Rivers Between Us

Abstract

Rivers Between Us is a short story collection that mediates the consequences of the Korean War lingering in the everyday lives of Koreans. The six stories paint raw human portraits of Koreans haunted by ghosts of the Korean War: a North Korean missionary who left his country and failed to return for the widespread famine floating the world as a ghost; a radio announcer from the North who pretends to be a South Korean receiving mysterious letters; a North Korean singer who is asked to sabotage her previous life at the cost of her stardom in the South; a South Korean military man who goes on a DMZ patrol only to run into ghosts whose lives were sacrificed during the war; a professional translator educated in America encountering a ghost of his dead father who had sent his child abroad out of fear of the war; an elderly woman diagnosed with dementia opening up her traumatic past as a war orphan to her granddaughter as the illness progresses. Weaving the forgotten and unforgotten Korean history into magical realism, Rivers Between Us reveals emotional truth behind the gleams and dreads of contemporary Korea.