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Red Sword by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur
Jun. 14th, 2026 04:49 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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magine knowing nothing about a world beyond what a character can see of it, and then getting random information about something that you cannot connect to the world yet. You see the character fighting to survive, repeatedly, but without any idea of in what context, for what purpose or against whom. You might want to DNF the book: Where is it going? Yet the emotions of being a prisoner who’s fighting her captor’s war linger heavily on the page, settling in your mind. How can such sparse prose do it?
The answer lies in Bora Chung’s Red Sword, translated to English by Anton Hur—that is, if you remain curious enough to read it till the end.
Intriguingly, she begins the story by introducing the intimacy shared by two prisoners—speaking different languages, having different pasts—who have found each other as fellow captives in a spaceship belonging to the Imperials. These two people, a man and a woman, step outside the spaceship in the white fog of the white planet:
The world the spaceship had landed on was white. The patch of sky above was an off-white gray, and white fog obscured everything else in sight. It even rolled over the ground, making it impossible to tell what the terrain looked like. (p. 8)
The man, young and beautiful, is sliced in half. His partner, the unnamed woman who is young and afraid, manages to save herself from the “white monsters”—beings who look like humans wearing white armour, use white weapons, have a third white arm around their helm, and also bleed white.
There’s also a white river in this planet, densely white on one side and transparent on the other, which also acts as a battle ground in the great war the woman now finds herself fighting on behalf of the Imperials. In this stark whiteness, her “sleek velvet scabbard” with “elaborately embroidered patterns on its surface, with little mirrors sewn into it and dangling flowers and butterfly charms” (p. 6) stand out. She carries the sword because the Imperials, her captors, didn’t take it away from her—they consider only guns as weapons, and don’t see a sword as threatening. She has another “man” and two women, known by their attire “Indigo Skirt” and “Light Green Skirt,” fighting by her side. Together, they fight for survival, and at one point the protagonist calls herself “Red Sword.”
Red Sword fights the white monsters for the Imperials, is repeatedly imprisoned again by Imperials and fights them, and is again thrown back into the wilds of the white planet to fight the monsters. What Chung might have lost with the absence of extensive worldbuilding amid all this, she gains by creating picturesque visuals through colours—for instance, in the giant black-red birds whose “wings became more blood-crimson towards the tip” (p. 26). She also adds stars, “floating half-spheres, for that was what they were, that sparkled and show with variegated lighting, were eating the fog and leaving a clear space where the flock had passed through” (p. 95).
Naming the women prisoners by the colour of their skirts also adds to creating a distinct image of them, and yet it isn’t just a visual choice—but a declaration of expected gender roles during war which Chung has overturned. When the man fighting by the side of Red Sword frustratedly questions the wisdom of wearing skirts to a war, the Light Green Skirt says, “You men were supposed to do the war, and we’re supposed to open our legs to you and die later” (p. 34). In another spectacular scene, women prisoners from the space ship use their vibrant skirts as flags to rescue the ones trapped by the monsters on the planet.
The author also introduces a character with a name, Isfobeddin, which almost sounds like “is forbidden” in English—ironic considering she is the only one who seems to have access to the prisons as well as the Imperial’s area in the ship. She is either not forbidden anywhere or finds a way everywhere. She learns about the reality of the world, warning the protagonist about it, who in turn takes time to figure out what is meant by her words: “We’re all dead. You, me, everyone here, we’re already dead” (p. 70).
This is Bora Chung’s third novel, though the first to be translated in English. It puts women in men’s roles, making it a refreshing read. It also makes a case for love and affection transcending any human urge to control the scientific advancement. In every lifetime, lovers find each other in a world that’s being regulated by the Imperials, who are hell-bent on removing any threat from a planet that might become habitable for them due to the presence of water.
Yet, the driving force of the novel is freedom. The prisoners are the Imperials’ foot soldiers, fighting simply to earn their freedom. In the beginning, it is stated that the protagonist “couldn’t believe everything the Imperials said. But freedom—that was a seductive word. A word that upon hearing exuded a whiff of hope. A wisp of a thing that persisted in the air around them once it was uttered, a strand of weak light they fixed their gaze on. A hope” (p. 5). Here, Chung adds another layer to the story: When you have traversed across galaxies to a planet where death seemingly doesn’t exist, where the dead seemingly come back to life—who are you or who is the real you? How many rebirths have you been through and is your yearning for the home long left behind real anymore? Can the greed to colonise ever benefit people who merely want to belong to a place they call their own?
Red Sword is an action-driven novel which engages the reader in the emotions of the prisoner who leads its story. This brings to surface the futility of the war. The novel’s blurb states that Chung is inspired from the “history of Korean soldiers who fought and died in a war against Russia on behalf of the Qing Dynasty.” I read the book without having read the blurb first, and in itself the story felt complete. If anything, as an Indian reading it, I kept going back to the Indian soldiers who fought the World Wars on behalf of the British Empire with the promise of independence. This is to say that the story resonates with wars fought across empires.
I like stories in which the world reveals itself as we turn the page. I imagine Red Sword might not be palatable for readers who indulge in extensive descriptions of world-building and characters’ back stories. Hur’s translation certainly makes the characters’ inner turmoil evocative, and nowhere is the austere prose compromised, even in the eventual explanations which occur later in the book. However, this sparseness in the face of its characters’ relentless struggle for survival worked well for me: Despite or because of it, this is a novel that is visually spectacular—and raises questions of memory, freedom, language, respect, empathy, and love.
Once upon a time, just after slavery but long before democracy, the Sand Mountain Hermit lived and died alone, just a couple of counties north of where I sit typing today. Marx Edgeworth Lazarus was his real name. I know nothing about his activities as a hermit: Hermits by definition do most of their activities away from the eyes of history. Before the War, though, he was a doctor, and a philosopher, and that rarest of things: an anarchist in the antebellum South.
