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Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood
by Richard E. Kim
Product Group: Book
Publisher: University of California Press (1998-06-10)
ISBN: 0520214242
EAN: 9780520214248
Dewy Decimal #: 813.54
Paperback: 196 pages
Edition: 1
SKU: 080827001
Condition: Used: Good
Comments: This copy is in good condition. No visible markings, highlights, underlining, tears to text. Tight spine. A few pages to the back has smooth-out folds. Tiny chip to bottom spine edge. No Dust Jacket. Front/back, top/bottom cover has a crease. Soft Cover has minimum, shelf/edge wear. Apart from minor flaws, one can get a lot of usage from this very interesting copy, worth having at an affordable price. (L8-27)
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
In this classic tale, Richard Kim paints seven vivid scenes from a boyhood and early adolescence in Korea at the height of the Japanese occupation, 1932 to 1945. Taking its title from the grim fact that the occupiers forced the Koreans to renounce their own names and adopt Japanese names instead, the book follows one Korean family through the Japanese occupation to the surrender of the Japanese empire. Lost Names is at once a loving memory of family and a vivid portrayal of life in a time of anguish.
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Amazon.com Review
From 1932 to 1945, the Japanese occupied Korea. Organized in seven vivid scenes, Kim's fictionalized memoir tells the story of one family's experience, as told by the boy. The narrative starts in 1933 with a dramatic iced-river crossing into Manchuria, when the boy was just a year old, a story the boy knows from the many times his mother has told him the tale. Next scene and we're in 1938. The boy and his family have moved back to Korea, where the boy is the new boy in school and is learning new routines like bowing his head toward where the Japanese emperor is supposed to be in Tokyo. He does as he is told, but wonders if the emperor knows the children are bowing to him, wonders if he's asleep, or eating breakfast--or maybe even in the toilet. He pictures someone knocking on the door, saying, "Your Majesty! The children, the children! They are bowing to Your Majesty!" and him saying, "Wait a minute! I have my pants down!" A few years later, the children are told they need new names--the Koreans must renounce their family names and take Japanese ones instead. Later, his father takes him to the cemetery to ask forgiveness from their ancestors for the humiliation of losing their names. The scenes continue as the boy grows up, mingling the experiences of childhood with the history of the occupation, seen in the small day-to-day moments that bring history alive. Richard Kim uses a simple but powerful voice to evoke painful times, a loving family, and a strong spirit of survival. Lost Names is a beautifully written tribute to the people of Korea that is subtle, moving, and hard to put down.
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Customer Reviews
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Insightful and uplifting
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-10-10
While reading this book I got the impression that it was a memoir. It is actally not so please be aware of this when reading. Considering that it is fiction the author was surprisingly "tame" in telling the story. I was expecting another depressing memoir of a family destroyed by the Japanese occupation. In Kim's book, however, the family's suffering is more subtle and their eventual triump refreshing. It's nice to not read a book where everyone and their mothers die a painful death. This book gave a lot of insight into the lives of Koreans during the occupation. It was also nice to know that not all of the imperial Japanese soldiers were as gruesome as they were in the Rape of Nanjing.
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Nonfiction bogged down by fiction
Rating  (3)
Date: 2007-06-15
The "scenes from a Korean boyhood" in this book, which are evidently based on actual events, are very compelling and convey powerfully what life was like under the Japanese occupation of Korea. So that's the reason to read this book. Unfortunately, these scenes are set in a kind of fiction jello that connects one episode with another by means of impressionistic accounts of the Korean landscape and so on. This sort of writing is much less successful, and you'll find your eyes sliding past some of it. Kim is not as skillful at blending fiction and nonfiction as, say, Dave Eggers, and one wishes the author had related more about the father, who had been imprisoned by the Japanese, or the grandparents, or even the village, which was located in what is now North Korea. However, that would be a different book. Lost Names is not difficult reading and is certainly a good place to begin learning about what Koreans endured during World War II.
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Lost Names
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-04-05
Imperialism is something that is often associated exclusively with the West. The histories of the British colonization of India and the Spanish colonies of Latin America abound, but many fail to notice the history of the Empire of Japan, which held Eastern Asia prior to and during the Second World War. Richard Kim writes about his childhood experience in Korea from 1932 to 1945 in his book Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood and focuses on the situation of Japanese imperialism on the Korean peninsula, and the effects of the colonization.
