Kim Soom’s 280-page novel Wandering Land (Eunhaengnamu, 2020) reimagines the 1937 deportation from inside the freight cars themselves. The story follows roughly 27 Koryo-saram — including a pregnant woman named Geumsil and a Russian-born boy named Michka — packed into a windowless boxcar for a month-long journey from the Russian Far East to Kazakhstan.
Kim spent four years researching and writing the novel, which was first serialized in the literary magazine Axt before this edition. It draws on Soviet internal records, which document that of roughly 172,000 Koreans deported in 1937, thousands died along the way — the novel cites a figure of 554 recorded deaths during transit — with families forced to bury their dead in unmarked ground beside the tracks whenever the train stopped.
Kim, who previously wrote Flowing Letters, a novel based on testimony from survivors of Japan’s wartime “comfort women” system, brings a similarly documentary sensibility to this book. Rather than centering a single protagonist, the novel moves between the voices of the people crowded into the car, asking — through one character’s words — how many generations a family must live somewhere before they’re no longer treated as strangers.