아들의 아버지

For the first time the author steps in under his own name to face the father who flits through his earlier books, and whom he never saw again after the age of eight, when the man went north during the war. The book covers his life from before his birth until then. His father left a clerk's job at a rural credit union to study in Japan, came home to run night classes and social work in the countryside, then organised in Busan and rose in the South Korean Workers' Party: a revolutionary dreaming of a just world, and to the boy's mother a man who abandoned his family for ideas. When the war turns and Seoul changes hands, the boy runs from American gunfire after neighbours inform on the household.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

382 pages in the original

Genres

Autofiction, Family, War (assigned by AI)

Set in

South Korea

First published

2013 by Moonji

Author's age

71 when first published

ISBN

9788932024486 (original)