One Hundred Shadows: A haunting novella told in simple, spare prose

One Hundred Shadows by Hwang Jungeun (translated by Jung Yewon)

One Hundred Shadows (2024) by Hwan Jungeun (translated by Jung Yewon) is a haunting novella told in simple, spare prose. But don’t let that simplicity, and the surface gentleness of the style, fool you. This is a story that is sharp in its criticism of Korean society (really, capitalist society in general) even as it is tender toward its characters, one that is thoughtful and moving even as it is spartan in its dialogue and language. It’s the kind of book that passes quickly in terms of reading experience but lingers in the mind for some time after you’ve turned the last page.

Eungyo and Mujae are two young people living in a poorer section of Seoul and working in a sprawling, old, ramshackle electronics market doing repair work. The market is made up of five buildings, but to make way for newer development, one by one the buildings are demolished, taking with them not just the structures but the people who worked in them. As their community disintegrates around them, the two grow ever closer together, quietly sharing a lunch of cold noodles, some rice wine with a third friend, or playing a nighttime game of badminton. Beyond these two parallel lines, Jungeun adds a bit of ominous fantasy: in this world, characters’ shadows can “rise” — become untethered from the person they belong to. Sometimes it’s partial, sometimes temporary, and sometimes more permanent. As unsettling as that is, it becomes even worse when someone “follows their shadow” (they often die soon afterward) and thus people are constantly warned/reminded not to do that. At least, people that share time and space with Eungyo and Mujae. Shadows rise when people seemingly reach the end of their endurance, and as we never see the upper class beyond a passing reference, we don’t know if the shadow phenomenon is pervasive in this universe or if it happens only to the underclass of the city.

In fact, the book opens with Eungyo’s shadow rising and her following it deep into the woods, only called back by Mujae’s voice. Throughout the course of the novella, both Eungyo and Mujae have moments where their shadows rise, letting the reader know that they are barely hanging on in the face of all that oppresses and exhausts them. Both grew up in partial families: Eungyo raised by her single dad after her mother left them, Mujae’s father dying after spiraling into ever-increasing debt. Their jobs are under siege, as is their entire community, by an enemy that don’t fully understand. As her boss explain “private enterprise” to her, and she hears how their building would be divided up and how much each unit would go for, she says “I felt like I was listening to a fairytale in a foreign language.”

It’s an apt sentence as much of One Hundred Shadows feels like a fairy or folktale. And not the Disney-fied ones but the sort that hearkens back to the originals, with their dark woods full of menace, the fear of the dark, the sense of potential violence, the potential always of death. The use of symbol also feels much in the fairytale mode. I have my own sense of what the shadows represent, but I think various readers will have their own explications: some that align with mine, some slightly different, others much more so. And that’s as it should be. The same holds true with other symbols in the story, such as a set of Russian nesting dolls, a store that sells small hard-to-find light bulbs, a tiny frog, an infestation of wood lice. Sometimes Jungeun will point the reader to a base reading, as when Mujae says, “Futility is precisely why I’ve always thought that a matryoshka resembles human life”, but that doesn’t mean this is the only way to read the dolls’ meaning. As for the frog, like the characters in the story, it too has been displaced, and we don’t know what happens to it afterward. The symbols, like the language, I’d say can be deceptively simple, but taken as a whole, there’s a cumulative effect that works perfectly with the sparseness of the language and the brevity of characterization to create a sense of the fabulistic.

Against the economic forces, Eungyo and Mujae have each other, and while we never, outside of a very brief aside, get any sense of a physical/sexual relationship, there is a lovely, quiet intimacy between the two of them that shines in the sharply vivid details Jungeun chooses to convey, such as the way Mujae prepares an orange for Eungyo: “peel [ing] it so deftly that the skin splayed out like petals around the navel.” A tiny, everyday sort of moment further de-emphasized by how he “then handed it back to me and went on with what he’d been saying.” But these quotidian moments of gentle courtesy and beauty are perhaps the only shield they have to hold back the world pressing in on their attenuated lives. Which makes it all the more heartbreaking when some of those moments or interactions, such as buying a little light bulb from an old man inside his “jampacked” tiny shop, disappear.

The ending is similarly powerfully quiet, both ominous and hopeful, and its language, imagery, and the question Eungyo asks of herself are all hard to shake even days later. The novella will certainly not be for everyone, with its elliptical style, abrupt shifts, lack of quotation marks around dialogue, and unexplained phenomena, but I highly recommend giving it a shot.