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- Herausgeber: Honford Star
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
By the internationally acclaimed author of Cursed Bunny, in another thrilling translation from the Korean by Anton Hur, Your Utopia is full of tales of loss and discovery, idealism and dystopia, death and immortality. "Nothing concentrates the mind like Chung's terrors, which will shrivel you to a bouillon cube of your most primal instincts" (Vulture), yet these stories are suffused with Chung's inimitable wry humor and surprisingly tender moments, too—often between unexpected subjects. Chung's writing is "haunting, funny, gross, terrifying—and yet when we reach the end, we just want more" (Alexander Chee). If you haven't yet experienced the fruits of this singular imagination, Your Utopia is waiting.
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1
Praise for Bora Chung
“Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny mines those places where what we fear is true and what is true meet and separate and re-meet. The resulting stories are indelible. Haunting, funny, gross, terrifying—and yet when we reach the end, we just want more.”
—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“Disturbing, chilling, wrenching, and absolute genius. I wanted Chung to write a story about a reader getting a deep look inside her fantastic swirling mind. I had to take breaks and gulps of air before plunging back into each story. Magnetic, eerie, immensely important.”
—Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face
“Anton Hur’s nimble translation manages to capture the tricky magic of Chung’s voice—its wry humor and overarching coolness broken by sudden, thrilling dips into passages of vivid description. Even as Chung presents a catalog of grotesqueries that range from unsettling to seared-into-the-brain disturbing, her power is in restraint. She and Hur always keep the reader at a slight distance in order for the more chilling twists to land with maximum impact, allowing us to walk ourselves into the trap.”
—New York Times Book Review
“[These] stories are beyond imagination: breathtaking, wild, crazy, the most original fiction I have ever encountered … each more astounding than the last.” 2
—Publishers Weekly
“Like a family in a home, fantastic stories gather together in this book. The stories not only take their revenge, but also love you, and comfort you. You’ll end up completely endeared to this fascinating collection!”
—Kyung-Sook Shin, New York Times Bestselling author of Please Look After Mom and Violets
“Sharp, wildly inventive, and slightly demented (in the most enjoyable way, of course) … All we can say is buckle in, because when these stories take their horrific turn there’s no setting them down.”
—Chicago Review of Books
“[A] get-under-your-skin collection”
—LitHub
“Whether borrowing from fable, folktale, speculative fiction, science fiction, or horror, Chung’s stories corkscrew toward devastating conclusions—bleak, yes, but also wise and honest about the nightmares of contemporary life. Don’t read this book while eating—but don’t skip these unflinching, intelligent stories, either.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Chung debuts with a well-crafted and horrifying collection of dark fairy tales, stark revenge fables, and disturbing body horror. Clever plot twists and sparkling prose abound. Chung’s work is captivating and terrifying.” 3
—Publishers Weekly
“The 10 stories, written between 1998 and 2016, span a variety of genres, flowing seamlessly from futuristic cautionary tales to surrealist, fable-like allegories inspired by Russian and Slavic tales.”
—The Boston Globe
“Nothing concentrates the mind like Chung’s terrors, which will shrivel you to a bouillon cube of your most primal instincts.”
—Vulture
“This short story collection is like a car crash you can’t look away from: grotesque in the best way … Each story is fantastically unique, and unlike anything I’ve ever read before”
—Buzzfeed
“If you want a spooky set of stories that will crawl under your skin and burrow into your marrow and stay there forever, Chung’s collection is a freaky, unforgettable outing. There’s a folkloric quality to this collection, like these are urban legends that have finally been put to paper.”
—Wired
“The strange and everyday are melded in these startling and original tales … Cursed Bunny is [Chung’s] first book to be translated into English, and hopefully not the last.” 4
—San Francisco Chronicle
5
Your Utopia
BORA CHUNG
Translated by Anton Hur
Contents
The Center for Immortality Research
“You know, I think I’m being stalked?”
