Aftershock

1

“If my name hadn’t been Munja, I would’ve lived a much cooler life.”

Munja said this one late afternoon in spring, around the time the cherry blossoms had fallen and the roadside trees were beginning to turn green. She had come over to my apartment. The late-afternoon sunlight reached deep into the living room.

“What happened to changing your name?”

Lately Munja had been saying all the time that she was going to file a petition with the family court to have her name changed.

“I will. Soon.”

“Have you thought of a name?”

“How about Subin?”

“Doesn’t that sound a little young?”

“Maybe. Then what about Misu or Suyeong?”

“Do you like names with su in them?”

“Now that you mention it, I guess I do.” Munja smiled. “But if I change my name, will my life get better?”

I say nothing for a moment. What difference could changing a name make to a life? Of course something would change, but how could anyone know whether the change would be for the better or not? Munja stares at me, waiting for an answer.

“Sure. It’ll get better.”

I say something I don’t mean. Lately, I have started lying again. I no longer want to make the people around me uncomfortable by always telling the truth.

“Right? I’m sure it will.”

One reason I like Munja is that she understands what discretion means. She knows what should be done and what should not. And she never puts on an act just to impress other people. I first met Munja at work. Strictly speaking, though, that isn’t true. I learned later that Munja and I had gone to the same elementary school and graduated from the same university. We simply hadn’t known each other. Perhaps we had passed each other once or twice at an elementary-school sports day or a university festival.

A year after graduating from college, I finally managed to get a job as the lowest-ranking employee in the PR office of a subsidiary of a large corporation. Munja was in charge of turning our company’s history into a book. She was a graphic designer who had studied industrial design at art school. She did not work for our company but for a publishing house that did business with our PR agency. Contractually, that made us Party A and Party C. Party A sounded grand, but as the youngest employee in the PR office, I had almost nothing to do except run errands. I was inexperienced at everything, got scolded every single day, and smoked countless cigarettes while stewing over it all. Munja, though, was different. She was only in her third year as a designer, but she was good at what she did. More than that, she understood how work actually moved and how decisions were made. The working-level staff listened to her opinions, and the proposals she backed usually won the approval of the final decision-maker without much trouble. My seniors in PR even told me to learn from Park Munja.

Once, when I was on the company rooftop smoking and trying to cool down, Munja came over. We smoked without saying anything. The yellow dust was especially bad that day, and visibility was poor. My head was full of thoughts about quitting the company I had struggled so hard to get into and doubts about whether I would ever be able to pull my weight there. I smoked another cigarette. After work, we went somewhere well away from the office and had beer. That was when we discovered that we had gone to the same elementary school and the same university. That was how our friendship began.

When the company-history project ended, Munja moved to a large publishing house. She changed jobs several more times after that. Two years ago, she left office life altogether and began working as a freelance designer. I know she has made enough of a name for herself in publishing that she never runs short of work. We didn’t talk all the time, but we called now and then to see how the other was doing, and every couple of months we would go out for drinks. Neither of us stood on pride and waited for the other to call first.

Munja was still unmarried, and I had not remarried since my divorce seven years earlier. It wasn’t that I had never met a woman I liked, but I no longer wanted to share my daily life with anyone. If someone took one step toward me, I took two steps back. Living alone no longer bothered me. And by now I was doing reasonably well at work. I was a team manager in PR, and someday I might even become head of PR. I was no longer the awkward person I had once been. I still wasn’t sure, though, whether I truly liked the work.

Munja’s appearance began to change when she reached her mid-thirties. She had never been strikingly beautiful, but as her very thin frame filled out a little with age, her intelligent air became more pronounced. Even the way she brushed her disheveled hair back with one hand looked rather stylish. After ten years of knowing her, she could still seem as fresh as someone I had met yesterday. And yet she was always comfortable to be around. I thought I was lucky to have a friend like that.

A few years ago, when Munja was seriously considering marriage, I genuinely encouraged her. I remember asking, “Does he make you laugh?” and watching her shake her head. I felt a little sad then. Looking back, I think my own marriage fell apart so early because we failed to make each other laugh. When there’s no money, love tends to cool. But even without love, a marriage can limp along if there’s enough money. To keep a marriage healthy, though, laughter is essential. If the thought of him or her doesn’t bring a smile to your face, the conclusion is obvious.

