Perhaps, after all these years, we should start taking Kim Young-ha at his word – he has “nothing to do with literature”. And yet, somehow, he is still far-and-away Korea’s most interesting writer.

Kim’s fame came early and thick, taking his reader into a difficult and strangely personal world – the life’s work of a suicide consultant on the streets of Seoul, with I Have The Right To Destroy Myself. In length and development it had the feel of a side-project, a warm-up for something real. It was as if Kim wasn’t yet sure of his ability to make it as a novelist, and was first testing the market with a short, introspective, draft-like piece of writing; something that didn’t require too much time and commitment, and so wouldn’t hurt too much if it failed to find an audience, or even a publisher.

I Have The Right To Destroy Myself did something long overdue and remarkable. The Korean literary scene at the time was dominated by a few large names, all writing with a single theme and purpose. Through delicate, Mandarin prose, they wrote Mandarin novels about ancestral wounds and sacrifice, of suffering and its romance, and the impure – un-Korean – effects of social change.

From the beginning Kim was far too animalised and muddied to play this game, instead he pushed into the uncomfortable pulse of modern Korean life – rolling unashamed in its shallow, nihilistic masochism; remembering throughout just how funny all this pain and suffering can sometimes be. “I only want to draw out morbid desires, imprisoned deep in the unconscious. This lust, once freed, starts growing. The caller’s imagination runs free, and she soon discovers her potential”.

The leap from Kim’s first book to his latest, Diary of a Murderer, isn’t one at all. Despite the years of writing and tradecraft under his belt, there has been a complete flat line of literary growth and style. Kim is still dark, still unbearably human through the slight details of his work, and all the weaknesses of his writing are still exposed, raw and lumbering. And yet there is still a substantial leap here, and something to cheer, because what he gave us in those middle years – through books like Black Flower, Your Republic Is Calling You and I Hear Your Voice – had the smell of disease.

We are dealing here with a style of writing designed for blunder and emptiness; it overreaches – not as a calculated literary device – but with a greedy, salivating hunger. Like a smug high school student trying to impress his teachers, no plot twist is too crude, no drip-feed of detail too obvious, and narrative selection is absolutely everything.

A suicide consultant (I Have The Right To Destroy Myself), a Korean slave labourer in Cuba (Black Flower), a North Korean spy in Seoul (Your Republic Is Calling You), a motorcycle outlaw (I Hear Your Voice), and now, with Diary of a Murderer, an elderly serial killer with encroaching dementia. Someone who remembers who he is, and how much fun he has had strangling his victims – “those were good times” – but is now waking up confused, covered in mud, and wondering who he might have killed last night, and where he might have buried them; or reading of new murder cases in the local newspaper – “they found another female body… on a country road” – and asking himself ‘is that one of mine?’

Apparently this is how the “Alzheimer’s-diseased brain” works, old memories are the last to fade, so – at least in the early stages – it’s really “future memories” that become a problem. The patient is frozen in time, forgetting that there is food on the stove, why they’re in their car and where they’re going, or who the dog that keeps digging up human bones from your garden belongs to. A careful, methodical, career serial killer becomes clumsy and amateur.

It’s a wonderful premise, and the humour writes itself:

“One bad thing about living so many years as a murderer: you have no close friends to talk to”

Or

[Asked by his adopted daughter where her birth mother might be today] “Where do you think she is now?”

“Who knows? She might even be somewhere very nearby.”

In our yard for instance.

But, as with Black Flower and I Hear Your Voice, too much of the story feels hacked together and borrowed from existing art and history. The echo from the 1980’s Hwaseong serial killings in Gyeonggi Province is impossible to miss, but Kim Young-ha still can’t help himself, fumbling-in an unnecessarily explicit reference, along with a mention of its movie adaption Memories of Murder (Directed by Bong Joon-ho).

What isn’t mentioned but deserves to be, is Christopher Nolan’s Memento from which Kim seems to borrow an extraordinary amount of memory-related detail. Still none of this is as crude or blunt as the opening line, carved unmistakably from Albert Camus’s famous first sentence in The Stranger. Camus was trying to quickly set an emotional coldness to his leading character, a casual indifference to things that shouldn’t be possible. Kim is clearly impressed by this effort:

Camus: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.”

Kim: “It’s been twenty-five years since I last murdered someone, or has it been twenty-six?”

The uncomfortable literary decision-making doesn’t stop here. There are repeated analogies to gods, religion and zombies; our serial killer is somehow both completely amoral and yet morally introspective: “my punishment is Alzheimer’s”; an amateur philosophy runs over the text like out-of-control backup vocals – “Montaigne’s Essays”, “Greek classics”, “Homer”, “Odyssey”, “Odysseus”, “Sophocles”, “Oedipus Rex”, “Oedipus”, “Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, “Nietzsche”, “Nietzsche”, “Nietzsche” – only for the reader to be later informed that “I don’t know philosophy”; and the use of “hunting” as a metaphor for murder repeats so often that it becomes impossible not to ask if the author – just like with his protagonist – has forgotten what he has only just said a few pages earlier. 

