K-Fiction Series features bilingual (Korean-English) editions of texts by the most interesting contemporary authors from South Korea. The editors emphasize that the selection of the best stories is crucial for them – but everything in these books is enjoyable: careful editing, aesthetics or an interesting study in the form of a commentary/essay offered after the main text.
On a trip, Jun-gyeong meets a fellow university student, Gyeong-gu, who is showing Jun-gyeong and his wife around Tokyo. Memories from his student days are woven into the narrative, when Jun-gyeong took Gyeong-gu under his wing and helped him acclimate to life at the university. Jun-gyeong’s outlook, especially in his memories of his youth, is quite simple and naive: Gyeong-gu is a funny boy who doesn’t speak Korean well and makes everyone laugh because he likes to swear.
When it turns out that he is excluded from military service, the colleagues begin to feel that there is much separating them. They are trying to categorize Gyeong-gu – is he a real Korean or a real Japanese? Or maybe an almost-Korean and an almost-Japanese?
Maya in Tokyo is a short and simple story, under the guise of which hides a difficult topic of Japanese-Korean relations. Together with the accompanying essay by Kim Ji-yoon, they will certainly challange how you look at the issues of belonging and identity differently, as well as your perception of others through the prism of the narrow information you have about them.
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