For whatever reason, Munja did not marry the man. If she had, our friendship probably would have ended. It wasn’t that I found Munja sexually unattractive. Strangely, though, I had no desire to sleep with her. I felt that if I did, I might lose a friend. The absence of sex gave me comfort. I didn’t have to exaggerate or show off to impress her. I am sometimes curious about what Munja thinks of me. But I have never asked her. Maybe I am finally old enough to understand what discretion means myself.

“I think I’ve lived too timidly because of my name.” Munja stood up from the sofa. “Should we get going?”

2

Munja and I went to a new French restaurant near her apartment. Her apartment was three blocks from mine. Munja ordered coq au vin, chicken braised in wine, and I ordered an Alsatian dish of sausage and steamed potatoes. We also had a bottle of reasonably priced Bordeaux.

“My father says he’s going to transfer a small studio apartment into my name. My oldest brother called this morning.”

“What are you going to do?”

Munja was silent for a moment. These days she barely spoke to her father, and at some point she had stopped going to his house altogether. After learning how he had accumulated his wealth, she declared that she would not inherit a single won from him. It wasn’t hard to imagine her father, a former military general turned lobbyist, flying into a rage. Her brother and sister had tried to arrange a reconciliation, but Munja always refused.

“What do you mean, what am I going to do? I told them I don’t want it. It’s dirty money. You saw it on the news too.”

“Then that settles it.”

“I’m glad I take after my mother. If I’d taken after my father’s side like my brother and sister, I wouldn’t have been able to be friends with you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” Munja shrugged. “But I know. I know that’s how it would’ve been.”

Just then my phone rang. It was Manager Kim Minseo from the PR office, who had recently submitted his resignation. I didn’t answer. I put the phone back into the inside pocket of my jacket.

“Who is it? Why aren’t you answering?”

“Work.”

“Work? On a Saturday night? What if it’s urgent?”

“It’s not urgent. Just annoying.”

“What happened?”

For a moment I hesitate over whether to tell Munja about the incident. I take a sip of wine. Munja watches me with curiosity.

“You know I went to Japan on a business trip last March?”

“When the earthquake happened?”

“Something bad happened then.”

“Didn’t you say everybody came home without getting hurt?”

“We were all in Tokyo. Nobody was injured.”

“So?”

Again I hesitate over whether to tell her more.

At 2:46 p.m. on March 11, when a massive earthquake struck the Tohoku region of Japan, I was in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Three days earlier, I had come to Osaka on business with Executive Director Park Jinwoo from the PR office. That morning we took the Shinkansen to Tokyo. Manager Kim Minseo, who had arrived in Tokyo two days before us, had finished all the preparations for the afternoon meeting and was waiting. I had lunch with executives from the Tokyo office, and at two o’clock we began a PR strategy meeting. We were deep in discussion when it felt as if someone had kicked the conference table. At first I thought someone had done it by accident, but when the table jolted a second and a third time, Executive Director Park suddenly snapped, asking who was kicking it. No one was. It was an earthquake. Neither Park nor I had ever experienced one before, so when the table first began to tremble, neither of us realized what was happening. I felt terribly dizzy. The water in a dispenser in the corner of the conference room sloshed back and forth.

The first thing to fall was the monitor remote lying near the edge of the conference table. When it hit the floor, its batteries popped out. Before the rolling batteries could reach the wall, a fifty-inch monitor toppled helplessly inward onto the table. My body went rigid as I stared through the conference-room windows. The high-rises of Shinjuku were swaying slightly from side to side. The shaking made it hard to keep my balance. Frames containing the company’s management philosophy and corporate motto fell from the walls. Shards of glass scattered everywhere. The conference table began heaving violently from side to side again. The large monitor slid off the table and smashed onto the floor. The conference room was a wreck. The building shook as if it might collapse at any moment. A wall clock that had fallen to the floor showed 2:48. There was a sharp creak as the conference-room door twisted in its frame. I had no idea how long the earthquake had been going on. One minute, two minutes, ten minutes. I could hear people screaming outside the conference room, followed by the dull crash of something falling over.

