Once the Shore BY Paul Yoon (Sarabande Books, 2009) Cover Painting: Ennui BY Brenda Chrystie/CORBIS From the Publisher: “With Once the Shore, Paul Yoon delivers an astonishing debut of linked short stories set on a South Korean island. Spanning over half a century — from the years just before the Korean War to the present — the eight stories in this collection reveal an intricate and unforgettable portrait of a single place in its entirety. An elderly couple embark on a fishing boat in a harrowing journey to find their son, hoping that he has survived a bombing in the Pacific. An orphaned Japanese woman’s past revisits her with devastating consequences in a wartime hospital. A case of mistaken identity compels a husband and wife to question the foundation upon which their lives has been built. An AWOL American soldier finds refuge in a small farming community, unknowingly endangering its inhabitants. And in the celebrated title story, a horrific accident at sea becomes the catalyst for an unlikely friendship between an American widow and a young waiter at a coastal resort.” “I was interested in exploring two themes (or ideas or situations) with Once the Shore; if you were to imagine the island as a painting, I wanted to present a diptych: on one side there would be a depiction of a foreign military occupation and on the other side there would be a depiction of tourism…” — Paul Yoon IN The Rumpus March 23, 2009

Mesmerizing. Ravaging. A source of legend, adventure, music. Eroding the boundaries between the familiar and the unknown, the Pacific has long served as a setting, and in Paul Yoon’s debut it is no less meaningful for its recurrence. The ocean becomes a destination, a refuge, and a haunting reminder that an island — a place of “wind, like great birds” — is not psychologically easy to leave. Once the Shore gathers characters who are experiencing varying degrees of post-traumatic stress, though their stories are not as wrenching as the publisher’s summary suggests. Yoon doesn’t dwell on traumatic events. He subtly explores how painful memories serve as a bridge between strangers or isolate even the closest family members. “Look for Me in the Camphor Tree” (pp. 159-197) was my favorite of these stories. The exchanges between a father and his daughter Mihna (who imagines a woman in the woods has begun wearing her dead mother’s dress) are masterfully interwoven with the thread on the sale of their farm to a hotelier. Mihna’s fantasy is a form of resistance against sudden change. She survives her emotional ordeal, and the story ends with a serene image of snow falling on evergreens, “slow moving … and wide as ships.” “And We Will Be Here” (pp. 199-234) features another character responding to loss by imagining someone she once knew. We’re seldom certain how much of the narrative stems from her delusions. Traditional storytelling blends with mystery, creating a moving snapshot of war’s ability to destroy the mind and evidence that resilience is more of a gift than a given. A submarine accident, a shark attack, and a bombing represent some of the harsher consequences of living near the water, but most of the resulting deaths or injuries occur offstage. When they are mentioned, Yoon searches for beauty amidst wreckage: … his brother … was killed when a United States submarine divided the Pacific Ocean for a moment as it surfaced, causing a crater of cloudy water to bloom, the nose of this great creature gasping for air while its body collided against what could have easily been a buoy or some type of detritus. But what keeled and snapped upon impact was a fishing boat. And within it a crew of fisherman. Their bodies, once broken, sunk into a dark depth, their limbs positioned, without effort, in the most graceful forms known to any dancer. — “Once the Shore,” p. 7 In “So That They Do Not Hear Us” (pp. 85-111), when Ahrim, the main character, recalls being kicked by Japanese soldiers on horseback, she remembers how “her eyes focused on the animals and their soft sighs, their white breaths. Hooves lifting, stamping the ground. Tremendous eyes. As if they had come from myth.” Another story describes a couple wading through the aftermath of a bombing. They recover bodies “as if for harvest” — an unusual phrase, considering the connotations for reaping the fruit of one’s labor and other similarly rewarding ideas. The incongruity between the elegance of the descriptions and the gravity of the scenes could make the reader wonder whether the search for beauty, cadence, and “truth in fiction” precluded a closer approximation of an emotional truth.

Such moments reminded me of Pablo Neruda’s line, “and through the streets the blood of the children / ran simply, like children’s blood.” ^[1] The idea that violent acts are incomparable — that certain events should be expressed directly, without embellishment — opposes Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Whether drowning figures should appear balletic or not is up to the reader. The bodies suspended in water could be read as a convincing, arresting and cinematic visual, or as a questionable attempt to veil an otherwise grisly scene.

When is an image vital, inventive, rousing, elevating human dignity, and when it is disingenuous, too removed from the subject it seeks to illumine? Although the line between artistry and faithful representation is sometimes blurred, Yoon’s writing is perfectly suited to these stories of introspection, with their measured pacing and ability to unsettle us.

One of his many strengths is building tension without creating familiar scenes. In “The Woodcarver’s Daughter” (pp. 113-157), when soldiers surround Haemi, the title character, we fear for her, projecting our desire for self-preservation. News reports detailing war crimes have lead us to expect captivity or death. After the men pass quietly, leaving her unharmed, we realize that a hint of danger can ignite the imagination far more than any event a writer might impose. The restraint is appealing for its implicit trust in the reader, and for the wisdom in relying on well-grounded characters rather than on complicated plot-twists.

“Once the Shore” (pp. 3-31) begins with a widow describing her husband’s hairstyle to a waiter:

From this opening alone we sense the mixture of pride and loss, we know she must have revered her husband and valued all that is sensory, we know she is thoroughly at ease speaking about her private life, and we know at once that Yoon is a literary writer for whom words are sculptural. His characterization of the widow is spare, but echoes in the imagination.

… going somewhere else was an act of rememberance, of where you were from.

The waiter is soon revealed to be the same man whose brother “was killed when a United States submarine divided the Pacific Ocean.” The two develop a friendship punctuated by the routine of daily meals and a growing, silent understanding.

At one point, the waiter contemplates: “going somewhere else was an act of rememberance, of where you were from.” The line accrues even greater significance after the entire book has been read. It encapsulates one of the main messages: Whether the characters are tourists or natives, first-generation survivors or heirs to the burden of collective memory, almost no one can leave their origins far behind.

“The Hanging Lanterns of Ido” (pp. 235-266) contrasts with the more intense stories, and resembles “Look For Me in the Camphor Tree.” Both take place within clearly defined, fairly domestic spaces. They examine the fragile territory between the characters’ private realities and their responses to those who love them, differing mostly in tone. Mihna and her father’s relationship end on a hopeful note, while the couple in “The Hanging Lanterns of Ido” are heading for heartbreak. The ending is similarly suffused with snow: “Everywhere there was snow. In the far distance the flash of a lighthouse swung across the sea and then stilled.”

As the final words in the book, they’re a fitting conclusion for a collection permeated with silence and darkness. The best of these stories are located somewhere between elegy for the lives claimed by the sea and praise for the strength that moves us forward. Like Louise Glück’s wild iris, they remind us that “… whatever / returns from oblivion returns / to find a voice.” Once the Shore turns the tragic into a spellbinding narrative that is deserving of greater recognition.