Author's Note: Schoolgirl Champ King Arthur

Until last summer I was on what I call my “creative march.” For two years, short or long depending on how you look at it, I devoted myself entirely to writing novels. This is the sixth novel I wrote in that time. While I was writing it, I was completely captivated by this story.

Unlike its title, with the bubbly word “schoolgirl” in it, much of the book is heavy and dark. Even so, hoping readers would turn the pages quickly, I wrote it faster than anything before. Over fifteen days I averaged forty-seven manuscript pages a day. Keeping to my routine of stretching, strength training, running and piano, I clung to this book alone.

“A study of the best revenge a schoolgirl who knows nothing but boxing could take.” That is the one-line summary I entered in my spreadsheet after finishing the revisions. Shorter still: “A girl in despair, fighting.” Rereading the manuscript while proofing it for publication, I thought it could be defined in two words: angapeum, a child repaying a parent's love, and anggapeum, revenge.

Seo-a was born on July 2, 2003. The story begins with the episode behind the combination of the three words “schoolgirl,” “champ” and “King Arthur,” and carries on in a fairly bright mood. Having taken up boxing by chance, she becomes Korea's amateur boxing champion in her first year of high school. But right after that, something happens that no teenager could handle alone.

Because she loved the mother who had raised her alone so much, Seo-a had no choice but to take the bait So-mi's father dangled before her. In other words, the filial devotion with which she meant to repay her mother is what started her slide into the abyss. “What on earth did she do wrong?” There is no question more cruel and more rude to ask someone who has fallen into misfortune.

In the short term, the world does not run like a well-made plot. Misfortune seems to befall only the weak, and the wicked are rarely judged. When quantum mechanics appeared, there were fears that causality might be discarded. But even if its stock price has dipped a little, causality is still valid.

At the same time, our civilization could develop as far as it has partly because of revolutionaries who pushed back against the causality of nature. Willis Carrier defied the obvious law that in summer the sun climbs higher and temperatures rise. He invented the air conditioner and saved the humans who live in hot places.

My part in turning this novel into a book was writing it on a word processor. From editing and cover design to the process by which digital data becomes type and takes its place in a bookstore, it took a publisher, a printer and many other helpers.

So it was for Seo-a, sunk deep in a world of uncertainty. There was nothing she could do alone. That is when the helpers appear: Coach Jang Myeong-pal, whom she calls Grandpa, the balding lawyer, Hwa-seon and her cellmates, Aunt Yeong-sin, Mi-ran, the prison guards and many others helped her.

It is a structure in which you can guess from early on where the story will go. First, the main villain, So-mi's father, causes the biggest conflict in the book. Many readers will have turned the pages expecting Seo-a to take a hot, satisfying revenge on him, an anggapeum. The word “revenge” appears nearly twenty times in the novel.

The targets of her revenge also include Ji-yeong and her gang, with whom Seo-a forms a stubborn enmity at the detention center. Seo-a takes revenge on Ji-yeong with her own hands. For someone as timid as she is, it was a fairly brutal revenge, but it may have been a little tame compared to what readers expected.

The Exodus, one of the central events of the Torah, has influenced countless works. Similar story structures must have existed before it, too. A hero who leaves where she is for an ideal place, for an essential value, and grows through every kind of trial: the story is not unfamiliar to us. Only after I had finished did it occur to me that Seo-a's struggle resembles that structure.

Exodus tells of the Jewish people, once slaves, leaving the land of Egypt for the promised land. What is striking are the plagues God sent upon Egypt and the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea. It is a story as powerful as a movie, but what follows is frustrating. God freed them even by using Pharaoh, and fed them in the wilderness with their daily bread of quail and manna, yet the Israelites kept wavering and doubting God.

Aaron, Moses's brother and helper, makes a golden calf as the people want. A frightened public is drawn to strength. So it follows a charismatic leader who promises overflowing abundance and ruthless revenge. But people who say satisfying things often are very likely, in reality, incompetent, cowardly populists. And those taken in by such words easily become fascists.

To return to the novel: you probably expected a story in which Seo-a goes to prison, comes back out into the world and takes a satisfying revenge. Instead, the story of her time inside goes on and on. I know many people dislike stories in which the protagonist suffers, but Seo-a needed a time of tempering.

As with the Israelites in the Exodus, the Bible is full of people who pass through the wilderness, willingly or not. The wilderness is a place of death. There, where you can do almost nothing alone, they realize that they are nothing. Modern people experience the wilderness too. Leave the comfort of family or company and you soon enter the wilderness and face harsh trials.

Only after the tempering is complete there does understanding come. You are born again. You learn what is essential and what matters, what to let go of and what to fill yourself with. Those who overcome the wilderness are solid and calm. Shakyamuni, too, after leaving home, faced the wilderness of the world outside the palace, and by giving up desire through ascetic practice reached great enlightenment. Only the striped caterpillar that faces its fear, spins a cocoon, dies inside it and is reborn can become a butterfly and fly.

I should say something about the ending. The best revenge Seo-a could think of was forgiveness, which may feel anticlimactic. Many will think the private justice Aunt Yeong-sin took against her son's enemy is more satisfying. Seo-a's revenge is completed when the words of Aunt Yeong-sin, who has become her partner in fate, come true, and it is still going on. Seo-a will keep winning.

Several publishers proposed revising parts of the novel before publication. Their reason was that it would make a drama or film adaptation more likely, and I admit I was tempted. But in the end I did not turn it into a rousing sports story in which a hot-blooded teenager takes a satisfying revenge. I thank Munhak Segyesa for allowing a book that keeps its “study of the best revenge” intact to come out.

Before I started writing Seo-a's story, I began practicing a new piano piece, “Fairytale.” For someone as impatient as I am it was frustratingly slow. It didn't match the mood of the novel, either. But it helped me write calmly. I still play it every day.

Spending fifteen days with gentle, good-hearted Seo-a, I felt her emotions just as they were. I laughed, cried and hurt along with her. Because I was so deeply immersed, it was hard to get out of the feelings Seo-a felt.

I have left it to readers to interpret characters like the lawyer, Sang-gu and her fellow inmates. I am curious what you will think of them.

There was a time when I did not trust my own writing. Whenever anxiety and depression threatened to swallow me, I ran around the lake park, until I was soaked in sweat and my heart felt as if it would burst. Then I would have the strength to write again. Often I ran listening to a song by Shin Hae-chul.

I loved Shin Hae-chul's music from boyhood, and as an adult I came to love the man himself. Engraved on his gravestone is a lyric I treasure like a jewel, in which he says that he still believes, and always will, in five words: promise, devotion, destiny, eternity and love.

Seo-a kept her promise to Ae-seul. She devoted herself to her mother. Boxing, which she took up by chance, became her destiny. She was helped by someone who believes in eternity and became part of a new family. What embraces all of this, in the end, was love.

In the long term, I believe causality still works in the world.