I was afraid the building would collapse and bury me beneath concrete rubble. If it did, I hoped I would die instantly, without pain. Only a few minutes earlier, I had had no idea death could be so close. I took my phone out of my suit jacket. I wanted to call the first person who had come into my mind. I felt I couldn’t die without saying the words I had kept inside for so long. Then the earthquake suddenly stopped.

A web of fine cracks spread across the conference-room walls like the veins of leaves. It took a long time to walk down from the seventeenth-floor office to the lobby because people from every floor had crowded into the emergency stairwell. No one rushed. They calmly followed the person in front of them. The emergency lights in the stairwell did not come on. People had no choice but to make their way carefully by the light of their phones. When I finally got outside, the first thing I saw was a utility pole lying on the ground, uprooted.

“So? What was the bad thing that happened?”

“Can I tell you later? I don’t feel like talking about it right now.”

For a while neither of us spoke. Munja seemed lost in thought too, fingering her wineglass as she looked out the window. A young couple passed by pushing a stroller, and an elderly couple followed slowly a few steps behind. A boy on a bicycle sped past them.

“Something happened a long time ago.”

Munja turned and looked at me.

“When I was serving as a KATUSA, the personnel NCO in our unit once decided we should all go out for dinner together. The senior soldiers who were close to him probably loved those dinners, but what was there for a PFC like me to enjoy? I’d just have to wait on them. But there wasn’t much choice. If he said we were going, we went. Anyway, after work that Saturday, we all got overnight passes and went to a sashimi restaurant in Noryangjin Market.”

“And?”

“There was a private named Hosik in our admin office. He couldn’t drink at all. But instead of saying so, he froze up and drank everything they handed him. Then suddenly he had a seizure. I really thought Hosik was going to die.”

“Good thing he didn’t.”

“Of course he didn’t. We made him throw up everything he’d drunk and rubbed his hands and feet. It was chaos for a while. After about thirty minutes he got a little better. The personnel NCO told PFC Kim and me to take Hosik home. His family ran a restaurant near Yeongdeungpo Station.”

“His parents must’ve been terrified.”

“They were. Hosik’s mother asked if he’d been drinking. I told her he hadn’t had very much. Then PFC Kim corrected me. He said no, Hosik had drunk a lot, and that was why he’d had the seizure. I still don’t know why I lied like that. Why I didn’t just tell the truth.”

I felt my face grow hot.

“Munja, after that day I decided I would never lie again just to get myself out of an awkward situation. But it turned out not to be as easy as I thought.”

Our conversation stopped for a moment while the waiter cleared the dishes from our table.

“And?”

“That’s it. PFC Kim and I left Hosik’s family restaurant and went home.”

“Sometimes I think about PFC Kim. I’m sure he’s doing fine.”

My phone rang again. Munja stared at me. I switched it off. A little later I switched it back on and told Munja I was going outside to make a call. I left the restaurant and called Manager Kim Minseo. When I finished talking to him, I came back to the table. Munja was resting her chin on her left hand, apparently deep in thought.

“What is it?” I said.

“That’s my line.”

“It was the same guy. Manager Kim Minseo. He was with me on the Japan trip. I’m meeting him tomorrow. Why do you look so serious?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Then why that face?”

“If I change my name, I feel like I’ll be separated from my family forever. The only thread still connecting me to them is the name Munja.”

Munja gave an awkward smile and emptied the wine left in her glass.

“Should we go? I’ve got a good bottle of whisky at home. What do you think?” Munja said.

3

Darkness had settled over the streets. It took less than ten minutes to walk from the restaurant to Munja’s apartment. Perhaps because the apartment complex was newly built, the trees were not very tall. The young trees, standing there with their roots in the ground, looked precarious. Munja’s building was at the far end of the complex. By the time we had climbed the long slope, I was out of breath.

“People who smoke like us can’t live up here. You’d die from the climb,” I said.

“I don’t want to quit. There’s nobody around to nag me about smoking, so why should I?”

