He squeezes toothpaste onto his toothbrush, his thoughts wandering to the small needle poking his brain. Ki-yong unscrews the cap of the mouthwash bottle and pours the blue liquid into the cup holding his custom-made mouthpiece. Last winter, his dentist warned: "If you don't do something about that teeth grinding, you're going to need dentures soon." He gently strokes her neck, then goes into the bathroom, takes out his night guard, and places it in a cup. The cat, whose mottled brown, black, and white fur creates a map of the world on her body, contentedly chomps on her kibble. He measures out some cat food with a stainless steel scoop and pours it into her bowl. The cat comes over and rubs her head on his feet as she does each morning, demanding food. Ki-yong pushes the covers off and gets out of bed slowly. "Feed the cat." She buries her face into her pillow. She asks, still half asleep, "Aren't you going to work?" He slides his hand out of her underwear and rubs his eyes. He pushes his hand deep into her panties and strokes the hair sprouting all the way up to her belly button, but she doesn't react. He stretches out to caress his wife's hip. He resolves to think of this mysterious pain as a temporary visitor, which makes it easier to tolerate. A small needle is stabbing the back of his head. Lying still, he thinks about his headache, his agony growing worse. It's as if his soul, having lain dormant in his body, woke up, discovered the heavy and authoritative being trapping it, and began pounding on it loudly in protest. He feels a passing disgust at his own body. He thinks it odd that such an insidious, unfamiliar throbbing could be expressed in one bland word - "headache." This intricate amalgam of physical pain and psychic irritation started last night it triggered an ominous feeling about everything that would soon unfold in the world beyond his bed. He has never in his entire life suffered from a headache, but he would have to agree if someone pronounced that what he feels is indeed a headache. Slowly, his brain whirs into activity, and a word gradually reveals itself, like a stranger emerging from fog. Along the way, we meet a huge array of sharply drawn social types - comedians and tax cheats, porn addicts and schoolteachers, spoiled college kids and former student radicals like Ma-ri who find their generational dreams of national reunification curdling into desperate adulteries. A keenly observant writer, he turns his story into an amusingly bleak X-ray of present-day South Korea that's as interested in Bart Simpson as in Kim Jong Il. He doesn't have a clue that Ma-ri also has secrets - she's trying to decide whether to partake in a threesome with her young lover.įueled by paranoia, Your Republic Is Calling You pulls you along like a thriller, yet Kim is after more than suspense.
Unsure whether to go back, Ki-yong spends the day wandering around Seoul and remembering his time there, basking in what he calls "premature nostalgia" for the city he may be leaving. Terrified, Ki-yong doesn't know whether he's been found out by the South Korean authorities or whether the North is calling him back to liquidate him.
And on this day, he gets a chilling message from his masters back in Pyongyang: He has 24 hours to liquidate everything and return home. But Ki-yong has a secret: He's a North Korean spy who has been sleeping with the enemy for the past two decades. He imports foreign films and has an attractive wife, Ma-ri, who sells VWs, and a brainy daughter who is just discovering boys. Taking place over a single day, the novel tells the story of Ki-yong, who seems to be an ordinary, middle-class guy in his 40s. This is precisely the subject of Your Republic Is Calling You, a smart new literary thriller by Young-ha Kim, who at 41 is one of South Korea's best and most worldly writers, with a knack for Kafkaesque surrealism and irony. But from the inside, it's lived as a bizarre form of identity crisis.
#North korea audio spy movie#
Even as South Korea's TV soaps dominate Asia, it also boasts one of the world's most exciting movie cultures - it had five films at Cannes last May.įrom the outside, the split between the Koreas is usually seen in terms of geopolitical menace. It's also an outward-looking cultural player. But in the West, it's less well-known that South Korea is a booming modern democracy with an infrastructure more advanced than our own. Dick.īy now, most people know that North Korea may the strangest country on Earth - an Orwellian dystopia complete with starving citizens, nuclear weapons, a goofball dictator, and public displays seemingly choreographed by Busby Berkeley.
Still going strong after 57 years, it has created a parallel reality worthy of Philip K. But in fact, the Wall could never really compare to the demilitarized zone that divides North and South Korea. When I was growing up, there was no more famous symbol of the Cold War than the Berlin Wall.
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