Given that loss of memory has become a familiar device in fiction, and the psychopath such a popular character archetype, we shouldn’t be too surprised by the notion of a serial killer hero with Alzheimer’s. The title story of South Korean author Kim Young-ha’s collection is a first-person narrative with a journal structure that nods to Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, and like its Russian progenitor charts the descent into dementia of an alienated protagonist.
Septuagenarian Kim Byeongsu has long retired from murder, but when a rival practitioner appears in his neighbourhood, and his adopted daughter Eunhui risks becoming a victim, he decides to use his old skills to terminate with extreme prejudice a threat he himself once posed. But he’s beginning to forget, and to lose any faculty for this harsh act of redemption.
Along with the publication in English of Un-su Kim’s The Plotters last year, “Diary of a Murderer” is part of a wave of dark fiction coming out of South Korea (I’m tempted to dub it K-noir). Both works invite us to empathise with habitual killers (in Un-su Kim’s novel it is a hit man), but they also share the political context of a country that has only recently transitioned from dictatorship to democracy, bringing with it the wider danger of a social amnesia. In The Plotters a new free market gives rise to a “major boom in the assassination industry”, as corporations replace the state as clients. In “Diary of a Murderer” Kim Byeongsu looks back on the homicidal atmosphere of an authoritarian regime in which his crimes could go almost undetected. “While everyone was trying to catch the phantom that was communism,” he muses, “I was doing my own hunting.”
Kim employs a wry, detached style throughout this collection. There’s much dark humour, which spills into absurd comedy in his final tale “The Writer”, an erotic fable set in the publishing business. At times it all seems a bit too coldly ironic, but there are flashes of emotion behind the deadpan wit. In “Missing Child” a boy recovering from a kidnapping is unable to break the maternal attachment he has for his female abductor. Emotional displacement is the heart of the matter and Kim reminds us of the peril, in our personal lives as well as in society at large, of forgetting our history.
• Jake Arnott’s latest novel is The Fatal Tree (Sceptre). Diary of a Murderer, translated by Krys Lee, is published by Atlantic (RRP £8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
