A travel account, and a 1960s city person

Kim Seung-ok’s Mujin kihaeng, the notes write, is a particular person’s travel record given literary form. The title itself shows that it is a kihaeng — a travel account — and the story takes the ordinary shape of leaving and coming back. As the sentences in the work show, they add, the figure begins a journey, enters the Mujin region, spends night and day looking around, ends the Mujin trip, and returns. That closed structure is why they call it a typical travel tale.

The protagonist is the narrator “I,” and appears as a typical city dweller. The notes place the author in the 1960s, and see the central motif as the hometown-seeking trip of an ordinary person who, in the sudden industrialisation and modernisation of that decade, has been wholly changed from a country person into a city person. Travel, in Korean fiction more generally, often belongs to the form of a road, or to the motif of a path, and here it is used to join an inner, existential self to the modernisation and urbanisation that ordinary people were then living through.

Shame, and travel as a means of reflection

Throughout the work, they write, the narrator gives voice to a serious shame about himself, and that change of feeling takes the form of self-reflection. Travel, in this reading, is the means of reflection that the writer chose for the protagonist, and a stylistic device as well. Once the journey to Mujin is decided, a person who in the city had simply kept up daily life falls into deep thought. That is because the trip is also a remembering of a gloomy past self that the protagonist had lived by forgetting.

The same genre, they add, can express wholly different themes according to the writer, the period, and the background. A travel account is often styled through a writer’s own ideas and private judgements of artistic value; the notes keep that caution in view, and still find in this work a creative taking-up of a motif that runs through the history of the novel.

Opening and closing, and a telegram that calls him back

The protagonist comes to admit that the city is at once like a prison and a kind of protective shield, and that daily life, though it repeats itself tediously every day, is not something one can realistically leave. Travel has the character of opening, of a brief departure from the everyday self; yet the protagonist makes the decision of closing, in order to keep daily life, and the story concludes on that choice. The last scene, they write, in which he is summoned at once by a single telegram, is the example.

He had left in order to come back. Each time he resolves on a new start, it comes to nothing in the real world. The ending of the journey is not a new turn or beginning, but a return to the city dweller’s closed, everyday structure. This, they write, is a creative change to the form of travel: not the usual homecoming that aims at returning to the hometown and staying there, but a leaving of the hometown and a return, instead, to Seoul — a leaving of Seoul’s daily life for the hometown, and a return to that daily life again. In that double use of opening and closing, the compulsive, self-contradictory character of modern daily life is shown in the form itself. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of Kim Seung-ok’s Mujin kihaeng: travel as reflection, and a return to daily life.

Last updated: 15 November 2026