On the Untraveled Travelogue by Kyung-sun Lim

On the Untraveled Travelogue by Kyung-sun Lim — On Kyung-sun Lim’s Travelogue That Never Traveled

A writer who first made her name as a columnist and now moves freely across genres, writing every single day. Each of her books arrives with a slightly different expression, as though small, quiet universes were being played out in variation, like a theory of parallels. We met writer Kyung-sun Lim, who finishes a journey before she ever sets out on one.

Interviewee Kyung-sun Lim
Interviewer Hur Taewoo
Photos Park Shinwoo
Location courtesy of Plant Studio Seogan
Picante

I understand you write almost every day.
That’s how it looks from the outside. You shouldn’t judge based on my social media alone. I don’t treat it like a job with fixed hours in the morning and afternoon every single day. Of course, when I’m in the thick of writing a book, that’s a different story—I write at least three or four hours a day, every day. As long as I’m not doing other book-related tasks, I like to focus purely on writing. I used to take my child to daycare and school myself, and once we parted ways I’d switch straight into work mode, starting at a café that opened around 8 or 9 in the morning. These days it’s a bit different—I write intensively for three or four hours whenever it suits me. Being a writer isn’t the kind of job where you can clock in and out. I think that’s true for most people who make a living by writing.

It seems like you’ve published a book almost every year.
I’ve been a full-time writer for 20 years now. Including revised editions, I’ve put out 24 books—about 22 if you exclude the revisions—so yes, roughly one book a year. Though some years I published two, and the year I was pregnant, I only managed about half a book.

In an interview with a newspaper *, I read that you alternated between publishing a novel and an essay collection.
At first I mostly wrote essays, then I tried my hand at fiction, and once I found I could write novels too, I seem to have settled into alternating between the two—like switching between the left and right sides of my brain. Even within fiction, after a short story collection I’ll move on to a novel. Going back and forth like that, constantly changing formats, feels refreshing to me. I have a lot of respect for writers who stick to novels alone—that’s a difficult thing to do.
* Chosun Ilbo interview, May 3, 2023, “One Book a Year for 19 Years… Never Putting Down the Pen Despite Five Cancer Recurrences.”

You’ve mentioned that your working method resembles Haruki Murakami’s.
Yes, though it certainly wasn’t intentional imitation. Murakami has made his living from writing for over 40 years, so the routines he swears by clearly didn’t come out of nowhere. I simply enjoy reading his books—I’m not the type to admire every other aspect of a writer and mimic them. Still, after more than 20 years of scraping by on writing myself, I’ve come to understand exactly why he does what he does. Murakami, too, once fit the image we typically imagine of a writer—smoking, staying up all night—but he quit smoking in his early thirties and completely overhauled his lifestyle: writing in the mornings, spending afternoons on tasks that don’t require much thinking. The rest of his time, in the end, is all in service of those morning writing hours. He also runs consistently. It’s not to make a good story or look cool—it’s simply necessary if you want to sustain a career in writing. I understand now that these habits were refined through trial and error.

You run too. Did you take it up for the sake of stamina?
I’ve run over 1,000 kilometers cumulatively, but I’m not sure I’d call that ‘running.’ I’ve never even entered a race. I started somewhat impulsively during COVID, and the main reason I’ve kept it up is so I can listen intensively to music I love. Listening to music you love softens your heart, doesn’t it? Maybe you could call it a romantic state. Writing benefits from being in a slightly sentimental mood, and listening to music while running puts me in the best mood for that. Especially at night, running through a dark, empty place while blasting music I love—it seeps deep into my body. Listening to music is the biggest benefit of running for me; the second is that it physically supplies oxygen to the brain and gets the blood flowing. People used to say that writers clear their minds by taking walks, and that’s really because walking supplies oxygen to the brain. But honestly, walking alone isn’t quite enough. Walking takes hours, and that’s too much time to spend for the return—running for just 10 minutes has a far greater exercise effect than walking for two hours or ten thousand steps.

