Prologue: The Ghosts of Daehak-ro

I was a business freshman waiting to hear back from a band audition when a notice caught my eye: a venture startup was looking for founding members. I applied on the spot and within a few weeks we were in business. Y, the third-year student I founded it with, was capitalism incarnate. His talent for rallying people and his knack for solving problems belonged to another dimension, the kind of thing no textbook teaches. Before six months were out we had an acquisition offer. I opposed the sale and went my own way.

On my own I started a second business, and it failed miserably. While I was holed up in the library working out the opening strategy for my third, I put into practice what I had learned from Y. I met the target customers in person and used my network to land partners that should have been out of reach. Not long after I set up a venture company called R4R, I appeared on the hottest live talk show of the day, billed as “the teenage CEO.”

The next morning absurd things began to happen. People asked for my autograph on the subway to school, I became a celebrity on campus overnight, and a freshman found himself giving lectures. That was not the half of it. I was invited to a private gathering of the heads and senior executives of companies everyone knew. It felt like too much and I declined, and then it occurred to me that Y would never let a chance like this slip by.

I mixed with people I had only seen in the business papers. They liked the cheek of a kid like me. After that I received offers I could not refuse, several times over. It was the perfect chance to outdo Y, who had sold his company and become an executive at a listed firm. But I decided to change the direction of my life. I wound up the business and set off on a tour of the whole country, saying I was going to write. Back at school as a student, I taught English and math, called myself an anarchist and put off military service to the very last, and in the end was commissioned as an officer.

On my first day reporting as a platoon leader, a soldier in my platoon died before I had even had the chance to say hello. Going through a joint inspection by five separate departments, I adapted to the military several times faster than the others in my cohort. I became a company commander before I had even made first lieutenant, and during a joint Korea-US exercise I ran supply for the entire western front from an underground bunker. Drinking with the generals and watching them, I had a strange sense of déjà vu. They had a great deal in common with the members of that private gathering.

Later I was posted to the rear as a staff officer in charge of operations, and then I was discharged. Having already put on the uniform I swore I would never wear, I now faced the office life I had sworn I would never lead. I was in the middle of writing a cover letter when I was summoned to the provinces. It was my twenty-eighth birthday. The chairman of a mid-sized company, who had always been fond of me, laid out a detailed blueprint and asked me to become CEO, an offer that was hard to refuse. My heart was pounding, but I sensed by instinct that it was a poisoned chalice.

After thinking it over for a long time I turned it down, sat interviews in food, film, games, internet portals and every other kind of industry, and decided to join the strategic planning team of a construction company. But while touring the country for new-hire training, I confirmed yet again that office life did not suit me at all. I gave notice that I would not be joining. Over drinks with friends we all agreed to start a company together, and when I sobered up I realized that not one of us had any real IT experience. A few days later I told them we should talk again once each of us was ready.

Just as I had toured the country in college, this time I went abroad. I spent the interview expenses I had collected on a quiet island off Pattaya, and I was drinking a cocktail there when the HR team of a portal company got in touch. I had passed their final round, but because I had skipped the pre-employment medical check they had recorded me as declining the job. Would I reconsider? Wait, I thought. If I join a portal, I can get IT experience. I snapped awake.

Back in Korea I met their head of HR at a bar in Yeoksam-dong. I told him I planned to be an office worker for three years only, and that I would join if he could make me a team leader before then. In a large company, three years in you are lucky to be an assistant manager, but he promised to meet my brazen condition. I entered the IT industry at less than half the salary the construction company had offered. The HR head looked out for me in particular after that, but of course my life was never going to run smoothly. About two months after I joined, he quit.

Even so, one way or another, I did become a team leader three years in, when I changed jobs. At my exit interview the company made an extraordinary offer, but I could not change my mind. I spent two more years as an office worker, then worked freelance, founded an IT startup and, for various reasons, retired from it. I touched on this briefly in my first novel, Goody Jeanne d’Arc. When merger talks were under way with a unicorn everyone has heard of, I again received an offer that was hard to refuse, but by then my energy was completely spent.

I made a podcast, gave lectures at companies and institutions when I could, and even taught a course called Strategies for Startup Success at a university. I mostly chose work that took a great deal of effort and paid very little. One of those was a web novel, serialized for paying readers on Munpia and Naver, about three protagonists who pass through an academy founded by a man called the Master and go on to take over Korea’s politics, economy and organized crime. It ran to only about 5,500 manuscript pages by the end, which is to say it did not make much money.

Then my first novel won a literary prize, I became a full-time writer, and I went through the period I call my “creative march.” For two years I devoted myself entirely to writing eight novels. This book is the sixth novel I wrote in that time. I had just come through the ordeal of finishing the first draft of Schoolgirl Champ King Arthur, in which I drove the heroine into extremity and made her endure every kind of trial. At last I was going to write in a genre I loved, and I was brimming with energy.

But when I actually sat down to write, the stories I had been planning for years were tangled like the arrowroot vines on Mansusan in the old poem, and for a long time they would not come apart. After finishing the arduous revision of the previous book, I went to Yeosu to clear my head. (That is why Yeosu turns up briefly in the novel.) On a rare outing to the hair salon, I stopped at a café in the La Festa mall and set out the synopsis on a single sheet of A4. In my diary that day I wrote: “All done in an hour, which makes all the agonizing seem absurd!!!”

But of course it was never going to run smoothly. The previous book, which was hard going throughout, I ground out at an average of 47 manuscript pages a day; with The Ghosts of Daehak-ro even 20 was a struggle. It was so hard that without my routine I might have given up halfway. When I looked at the statistics after finishing the draft, it had been the slowest of all my novels. At the time I did not know why, but I think I understand now. It must not overlap with what I had already let loose in the web novel. Above all, it was self-censorship.

I do not mean to say “look how varied my résumé is.” It has taken me this long to explain that what I saw and went through myself is the foundation of this book. Ever since my first year of college, when I set off around the country, whenever I had to endure every kind of hardship and humiliation, whenever I turned down an offer that went against my convictions, whenever I needed courage, I always swallowed the same words: one day I will write this feeling, this sensation, this situation into a novel!

My experience, that is, the offers I received in the past, the projects I carried out in secret and the powerful people I spent time with, may be partly reflected in the pages that follow, but all of it is invented. If anything, it is a toned-down version. Whenever a powerful person made me a big offer, there were ghost-like figures around them. What they had in common was a line into politics, and even their business cards did not make plain what they did. When businessmen laid out a vision for me, these people talked about positions. This novel is an eyewitness account of people like that.

The only two people who read my first drafts, my mother and my younger sister, said this is the most entertaining thing I have ever written. It has no allegory and does not tangle its timeline, which is rare among my novels. I hope you enjoy reading it.

The season I find hardest, since I do not cope well with heat, is on its way. This summer I mean to begin the creative march again.

Gimpo, June 2026.