The End of August
A Novel
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
From the National Book Award winning author, an extraordinary, ground-breaking, epic multi-generational novel about a Korean family living under Japanese occupation.
In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-cheol was a running prodigy and a contender for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. But he would have had to run under the Japanese flag.
Nearly a century later, his granddaughter is living in Japan and training to run a marathon herself. She summons Korean shamans to hold an intense, transcendent ritual to connect with Lee Woo-cheol. When his ghost appears, alongside those of his brother Lee Woo-Gun, and their young neighbor, who was forced to become a comfort woman to Japanese soldiers stationed in China during World War II, she must uncover their stories to free their souls. What she discovers is at the heart of this sweeping, majestic novel about a family that endured death, love, betrayal, war, political upheaval, and ghosts, both vengeful and wistful.
A poetic masterpiece that is a feat of historical fiction, epic family saga, and mind-bending story-telling acrobatics, The End of August is a marathon of literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Yu (Tokyo Ueno Station) draws on her Korean Japanese family history in this resonant if overstuffed saga. In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-cheol jogs every morning to train for the 1940 Tokyo Olympics. In the present day, his granddaughter, Yu Miri, is living in Japan, where she trains to run a marathon and wrestles with her dual heritage ("When I can't express my feelings I speak Korean"). Adding to the autobiographical elements are intriguing slices of history, such as the Korean Heroic Corps, a resistance movement founded in 1919 by Kim Won-bong, and the "comfort women" who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during WWII. Central to it all are themes of Korean defiance and alienation, glued together by the bittersweet story of Woo-cheol, who'd hoped to bring glory to Korea in the Olympics before Japan's invasion and the Games' eventual cancellation. Some readers will certainly wonder if they can go the distance, but the prose is artful and kinetic ("My breath is a whip in my heart a red horse running around inside me/ each drop of sweat becomes a shout and is shaken off"). Though it doesn't reach the height of Yu's previous work in translation, this has a power of its own.
