The Man in Black & The Tiger

Having an episode of vertigo that lasted a few days meant that I couldn't read and scroll. Reading things on paper or off of a screen was unbearable. Listening was preferable. I bravely attempted an audiobook via Storytel — 'The Man in Black' (January 2022) by Oh Yoonhee, translated by Sean Lin Halbert. It's a short story. It's a commissioned '© Storytel Original', available as an audiobook, and as an e-book on Storytel platforms. I quite like that. At least the brand bothers to put in effort to support writers and translators. And yes, storytelling.  

The book's summary indicated that it's my kind of genre. So I was open to listening to it. It was a curious tale of the supernatural and it involves tigers again. Okay, can. What is it about fantastical tales and tigers. Since this is Year of the Tiger coming up tomorrow, it's a nice book to begin the lunar new year with. Storytel used a tiger as the cover art — "The tiger in the cover image is taken from the anonymous painting from Joseon Dynasty era, during which this story is set, titled Painting of a Ferocious Tiger (猛虎圖), Accession No. M67, courtesy of the National Museum of Korea."

The book opened with a lovely description of a corpse found in late autumn. I began cackling. All right. This is my kind of book. Korea was once known as the 'Land of Tigers' in Joseon Dynasty. There're so many myths, legends and folk tales about tigers as guardian spirits and symbols of virtue. There're tales of punishment and retribution. Say, 'Legend of Dangun' (the founder god-king of Gojoseon), and as stone sculptures guarding the entrance of royal tombs. The white tiger is considered sacred in folk legends.

Cho Kyoung-ho is a body handler with the coroner's office. In a village, there were two deaths in three days, supposedly done by tigers. A third death seemed natural (his heart stopped) and had no wounds on the body. He's puzzled that a tiger would come down the mountain and into the village, supposedly kill a human but not eat him or chew him up. It was an unusual sort of attack, if it is indeed done by a tiger. Granted, the dead men aren't well-liked in the village and are somewhat of a miscreant with a gambling problem who knew one another. 

He sought help from his friend Seok-nam, who is the son of a "legendary Royal Tiger Hunter known far and wide as the only man who put fear into the heart of the mountain king, Seok-nam was supposed to follow in his father’s footsteps and live out the rest of his life as a tiger hunter" but after his father was killed by one, and he left that life to become a porter at the port. Seok-nam looked at the second dead body and ascertained that it was indeed clawed by a tiger.

“Beasts don’t harm people for no reason,” Seok-nam said, repeating what he had told Kyoung-ho a couple days earlier. “That’s the difference between humans and beasts.” 

“The tiger must have had its reasons,” the coroner said. 

“But what could those be?” 

“How should I know? And what does it matter anyway? Are you going to catch the tiger and lead an inquisition?”

And then, one night, for an inexplicable reason, through Kyoung-ho, who has no power to influence the coroner's investigations or conclusions or verdicts, we meet The Man in Black. He said he was the one who killed all three men, and he was just a messenger who served a higher master. The Man in Black told Kyoung-ho why these three men had been killed, and the murder they committed. A divine mountain deity dishing out justice, unleashing his black tiger servant to mete out punishment to the unrepentant mortals? Kyoung-ho didn't know what to think. 

And yet strangely enough, Kyoung-ho didn’t sense any humanity coming from him. It was probably because of this that he was having such a difficult time guessing his age. The man’s attire was also peculiar. He was wearing a black bokgeon top hat, implying high status, and black robes. Kyoung-ho had never seen robes so black. On his feet, he was wearing taesahye, which were only worn by aristocratic men, but unlike most taesahye, which were white with black patterns on the tips, these where inverted: all black with only white on the tips. Because the man’s jet-black clothes blended into the darkness, if Kyoung-ho had only seen him from far away, he probably would have only seen his two eyes, which were almost glowing in the darkness.

As the story continued, it seemed as though the actual investigations were done by the coroners and Kyoung-ho, as a body handler, had no part in it. Yet he was privy to divine messages and dare I say, explanations as to why these three human deaths happened, and were deserved. We delved more into Kyoung-ho's dreams or was he really having visions? He learnt more and readers got a clearer picture of what's going on in this village. We learnt of the run-down shrine at Mt Inwangsan, a mountain god that exists, and serving him faithfully, a black tiger.  

I really enjoyed this short story. It's got all the fun narrative elements in it, typical of a folk story, but well presented. It isn't draggy or incoherent. It's good storytelling. If these collaborations are the hallmark of all © Storytel Original/s, then I look forward to reading/listening to more of these. 

Is this all the divine work of some mountain god? Had the mountain god sent that storm to prove that what the man in black had said was true? 

Both frightened and in awe, Kyoung-ho looked up at the fresco of the mountain god in the shrine. The white-haired, white-bearded god was wearing red and was sitting upright on a cloud. But looking closer, Kyoung-ho noticed another detail: there was something standing next to the god with its back arched. It was a black tiger. Black fur, fiery bright-yellow eyes, 38 and white claws. It looked to be guarding the god like a faithful servant. Even in the fading fresco, those two eyes looked alive, like two brilliant torchlights.