That’s what an unni at the Center confided to me two months ago, right in the middle of preparations for our anniversary event. Apparently, some man had called up the Center saying he was such-and-such and had come from the same region as my work unni and they were extremely close friends and he was running for the National Assembly and he would like to know the unni’s phone number. Of course, our receptionist had immediately picked up on the fact that calling oneself “extremely close friends” with someone was extremely suspicious in itself, but when the mention of his political ambitions was followed by a presentation of his clearly fraudulent campaign promises, she cut him off, saying the unni was not at her desk right now and, furthermore, she was hardly in a position to hand out personal information such as phone numbers to strangers. Still, as a common courtesy, she had asked if he had any messages. This led to his “I’ll call again later” follow-up calls, which made all other work almost impossible for the receptionist. Well, not that the Center had all that much work to be made impossible, normally, and this was the reception desk at that, but it was a very busy 10time. Everyone was frantic with the anniversary event, and how annoying that these calls, that could’ve been made during any of the vast expanses of emptiness in our calendars, were instead being foisted on us during this inopportune epoch.
If you were to ask what the Center for Immortality Research does, we do exactly what it says on the label: research immortality. In 1912, not long after Korea was forcibly annexed by Japan, the Center opened with the hopelessly silly slogan of “Our Country May Fall but We Shall Live Forever,” and it was now the ninety-eighth year of its founding, which occasioned a huge blowout party. I still have no idea why we settled on ninety-eight for such an occasion instead of ninety or ninety-five or one hundred, but none of my older sunbaes at the Center know either, nor do the Center’s board members no doubt. I mean, whatever, I’m at the bottom of the hierarchy in this establishment, and it’s my job to do the work they give me, and if the work involves an anniversary party in a random year, that’s what I’ve got to do.
I may be at the bottom of the hierarchy, but my title happens to be gwajang—“middle manager”—which of course is also part of a long chain of fluffed-up titles going right to the top. The board members are at the highest echelons, with a slew of bujangs and chajangs and other titles going down, and I’m the lowest-ranking, with not a single sawon below me, to say nothing of a daeli. Why, despite our designation as a research lab, we have such corporate titles instead of “primary investigator” or some such is also beyond me.
I mean, that’s all well and good, especially when I get my monthly salary, but the problem is that because there are no sawons, all the tiny little chores that a sawon would do simply 11fall to me. And among the silly little chores I was given was to somehow get Movie Star B to come to our anniversary event.
Who was Movie Star B? He was in fact quite handsome and a good actor and had won some award and his name was well known; what did he have to do with our Center and its ninety-eighth anniversary? Well, nothing, except for the fact that a long time ago, before he became a big star, he had been in a fantasy movie that had to do with immortality. A movie that bombed so spectacularly that people these days hardly remembered its title, and the actors in it probably wanted to erase it from their CVs, but in any case, it was a movie about immortality, and the event would be filled with doctors and professors and fancy academics, which is why they thought having a movie star in the mix would make the atmosphere less rigid and the Center would look more glamorous, as it were, hence we decided to bring in Mr. B.
A good idea, but as all such planning goes, there was no way it was going to pass a board vote, and since all the bujangs and chajangs of the lab were experts in immortality in their own ways, there had to be a battle of what constitutes immortality as a concept before we moved forward. The Korean word for immortality is a combination of “long youth” and “forever life,” and did “long” and “forever” really mean the same thing? Of course not, because “forever” lasted a lot longer than “long.” Therefore, “long youth” was tawdry compared to “forever life,” and for the actor to have starred in a movie about “long youth” was, according to detractors, not a good fit to the Center’s mission. But when we then looked for movies dealing with the strictest sense of “forever life,” there were almost no such films in Korea, 12and it would be absurd to think an actor like Hugh Jackman would bother to come to a Center for Immortality Research’s ninety-eighth anniversary celebration event in Korea (there was also some debate as to whether the movie Hugh Jackman had starred in, The Fountain, was a movie about immortality or reincarnation, or whether it might actually have been about parallel universes, but when we decided to watch the film as a group in order to determine this issue, the board members all began to snore fifteen minutes into the film, making the whole point moot). Then, as an alternative, there was a Russian film trilogy that was extremely successful at the box office and won some impossible-to-pronounce award, but there was no one at the Center who could speak Russian and therefore this suggestion was also rejected.
