I didn’t know what to think of this collection. I had not read a Korean writer before, as far as I can recall. There were stories set in cities and stories set in the countryside, stories of peasants, soldiers and prostitutes, the young and the old. The language was simple, the narration straightforward. It was not until the penultimate piece, a sequence of four shorter stories called “Places of Death,” that an awareness of what I was reading came to mind. A carpenter loses his sense of smell after failing to warn his crew before the collapse of a construction tunnel. A man disembarking from a train, intent on selling at market the chicken in his sack, is accused of being a spy and tortured. A child’s classroom composition innocently describes the death of his bedridden mother. A soldier driving a truck back to base late at night kills a pedestrian. I realized that The Book of Masks is a collection of horror stories, or stories of horror, with no fearsome beasts, no bloody weapons, nothing magical or supernatural, but the horror of loneliness, the horror of wasted chances and memories returning, the horror of getting just what you want but losing everything.

A young man’s preoccupation with the imagined thoughts of a girl in his building is played out in a series of violent outbursts on the street. A peculiar relationship develops between a woman in a coma and the woman with a troubled past hired to attend to her. A reluctant student activist is rescued from a fusillade at the barricades by a woman forced to work as a prostitute during the long absences of her husband. An elderly widower, retired from a career as a concert pianist because of paralysis in his arm, is set to marry a beautiful younger woman but becomes obsessed with a fish, the last of a rare breed, living in a bowl on his kitchen table. A little girl saves a boy from drowning, twisting their fates together ever after. The memory of an accident at a church bell-tower in a country village forty years before brings a man to the funeral of a boyhood friend. A man schedules his suicide for midnight down by the river but is granted a vision of annihilation postponed in the arms of a lactating prostitute.

I was caught off guard by Hwang’s talent for telling these stories with such unadorned style, as I was startled when the old pianist pulled the rare fish from the bowl and crushed it in his fist, but I came away with an appreciation for Hwang's art. ( )