For any writer, moving into fiction is naturally tempting, but it seems like it wouldn’t have been easy to make the leap from essays to novels.
That’s true. In Korea, aside from the debut system—winning a new writer’s literary award or a spring literary contest—there’s virtually no other path to becoming a novelist. That was especially true when I first started writing fiction. There were occasional cases of newspaper reporters or magazine editors-in-chief writing novels, but I published my first novel on the strength of my name recognition from essays and television appearances. A young female editor at Hakgojae Publishing suggested we give it a try, and that’s how ‘Geotteon Nal Geunyeodeuli’ (a collection of nine short stories about romance, published in 2011) came about—and, as it happened, it became a bestseller. It sold over 50,000 copies, which is incredibly rare for a debut book. I think I was really lucky. It was a kind of novel that hadn’t existed before, so I suppose there was demand for something like that. The market response was good enough that I could publish my next book. If that first novel had flopped, I would have disappeared quickly. That’s why I think the first opportunity is always so crucial.

You also write on social media. Does that activity have any effect on your writing work?
Do they clash with each other, you mean? Not at all. What I write on social media doesn’t come from the same place in my brain. It’s more like momentary grumbling. I never write anything in advance and post it later. Even so, it tends to come out fairly organized, and that’s because I’ve written columns for a long time. Having written nearly a few thousand of them, structuring a piece of 1,000 or 2,000 characters with a clear beginning, middle, and end has become second nature to me. On social media, I write on impulse, whatever comes to mind, and then keep editing afterward. Even a week after posting something, I’ll read it again and make revisions. I’ll even fix things like uneven paragraph breaks or photos that don’t quite go together. In short, it’s basically a hobby for me.

So you keep revising even after posting?
Right. Since I write it roughly the first time, whenever it catches my eye I read it again and fix it. I have no hesitation about that. Writing for social media shouldn’t become a burden or an obligation. You have to enjoy social media—if you start doing it just because everyone else does, it tends to fall apart. If I come across as unnatural, the person reading it feels uncomfortable too. So where’s the line between natural and unnatural? My attitude is: whatever people say about my writing, it’s none of my business. Whether there are nasty comments or not, I just leave them be. I don’t even block people.

Your books keep getting translated as well. Are there two published so far?
Three editions have come out in Japanese. I made those connections myself. Selling overseas rights is genuinely difficult. I actively pursue the Japanese market myself and leave the rest to an agency. I focus on Japan because I can speak Japanese, I’ve lived there, and it’s close by. Do you know what percentage of the U.S. publishing market foreign literature takes up? Just 3 percent. Writers from around the world are competing within that sliver. The Japanese market, at least, shares a similar cultural context and allows for smoother translation, so I keep my focus there. I work directly with editors on the ground too.

When you write, do you ever consider style, sentence structure, or nuance with Japanese readers in mind?
That’s simply not possible. I don’t consider Korean readers either, for that matter. The moment you start writing with readers in mind, it falls apart. For practical or nonfiction books, you might need to write with a target readership in mind depending on the case, but for essays, prose, or novels—literary work—all there is to it is writing what you personally want to write. Whether that gets accepted in the market, or how it’s read, is a separate matter that comes after. I always say this: readers are people I’m grateful for, but there’s no place for them in the process of a book being written and made. If you write while worrying about readers’ expectations, even the writer herself won’t find it interesting. If readers say they like something particular about you, you have to keep betraying that. A writer shouldn’t be kind to readers. That’s not for the reader’s benefit at all. Once a book is published, you can be kind—but before that, it belongs to the writer alone.

You spent your childhood in Japan. I hear you’re a huge Murakami Haruki fan.
I read Norwegian Wood when I was a sophomore in high school in Japan. It’s about the love and loss of youth, so of course I found it fascinating. It was a little racy, too, and read so smoothly. The author himself probably never imagined it would sell as much as it did, so he must have been quite bewildered. Like I always say, an author can’t choose their own representative work. For a long time, that book became something like Murakami’s defining work, and I imagine that left him feeling conflicted. *‘On Attitude’ is like that for me.
* A steady bestseller with 220,000 copies sold since its first publication in spring 2015. Last October, to mark the sale of its 200,000th copy, a fully revised and expanded edition was released.