And so, it came down to the actor Mr. B. When not a chajang or a bujang, or not even a board member, but the sojang himself suddenly called me, I ran to his office with my heart pounding; he handed me a Post-it with an email address and phone number scribbled on it and said such a famous movie star would probably have a busy schedule so I needed to call him early and nail him down, and that his assistant had already called them once and got a “We will look into the matter,” and that this was the actor’s manager’s phone number and I needed to call them and get a sure answer, and he then proceeded to give me an exact script of what I was to say over the phone. I was to say I was the gwajang of a “large pharmaceutical company” and how we would appreciate it if you would grace our ninety-eighth anniversary celebrations with your presence, to be polite but firm, and to emphasize how we were a “major pharmaceutical 13company” and that I was a “gwajang.” And that they’d understand they were being treated with a certain respect if they understood a gwajang was calling them, and also if I mentioned we were a big pharmaceutical company, they might think we would eventually offer him a commercial, which would make them hesitate to refuse the offer.
Of course, we were not a pharmaceutical company, but a research center attached to one, and we didn’t do commercials, but in any case, this was the task I was given and I did it to the best of my abilities and it resulted in a complete and utter stonewalling from B’s manager.
I made thirty-eight calls and sent twenty-two text messages and even fifteen really polite emails, but there was no answer, which made me anxious at first and then angry and, finally, resigned to the fact. Even if I was the lowest-ranking person and there was no possibility of moving up in this organization until the end of time, I had managed to hold on to this job all these years and it just riled me that I was suddenly faced with an obstacle that had nothing to do with my office work or research, but something as silly as a manager refusing to take my calls, it was all just incredibly unfair.
As I sat in the Center lobby, fiddling with my phone and wondering if I should try again, suddenly I heard a voice.
“Excuse me, you don’t happen to know where Kim Segyeong bujang’s office is?”
The man was very polite and his tone very calm, and when I looked up and met his gaze I had a feeling I had seen his face somewhere before, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
“Do you know what floor Kim Segyeong’s office is? I am a 14childhood friend of hers, Park Hyukseh, I’m running for the National Assembly …”
That’s when I thought, Oh, it’s the stalker, words that almost left my mouth, but I stopped myself. Whereupon I frantically rummaged through my mind to find something else to say but came up completely empty. And since I simply stared at him, the man spoke again.
“I was very close with Kim Segyeong bujang since we were children and grew up in the same place, and I do have some connection with the Center. As a candidate for the National Assembly, I am working day and night for the betterment of my country and fellow countrymen. If you pick me as your National Assembly member, I will make everyone in our country live forever, and that would make the Center for Immortality Research the foremost research center in the land …”
Make everyone in the country immortal? I’ve heard all sorts of things from politicians in my time, but this took the cake. However, my academic curiosity forced me to keep listening to his spiel no matter how ridiculous it got.
At the end of it I blurted, “But how exactly are you going to achieve immortality for all?”
I’m sure I was the only person in this entire century who had showed that much interest, little as it was, in his campaign promises. He got all excited and began to speak in a louder voice, his eyes positively sparkling.
“The twenty-first century is the age of technology, is it not? Concentrating all our technology to compress the sun’s rays and shoot them onto Earth to make our ancestors come alive again would be my first task. The method was already developed in 15mid-nineteenth-century Russia and was thoughtified to be impossible to bring to fruition at the time …”
Thoughtified? Was he making up grammar now? I loathe people who go to great lengths to keep talking in the passive voice, but there was no way of stopping the deluge that was coming at me now.
“Of course, our ancestors who have been deceased for relatively longer periods of time and are skeletons now might be thoughtified to be difficult to revive, but the ones who have just died and whose bodies are in passable condition will not be too difficult to bring back, I should think. To restore our dead ancestors and put them on the path to immortality in its own way can be thoughtified as a form of ancestral piety and befitting our country’s traditions that speak of respecting our elders, and it is also a way of maintaining and even increasing our population which is decreasing rapidly due to declining birth rates—”
“Excuse me.” The campaign promise was one thing, but if I kept hearing this “thoughtified” word one more time, I thoughtified I would never manage to hold on to my sanity. “I have to go back to my office. I’ll tell Kim Segyeong bujang you’re here.”
But unfortunately for me and my attempts to escape, the word office made his whole face light up.
“You’re going to your office? I shall go with you. So Kim Segyeong must be in the office today, is she?”
“No. That unni—I mean, Kim Segyeong bujang is working outside the office today and she’s not here.”
As abruptly as it had lit up, a shadow fell over the man’s face.
