KOREA MANTIS TOUR

  THE RED GOD This is a work of fiction. PART I THE CHILD BEFORE THE NAME CHAPTER TWO The Professor’s Son He would remember none of it. Not the snow. Not the hospital. Not the old man waiting beneath the awning. Not the red thread around his wrist. Not the sealed room beneath the floor. Memory came later. What Han Seong-jin remembered first was his father's study. It occupied the smallest room in their house and somehow seemed larger than all the others. Books covered two walls from floor to ceiling. Some were in Korean. Some in Japanese. Several were in English. A few were bound in cracked cloth with titles Seong-jin could not read. His father kept journals stacked beside the desk, newspapers folded into precise rectangles, fountain pens inside a wooden box, and a brass desk lamp that cast a circle of yellow light over everything he considered important. The room smelled of paper. Paper and dust. Sometimes tobacco. His mother hated the tobacco. His father claimed he had stopped sm...

THE RED GOD This is a work of fiction. PART I THE CHILD BEFORE THE NAME CHAPTER ONE Winter, 1960, Seoul The snow began before midnight. It came quietly over Seoul, too thin at first to settle, drifting between telephone wires and bare branches before dissolving against the blackened roofs. By one in the morning, the streets had turned pale. The city looked cleaner beneath snow. That was the lie winter told best. From the second-floor window of the small hospital, Han Mun-seok watched flakes gather along the edge of the road. Across the street stood a row of buildings that had somehow survived war, occupation, liberation, another war, and everything that came afterward. Their walls had been repaired so many times that no two sections were the same color. Some bricks were Japanese. Some were American. Some were whatever people had been able to find. Seoul was like that. Nothing had truly disappeared. Things had simply been built over. Behind him, someone screamed. Mun-seok turned. The sc...