I Hear Your Voice unrolls at its own pace, and we’re never quite sure where it’s going until we get there (and even then we’re not completely sure if we’ve arrived). Jae’s legend starts to grow, and his gang rises in status until his position as the leader of the nightly cavalcades is unquestioned – at which point, Liberation Day rolls around, with plans for the biggest (illegal) motorcycle rally the city has ever seen… It’s only when he gets out and returns to the big city that the two youths meet again, with Donggyu gradually being drawn into his friend’s life in Seoul’s shadows, becoming part of a gang of motorcyclists who take over the streets of the capital after dark once the normal folk have abandoned them. The boys make an instant intimate connection, but events conspire to separate them, with Jae eventually ending up in an orphanage.

Despite coming from very different worlds, their paths cross when Jae and his adoptive mother move into one of the flats owned by Donggyu’s family.

I Hear Your Voice (translated by Krys Lee, review copy courtesy of Mariner Books) focuses on the lives of Jae and Donggyu, two boys growing up in the Korean capital. It’s the story of two boys, one city and a hell of a lot of motorbikes – so now that I’ve got your attention…

To be honest, though, he’s never quite managed to make it into mainstream consciousness in a way that might have been expected after the positive reception of I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, so it’ll be interesting to see if his most recent work in English manages to relaunch him in the Anglosphere. Of the young(ish) Korean writers translated into English, Kim Young-ha has fared better than most, with several novels available from reputable American publishers and a few shorter works brought out in Korea floating around in second-hand bookshops ( or in the form of bootleg PDFs in the digital realm).

I hear your voice young ha kim