“Want me to nag you?”

“You quit first. Then I’ll consider it.”

When Munja opened her apartment door, an old Chihuahua tried to get up, gave up, and merely made an effort to raise its head. Munja went into the living room, picked up the dog, and stroked its head and back. The Chihuahua’s lower abdomen was swollen.

“Aji doesn’t have much time left. She’s already thirteen. They say that’s like being in your eighties if you’re human.”

“What does the vet say?”

“They say she probably won’t make it through the spring. The vet says the tumor has gotten so big I should start considering euthanasia.”

“When a dog you’ve lived with dies, it’s hard for a while.”

“I suppose it will be. When Aji dies, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to have another pet.”

“A lot of people say that.”

Munja and I sat on the living-room sofa and began drinking whisky. The Chihuahua lay at our feet, rubbing its face against us. Looking at the sick dog made me feel sorry for it. Then suddenly there was a heavy thud from the ceiling. The whole apartment shook for a moment as if we were inside a giant drum. Even the living-room windows trembled from the vibration. My expression stiffened. So did my body.

“The people upstairs make noises like that sometimes. What on earth are they doing?”

“I felt seasick for a second. Ever since that big earthquake in Tokyo, my body reacts to vibrations. Apparently they call it earthquake sickness.”

“Was it bad?”

“What?”

“The earthquake in Tokyo. What else?”

“It felt like the building was going to collapse. It shook hard for about five minutes, but it felt like an hour. And maybe because we were in a high-rise, the movement was much worse. Everyone who was on the trip acted calm at the time, but later they all said they thought they were going to die under the rubble.”

“They say when you’re about to die, something comes to mind, don’t they? Something you regret not doing, someone you want to see, someone you never made peace with……”

“No. Nothing like that happened to me.”

I take a sip of whisky.

“I woke up thirsty in the company apartment before dawn and went into the kitchen. The refrigerator door was open. The refrigerator itself had crawled about a meter away from the wall. Its power cord was caught on the sink and stretched tight like a dog leash. There had been hundreds of aftershocks all through the night.”

“So what exactly happened in Tokyo?”

“Oh, that. If we’d come home the day after the earthquake, nothing would’ve happened. But because of the business schedule, we couldn’t leave right away. It was the weekend, and because of the earthquake all the flights were sold out. Then the head of PR said we should go out to the nightlife district in Shinjuku on Saturday night.”

“Seriously? In the middle of all that?”

“Hard to believe, isn’t it? Manager Kim Minseo said no. He’s the guy who called earlier. Kim’s naturally bold and doesn’t worry much about what his superiors think. Once he said no, I told the head of PR we should just have some beer near the company apartment.”

“And?”

“The head of PR said what did the earthquake in Japan have to do with us? He said when a disaster that big happens, a few tens of thousands of people dying is nothing.”

“Seriously? Is that man insane?”

“I completely lost whatever goodwill I had left toward him. And then he dragged Kim and me to the nightlife district in Shinjuku anyway. It was one of those places where dancers perform completely naked, with their genitals exposed.”

“That crazy bastard.”

“I felt awful too. Thousands of people had lost their lives in the earthquake, and I couldn’t stand the thought of myself sitting there watching a nude show. So not long after the show started, I walked out. Kim came out a little later.”

“And?”

“When the show ended, the head of PR came out too. Then he started yelling at us for walking out in the middle. He said it was disrespectful to the dancers. Suddenly Kim started swearing at him, even though the man was more than twenty years older. He said, ‘You’re always bragging that you came out of the student movement. So this is what a fucking democracy fighter amounts to?’ The head of PR got worked up and tried to punch Kim. I barely managed to get between them. It was ugly that night.”

“So Kim got disciplined?”

“No. The head of PR hadn’t exactly behaved well either, so we kept the whole thing among ourselves and let it end there. If word got around, it wouldn’t have been good for him either. We finished the trip and came home. Nothing happened for a while, but then recently the story started going around the company.”

“So it reached the point where it couldn’t just be ignored.”

“Pretty much. It became a mess.”

“So how did it end?”

