Preface to the Korean Edition 7

Part 1, Chapter 13
Part 2 145
Part 3 261
Part 4, 315
Part 5 481

Commentary on the work 582
Author's Chronology 593

“History focuses only on the results, not on the means.

Just like when people see great structures like the Great Wall of China or the pyramids of Egypt,
It's like you can't see the countless bones that lie behind the architecture.

▶ “It fuses hallucinatory realism with folk oral literature, history, and the contemporary era.”
―Reasons for selection for the Nobel Prize in Literature
▶ 『Frog』 shows a passionate love for humanity while pursuing the essence of life.

―Mao Dun Literature Award Selection Committee
▶ A bold novel that deals with the most sensitive topic for Chinese people.
China Daily

The most pressing issue in modern China: childbirth.

Mo Yan's work "Frog" caused a huge stir by raising the issue of family planning, a hot potato in modern China.
When the population, which was approximately 541 million around the time of the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, exceeded 800 million in 1969, the anxious Chinese government began to pressure local officials to lower the "birth index" unconditionally, with radical slogans such as "Even if blood flows like a river, excess births cannot be permitted." As a result of this forced enforcement, side effects began to appear all over China.
In particular, issues related to bioethics have arisen, such as forcibly performing abortions on pregnant women who violated their family planning.
Many girls were left as 'children of darkness' without being registered in the family register, which became a social problem.
Mo Yan, who won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature and was praised for creating “hallucinatory realism” based on Chinese folk culture, uses the frog totem, a symbol of fertility, as a motif in “Frog,” praising the vitality of the people who live and breathe tenaciously even in the historical currents that legally restrict the birth of life in the name of economic development.

“I decided to look straight at people and write.”
―Mo Yan, the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature

Mo Yan, whose pen name means "I only write, I don't speak," emerged as a world-renowned writer when Zhang Yimou's film "Red Sorghum," adapted from his 1986 novel "Red Sorghum," won the Golden Bear at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival.
Since his debut, he has written novels mainly based on his hometown of Gaomi County, Shandong Province, and is therefore sometimes categorized as a local novelist or a novelist who delves into his roots. However, he is well known as a writer of the avant-garde literary movement, influenced by Western modernism, which began to resurface in 1985.
His masterpiece, "Frog," also maximized its literary effect by incorporating the issues of planned family planning into a unique format that combines letters, a novel, and a play.

The unchanging theme of Mo Yan's novels is 'humanity'.
In the preface to the Korean edition, he stated, “The most important thing in writing a novel is to write about people,” and “I decided to ‘write by looking straight at people.’”
Although it deals with the specific event of family planning, Mo Yan's interest lies in the human being caught up in the historical storm.
Mo Yan focuses on the various side effects of violent population policies, meticulously depicting the conflicts and reconciliations between characters in complex situations where it is difficult to distinguish between perpetrators and victims.


/“I don’t blame my aunt.
I don't think it's my aunt's fault.
These days, my aunt often repents that she has blood on her hands.
But that was history.
History focuses only on results, not on the means.
Just as when people look at great structures like the Great Wall of China or the pyramids of Egypt, they fail to see the countless skeletons that lie behind them.” - From the text/

A novel that combines novels, letters, and plays

"Frog" is formally an autobiographical first-person novel, but the actual protagonist is his aunt. Although it is a novel, it consists of five long letters sent by Kedo to the recipient, Yoshito Sugitani.
Also, the last fifth letter contains a nine-act script.

Although it is clearly a letter in form, the content reads like a novel, and although it may be considered a novel, it is clearly a letter, as the author himself has stated.
If it's a letter, there would naturally be a sender and a recipient, but even if the sender is the author himself, it is not clear who Yoshihito Sugiya, who is listed as the recipient, is.
Since the author mentions Japanese Nobel Prize-winning writer Kenzaburo Oe in the preface, it is possible to speculate that the recipient may be him, but Mo Yan denies this.

In the letter, he promises to write a play based on his aunt's life.
However, the script contains the ending of the entire novel instead of the aunt's story, and the script for the television series appears in Act 8.
The author said this about why he chose this new format:

/“I created a new form that combined epistolary and dramatic elements in the composition of the novel.
(Omitted) At the same time, the way fiction and truth alternate and the kind of alienating effect of ‘a play within a play’ will greatly expand the narrative space of the novel, making it richer and more ambiguous.” /

In other words, through this avant-garde attempt, Mo Yan prevented "Frog" from becoming a reportage or non-fiction, even though it was based on actual history. He combined the realism of letters with the fictionality of a novel to create three-dimensional, living, breathing characters within it.
His literary motto of "facing social reality head-on and writing while looking straight at people" can be seen as embodied in the form of his writing.