The Sick Rose

About

A short story published in 1938 that borrows its title from William Blake's poem and uses the metaphor of disease to explore the corruption — personal, social, political — spreading through Korea under Japanese colonial rule. Lee Hyoseok's prose is lyrical and compressed, treating the body and the body politic as mirrors of each other. This is Korean modernist fiction at its sharpest: a writer using literary allusion and natural imagery to say what censorship forbids saying directly. The rose is sick, and the sickness has a name that everyone knows but no one is allowed to speak. A story that hides its politics inside a flower — and trusts the reader to see what's killing it.