[K-LIT REVIEW] June Hur's 'A Crane Among Wolves' takes young adults on journey to past

By Bruce Fulton

The current decade has witnessed a renewed blossoming of literary works by Korean American and, increasingly, Korean Canadian writers. Prominent among the fiction of these writers are novels targeting a young adult (high school and up) and juvenile (middle school and up) readership. Some of these novels are set in the present day — at least three deal with the lives of K-pop trainees in Seoul — while others take place during cataclysmic events in the past — for example, the 1950-53 Korean War. Almost all contain a strong coming-of-age element.

As a reader of mysteries that offer a strong sense of culture and place — consider, for example, the Sueno/Bascom mysteries by Martin Limón featuring two Eighth U.S. Army criminal investigators based in Seoul's Yongsan Garrison — I was delighted to come across June Hur’s young-adult mysteries set during the 1392-1910 Joseon Dynasty. I had the pleasure of studying Joseon history under James Palais during a graduate program in Korea Regional Studies at the University of Washington in the early 1980s, and the very first book he assigned us was Edward Willett Wagner’s "The Literati Purges: Political Conflict in Early Yi Korea" (Yi being the clan that ruled for the entirety of the Joseon era). I came to know therein of the king known to history as Yeonsangun, one of only two Joseon monarchs not dignified with a posthumous reign name.

"A Crane Among Wolves" is the latest of the Hur novels. It is set in 1506 when a purge undertaken by Yeonsangun is well underway. Iseul, 17-year-old younger daughter of a wellborn family, has been orphaned by the murder of her parents by minions of the throne, and isolated further by the kidnapping of Suyeon, her older sister, for Yeonsangun’s harem. Bereft of family, she is determined to cross forbidden territory to reach the capital of Seoul and free her sister. The struggles that confront her along the way take place amid the burgeoning of dissent with Yeonsangun’s purge, which is notorious in Korea history for the brutality of the king’s vengeance toward his political enemies.

A chance encounter with Madam Yul, owner of a traditional inn, and Wonsik, a long-term guest with forensic skills, fortifies Yiseul’s resolve to rescue her sister: she joins Wonsik in a quest to identify Nameless Flower, the otherwise anonymous perpetrator of several murders of court officials, believing that in this way she can gain access to the court and her sister. But as she makes her way toward the capital she is almost slain by a guard party headed by Daehyun, a half-brother of Yeonsangun. Before long, though, the two of them come to an understanding based on their mutual distrust of the monarch as well as on Iseul’s demonstrated capacity for empathy toward other victims of Yeonsangun’s misrule.

"A Crane Among Wolves" succeeds on a variety of grounds. The narrative alternates between Iseul’s first-person account and chapters told in the third person and focusing on both Iseul and Daehyun. The characterization is engaging and the dialogue appropriate for events taking place half a millennium in the past.

In a historical note at the end of the novel, author Hur describes how she shaped the characters on the basis of historical sources (including "The Literati Purges"). To her credit, she acknowledges in this note (and in an author’s note at the beginning of the book) content that young adult readers in particular might find disturbing. But rather than avoiding such content and more generally the unpleasant historical events in which they are framed, she reminds us that “it is imperative to confront history because it repeats itself if ignored…. Thank you for not looking away.”

A final observation: Hur acknowledges in her author’s note that Yeonsangun’s “revenge spree” was occasioned by the execution of his mother. This observation is consistent with academic research suggesting that his psychosis, manifested in such atrocities as the unearthing and desecration of the corpses of his political enemies, was triggered by the belated realization that his birth mother — the woman known to history as Deposed Queen Yun — had been expelled from the throne and was then forced to drink poison, the usual means of eliminating a court figure.

Which leads me to wonder if author Hur is aware of the more than 100 hanshi, poems written in Chinese by Koreans, composed by this monarch. Some of these poems reveal insight into the paranoia that crested in the psychotic behavior he displayed during the Purge of 1504. Especially poignant among these poems is one in which he visits his mother’s grave.

In any event, the author is to be commended not only for acknowledging not only the historical accuracy of the outrages committed by Yeonsangun but also the possibility of empathic psychological context for his state of mind and his behavior.

"A Crane Among Wolves" is available through dbbooks.co.kr.

Bruce Fulton is the co-translator, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction, most recently the novels "One Left" by Kim Soom (2020) and "Togani" by Gong Ji-young (2023), and editor of "The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories" (2023), the first volume of modern Korean literature among Penguin UK’s 3500-plus World Classics.