Does it bother you that it sold so much?
It feels like too much of an ‘honor student’ kind of book. Honestly, even saying this is a luxury complaint. I’m just grateful, and instead I keep revising it. For this new edition, I cut, revised, and rewrote a lot. It has to feel exactly right to me. Only then can I feel even a little bit proud of it. Even I can tell the difference between a book I think, ‘Ah, this is really well written, this is good,’ and one I think, ‘Ah, this one was a bit rushed.’ You don’t love all your children equally, even though everyone says they do. It’s not true. It can’t be. We’re only human.

When you put out a revised edition, does that mean going back and rewriting what you wrote before? That sounds like something you’d really dread doing.
Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do. For me, it felt like finally finishing a long-overdue assignment. It doesn’t sit well with me that a book I’m not 100 percent happy with keeps selling steadily. Someone might read writing that reflects thoughts I no longer hold and assume that’s who I am now.

When you look back at the past from where you stand now, what do you think has changed? I imagine revising a character you wrote in your thirties would feel different depending on whether you’re doing it in your forties versus your fifties.
It’s less about age and more that I realize I sometimes thought about things from too one-sided a perspective. In a way, I think I used to be more preachy when I was younger. As you get older, you start to see things from more angles—thinking ‘that could be true too’ or ‘it’s not necessarily like that’—whereas when you’re young, you tend to have this baseless self-certainty. When I notice that in my old writing, I feel embarrassed. Of course, I meant it sincerely at the time, but now that I can see other possibilities, I find myself wanting to express the same idea differently.

When you write travel essays, do you write on location, or do you take notes while traveling and then build the story afterward, adding details along the way?
The book ‘Imkyungsun’s Tokyo’ was self-published in a limited run of just 2,000 copies. It’s a book based on my own trips to Japan over the course of several decades. It only includes places I genuinely love, with a few essays woven in, and it introduces only the hot springs across Japan that I personally like. It’s essentially a Tokyo guidebook that I curated myself. Since I registered the publishing company myself and released it as limited-edition marketing, even when it topped the travel book charts and online bookstores asked for more copies, I stopped right there. I’m someone who cares a lot about ‘face,’ I guess. (laughs) Anyway, I wrote that book by actually going there and scouting locations for weeks at a time. But with *‘I Went to Kyoto’ and **‘A Gentle Salvation,’ people are always shocked when I mention this in talks—I write the whole thing before I even go.
* Her second travel essay collection, about the particular sentiment she felt while traveling through Kyoto. Published in 2016.
** A travel memoir about revisiting Lisbon with her daughter after her father’s death, in search of childhood memories. Published in 2019.

You write the whole thing before you go?
Yes, I write it all beforehand. First, I buy up every resource I can find in English or Japanese. I study the destination, sift out only the parts that interest me, then build a structure and plan the route. I organize background knowledge about the places I’ll visit in advance, and after thoroughly mulling it over and digesting it all, I set off already feeling like someone who’s been there before.
In my view, the worst way to write a travel essay is to go somewhere without much preparation, wander around here and there, then jot down what happened that day like a diary each night at the lodging, and stitch it all together afterward. When you do that, you end up artificially hunting for things that might make a good story. People assume that going somewhere unfamiliar and exotic will automatically become a story, but it doesn’t work that way. It ends up as mere listing, with no depth—precisely because you haven’t done the homework.
Since I’ve written several books, I naturally start thinking in terms of narrative structure. I plan the itinerary accordingly, read through and simulate all the material, and go with a rough sense already in my head of how to fill 100 pages of A4 paper without it getting boring. That way, once I’m at the destination, I can stay as relaxed as possible and simply take in whatever thoughts and feelings arise in the moment. That leaves me room to write about what I felt that evening, or about unexpected variables I never anticipated. I supplement the material on-site, and once I’m back, I put it into the most refined book form.
A travel essay is writing that heightens anticipation for a place before you go. We romanticize the Duomo in Florence because there’s content that has built that up. That’s what you have to give readers—not just a list of facts or shallow impressions. You can’t lean too casually on the destination itself. That’s why travel essays are no easy genre—truly.

So writing the whole thing beforehand means you laid out an overall guideline or manual before leaving?
Literally, I’d write it all out across 100 pages of A4 paper before going—Day 1, Day 2, and so on, following the route. I even wrote down what emotions I expected to feel at each place. Of course, things often didn’t go exactly as planned.

