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KIM SUN-WOO MUJA (THE DANCER), FOURTEEN YEARS OLD TRANSLATED BY SAM CHA 1 Shed your iron shoes and shake your bells of bronze sky high, hemp smell, moon-close, wet hair drinks of wind – sap flutters strand by strand. Girl, you have dug your well deep in your body and from it you draw the water. Look, the red river overflows. Throw away your gourd, it wheels and flows over the long dead moonlight’s milkflower areola. Whiter than the white blood shed by the moon, night full on the edge of the knife. Tear your wet linen and row your soulboat. With the spirits of the young women inside your body. And so this is an old story (a story about a very old today, it is). That dancing child was born in a dragon year, lived in Masan since she was ten . . . The rumours were that they were taking the maidens, and on the twentieth day she hid in the cremation tent and heard it for the first time, the sound of a cremated belly bursting, the sound of bone burning . . . and the girl was fourteen . . . 154 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES
page 157
GUEST LITERATURE – KOREA . . . Father snatched up the kitchen knife but the gun barrel hit his forehead red first. Blood. As if it had been dyed with hollyhock. Mother cried: “Let her dress at least before you take her.” Swoon and hollyhock. Choking up. And torn. The brocade jacket smeared with red dye. Dragged out in my black skirt, I was fourteen . . . Busan. Shimonoseki. Hiroshima . . . The military police turned us over to the army and left and then . . . . . . and there was the day the actors came on tour for the troops with the smell of face powder coming off them in waves and they twirled their umbrellas and sang, they did, like a dream that didn’t end, and those little rounded umbrellas were so pretty, I dreamt that night of twirling umbrellas, I did, in the cremation tent filled with the smell of burning flesh like a thick white fog. A dream of twirling little round umbrellas jumping from one cadaver’s chest cavity to another . . . At the base they gave the women names, they did, and mine was Muja [which means dancer] they pronounced it Maiko, though up till then I’d never danced. And in Hiroshima I picked clementines and figs all day. When the soldiers poked at our backs with the ends of their guns, the yellow of the clementines dangled in my cravings for meat, and I’d retch . . . . . . the ship came, they said. We were going as nurses and the name of the ship was Midomaru. The ship was very big and on it we even learned army songs from a white-whiskered grandpa of an officer. Like we were riding the waves with our hands on our hips, we shook the waves and sang, we did. Parao of the South Pacific islands. Off to Parao, like the inside of the mouth of a burning animal. That child she was fourteen. BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 155

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KIM SUN-WOO

MUJA (THE DANCER), FOURTEEN YEARS OLD

TRANSLATED BY SAM CHA

1

Shed your iron shoes and shake your bells of bronze sky high, hemp smell, moon-close, wet hair drinks of wind – sap flutters strand by strand. Girl, you have dug your well deep in your body and from it you draw the water. Look, the red river overflows. Throw away your gourd, it wheels and flows over the long dead moonlight’s milkflower areola. Whiter than the white blood shed by the moon, night full on the edge of the knife. Tear your wet linen and row your soulboat. With the spirits of the young women inside your body.

And so this is an old story (a story about a very old today, it is).

That dancing child was born in a dragon year, lived in Masan since she was ten . . . The rumours were that they were taking the maidens, and on the twentieth day she hid in the cremation tent and heard it for the first time, the sound of a cremated belly bursting, the sound of bone burning . . . and the girl was fourteen . . .

154 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

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