She was a founding member of the company and a mainstay employee for decades. Now she’s in her 60s, and she faces being pushed out – rudely, by a jeering male junior. Termination is painful for professional assassins.
The female lead character of The Old Woman With The Knife could be any older woman in the workforce, or any Second Wave feminist.
It’s a cracking crime thriller. It’s also a social allegory asking us to consider the value of a life: why some lives are devalued, how value is contingent. How people are used. How people are thrown away.
This old woman wants to go out on her own terms. She might also want the experience of love, a sense that she has in some small way experienced tenderness, compassion, gratitude, and protected goodness. These are experiences never permitted her.
Reseng, the male lead character in The Plotters, is similarly caged in a dog eat dog reality. He exists only to carry out, to the letter, directions from mysterious Higher Ups. He’s a male assassin. He does have, or has had, people he’s cared for, but they get killed. That’s business.
A target tells Reseng, “A man ought to be able to choose a death that gives his life a dignified ending. Only those who truly walk their own path can choose their own death. But not me. I’ve been a slug my whole life, so I don’t deserve a dignified death.”
The Plotters is a tale of the worm turning. Reseng has never been permitted to write his own script. He believes – and he has evidence – that given the chance to turn his life around, a person will voluntarily return to the cage they were in. Reseng is a fatalist. He knows – he has evidence – death comes to everyone; he believes it doesn’t matter who kills us. But is it possible that the circumstances of our death can make our life meaningful?
The Plotters is set around a library filled with unread books. Every book is a script, and every script is a life. Who gets written, and who gets to write?
The Washington Post chose The Plotters as Best Thriller of the Year, presumably for 2018, the year the English translation by Sora Kim-Russell was published (in Korea, the novel was published in 2010). I love this book. I love both these books. The Old Woman With The Knife first appeared in 2013, English translation by Chi-young Kim in 2022.
I thought I was okay at decoding K-drama, but the 12-episode drama Hometown is the most enigmatic Korean TV product I’ve encountered.
Far from the most enjoyable. Far from the most engaging. But the most baffling, the one that kept me guessing – frustrated, barely hanging in there, but anxious (neurotically, physiologically) to see where it headed.
At first I thought its primary real-life referencing was to the 30 August 1987 cult mass suicide-murder in Yongjin, 30 miles south of Seoul, morphed with the Matsumoto sarin gas attack perpetrated in Japan 27 June 1994.
On Facebook I summarised the first two episodes of Hometown this way:
‘A nerve gas attack at a train station on the eve of the nation’s biggest family holiday. A cult. Killings. Madness. A disappearance.’
I noted the aesthetic of cinematic realism. I noted the serious actors. I noted there was nothing funny, cute or glamorous here (most K-drama serves it up).
As the drama unfolded, increasingly I was concerned by the presentation of the cult leader, “the Guru”. The degree of mind control he wielded went well beyond anything realist, well into the supernatural, demonic.
I worried why what I took to be his murderous instigations were mediated via technologies: videotapes, cassette tapes. (I thought it was the influence of the Japanese hit horror movie The Ring.)
I worried why the timeframes were opaque: sometimes we were in 1999 (the apocalyptic Y2K moment), sometimes in 1987, sometimes earlier, at an orphanage.
I noted that characters implied or claimed intimacy with other characters who did not seem to recall them.
I worried why the hallucinations some characters experienced shared common elements – notably, the traditional Korean vengeful ghost-maiden, the dead woman with tangled long black hair, sometimes hanging upside down, wearing white.
It all moved slowly and at some point fairly late in the drama I declared it irredeemable tosh.
I marvelled to my sister that everyone concerned – the actors, the cinematographer, the director – were working so hard to sell something so fundamentally nonsensical. Then I worried, why would they do that?
I think the last two episodes are key.
I reported back to Facebook:
‘Turns out to be about memory, forgetting and accountability. I think it’s a parable about the years of the dictatorship, the disappearances, tortures and deaths, and cultural amnesia.
‘[It’s] the bargain with the Devil where you sell your soul in exchange for having the memory of your sins erased. Moral: if you reject that bargain and face up to your sins, you might live through the pain of that knowledge and, eventually, atone.
‘I’m wrestling with the allegory in this drama (Hometown). The cult leader is wholly allegorical. He’s the Monster of repressed trauma, palliative amnesia. He’s the collective pact, the pact to not remember. The cop participated in torture and extra-judicial execution. The politician is a serial child molester who murders his daughter rather than have her denounce him. Parents who sold their children into exploitation. Loan sharks who take the ignorant and desperate for everything they’ve got.
‘What is “the memory of your sins” if not conscience? The allegory is also about secondary victims: the traumatised survivors, and how the pact to forget leaves them unseen and unheard, living dead. The drama says: for them to live, their pain must be acknowledged, their loss recognised.’