For the author Clive James, successful writing was a process of “turn[ing] a phrase until it catches the light.” Labouring over the elegance of a sentence is not something that Kim Young-ha has likely ever done. At the end of I Hear Your Voice, when the story takes a semi-autobiographical turn, Kim speaks of the difficulties he was having finishing the novel. His blunt-force solution? “I began writing to a word count every day”. When Diary of a Murderer repeats the same turn into memoir, we hear it again: “We’re [novelists] built differently from Poets or critics. We’re the marines of literature, its manual laborers and butcher shop owners”. Perhaps for Kim, but it’s hard to imagine Han Kang, Shin Kyung-sook, or Hwang Sok-yong thinking this way about their work.

In love with storytelling but not language, Kim is just never going to be a literary sniper, someone who steps back from the action, steadies his thoughts, delicately selects a target, squeezes the trigger, and bets his success on a kill-shot. No! He is a lunatic, a mass shooter with too many guns and too much ammunition, firing indiscriminately into a crowded school yard. Sure, he misses the target a lot, but he was hoping only for a massacre, and that it definitely is.

His novels do this to you. They reach up from a pool of unconscious emotion and strangle the reader, ever tighter with each passing page. The imperfections fade under this grip, and you become absorbed, even fascinated, by the violence playing out on your own body. As the bruising settles into your skin, the sharp pain hums-down into a satisfying ache, you catch sight of yourself in a broken mirror and notice that you are smiling. It then dawns on you, that maybe, just maybe, you quite enjoy a little light choking from time-to-time. A little harder next time, please!

Kim’s mistakes here are not the result of laziness (not always anyway), but of bravery and impatience. This distinguishes Diary of a Murderer from his previous few books. Written as a journal, the short, punctual, detached, hasty musings of the author fit perfectly to theme; taking us into the cracking mind space of illness. There is no subtlety here, and this is just as well because subtlety wouldn’t be appropriate.

What I Have The Right To Destroy Myself and now Diary of a Murderer both gave its author, was a chance to be himself. To stop playing-up to his audience. All of Kim’s central characters are outcasts on the edges of ordinary life, but with these two books he doesn’t try so hard to universalise individual emotion. The numb disaffection of his prose is allowed its own space, unmolested by normalcy. Cold, callus, and inaccessibly fun, Kim’s literary style was always going to find a natural home with the internal thoughts of a suicide consultant or serial killer; those who hope for, and enjoy, the deaths of others.

And then just like that – with an overly-conceived, unwieldy, and yet satisfying twist – it ends prematurely and Diary of a Murderer breaks into short stories that feel more like lost ideas. Small, fractured, writing projects that our author couldn’t quite squeeze into a novel, and yet couldn’t bring himself to throw out. The less said about The Origin of Life and Missing Child the better, but then there is The Writer, and something delightful begins to happen.

Kim Young-ha is looking back on himself, and the unexpected success of his first book, with the harsh, sceptical eyes that he ordinarily applies to other people. He talks about the blur of writing, of being engulfed by a muse, of rediscovering himself in his work – “I hadn’t experienced such heights of productivity since my debut.” And he does it all with a raw honesty, “an unpublishable, erotic, experimental, disjointed novel, I didn’t need to reread what I’d written, and consistency of character wasn’t important”.

Asked by a young love interest what he does for a living, our narrator-author responds “I used to be pretty famous”. He talks her through the details of his first novel, and she looks back at him with an unimpressed glare, “Never heard of it”. But make no mistake, Kim Young-ha is back in his pomp here, and new audiences – not old enough to understand why he is famous – will at least begin to understand why he is so transfixing, and such an important counter-point to the Korean literary scene. (Even his Korean-to-English translator, Krys Lee, has dramatically upped her game from her previous effort on I Hear Your Voice).

Then the reader – with growing mood and excitement – gets to the last page, and is hit with “I slowly opened my eyes”. The moment crushes you. No! He isn’t going to do it! Surely not! But it continues like an all-to-obvious practical joke, and – in disbelief – you begin looking around for the hidden cameras. Kim is sometimes a little crude and loves to smuggle in a twist-for-twists sake, but certainly even he couldn’t possibly finish such a promising piece of writing with the child’s cliché of ‘then I woke up, and it was all a dream’. But, he, inexplicably, does!

If I wasn’t in a public café at the time, I would have thrown the book across the room. Do yourself a favour, and save yourself the aggravation, tear this last page out without reading it. Finish the book a few paragraphs early. Don’t let Kim Young-ha destroy your spirit and literary sensibility – forever a bad writer producing wonderful books.