“Kim handed in his resignation and said he was sick of the whole thing. He’s still single and he’s good at his job, so he’ll find another position easily enough. The problem is the head of PR. Once the rumors started making him look bad, I think he gave the company a different version of what happened.”

“What version?”

“That Kim Minseo was the one who wanted to go out in Shinjuku, and he had no choice but to follow.”

“What a joke. That bastard. That fucking bastard.”

“Kim said he might be leaving, but he wasn’t going to leave with that accusation hanging over him. He asked me to be a witness.”

“A witness?”

“He says he’s going to submit a written report about the whole incident before he leaves. I tried telling him that if he was resigning anyway, maybe he should just leave quietly, but he wouldn’t listen. Kim says there’s no way. If he goes down, the head of PR is going down with him. He says he has nothing to lose. Which leaves me stuck in the middle.”

“Then why did you follow him there in the first place?”

“I’ve got no excuse.”

“Yeah.” Munja let out a long sigh. “Your boss told you to go. How were you supposed to refuse? It’s not easy. What are you going to do when you meet Kim tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to meet him first. I tried to avoid it, but that doesn’t seem to be working.”

“You could end up in trouble yourself.”

“Kim’s leaving anyway, but I still have to keep seeing the head of PR every day. It’s killing me.”

“I don’t think Aji is breathing.”

Munja carefully slipped her feet away and stood up from the sofa.

“Give me a hand mirror.”

While Munja went to get one, I gently shook the Chihuahua. It did not move at all. Munja came back and handed me the mirror, looking frightened. I held it under the Chihuahua’s nose. A faint patch of mist formed on the glass.

“I’m glad you’re here tonight. Thank you.”

I looked at the clock on the living-room wall. It was almost ten.

“Could you stay a little longer tonight?”

“Don’t worry. I might stay the night.”

An awkward smile appeared on Munja’s lips.

4

Munja filed a petition with the family court to change her name. I now call her Subin. Before saying her name, I first think Subin in my head so that I will never call her Munja again. I hope that the dark, ominous memories of childhood that surface late at night, with eyes closed and a hand beneath the pillow, will disappear along with the name Munja. Subin recently adopted an abandoned kitten. She says cats are easier to care for than Chihuahuas. She named the kitten Myohui. Whenever I hear Subin call the kitten Myohui, I get a strange feeling. Somehow, it doesn’t seem like a name that suits a cat. But I say nothing. All I can do is hope Subin will have a better life from now on.

The great earthquake I experienced in Tokyo knocked my life onto a different course. Executive Director Park Jinwoo is still head of PR at the company, and Manager Kim Minseo’s resignation was rejected. I later learned that Park had gone all the way to Kim’s home and formally apologized. Park also apologized politely to me and asked for my forgiveness, while Kim apologized for dragging me into the trouble. In the end, as things at companies often do, the whole affair was quietly smoothed over in the spirit of leaving well enough alone. Yet somehow I no longer wanted to work with them. I don’t particularly blame either of them. But when I think of the earthquake that day and the dancers in Shinjuku, I still can’t shake the self-disgust that rises inside me. The great earthquake had awakened me to death, and that awakening collapsed in a single day in front of dancers performing with their genitals exposed. Willingly or not, I had used the organization and its hierarchy as an excuse and gone too far. In the end, I handed in my resignation, claiming that my health was poor. Once I left the company, I felt as though I had returned to my proper place. I felt neither anxiety nor fear. I wanted to leave myself alone for a while, until I felt the desire to begin something new.

More important to me than any of that is the fact that these days I see Subin often. That doesn’t mean we have officially started dating. Even now, and in the future, I have no intention of living under the same roof with her. I have lived alone for too long to share my daily life with another person. There is still no empty space in my life. That is why I prefer to see Subin from a little distance. That way, there is room for her to enter my life.

I never told Subin that hers was the first face that came to me inside that building in Tokyo as it shook as if it were about to collapse. What would Subin think if she knew that, in the moment when I believed I might die, she was the person I wanted to see most? I will never tell her. I want to keep to myself the moment when the quiet love that had rested deep inside my heart woke up.

— End —