Dog Days

Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s previous works centered around the effects of the Korean War, though she took rather different approaches. In her 2021 book The Waiting, she drew on historical accounts to tell the story of a woman who becomes separated from her husband and son as they flee from North to South Korea. Even though Gendry-Kim’s mother became separated from her sister in the same way, Gendry-Kim wanted to tell a fictional story, albeit one that was rooted in history. In The Naked Tree she adapts a 1970 novel by Park Wan-suh. Rather than simply re-telling the story in graphic format, however, she uses Park Wan-suh as a framing device for the novel, making changes to the text to delve into the question of what it means to be an artist in the midst of a war.

In Dog Days, she takes her first step into autofiction, using her and husband’s move to the countryside to tell the story of how an unnamed woman and her husband Hun end up caring for three dogs. At first glance, this rather plotless work about a couple who purchase or adopt three different dogs doesn’t seem to have much of a connection to Gendry-Kim’s previous work. The story is in a contemporary setting, and there’s no mention of the Korean War. However, this work is quietly subversive, much as her previous work has been, especially in its exploration of the generational divide that still exists in Korea.

The artwork mirrors the simplicity of the plot, in that she sticks to a black-and-white palette, with many panels often appearing sketch-like. Even when she does focus more on details, especially of the dogs, there are limited backgrounds, if any. She often uses the dark backgrounds that she does create to help nurture a feeling of foreboding or even suspense, especially when humans approach the dogs. Similarly, there are several storms at important moments, particularly when dogs are threatened, and black rain and shadows often overwhelm the little light in those panels.

The book centers around seven different dogs (or groups of dogs), each with a chapter devoted to it, with an eighth chapter serving as a summation titled simply, “Life Goes On.” They begin by purchasing Carrot from a pet store, a decision that ultimately leads to their moving out of the city to give their new pet more space. Though they don’t seem familiar with the rural culture, the transition appears to go smoothly, especially as they meet other people who seem to love dogs. Along the way, they also end up with Potato, whom somebody left on their porch, and Choco, a dog that has lived most of its life in a cage, as its owner doesn’t seem to care for it.

However, their move to the country is more complicated than it first appears, as several people who live around them, especially Mr. Han, love dogs for much different reasons. For example, there’s a white dog that the wife often sees when she’s out walking. After she hasn’t seen it for a few days, she runs into the owner and asks her about it. The owner replies, “Ah, I sent him away.” When the wife follows up to ask where, the woman replies, “Actually, I made soju out of him.” The wife is horrified and thinks, “She’d turned her dog into booze and was smiling about it. Her smile couldn’t be any brighter.”

Similarly, Mr. Han initially seems quite helpful, offering them part of his land for them to have a garden. They even describe him as a “wonderful neighbor.” They ultimately find that he has three dogs living in a building near their field, and Hun spends some of his time taking them out and carrying them around to see something outside of the building. One day, though, they’re simply gone. It’s only later when the wife is out for a walk that she finds Mr. Han wearing a red apron with knives in his belt, and she sees the charred remains of a dog on the table.

Gendry-Kim even turns the lens on her own family through a flashback. After her encounter with Mr. Han, she dreams (or remembers) a moment from her childhood when she was out during a storm. She discovers a dog that she frees from her leash and encourages to run away, telling it that it will die if it comes back. She later she sees a dog hanging in a tree. When she sees a face come into focus, she cannot tell if it's her father or Mr. Han. Gendry-Kim uses grays throughout this section both to represent the night-time event, but also the moral dilemma the protagonist confronts. It’s unclear if this scene is simply a dream, equating her father with Mr. Han because of their generational connection or if the wife has repressed a traumatic event from her childhood that the encounter with Mr. Han brings to the surface.

It’s this generational divide that Gendry-Kim seems focused on exploring, as she, like the couple in the book, discovers that older Koreans, especially those outside cities, still see dogs as sources of food, and not as pets. While the description of the book and the opening sections lead the reader to believe it will focus on the wife’s relationships with her dogs —  and the book's structure even reinforces this idea — this divide slowly becomes the focus as the work progresses. She’s not preaching to her audience, but the idea is clear by the end.

In an afterword, she writes about the way people treat pets in the city, which is much what one would see in most places in the U.S. – people not only walk their dogs, but treat them like children, pushing them in strollers or carrying them. “Dogs have become an integral part of the family, with 15 million pets making up 30 percent of South Korea’s population,” she writes. However, when they moved to the country, they encountered a different reality, as she explains that “some houses had several cages out in the open, filled with puppies in the fall, and by the following year’s Boknal [the three hottest days of the year. It’s believed that consuming dog meat soup or tonic soups on these days helps conquer the year’s heat.] the cages would be empty.” She would tell her friends in Seoul about what they found, and nobody would believe her.

Gendry-Kim worries to her husband that she might be reinforcing stereotypes about Korean culture, as many Western readers not only might not be surprised by what they find in the country, but would have expected such behavior. Her husband, whom she quotes in the afterword, tells her, “Your readers are wiser than that. They know not all Koreans eat dog meat—it’s a practice of only a few people from the older generation. Write what you need to write, just as you always have.”

Thus, on one level this book is an attempt to bear witness to the ways in which some Koreans still hold on to traditional practices of seeing dogs as nothing more than food. Gendry-Kim believes that educating people about these practices can help lead to an end of them. As she comments when describing people buying multiple copies of the book, “The truth can be uncomfortable, and facing it and acknowledging it takes courage—acting on it even more so. Yet recognizing the truth begins with showing interest.” Thus, in the same way she has written about the effects of the Korean War in her previous works, she wants to call attention to what she sees as a barbaric practice that needs to end. Though her focus is on a different subject, she believes in the power of art to effect real social change.

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