The End of August: A Novel

by Yu Miri, Morgan Giles (Translator)

Overview

From the National Book Award winning author, an extraordinary, ground-breaking, epic multi-generational novel about a Korean family living under Japanese occupation.

In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-cheol was a running prodigy and a contender for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. But he would have had to run under the Japanese flag.

Nearly a century later, his granddaughter is living in Japan and training to run a marathon herself. She summons Korean shamans to hold an intense, transcendent ritual to connect with Lee Woo-cheol. When his ghost appears, alongside those of his brother Lee Woo-Gun, and their young neighbor, who was forced to become a comfort woman to Japanese soldiers stationed in China during World War II, she must uncover their stories to free their souls. What she discovers is at the heart of this sweeping, majestic novel about a family that endured death, love, betrayal, war, political upheaval, and ghosts, both vengeful and wistful.

A poetic masterpiece that is a feat of historical fiction, epic family saga, and mind-bending story-telling acrobatics, The End of August is a marathon of literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593542675
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/30/2024
Pages:	720
Sales rank:	317,322
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 5.90(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

A Korean author writing in Japanese, Yu Miri has over twenty books to her name. She received Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, and her novel Tokyo Ueno Station won the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature. After the earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima, she relocated there and has opened a bookstore and theater space.

Morgan Giles is a literary translator. Her translation of Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station won the 2020 National Book award for Translated Literature. She lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The End of August

"Commanding... Yu’s passion for rescuing history from violence is palpable on every page." —Kirkus

“Artful and kinetic…This has a power of its own.” —Publishers Weekly

"Spellbinding." —LitHub

“Morgan Giles' translation of Yu Miri's The End of August reads at a breathlessly swift pace despite, or because of, the painstakingly meticulous care put into every word and line. Yu's rich storytelling never loses its pace as Giles relays her depiction of the resilience of the Korean nation through the tragic consequences of colonialism that reverberate to this day.” — Anton Hur


Praise for Tokyo Ueno Station and Yu Miri

"Tokyo Ueno Station is a dream: a chronicle of hope, loss, where we've been and where we're going. That Yu Miri could conjure so many realities simultaneously is nothing short of marvelous. The novel astounds, terrifies, and make the unseen concrete—entirely tangible and perennially effervescent, right there on the page." —Bryan Washington, author of Lot and Memorial

"Glorious." —New York Times Book Review

"[A] relatively slim novel that packs an enormous emotional punch, thanks to Yu's gorgeous, haunting writing and Morgan Giles' wonderful translation.... Yu does a magnificent job exploring the effects of all kinds of loss on the human psyche. Tokyo Ueno Station is a stunning novel, and a harsh, uncompromising look at existential despair." —NPR

"Poetic... How Kazu comes to be homeless, and then to haunt the park, is what keeps us reading, trying to understand the tragedy of this ghostly everyman. Deftly translated by Morgan Giles... It is an urgent reminder of the radical divide between rich and poor in postwar Japan." —The Guardian

"Spare, indelible." —O, the Oprah magazine

"A novel of the world we all share — not what we expect from a ghost story but frightening all the same." —Rumaan Alam, Washington Post

From the Publisher

Sue Jean Kim performs National Book Award-winning (TOKYO UENO STATION) author Yu Miri's new novel. Yu, an author of Korean descent writing in Japanese, fictionalizes her grandfather's experience in the 1930s as one of Korea's top athletes. In the story, he's a candidate for the Olympics, but because of the Japanese occupation, he would have to compete for Japan. Kim perfectly delivers the rhythms of the many large sections of poetic prose. Her performance highlights her incredible range, but with so many characters and voices, listeners may get lost from time to time. Choosing to use one narrator seems like a missed opportunity to feature an ensemble who would have provided more distinction among the many players in this sprawling, vibrant story. K.D.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2023 - AudioFile

06/26/2023

Yu (Tokyo Ueno Station) draws on her Korean Japanese family history in this resonant if overstuffed saga. In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-cheol jogs every morning to train for the 1940 Tokyo Olympics. In the present day, his granddaughter, Yu Miri, is living in Japan, where she trains to run a marathon and wrestles with her dual heritage (“When I can’t express my feelings I speak Korean”). Adding to the autobiographical elements are intriguing slices of history, such as the Korean Heroic Corps, a resistance movement founded in 1919 by Kim Won-bong, and the “comfort women” who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during WWII. Central to it all are themes of Korean defiance and alienation, glued together by the bittersweet story of Woo-cheol, who’d hoped to bring glory to Korea in the Olympics before Japan’s invasion and the Games’ eventual cancellation. Some readers will certainly wonder if they can go the distance, but the prose is artful and kinetic (“My breath is a whip in my heart a red horse running around inside me/ each drop of sweat becomes a shout and is shaken off”). Though it doesn’t reach the height of Yu’s previous work in translation, this has a power of its own. Agent: Michael Staley, Michael Staley Agency. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

2023-05-09
A multigenerational saga about small-town Korean life under Japanese imperialism.

Yu’s novel, first published in Japan in 2004, likely appears in translation nearly two decades later for two reasons. First is the success of her novel Tokyo Ueno Station (2020), which won the National Book Award for Translated Literature; second is the success of Min Jin Lee’s novel Pachinko (2017), a similar epic about Korea under Japanese rule. Readers may find this novel less immediately engaging than those, opening as it does with an extended section of dense family history and religious rituals with invocations of ghosts. But in time three lead characters come into clear focus: Lee Woo-cheol and Lee Woo-gun, siblings in the town of Miryang who are both talented distance runners but who have their Olympic ambitions stymied thanks to World War II; and Eiko, a neighborhood girl who at 13 is abducted with a promise she’d work at a uniform factory but is instead sent to China to serve as a “comfort woman” to Japanese soldiers. Woo-cheol’s and Woo-gun’s stories reveal the Korean folkways that were suppressed and warped under Japanese rule—Yu explores birth, marriage, and funeral rituals in depth as well as efforts by resistance groups like the Heroic Corps to disrupt Japan. Meanwhile, Eiko’s brutal ordeal is a troubling portrait of extended sexual violence, including serial rape, forced hysterectomies, and murder. Translator Giles leaves many Korean terms relating to family and rituals untranslated, which creates an immersive effect and underscores the theme of an instinct to preserve one’s culture when another attempts to erase it. (Koreans were forced to change their names by the Japanese.) The book is overlong, but Yu’s passion for rescuing history from violence is palpable on every page.

A baggy but commanding study of oppression at the individual and national levels.

Kirkus Reviews