The King of Confession

The King of Confession is the first collection of short stories by Lee Jang-wook, a well-rounded writer who publishes several forms of writing including poems, novels and reviews. In his early work “The Space of Armadillo,” space and time, as well as cause and effect, are shuffled and rearranged in an unexpected manner, which is a reflection of the story’s poetic nature. On the other hand, “Tokyo Boy” tells the story of a man the main character encounters at a rundown inn in the backstreets of rainy Tokyo. The man whispers as if he was talking to himself: “But do you think my dear Yuki is really dead?” Yuki means “snow” in Japanese. And just like snow, her existence fades with time and eventually melts, becoming invisible in the end. However, the last scene in which someone imperceptible to the eye walks beside him holding an umbrella clearly indicates Yuki’s existence. In “Byeon Hee-bong,” an aspiring stage actor keeps running into the film actor Byeon Hee-bong who is invisible to others. In the title work the main character stuns his friends with stories of his unhappy family and increasingly terrible and unbelievable confessions. The author’s persistent exploration of the boundary between existence and non-existence continues in “To Your Forgotten Nights” where people wander through the night world possessed by death.