Real Toads, Imagined Garden

RUNNER-UP IN THE 2022 REFLEX PRESS NOVELLA AWARD

As Joyce once said of Dublin, the same can be said of Seoul: ‘It seems strange that no artist has given it to the world.’ In remedy arrives this work’s narrator, a flaneur living as a foreigner in South Korea. As he navigates an international marriage and the approach of fatherhood, the observations and peregrinations of this urban Thoreau are recorded in a series of linked vignettes, seasonally arranged and varying in content from ethnographic insight to metaphysical musing.

Accompany him to the marketplace, the public bath, the passenger car of a bullet train. Encounter the characters that people these places: the teachers, tailors and billiard players, the elders, lovers and loners. No class nor corner of the city is ignored in the protagonist’s search to understand both self and society. And though the work is set in the environs of Seoul, its plein air portrayal of a culture in transition, along with its artful unlocking of the mystery in the mundane and the beauty in the banal, render local colours with universal appeal.

A panorama both critical and poetic, Real Toads, Imagined Garden courts the genres of the travelogue, the lyrical essay, and even haibun to give elegant expression to the evolution of a life and a land.