23 Mar / I’m Waiting for You: And Other Stories by Bo-Young Kim, translated by Sophie Bowman and Sung Ryu [in Shelf Awareness]
As impressive as Kim Bo-Young’s intriguing stories are, their literary provenance is equally entertaining. “I wrote ‘I’m Waiting for You’ for one person to read and one person to hear, with no ambitions of it ever being published,” Kim reveals in her author’s note. An old friend reached out via “polite email” and, although Kim had never written a romance, requested “a story he could use to propose”! The highly successful result – both as aphrodisiac and literature – appears as the eponymous opener to Kim’s four-title collection of two interlinked pairs, the first and last translated by Sophie Bowman, the middle two by Sung Ryu.
Lucky readers are wise to lean in and get ready to sigh and soar. The bracketing stories, “I’m Waiting for You” and “On My Way to You,” are a he-said/she-said duet about timeless love. In the proposal-accepting former, a young man embarks on an eight-week voyage into space, expecting to meet his fiancée at trip’s end for their wedding ceremony. A series of 15 letters he writes to her capture all the ways the journey goes awry causing missed connections. Despite a separation that lasts so many Earth years as to lose count, his love remains utterly constant.
With the real-life couple happily married, Kim then wrote the resonating sequel, “On My Way to You,” intended as a first anniversary gift, then to welcome their first child, finally delivered as that child turned 2. Here the fiancée gets her say, also in 15 letters that record what happened during the waiting, of the disasters and destructions wrought throughout the universe, and her tenacious belief in unwavering true love. In between exploring such everlasting commitment, Kim includes “The Prophet of Corruption” and “That One Life” – the latter she calls “a light spinoff” of the former – in which the immortal world of connected-yet-conflicting creators observe and evaluate the machinations and manipulations they control on Earth below.
Kim, lauded as one of Korea’s most influential and award-winning sci-fi writers, served as a script adviser to an earlier film by Oscar winner Bong Joon-ho of Parasite fame. Her short story “Between Zero and One” was a highlight in the 2019 anthology Readymade Bodhisattva, which introduced her work to Anglophone audiences. Readymade‘s publisher, indie Kaya Press, will publish Kim’s On the Origin of the Species and Other Stories in May 2021. Such a plethora of compelling choices seems poised to enable and encourage Kim’s international acclaim.
Shelf Talker: Kim Bo-Young, one of Korea’s most influential sci-fi literary stars, transforms a friend’s request for assistance with a marriage proposal into a compelling four-story collection.
Review: Shelf Awareness Pro, March 23, 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2021 (United States)