We begin in a dark forest in the dead of night. Eungyo is following a shadow deeper and deeper into the woods, coming to a stop only when hailed by someone. It is Mujae, a friend. He deters Eungyo from going any further and getting lost, warning against chasing shadows.
In Hwang Jungeun’s novel, translated from the Korean by Jung Yewon, shadows dissociating from their owners is quite a common occurrence. They rise up, move around, and follow their own whims. The narrative is largely set in a Seoul “slum” and follows Eungyo and Mujae, who both are employed as apprentices-cum-assistants to mechanics. They work out of a crumbling, labyrinthine electronics market that’s to be the latest victim of gentrification under the guise of urban development. As the novel progresses, the two protagonists’ feelings and affection for each other increases and they initiate an unspoken, sweet relationship against the backdrop of socioeconomic precarity and thriving capitalism.
Han Kang, who has provided a short introduction to One Hundred Shadows, remarks quite succinctly: “This is a world in which those living on the edges of society, at the very bottom of the social scale, are being brought to the limits of what they can endure. When they reach this point, their shadows rise up, startlingly sudden, and start calling them away from their lives.” The book provides no explanation as to why the shadows are rising or whether it is happening to other people beyond the socioeconomically disenfranchised. Although Carl Jung’s analytical psychology and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis respectively approach the subject differently, both saw shadows as unconscious aspects of someone’s personality that symbolise repression and make their way to the surface occasionally.
The shadows here seem to thrive on the energy of their living counterparts, rising up and becoming stronger when their “owners” are dejected and hopeless. Often, a shadow will adopt an independent existence and do its own thing while remaining close to the original human. They rise and get bigger until they threaten to completely engulf their counterparts and take over their lives. While they usually trigger a freeze response, there is also an allure to them that makes their “owners” follow them when they detach and move away—and the more a human follows their shadow, the more they seem to retreat from life until they fade away and die.
A strong will is occasionally enough to prevent what seems like the inevitable: While the shadows rise, there is also the possibility of them falling back into their usual place, if only temporarily. There is even an older character in the novel who has had “a big chunk of his shadow ripped off” and as a result has become oddly absent-minded and easily lost. As a result, the supernatural shadows in the novel can be seen as the manifestation of hopelessness in the middle of precarious living conditions, the proletariat’s afflictions given sentience, or a metaphor personified into existence.
Mujae is the novel’s voice of class consciousness with a strong understanding of how capital works and accumulates. He often influences Eungyo to zoom out and examine things with a critical lens. As a child, he was embarrassed by his father, who touted stoves to make a living. Now an adult, Mujae is introspective and thoughtful. Early on in the book, when Eungyo says that there are people who live without having debt, he is quick to rebut:
“This might sound a little harsh, but I think people who claim to be in no debt of any kind are shameless, unless they sprang up naked in the woods one day without having borrowed anyone’s belly, and live without a single thread on their back, and without using any industrial products … What I’m saying is, even if you buy so much as a cheap pair of socks, that low price is only possible because a debt is incurred somewhere along the line.”
It is an incredible lesson about tainted chains of production and outsourced labour exploitation.
Towards the end of the book, Mujae shares that he used to believe that the essence of human life was futility and one has to make peace with it; but lately he has realised that this is a mistaken perspective. He brings up the story of an old lady who collected discarded boxes to sell. She died of a heart attack and her body was discovered only much later. His earlier pessimistic outlook would have dismissed this as just another death, but the Mujae of today cannot do the same: “For instance, is it really so natural and inevitable for an old woman to eke out a living by scavenging cardboard boxes? Is that part of the essence of human life? Is dying like that down to the individual, nothing to do with anyone else? And if it’s not natural and inevitable, just sufficiently common to be accepted as such, isn’t that futility even worse than if it was simply the essence of life?” Accepting this as normal is defeatism.
Eungyo’s boss, Mr. Yeo, is another insightful character who has the benefit of age to fuel his cynicism. The electronics market is proposed to be demolished in the name of urban planning, with the area designated a slum. While only one of the buildings is brought down, the newspapers make it seem as if the entire market is gone. Mr. Yeo affirms: “[T]he intention was to ensure a smooth passage for the final demolition by killing of business in advance. They keep saying Die, die, to those who are already dying.” As the negotiations for the rest of the market progress, private enterprises with the means of buying people off enter the fray. When Eungyo expresses curiosity about it, Mr. Yeo explains the implications of this important development: “Money is a powerful thing. Mr. Yeo said that the government had made a show of digging up the first shovelful themselves, then quietly handed over the shovel; that that was how they’d always been, and that nothing ever changes.”
One can perhaps compare Jungeun’s novel to Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1953), as the interactions between Eungyo and Mujae are reminiscent of the circular conversations between that play’s Vladimir and Estragon—there is a point in the text where Jungeun has her characters have a conversation about whorls for about three pages—but the former does not really go to the extremes of absurdism that sets Godot apart. Beckett could certainly be accused of excess in a way that is far removed from Jungeun’s sparse, pared-back style. The blurb itself calls the novel “Han Kang’s Human Acts meets Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police,” and a case can be made for that statement. The engagement with human rights violations in the first, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith (2016), and the dream-like nature of a dystopian reality in the second, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder (2019), are both reflected in the concerns and tone of the novel. I would also like to throw another book into the mix: The Impossible Fairy Tale by Han Yujoo, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong (2013), for the shared off-kilter atmosphere and uncanniness alone.
For her part, Hwang Jungeun has said that the story was in part inspired by the Yongsan apartment building disaster of 2009, one of various such incidents in South Korea’s meteoric rise as a capitalist economy: It was caused by the easing of restrictions at the cost of disadvantaged people, who are always the first victims of lapses in safeguards and are then further brutalised while protesting the tragic events. Jungeun has pondered on these origins in an interview that appears at the end of the book: “Most things were beyond my power back when the families of the Yongsan victims felt isolated, those responsible stayed silent, and the reality of the incident was nothing but brutal. I decided to write through my feeling of helplessness … I wanted to write something warm, something like a song. The novel, to my own surprise, evolved into a sort of love story. This is one of my most important themes: the resolve to hold on tightly to love, no matter the circumstances.”
Love indeed is a charming throughline in the novel. Mujae and Eungyo are incredibly cute together and their interactions with each other are almost idiosyncratic. From hunting out nice soup and noodle spots to playing badminton in the dark, from narrating stories to singing songs, they come closer and closer by spending a lot of time together, allowing for long, heartfelt conversations. It helps that they work nearby: This guarantees run-ins. Their relationship is like an oasis in a chaotic world, a few moments of respite from the day’s cruelties. That being said, the bubble is unstable and not immune to the realities of working-class life.
While the romantic subplot does add the necessary contrast and grounding to the narrative, then, the book comes into its own when the shadows take the limelight. Amid this speculative context, the enigmatic, occasionally banal prose establishes verisimilitude while at the same time resulting in a jangling disconnection. One Hundred Shadows is a fascinating exploration of how we go on when we are alienated from the labour we perform, how we make sense of the darkness that threatens to engulf us in increasingly exploitative times, and how we make space for singing in order to prevent us from being estranged from ourselves.