“Oh, she’s not here again? She must be really busy. Where is she working so busily these days?” 16
“She really is …” Out of desperation, I began to lie extemporaneously. “We’re actually … going to have an anniversary event for the founding of our Center, and we were going to invite Movie Star B to the ceremony, but we can’t get a hold of him. … So I think she’s at the manager’s office, trying to negotiate, but I don’t think it’s going well—”
“Is that so?”
It had been a lie, but his face became so sincere that I began to worry. Lo and behold, the man started interrogating me about the issue.
“Why isn’t the negotiation thoughtified to be going well? Is it a money issue? Schedule clashes?”
“Well, I actually don’t know myself …” It’s true that people say the wildest things the more anxious they get, but in this case, I want to blame the weird reappearance of thoughtified for throwing me off. “So like … when Unni first went to their office, she didn’t call him ‘Seonsengnim’ but simply called him ‘Mister’ and … so …”
“What? He refused the invitation on such a trivial an issue?”
He looked so angry that I wanted to take back what I’d just said, but it was too late. As I hesitated, trying to figure out what to say next, the man’s face hardened and said, “All right. I’ll do something about it. So you’re saying Kim Segyeong bujang is at that actor’s management office, am I correct?”
“Well … yes …”
Of course, Unni was calmly sitting in her office on the fourth floor at that moment, suffering from anniversary event-related activities that had nothing to do with immortality, and neither of us had any idea where such-and-such actor’s management 17office was. But the man seemed satisfied and left after saying goodbye, which was a great relief, and I forgot about the whole thing soon after.
Until a month later when I was reminded of it because of the election. So that guy, who claimed to be running for the National Assembly and had that ridiculous platform, the guy who had pursued Unni so zealously without it ever being clear as to why, turned out to be an actual National Assembly candidate, and what’s even more incomprehensible, he actually became electedified.
And then that actor B’s manager actually called our office. They were, surprisingly, agreeing to attend the anniversary event and were asking for the place and time. I was pretty sure the man on the other end of the line was the manager whom I’d called thirty-eight times with no answer, and him being “delighted” to have B attend did not exactly sound sincere. I felt a sudden sense of desperation and very apologetically told him the time and place and how to get here, but the manager cut me off at one point as if impatient to get off the phone. But even after being so abruptly cut off, I couldn’t help but stare at the receiver in a daze. Unni’s stalker, who had actually won his election, had believed my lies (which weren’t 100 percent lies, to be fair) and as soon as he won his election had, out of affection for her, used his stalker powers on actor B, on B’s manager, and even on B’s manager’s boss, throwing his political power in their faces a little, using all sorts of threats and insinuations to somehow get B to swear on his life he would attend the event. I was a little miffed that I hadn’t known all this before and had acted so obsequiously to the manager during our phone call, since he 18did ignore me thirty-eight times and this had been a chance to ride a National Assembly member’s coattails to an emotionally satisfying conclusion.
These little and big incidents made our event planning creak along. Now that I had successfully gotten B to participate, the next thing I had to do was make invitations and posters. I accepted this chore, since I was in no position as the lowest of the low to deny the highest of the high, but later I learned all too well that these invitations and posters were to be distributed outside of our organization and furthermore would leave important material evidence in the form of real letters printed on real paper, which meant if I did well no one cared and if I made a mistake the whole world would know. I wouldn’t have the tiniest bit of authority, only loads and loads of responsibility, and my public humiliation was more or less inevitable, which is how it turned out in the end.
It went something like this. I was asked to write the invite copy titled “A Letter of Invitation,” and so I tried my best to put together the most polite and succinct invite that I could. The board members took a look at it and it went up to the sojang at the top. The office of the sojang passed on his comments.
“Don’t say ‘letter,’ say ‘words.’”
So I changed it to “Words of Invitation.” Board member A gave me the following order:
“Change ‘of Invitation’ to ‘Inviting.’”
So I changed it to “Inviting Words.” Then board member B ordered:
“Change ‘words’ to ‘letter.’”
That, I could not change. 19
“Uh, sir, it was the sojang who changed that word …”
“Oh, really? Then leave it the way it is.”
Exactly three minutes and twenty seconds later, C gave me a call.
“Change ‘inviting’ to ‘invitation.’”
By the way, the invitation in question was half a page long. I was getting to the point of wanting to put the latest draft in my mouth before jumping off a bridge. But what could I do? I was a team player and what’s more, a salary-receiver, which meant I had to see this through no matter what. The person who really suffered after the invitation was finalized and the poster had to be designed and approved was the graphic designer.
