[Short Fiction Series 10]

The Other Side of Dark Remembrance was the winner of the 8th Annual Yi Sang Literature Prize in 1984. This novella falls into the fiction genre dealing with the division of North and South Korea. Stories of this genre often hold ideological conflicts and their ramifications at their center; rather than treating these issues upfront, however, this work follows the mundane yet confused life of a metropolitan salaried man. During the process of retracing important contract documents he lost while drunk, the protagonist unexpectedly comes face to face with a dark memory submerged in the subconsciousness of his common bourgeois being. This remembrance of a heartbreaking separation caused by the Korean War ultimately impels him to confront the long-repressed injunction of his mother's last words.