Mumu the Quadrupedal, An Extraterrestrial

An extraterrestrial who crash landed on earth and feels out of place? Hmmmm. This isn't a book I'd usually pick up. But I'm in an episode of book drought, so I'd read anything vaguely interesting.

Read 'Walking Practice' (published independently in Korean in 2017). It's a debut novel by Dolki Min, translated by Victoria Caudle and published in English by HarperCollins in March 2023. (Reviews here, here, here, here and here.)

Since that crash landing, Mumu the quadrupedal, has been stuck on earth for 15 years. Mumu has stayed alive by disguising their fluid body into the human form, killing and eating humans they meet via dating apps. Sex brings Mumu humans to devour. I burst out laughing at that. How apt huh! The author has crafted quite a vibrant character. Author writes gory details. But it's really cool. It's funny when we see their attempts to be 'human', but it's also sad when we realize their deep loneliness and desire to connect with another living being. 

Mumu needs to eat, and humans satiate her appetite and nutritional requirements. Mumu learns that the quickest way to find humans to eat is via the murky world of dating apps. We follow Mumu from hookup to hookup as they kill their victims and clean them up. With their home planet destroyed, there's nowhere to return to, and they're torn between the contempt they feel for Earth's humans, and a desire to belong to this planet that they are forced to stay on.

They are stomping on the masterpiece I slaved over as if they were mincing meat. I am loath to show them the real me. If I'm going to be stomped, I'll be stomped as a human, and if I'm going to die, I'll die as a human. Can you understand the agony of hating humans so much but shoving that hatred aside to look just like one? The desire to become a member of society always overpowers the shame of being embraced by their system. There's nothing worse than having my hideousness incur ridicule or cause some to be struck with fear. I will use every last bit of strength to hold on to my mimicry of humanity.

The story's fonts change (as digital books are able to play with that), and so does the spacing between the words, presumably to take us to inside of Mumu's head. The ending was almost poetically hilarious. She finally met a 'human' who transformed after sex into a form thrice bigger than she is. And he had tentacles. Gosh.

At the end of the story, the translator Victoria Caudle penned a note to express her thoughts about translating this work, and her advocacy work for the global queer community. I thought it was really nice of the author to have this understanding and generosity to acknowledge his excellent translator. 

Physicality is not only expressed in the language the novel uses, but also in how it visualizes the mental state of the narrator through the disruption of legibility. In the source text, this is expressed more orthographically due to the fact that, in Korean, the parts of a sentence are marked by postpositions, which make the meaning more trackable when words are torn apart and stitched together. The limitations of how English is written and read created further challenges when trying to express this facet of the Korean text in the most legible, yet still visually striking and disruptive, manner. Ultimately, the solution resided in moving away from replicating the Korean technique and into a more technical adjustment to how the words are presented on the page. While at first it may look like a typesetting error, the expansion and contraction of the English text is the strategy I devised as a way to visualise in English the way the Korean text separates and clusters characters when the tension breaks and Mumu's consciousness reverts to something less human and indecipherable to others. 

The final two pages of the story.

To my surprise, I really enjoyed the story. It's hilarious and tragic. Mumu is a competent hunter, sardonic murderer, offering incisive glimpses into how humans view gender and how people marginalize those who are different. The book features 21 line drawings by the author. These presumably take the form of Mumu when they can't control their form anymore. Mumu says that they're female. But I choose to use 'they' as the gender pronoun.  

The Korean wave isn't just sweeping films and network television. It's also sweeping books and their English translations. The translator Victoria Caudle has a huge part to play in getting this book out to English audiences. She read it, asked to translate and for permission for a sample translation to be sent out to Barbara J. Zitwer Agency (responsible for exporting big-name Korean writers such as Han Kang, Shin Kyung-sook and Kim Young-ha to the English-language market), and it was picked up by HarperCollins, and the rest is history, so to speak. 

“He is completely brilliant with a singular vision that is rare and new,” said Zitwer in an email interview with The Korea Herald. “It was the most sensational writing I had read in a decade. … It is incredibly rare and the first time that I sold a Korean book in English before I sold it in Korea,” she said.

“It was so unreal that I first thought it was a scam. … I heard this is a very rare case: An author who has only published independently signing a contract with a huge publisher like HarperCollins,” Min said in a recent interview with The Korea Herald. 

Dolki Min is the author's pen name. He also only appears masked for public and media appearances.

In an interview with The Korea Herald in January 2023.