This graphic designer was the high school friend of a cousin of the husband of an unni of a person I knew at one of the headquarters’ subcontractors, in other words someone I could say was a personal acquaintance but not really at the same time. The reason I didn’t even bother looking at her portfolio before hiring her was that we were in a rush. I wanted to at least print out the invitations to give them to the VIPs to RSVP. But asking the person I knew at one of the headquarters’ subcontractors to call their unni to ask their husband to call their cousin to ask their friend the graphic designer took a bit of time to arrange, not to mention the time it took for the designer to call back their friend who would call their cousin to tell the unni’s husband to tell the unni to call the subcontractor to call me, which led me to finally calling the designer on a Friday to tell her I needed to hand over the files to the printer on Monday no matter what, which meant she needed to work through the weekend, and the whole while I assumed she would say this was impossible. 20
But the designer actually came up with a finished design. Not only that, but I’d given her the job on a Friday and she called me on Saturday to say she was done. I thought it looked perfect and there would be no problem simply handing it to the printer. I sent it out to the sojang and the board members. That was Saturday night.
There was no response until Sunday evening, when the calls began.
Board Member F: Move the Center logo a little to the left.
I moved it.
Board Member G: Move the Center logo a little further up.
I moved it.
Board Member D: Left-align “Inviting Words.”
I left-aligned it.
Board Member A: Right-align “Inviting Words” and move the Center logo to the right.
I right-aligned and moved it.
Board Member C: I told you to change “Inviting Words” to “Letter of Invitation,” why didn’t you fix it?
I’d told this guy the sojang himself had changed “letter” to “words” ages ago, why was he getting on my case now? But I couldn’t tell a board member that he was getting on anything even resembling my case, so I had to explain everything to him one more time.
Board member E: Get rid of the background picture.
I got rid of it.
Board member A: Why did you get rid of that background picture? Put it back.
And there were many other orders, but I think you get the idea. 21
The designer was kind enough to fix everything we asked her to fix, but at my sixth phone call, she very carefully asked me, “So, I think we’ll continue to get requests like this up until we go to the printers tomorrow … Do you think it’ll be easier for both of us if you just came to my studio instead of calling me each time?”
And so, I found myself going to the designer’s studio in the middle of our Sunday night. It was cozy and her coffee smelled lovely and more than that she had two nimble and affectionate cats, which made it a nice work environment, but the poor designer was being bombarded with a call every three minutes, being asked to move the logo to the left or to the right, the words up and down the page, all night, until finally when the gray light of dawn slipped through the curtains, she said to me, “Is all the work you do at the Center run like this?” Seeing how pale her face and bloodshot her eyes were, I realized that while I was a mere lowest of the low working at near-volunteer wages at the Center, I was going to do my best to get the designer the highest pay we could offer her.
As I tortured our poor graphic designer in this fruitless quest, were the other bujangs and chajangs just twiddling their thumbs? No, they were going round and round in their own circles of hell. The Center was going to do some kind of exhibit with headquarters, something to do with immortality, and of course this idea did not come from headquarters but the Center, and headquarters’ attitude was basically we paid for the stupid thing already why are you bothering us with this, complete disinterest in other words, which meant every time the Center had to contact them and get approval for getting a venue and display items and creating a 22real exhibit that was worthy of the pharma brand, it was a huge mountain of disapproval to climb every time. The fact that bujangs and chajangs of one of our country’s major pharmaceutical brands’ research centers were going through this ridiculous amount of work was completely ludicrous, but what can you do? Like I said before, we really had no sawon under us and the lowest of the low was stuck in a graphic designer’s studio moving a logo around a poster, and even if we were a part of a big pharmaceutical company, we were still just a research center and not a profit-creating department like sales, meaning we’ve got to make do with what little event-planning budget headquarters tossed at us and not even dream of outsourcing the work.
Finally, we were two days away from the anniversary event and exhibit, created by the blood, sweat, and tears of all the people working at the Center and our poor graphic designer who through no fault of her own got mired in this mess. The invitations, posters, and ads for the top-five major dailies all finished, I found myself having nothing to do, so I went to the event space to help out, where I happened to meet Kim Segyeong bujang, the unni who was being stalked. We worked on the same fourth floor of the Center but were so busy with our respective event planning that we had had no time to talk to each other for a while now, but we were able to go to lunch together that day, where I voiced my biggest concern about her, that of the stalker, but surprisingly, she seemed completely unfazed about it.
