Reviews with content warning for Rape - The End of August

The End of August begins and ends with script-like sections that describe a funeral gut (ritual) where the voices of Yu Miri’s ancestors speak through the mudangs leading the gut to offer to her the threads of the story we are about to hear. The spirits of these ancestors are restless, having left this world in troubled ways - Yu Miri’s grandfather Lee Woo-Cheol lived through the Japanese occupation of Korea, the Second World War, and the Korean War eventually fleeing to Japan where Yu Miri has lived all her life.

Yu Miri is herself a character in this book based on her family’s history and in another kind of divining ritual she takes up long distance running in order to connect with Lee Woo-cheol. Like many families that have undergone extreme trauma the actual facts of what happened in the past are buried along with the dead, those affected refusing to speak about what happened. The only way Yu Miri can attempt to understand the repercussions of trauma that the younger generations are left to deal with is writing (and running) through this.

The running sections are punctuated throughout out by a repeated ‘in-hale ex-hale’, the rhythm of breathing, pacing the way the thoughts tumble out in this semi-meditative state. This type of passage repeats at the start and end of the book along with the gut, and it also appears frequently as a way of letting us into Lee Woo-cheol and his brother Lee Woo-gun’s inner thoughts. Running is both a way to connect and a way to escape.

It’s not just the sound of breathing that punctuates the book, Yu Miri’s writing is rich with all sorts of onomatopoeic and mimetic words that describe the sounds of Miryang, it’s river, insects, plant life and weather. A sense of place is conveyed so effectively and helps us get a sense of how tied to Miryang many of the characters are and what that means for their sense of identity while living under Japanese occupation. The book is long but zooms in and out of details, sometimes moving forward at a rapid pace then settling for a while with one character.

The frequent use of Korean language throughout is also really important for this and Morgan Giles has done a really excellent job of translating this book ensuring that we are immersed in the feel of the Korean language and the mimetic words, leaving them untranslated as in the original. Obviously there is additional resonance I would guess in the original Japanese, written as it is in the language of the coloniser. This book is an incredible piece of writing and I am endlessly grateful to Morgan Giles’s commitment to translating this one for an English speaking audience, it was so amazing to hear both Morgan Giles and Yu Miri speak about this book in Manchester last year and hear about the writing process and Giles’s passion for this story. So thankful I got to read this one! So much more I could say about this but I’ll leave it there, hugely recommend it. (Please check the content warnings if you need to - obviously there is a lot of very traumatic stuff covered.)

Content Warnings

leeuh1997's review against another edition

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I hard very hard time understanding the book and getting into the flow. I felt like I was going to be struggling throughout the whole book and it seemed too long to continue struggling like I was. I also read some bad reviews of the book that deterred me from reading further.

Content Warnings

annreadsabook's review

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Yu Miri’s The End of August is a deeply intimate yet sweeping exploration of family, nationality, resistance, and dreams deferred. We are introduced, through a contemporary character named after the author herself, to a young Korean boy who loves running and has his heart set on running at the Olympics, but is forced to navigate the harsh realities of life under Japanese occupation. Over time, the narrative branches out to consider the lives of his relatives and others in his community, who contend with daily life set against the backdrop of war and colonization.

I loved Yu’s exploration of the significance of names—we see multiple characters muse over what it means to be called certain names or to shrug off certain names, and what it means for Japanese colonizers to force foreign names upon people who hold their family names so dearly. And there is the aspect of local and national mythology that I found so intriguing—this idea that the spirit of a community can bear witness to the locale’s struggles. There is also a lot to be said about the role of girlhood and womanhood in this book as well—the embodied spirit of Miryang is the soul of a young girl who died horrifically but appears unthreateningly (and often soothingly) to those in distress.

The writing style in this book, as I have mentioned previously, is quite unconventional and idiosyncratic, and it requires a heightened attention to the words on the page—there are points of the book that will require your full attention for you to understand what’s happening. But, with that being said, I think the payoff is tremendous, even in a book clocking in at over 700 pages. Yu’s writing in this book helps the reader delve further into the psyche of each of the characters, highlighting the various ways in which life, love, desire, and struggle unfold for each of them.

If you’re looking for a chunky historical fiction, and especially if you loved Pachinko but were looking for a deeper exploration of Japanese colonization on the Korean peninsula (as opposed to a primary focus on Zainichi Koreans), I would highly recommend this book!

Please note that this book broaches heavy themes including colonization, war, violence, r4pe (specifically, as pertaining to Korean comfort women), grief, and child loss.

Thank you so much to Riverhead for the gifted ARC!

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