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THE OTHER SIDE OF DARK REMEMBRANCE

By Lee Kyun-Young
Translated by Ahn Jung-hyo
Seoul, Korea: Jimoodang Publishing Company, 2001
ISBN # 89-88095-55-3
103 pages

Comments by Bob Corbett
December 2012

Shin is a bank worker in Seoul, current time. He and a co-worker go out one evening after work and get smashingly drunk. Shin has with him his work briefcase containing some important papers of a deal the bank is about to close. He wakes up in a strange hotel then next morning, very hung over, having no idea where he is, but the briefcase is gone. Yet all his money and such are still in his suit coat. Further, he discovers a woman checked them into the hotel and even paid the bill. He has no idea what has happened and has no memory of the woman.

His sole concern is finding the briefcase since an important deal for the bank could be compromised by these papers falling into competitors’ hands. Shin sets out to find the lost briefcase.

In a brilliantly constructed thriller Shin soon leaves the trail of the briefcase and enters into a part of his past deeply buried in his memory, and slowly unwinds a tale of his earlier life.

This is a magnificently constructed book, well-told and keeping one guessing the entire time. In the beginning the reader, at least this reader, was a baffled as was Shin. Slowly I began to suspect what Shin hadn’t yet faced, that the brief case wasn’t what this was all about. I simply couldn’t stop reading and read the whole book in about two or three sessions. A marvelously

Bob Corbett corbetre@webster.edu

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