The Korean War (1950-1953) was a horrific, internecine conflict that claimed the lives of up to 4 million civilians. While the war’s origins have often been glossed over in reductionist terms (“democratic” South versus “communist” North), few have tried a more nuanced approach of looking at the causes of the war. Novelist Hwang Sok-Yong is one of the few. The appearance of a translated The Guest (by Maya West and Kyung-Ja Chun and published by Seven Stories Press) is welcome, four years after the Korean version was published, as it shows the extent to which the painful trauma of the war still exists today.

The title refers to the ironic use of the Korean word sonnim (which means “guest”) to refer to the arrival of Western smallpox in Korea. Like the disease that needed to be warded off, Hwang describes how Marxism and Christianity were “uninvited guests” that came to Korea. From the author’s point of view, both forces were part of a “cultural imperialism” that devastated the Korean people. Marxism, of course, can easily be linked with the North Korean Communists, but the role of Christians during the Korean War has largely been overlooked. The Guest distinguishes itself from other Korean War novels in that it describes the intense hatred between Christian and Communist neighbors, in this case, in Hwanghae Province in North Korea, the sight of a gruesome massacre. One-fourth of the region’s entire population was killed, including some 400 women and 100 children who were slaughtered. While North Korea claims to this day that U.S. troops were to blame, the truth is that it was Koreans killing Koreans. As one of the characters in the novel says: “It was our friends, the kids we grew up with, the ones we’d known from babyhood … these very same sons of bitches started showing up, completely poker-faced, telling us to hand over our land.”

Guest by Hwang Sok-Yong (Seven Stories Press, 240 pages).

Indeed, the bitter issue of land reform after the Japanese occupation (1910-1945) is where Christianity enters the picture. “Show me a Christian leader who didn’t come from a family of landowners,” states one character. In North Korea, where the prevalence of Christians before the war even marked the border city of Sinuiju as the “Jerusalem of Choson,” it didn’t help that many of these Christian landowners were seen as collaborators with the hated Japanese.

The novel opens in America with two brothers who are living in New Jersey some 40 years later. Reverend Ryu Yosop is the main character, but as we soon discover, he serves more as a witness to a parade of ghosts from his past. His brother, Ryu Yohan, is an unrepentant minister who had committed horrific atrocities during the Korean War in the name of Christianity. Three days after Yosop announces to his brother that he will return to visit his North Korean hometown, Yohan passes away, but his spirit remains throughout the novel to haunt Yosop on his return journey. As Yosop arrives in North Korea and visits his village, the ghosts of the massacre’s victims begin to visit him one by one.