Richard sees first hand how Japan influence on Korea is affecting his family life, school, and friendships. The book begins with an image of Kim's family leaving Korea for a job and being stopped by the Japanese Imperial Army. This was the first of the scenes that were told through the eyes of Richard Kim. The book goes on to depict six more stories, separated by chapters.
Japan is painted as an outside influence, which is taking over Korea in a more passive way. The narrator describes the Japanese as not bad people, but people who are distinct from the native Koreans, and collectively more powerful and all-surrendering when it comes to their Emperor. This is shown when the narrator talks about how the books gets it's name, in which the Koreans are made to give up their Korean names in exchange for a Japanese name. Showing the strong nature of his family the name chosen by his father means "Foundation of Rock."
Throughout the book, Koreans are portrayed as being in control in Korea behind the thick wall of Japanese occupation. This is largely personified in the character of Kim's college-educated father, whose firm anti-Japanese standpoints are looked-up-to by much of the local community. In spite of this, many Koreans are portrayed to be people who are indebted to the Japanese - shown by the character of Kim's teacher.
Aside from the educated people, Koreans are portrayed as being unaware of the events around the world at the time, shown by the narrator's mother's obliviousness to the unfolding of German invasions in Europe and Japanese occupations in China. These chapters's focus on day-to-day event, which make it very important to the overall understanding the reader, gets of the depth of the effects of the Japanese colonization.
Overall this book was very informative, one is able to see the true impact of the Japanese during World War II. However, not every event depicted in the story is completely true is still shows a first hand perspective in a new way, through a child eye. I would recommend the book to anyone interested in history or the impact of war. Just keep in mind this is not completely factual, but it will give you a better understanding of Korean history.
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Korean pride triumphs
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-09-20
10 out of 10 customers found this reveiw helpful
This was probably my favorite of the books we read in the Japanese History course I took my senior year of college. Young Richard Kim spent the majority of his childhood in his native Korea while it was under occupation by the Japanese, who were not very nice to or tolerant of his people, no matter they were the majority and the occupying Japanese were the minority. There are many hardships and much prejudice he faces growing up, from neighbors, the government, teachers, and schoolmates, but he never loses his sense of pride and Korean nationalism, constantly being reminded by his parents (who are ministers) and his grandmother to remain aware of where he comes from, his identity, the sustained hope that the Japanese won't always be in Korea, and to do well in school and set a fine example to the Japanese, since he mustn't let those Japanese boys at school think they're better than he is. When WWII comes along, everyone suffers the normal wartime deprivations, such as food shortages and bombing raids, but it is especially hard for the Koreans in the midst. Young Richard is forced, along with his classmates, to bow in the direction of the Emperor each morning, recite an ode of allegiance to the Emperor and Japanese government, and, worst of all, to even change his family name. All Koreans are forced to change their surnames to Japanese surnames, although Richard's father is clever and changes their family's name to one with the root meaning "rock," which of course is a reference to Saint Peter and the family's religious faith, a reference the Japanese won't get. It's enough to take away and try to usurp one's culture, traditions, customs, language, and way of life, but when you take away someone's name, that is in a way the ultimate erasure of their identity. Even when forced to, at least on the surface, speak a foreign language, submit to foreign leaders, and follow alien customs, there's still the comfort of knowing your base identity, your name, is still the same, but taking it away makes this prejudice and attempted usurpation of Korean culture incredibly personal and insulting.
It didn't really bother me that some of these memories and thoughts are very complex and detailed for a child as young as Richard is in the beginning. Many times memories of traumatic defining events are stronger and more vivid and real precisely because they were so awful and traumatic, leaving more impact than something as mundane as, say, eating breakfast or walking the dog. And even if some gaps in Richard's memory may have been filled in by what he imagines happened or what his family have told him happened, it doesn't lessen the emotional impact of these events in the slightest. And I like how it was told in the present tense; since discovering quite some time ago that books can be written in the present tense and there's no rule written in stone saying you must only and always write in the past tense, I've much preferred books written in the present tense. It makes the events seem more real and gripping, full of suspense and tension, like constantly wondering what's going to happen next, living right in the moment.
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No blame, just poetry
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-08-28
3 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
A beautifully written book that places you in Korea during the second world war. Fast reading, and well paced told from the POV of a very (maybe too!) wise young boy. Only thing that got me down was knowing that it ended just before the next war again wreaked such damage and havoc, and there was no post script. Definitely worth reading.
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