So in the case of ‘A Gentle Salvation,’ what about *Mr. So?
I contacted him in advance. I said, ‘Uncle, I’m coming.’ Of course, I had no idea what stories he’d end up telling me once I was there, and what I heard turned out to be absolutely amazing for me. I put all of that in the book too.
* A close acquaintance of her father from their time living in Lisbon. The story of reuniting with him after more than 30 years is recounted in ‘A Gentle Salvation.’

You wrote about Kyoto mostly in past tense, but Lisbon in present tense.
With Lisbon, I felt I needed to give the sense that I was walking alongside the reader. I thought that would create deeper emotional immersion, whereas with Kyoto, as the title suggests, I wrote in a tone of quietly telling you about the city I came to know after visiting. In ‘A Gentle Salvation,’ I had to lay bare a very emotional state of mine, so writing it in present tense rather than past tense was quite difficult. That’s exactly why it’s not easy to write, and exactly why it has its own charm.

You also wrote a novel set in a hotel. Judging by that book, hotels are a real passion of yours, aren’t they?
I thought about writing an essay collection about hotels, but felt that would be too on the nose. Some subjects are fun to serialize one piece at a time in a magazine, but feel like too much to read as an entire book. So instead I wrote *a collection of linked short stories. I think I instinctively love hotels because of that mineral, neutral quality that lets me erase my original self. One of my fantasies is simply evaporating. Whenever I travel or go abroad, I always think about what it would be like to just vanish like that. On trains, watching the scenery go by, I imagine, ‘I could work at that gas station over there, live in a house like that, and become some new character, Number 6.’ It’s an anonymous kind of space that offers the possibility of becoming a completely different person. That’s probably why people love airports and train platforms. Writers can’t help but love the unfamiliar—that’s what gets the mind working.
* ‘Hotel Stories,’ a collection of five short stories set in hotels. Published in 2022.

Do you have your own criteria for choosing hotels when you travel?
On a personal level, I automatically rule out any place that embroiders or prints the hotel’s name on the bedding. I don’t do Airbnb either—or rather, privately run accommodations in general. I don’t like places where the owner’s personality is too strong, or rooms that push a concept too hard. I prefer places that feel neutral and achromatic, with lots of wood. If I’m staying in a city for a long stretch, I might switch accommodations once or twice, but I like to settle into a well-located place and then just enjoy that neighborhood. I don’t enjoy the kind of travel where you chase landmarks, leaving the hotel in the morning and coming back late at night. Since I want to be able to walk to parks, small shops, bookstores, cafés, and so on, the location of my lodging really matters. Like a lot of people, I’d rather there be fewer tourists around. When I’m at a hotel, I talk a lot with the staff at the front desk or bell desk. I’m always curious about the people working the night shift. At hotel bell desks, too, it’s usually just one person alone at night. The reason I wrote ‘Night Shift’ in ‘Hotel Stories’ was that when I go running at night, I pass a certain hotel near Gwanghwamun, and the bell desk clerk on the first floor is always sitting there alone, quietly, at night. Every time I saw that young man, I wondered what he was thinking about. He was probably thinking about nothing at all. But I find it interesting to talk to people like that. My first job was in a hotel’s PR department, and it’s the kind of job where you end up meeting every job type across every corner of the hotel. I didn’t work there very long, but it was fun.

Do you bring books with you when you travel?
Of course. It’s essential, absolutely essential. Mostly Japanese pocket-sized paperback novels. They’re light, and since I keep up with reading in Japanese, I’ll bring one of those, or a book that’s enjoyable no matter how many times I reread it. I often bring older books, like a Murakami Haruki short story collection.

I’m curious how it feels to return as a traveler to a place where you once lived as an outsider.
There were many times I lived abroad relatively young, before becoming an adult (she spent her childhood in Japan, Brazil, Portugal, the United States, and Romania, following her diplomat father), but honestly, I don’t feel any sense of estrangement or foreignness even when I go abroad. Put another way, I don’t really have a strong sense of ethnic identity. I suppose you could say I don’t have much attachment to roots. Wherever I go, I don’t really get that feeling of ‘hometown’ or ‘second hometown.’ That’s a bit sad, in a way, but I think it’s because wherever I’m placed, I just start from there. I don’t seem to have any particular attachment to place.

