Abstract

Lee Hyun-soo’s novel Four Days deals with the Nogeun-ri Incident, a massacre of civilians carried out by US forces in Yeongdong, North Chungcheong Province, from July 26 to 29, 1950. In the novel, documentary director Kim Jin-kyung returns to her hometown of Yeongdong and looks back on the history of the village and her family in order to plan a television program on the subject of the Nogeun-ri Incident. The narrative has been criticized for how it overlaps here, and it lacks a sense of completeness. This paper examines what exactly Lee Hyun-Soo’s novel, which depicts the period after the Nogeun-ri Incident, implies through its treatment of “distraction.” This article asks the female narrator, who exists alongside the massacred “good people” (yangmin), why the process of revealing the facts of the Nogeun-ri Incident had to be expressed in a distracting manner. The narrative traces how the two characters lived two very different lives after the massacre: One is a life that responds to the politics of reconstruction, while the other is a life that is unable to even approach the space of “reconstruction.” Lee Hyeon-soo’s novel, which attempts to get increasingly closer to the “disappearing women” of the Nogeun-ri Incident, does not engage directly with the problem of reproducing the “yangmin” who sacrificed, and it demonstrates that the life of a woman after the massacre is never confined to a single point of view.