some kind of change in Jiyeon’s present life.
So, can we say “Bright Night” like this?
Eunyoung Choi's beautiful and sincere answer to the question of why some lives must be told to us through stories.
Choi Eun-young, with a deep faith in the inherent power of the novel, carefully takes each step forward, drawing the path of the heart flowing toward people she has never met.
The shape of the waterway that is completed the moment you close the book may be different for each person, but one thing is certain.
The water will flow to where even a little love is stored, “even if it is a place full of thorns” (p. 56).
Like the warmth that comes from touching a sun-warmed stone, the love that Choi Eun-young discovered and passed on to us is so warm and strong.


“The past two years have been the most difficult for me since becoming an adult.
For half of that time I couldn't write, and for the rest of the time I wrote "Bright Night."
“At that time, I didn’t seem to be a human being. I was like a water bag that would spill if someone touched it. Writing this novel was a process of me regaining my body and my mind and becoming a person.” _From the author’s note