What I call “the traumatised survivors” are seen here often as the next generation(s), the scarred children of sins that pre-date their existence.
As I thought more about it, I came to see the anchoring references as being about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, a student protest that turned into a massacre. That’s almost certainly not all that’s going on here. This is a drama made not for the international market but for those in South Korea who remember, even when they might wish to forget. Media are channels for reactivation (“triggering”) and also obfuscation.
The Monster of repressed trauma, the cult leader, is the embodiment of intergenerational trauma. He has taken on the name of his murdered father. He experiences past/present/future as a compressed unity. Nothing can end. In his cosmos, there are only two options: Kill the one you love most, then kill yourself; or, Accept the illusionary balm of amnesia, and give yourself over to the Monster.
The Monster is beautiful, and charismatic. Can a demon also be an innocent? His counterpart (opposite) is surely the gangster loan shark, who resists killing what he loves, the pure core at the heart of his being: the sinner as saint.
Hometown uses the metaphor of children shut inside a small, pitch-black room. It ends exhorting words to the effect, ‘If you have a small, dark room inside you, open it to the light. Choose life [with its pain, don’t choose to numb].’
Children have an instinct for sweetness When young nectarines sprouted From the young nectarine tree My goblin sister and I ate them greedily All of them The fallen and the barely freed from budding They knifed our bellies What’s wrong with them My mother cried Meaning us, her children She was so helpless We were such shits Rolling round Like nectarine pits Suffering from surfeit Suffering for sweet
SPOILER ALERT: Don’t even think about reading this if spoilers bother you.
This may plod. I am sorting out my thoughts as I write.
I’m prompted to write by the posts I see online that purport to explain the final scene in Drive My Car.
The final scene shows the driver, Misaki Watari, shopping in a Korean supermarket, in Korea, addressing the check-out assistant in Korean language. She gets into a red car, the red car we recognise she’s been driving throughout the film, and she greets a golden dog, the golden dog I believe we met earlier in the narrative in the home of the Korean couple Yoon-a and Yoon-soo.
What is this Japanese woman from Hokkaido doing speaking Korean in Korea in possession of her client Mr Kafuko’s car and her colleagues’ dog?
The internet explainers: Misaki has been freed from her miserable past by her cathartic experiences with Mr Kafuko and his theatre troupe. She has moved to Korea and commenced a new life. (Mr Kafuko, similarly freed from his miserable past, has given her his car, emblematic of said past. Yoon-a and Yoon-soo have given her the dog to be her companion and have, presumably, supported Misaki in transplanting to Korea.)
It’s not a total no-no explanation. The theatre troupe has been workshopping a production of Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya, which, at one level, is about dealing with life coming to dead-ends. Though Chekhov didn’t offer his characters’ the option of acts beyond the final curtain: say, The Three Sisters move to Moscow.
Myself – and I am odd – view Drive My Car differently.
On the face of it, this is a film about a man grieving his wife’s death who can’t reconcile his wife’s proclaimed deep love for him with her sexual infidelity. So: a film about distinguishing authenticity from acting.
On another layer, this is a film about the genius of Chekhov: how to present the authentic small lives of relatively ordinary people as worthy of our focus.
Theatre as most of us know it in the West derives from classical Greek drama. Its purpose is carthasis – the purging of deep emotions. Its protagonists are the great and powerful. They fall due to their fatal flaws. Witnessing their fall stirs deep emotions in audiences. The purpose of drama – the purging of deep emotions.
Every character in Drive My Car is, or has been, an actor, except Misaki, the driver. Yes, Mr Kafuko’s wife Oto was a scriptwriter. But before that she had been an actor. Yes, Yoon-a was a dancer. But now she is an actor. Yes, Yoon-soo is a dramaturg. But he studied Noh (or was it Kabuki?) at a Japanese theatre school. There’s the theatre festival’s director. But I say all theatre administrators started out as would-be actors.
The driver, Misaki, has her on-stage correlative in Uncle Vanya in the character Sonya: a plain girl easy to overlook, to disregard. Sonya is the emotional centre of Chekhov’s play. She owns the final scene. The character of Sonya is played in Mr Kafuko’s production by Yoon-a, who is deaf, and communicates in Korean deaf sign language.
Mr Kafuko’s production of Uncle Vanya is multilingual, featuring actors from across Asia acting their parts in their native languages. In the earlier stages of the readings, the Japanese actors admit they find the foreign language passages boring, like listening to a mantra. All the actors find Mr Kafuko’s insistence on a lengthy lead-up just reading the text, without vocal emotion, without embodiment, frustrating. He tells them to “listen to the text”.