“It’s all right. It turns out, he’s on our side.”
“What? What do you mean?”
Unni smiled. “It’s been such a long time, you must’ve forgotten?” 23
Forgotten what? Unni must’ve seen the question on my face, because she explained, “He used to work for the Center, very briefly, a while ago.”
Really?
“I’m telling you. Maybe he quit around the time you came in. But I think your times overlapped for about two months. You really don’t remember?”
Now that I thought about it, there was someone like him who had quit not soon after I joined. Was that why his face was so familiar?
“Then is it true he’s from the same region as you? Why did he stalk you?”
“He really is from the same place as me. I think we used to go hiking together and see the tigers and such.”
“Then what is up with his weird campaign promise?” I asked, still not convinced of his good intentions.
Unni laughed. “That’s an actual theory that existed in late nineteenth-century Russia. I don’t remember the guy’s name, he was some kind of philosopher, and the idea was a sensation at the time. The philosopher still has fanatic adherents in Russia, I believe.”
To compress the energy of the sun and revive our ancestors into immortal beings, and to not only believe such things but to be a fanatic adherent of it—Russia must be a very strange place. Unni, seeing my expression, laughed again.
“That man, he’s always had a comedic streak, but he really believes in immortality. It’s just that he didn’t want to study it, he wanted to apply it in real life, and that’s where we diverged in our attitudes. Still, he must’ve heard somewhere that we were 24doing a ninety-eighth anniversary event. I’m sure he’s here to see some old friends and glad-hand and all that.”
Then he should’ve said that from the beginning, why did he have to single out Kim Segyeong bujang and seem like a stalker? But Unni looked perfectly at peace with the whole thing.
“Also,” she added, “he really was helpful, wasn’t he? That whole actor thing, he took care of that. And the celebrity lecturer, too, he got her for us.”
“A celebrity what?”
“She lectures about immortality from the perspectives of medicine, religion, and philosophy, a three-part talk.”
Well, Unni seemed fine, and so I decided to be fine about it myself, and we were running out of lunch time so we quickly finished our food. And so two more days passed, and it was finally the day of the anniversary event.
The ceremony was at 6 p.m., but the event space was already crowded by morning. We were using the hall in the basement of headquarters, and usually it was a dark and dreary place, but with the lights shining brightly for the event and the people crowding about, it actually looked pretty festive. Especially when Movie Star B arrived—the mood turned to a near frenzy. B didn’t look like he wanted to be there, but when Park Hyeokse, Unni’s stalker and sitting National Assembly member, came and asked to shake B’s hand, the sight of the actor’s disgusted face as he complied made all the stress I felt while preparing the event somehow just fly away.
Furthermore, there was an extraordinarily beautiful woman with long black hair coming down to her waist who made quite 25an impression on everyone. I assumed she was an actor like B, but apparently she was the celebrity lecturer hired by Park Hyeokse. Which is apparently why Park went to her side and spoke to her and tried to make her feel more at home, but the lecturer herself seemed bored and disgruntled to be surrounded by so many strangers. She walked around the exhibit space a bit but did not seem interested in the exhibits.
The exhibition itself, however, was pretty neat. When they first announced it was being done, I wondered how on Earth could they fill up that wide of an exhibition space with things that supposedly had something to do with immortality, but there really was a whole plethora of things, like paintings, photographs, books, DVDs, and other interesting objects. Of course, some of the paintings were by unknown painters who had produced blobs with titles like “No Death” and whatnot, but there were other artworks that had to do with religious immortality or resurrection, and a documentary series on DVD about the Emperor Qin Shi Huang and his quest to find the herb of immortality (a personal possession of the board member who had insisted “long youth” and “forever life” were the same thing), and looking around the fancily decorated exhibition hall, I could see how obsessed humanity had been with living forever and how this obsession had continued from the dawn of history to today, which was awe-inspiring on one hand and, I don’t know, pitiable on the other, a complicated combination of emotions.
The books, CDs, and DVDs were in display cases, and I was selling pretty bottles with our Center label stuck on them that purportedly contained “Immortality Elixir” as a souvenir—five 26thousand won a pop—because we couldn’t afford to hire a temp for the job.
