Three Days in That Autumn

The opening pages of Pak Wanseo’s Three Days in That Autumn offer up an elaborate description of a chair that has sat in the same corner of the narrator’s gynecology surgery for the better part of thirty years. A relic of the abandoned photographer’s studio that had occupied the space prior to the War, the chair has somehow survived numerous renovations and the obvious distain of its de facto owner. Though garish in the extreme, unsightliness alone cannot account for its prominence in these early pages. Clearly the chair represents something else. That something, we later learn, is none other than the narrator’s tormented soul.