A multilingual production of a Russian classic suggests the text is universal, and that ‘hearing’ the text transcends words. Eventually the text is felt, at the level of deep emotions. Eventually, almost everyone can understand that feeling of life coming to an end during one’s life-time, or of life running out of life within its allocated limits.
This is the experience of Uncle Vanya. “If I live to 60 and I’m 47 now, how will I fill in the years?”
Sonya’s answer: We will endure. Then we’ll die, quietly.
There are several characters in Drive My Car who have ‘run out of life’. A young man’s life can have ‘ended’ prematurely as much as his older counterpart’s. We are all Vanya, eventually.
So personally I don’t think Misaki moved to Korea and began a new life.
Personally, I think the film director is revealing “Misaki” to be yet another actor, an actor in a fictional narrative purporting to be true life, that is true to life, but not real. “Sonya” in Uncle Vanya is presented as a simple, ordinary girl, yet is a theatrical construct brought to life by an actor and, as such, as much the performer as the histrionic beauty Yelena (a mask for another actor).
“Sonya” / “Misaki” is the antithesis of the great and the powerful, yet is an agent of catharsis. Because Chekhov taught us drama is not wholly the domain of the great and the powerful, the noisy and famous, but also the stories, in any language, of those who endure quietly. And drama translates to cinema.
Intelligent cinema, anyway.
Afternote: Drive My Car is based on a short story by Haruki Murakami from his collection Men Without Women (2014). Murakami explores the relations of fiction and actuality and acts of creating. The Korean film Burning (2018) is also based on a Murakami short story. One of the more interesting commentaries I read on Burning suggested the characters Ben and Hae-mi never exist in life but are imagined creations of the would-be writer Jong-soo. I recommend viewing Burning in tandem with Drive My Car. (The final sequences of Burning, where Jong-soo attempts to assert agency, are not part of Murakami’s narrative.)
In 1984 I wrote a poem I called ‘Tidal’ and submitted it to several publications simultaneously, as was my practice. (The odds against a poem being accepted were low and editorial decison-making was slow.) All four journals published it. How embarrassing.
‘Tidal’ was a love poem to my dad. My dad across that period spent hours fossicking on the rockpools at the local beach, looking for shards of willow-plate and fragments of other ceramics lost in C19th shipwrecks.
His pose bending over the rockpools reminded me of a framed print in his parents’ house, the house where he’d grown up, a famous Edwardian image of a woman beachcombing. (Dad named a later home ‘Beachcomber’.)
In ‘Tidal’, I combined that image with the image of my father seeking, seeking… and merged that with the image of his parents on their wedding day, his mother, Edie Gibson, looking young and lush. A Gibson girl.
Two years later, in 1986, I wrote ‘Father and Child’, a deliberate echo of ‘Tidal’, this time the love between father and daughter rather than son and mother. Both have an erotic charge in the last line, intentionally evoked by reference to touch.
‘Father and Child’ was written as an technical exercise, a conscious attempt at a ‘happy’, “life affirming” poem. But I wasn’t happy with it. My father seldom talked about his mother or his parents’ relationship, which I knew was violent. So I wrote the poem ‘Wedding Photo’, about a battered bride, at much the same time. There’s an earlier poem, ‘Mad Edie’, also about, duh, Edie.
(I knew my grandfather’s feelings for Edie were tender, too. As he lay dying, he told 15 y.o. me that I looked just like 14 y.o. Edie as he first met her.)
At the same time as ‘Wedding Photo’ and ‘Father and Child’ I wrote a poem I called ‘Possums’ about someone I’d trusted who turned into a goblin. It was a poem about emotional violence and fear.
That suite of poems put paid to my poem writing for a few decades. A bit before I wrote my first poems in 25 years, my sister took a portrait photo of me as a kind of water spirit / earth goddess. The Gibson Girl of ‘Tidal’ turned full circle.
I’ve written before about a day at poet Dorothy Hewett’s place where I overshared about my maternal grandparents (not Edie and Angus) and Dorothy turned to her husband and said: “How gothic.”
My sister spontaneously confided similar thoughts last week: “Both our grandfathers were so gothic. One lived in Miss Haversham’s house, the other was King Lear.”
So what’s this about? Honestly, I’m over people assuming they know what or whom I wrote about. Those people don’t know the names of the people who mattered most to me. It’s just a bit ‘You’re So Vain’. I bet you think this song is about you.