Our magazine's theme is sustainable travel—what are your thoughts on that?
Honestly, nothing really comes to mind except the idea that you should conserve whatever you can. Buy less, use less. I just do what I can, but what exactly is sustainable travel? What am I supposed to do? I'd like to ask you that instead—what should I be doing?

Being eco-friendly and contributing to the local economy. You could call it community-based consumption.
Not having hotel linens changed, buying local products… I think I do those things naturally, without really thinking about it.

I heard you also got rid of your personal car?
Yes, if you don't have one, you don't need it. I rarely had occasion to drive, so keeping it around felt pointless, and I sold it.

Even when traveling, you tend to seek out the spots locals actually go to.
Absolutely. But isn't this making it sound a little too neat? (laughs)

You've visited Tokyo more than anywhere else, right?
I haven't counted, so I couldn't tell you the exact number. If you include the time I lived in Yokohama, that's about four years, plus all the business trips. For me, Japan barely registers as “abroad.”

So do you stay in a different neighborhood and a different hotel every time?
Of course. Unless there's a specific reason not to, I usually stay around Ginza. It has to be a place where I can get most things done on foot. I don't go to Shinjuku or Shibuya much. Staying in Ginza means the subway covers everything, so I never have to take the JR line.

As a devoted Haruki Murakami fan, have you gone looking for the places that appear in his work?
I did that once, a while back. It's actually in my essay collection *‘Purely Personal.’ I made a whole circuit—from the diner in Shonan that Murakami frequented early in his writing career, to the neighborhood library in Kobe he used to go to as a kid, to DUG in Shinjuku, the jazz bar that appears in ‘Norwegian Wood.’ If I ever find the time, I'd like to visit the electric bathhouse from the film ‘Perfect Days’ too, but I haven't had the chance yet.
* A book in which the author, as a devoted Murakami fan, meticulously traces and records his footsteps. Published in 2015.

Why do you go looking for these places?
Because it's fun. The first book of mine to be published in Japanese was ‘Purely Personal,’ which reads almost like a biography of Murakami. After that came the Japanese editions of ‘A Tender Salvation’ and ‘Hotel Stories,’ and soon *‘The Name I Quietly Call’ and ‘Everything Left Unsaid’ will be released as well.
* Her second and fourth novels, published in 2019 and 2024 respectively.

This interview came from a travel magazine—what kind of questions did you expect?
I figured you might ask how I write while traveling, or what kind of material I go looking for, and maybe talk about my travel style or travel essays in general. I wouldn't say I dislike traveling, but I don't love it either. I think what I enjoy isn't so much traveling as going somewhere unfamiliar. That's why I do a lot of lecture events in regional cities—including quite small towns. I don't mind staying at a motel in front of some small-town train station, either. So while I do have my own criteria for choosing where to stay, it's not necessarily about luxury or comfort. I think I just like unfamiliar situations in unfamiliar places.

It seems like you're not all that interested in food, though.
I think people who are deeply interested in human emotions and relationships tend not to care much about food. For me, eating is just a source of energy. Food can be one of life's pleasures, but if it becomes too important a pleasure, I feel like life would end up feeling rather dry. If the greatest joy in someone's life is eating something delicious, that seems sad to me, honestly—though of course, it's different for everyone.

So what are you most interested in, then?
People. People themselves. Human emotions, relationships between people—things like that.

Lastly, when you eventually retire as a writer, have you thought about what subject you'd want to write about last?
I used to have a vague idea that my last book would be an illness memoir, something like Paul Kalanithi's * ‘When Breath Becomes Air.’ Writing from a place of desperate, genuine feeling seemed meaningful to me. But lately, as I find myself talking to my only daughter—now a high schooler—more and more as an equal, it suddenly occurred to me that a book like that might only cause her pain and hurt. So for my final book, I want to put into words what I wish to leave for my daughter. Even after I'm gone, I want her to feel, whenever she misses her mother, as though I'm always right there beside her.
* A work in which neurosurgeon and writer Paul Kalanithi wrote about the two years he had left to live before dying of lung cancer.