A white bus speeds through the night on an elevated road.

It rushes through the city in an endless loop.

Inside the brightly-lit interior, some elderly women are sitting around a table reading an illustrated edition of the Kama Sutra.

A man in a monk's robe sits on the back seat.

Flares draw red dots in the black sky.

A young woman watches him on his drive.

Then he rolls over a passerby in front of her eyes.

She puts a hand over her mouth in shock.

But no scream escapes her.

The bus comes to a silent stop.

The protagonist lived through the scene in the novel “White Night” by the South Korean author Bae Suah several times.

Sometimes a white crow sits on the bus, sometimes a headless rooster.

The reader does not find out whether she dreams, remembers or the accident really happened.

Anna Schiller

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“White Night” is Bae's first novel to be published in German.

The author, who was born in Seoul in 1965, has already lived in Berlin and Zurich and speaks fluent German.

It is also known to Korean readers because it translates Franz Kafka and Christian Kracht into Korean.

And “White Night” can also be called kafkaesk.

Impulse writing

The story follows the 28-year-old Ayami on her last day at work in an audio theater. It will close the next day. She is a trained actress, but so far has only had one role in a student short film. Already in the morning the heat builds up in the narrow streets of Seoul. The weather report reports 30 degrees and mirages. The candle on Ayami's windowsill is melting. The last performance at the theater is poorly attended, everything seems as it always has. Until Ayami hears voices from the speakers. When she has already finished at the end of the shift, a man appears at the entrance. He supports himself with both hands on the glass door. On the other hand, Ayami does the same, so that their palms are on top of each other on the glass. Up close, she observes the red veins in his eyes.She hears his thoughts. Ayami is going mad.

Bae peppered her novel with allusions to surrealism.

With her German teacher, Ayami reads the short novel “Die blinde Eule” by the Iranian author Sadegh Hedayat, who draws an opium-induced dream world.

The theater director says of himself that he is so ordinary that he would never appear in a picture of Max Ernst.

In an interview with the Korean daily Hanguk Ilbo, Bae was asked how she write her stories.

The author said she had no technique.

She works intuitively and spontaneously decides where a narrative will develop.

Sometimes she picks up sentences that she encountered in a dream.

Flashbacks to traumatic experiences

“White Night” can be recognized as the product of her impulsive writing.

The novel looks like a written painting by Salvador Dalí.

At the beginning the reader is still tempted to hold on to certain places and protagonists.

But whenever you think you've finally arrived at the linear narrative again, Bae breaks the boundary between past and present, between reality and the world of thought.

Time merges, people blur into one another.

Ayami walks between the living and the dead.

With it, the reader loses the ground under his feet.

You end up drifting through the night with the protagonist, disoriented.

Or is it getting light again?

Ayami indulges in the journey through space and time.