But you know what? Even if the song *were* about you, I own my experiences and memories. And anyone who feels otherwise can climb a rat’s arse.
from across the room this woman stares: this face you’ve seen distorted by emotion by years by the camera this face soft-framed defamed a face badly-loved, well-hated unresolved different every time, every time you feel the same you still feel the same you feel your face dissolve into hers; you take her expression, you turn into her, towards her her smile on your lips her reflected in grey eyes hungry eyes your move – and her face falls
My mother has arrived. She’s unpacked in my bedroom. From the bathroom I can hear her chatting; she chirps like a sparrow, cheerily, knowing God cares – a bird among cats young kittens, savage strangers. She’s rolling bright-eyed amidst claws, on the floor – they’ve hunted her, caught her pinned her wings flat; they crouch on her chest and guard her for me, the arch-predator – for my approval keeping her prone, they keep this place ours denying safe hose to the light speckled alien refugee: a sparrow, fallen who helplessly laughs
two thighs, knees together
firm converging lines
parabolic like an egg sucked
hollow inside
decisive outer planes
and gummy inner-lining – the jaws
of a dolphin, linear like this
wash up on northern beaches
bare and hard as crayfish claws
two thighs, knees together
an insolent autonomy
self-contained, impervious
bold strokes defining space
extended to an apex (knees together)
deft draftsmanship
emptiness encased
no fleshy Bardot pout: whose body?
brittle, bleached, beached
what body?
a dolphin’s skeletal beak
After writing a sequence of horrifying nightmare poems, I decided to attempt a life-affirming, positive poem.
I wrote it in two parts, out of an intended three: I was aiming for a triptych. But after Pt2 I felt my heart wasn’t in it. I abandoned that poem and didn’t write another poem for about 30 years. When I re-read this one I thought it was awful, Hallmark greeting card stuff. I chucked Pt2 altogether. This is Pt1.
I.
A woman pulled a rib from out of my side and my heart stepped out. she looked just like me: a small grey-eyed, soft-fleshed, female me.
My daughter he said. I am not ashamed to recognise love. I see no shame in relatedness. Her eyes are mine, and she is my heart.
He walks her up the road. He holds her hand. she rides on his back and she laughs.
My daughter he says, and her arms curl around his neck as years ago he sucked the breast of a woman
he loves
Artwork by Jenny Pollak @jenny_pollak_artist from ‘Bloodlines’ series, 2010
limbs contorted, tearing thick air: white fleshy
boomerangs broken
arms, snapped ribs: eyes fear-forced open, bruised and
swollen closed, the smashed
nose and plates, bent knives, kicked in
door
permanent
images, fixed like that clock – one hand
wrenched off, stoved in and reckless, lying
on its side on the living
room floor – no progress, not ever, silenced and
strange; or the door-frame, splintered
as readily as bone – the violated
flywire, the hammer-bashed
lock: glass stabbed curtains and blood
in the bathroom – the bride in the photo
(no sound) lies senseless, scrunched up
and torn
face downwards
Unbalanced, tall buildings loom
above us: screening out the sky, too close
together – like cramped teeth they jut
in shades of bone decay. I look quickly
at her
she looks down, and frowns
Uneven, the roadface staggers before
us. Cobblestones: smooth swellings
cemented together, colourless, so cold –
like trampling
thousands of hardened dead
breasts. Now she turns on me
her death’s head, survivor’s stare
black
streets drop away, breath
catches, while rain
– not quite falling –
hangs in dark clumps of
night and possums sit
in the middle of a fence
nightfall
wide-eyed, they observe – not caring
neither way
we mean nothing, this is nothing
not to them, not us
come away
from here, take care
in this dark, bright-eyed
with cars – we are blinded
by cars –
in public, all observed
two possums stare
balanced on a fence
you and I, eye to eye
you and I, watching on
small blundering familiars
neither comprehend nor care
my hand reaches out
to your shoulder, instinctive – I touch
your neck:
warm and unresponsive – you’re scared
we two, clinging lightly
lean on each other
look up, look and see large
luminous eyes
in a damp-cheeked night
walking onwards, then at once pulled up pulled back – as if by an image reflected in a window, a face one-known your own aged features – sharp-edged, so white – a bloodless light hand reaches out touch finger touch phantom a skeleton bridge half-flesh, half-hope: the ghost behind your eyes steps out, stands beside you but it can’t be you at all
not this time. In half dark (half-light into night), it’s someone you remember: someone else.
Your stare mirrors his; the ghost you’ve become sees itself living, behind his eyes reflected; in the present, it relives a scene from the past. It stares through a window and sees you both there – profiles overlapping, fingers touch flesh… the man (who is him) looks up stops stares out the window, straight at the phantom, half-sees through shadow: he says I once knew her The girl with him smiles (she is you, and she smiles) Go on, go and tell her ‘good to see her again. Go out there and talk but He looks away and whispers She won’t talk to me now
now on this street you stop, you stare you can see yourself touching (white lip touches shoulder), phantom lips plead promise me don’t ever walk past me, don’t let me walk past No matter what happens, whoever we become, I will always stop:
Elly McDonald 