Oral histories are a preeminent means for vulnerable minorities to resist mainstream histories that have assumed authority. When we chip away at histories written from the perspective of subjects who have assumed “universality” and we record the remaining stories that have been marginalized, we are sketching the other side of history while also filling in the gaps where that history is still incomplete. It is not a simple matter, however, to identify the historical, political, and sociocultural meanings within individual stories. The lack of representativeness and incompleteness of representation become obstacles of a sort. How do we go about establishing a basis for viewing a person’s story not only as that person’s individual story, but also a story reflecting the era of which they are a part? How do we establish the historical value of incomplete stories remembered by human beings, who by their nature tend to misinterpret and rationalize things? Kishi Masahiko’s “Mango and Hand Grenades: Theory of Life History” (Korean translation by Jeong Se-gyeong, Second Thesis, 2021) offers the following explanation of the universal meaning held by the theories of life history as “mere” individual stories:

“The details sketched in qualitative studies are not intended to proclaim the ‘plurality of reality,’ but to communicate to the ultimate reader multiple layers of truths: that our memories, experiences, and stories are connected with the world; that these are things that actually happened; and, most crucially, that there are people who actually experienced those things, and that those people exist before us here and now slowly telling the stories of their lives through oral histories. In that sense, the details of stories are a means of arriving at reality.”  - Kishi Masahiko, “Mango and Hand Grenades”, pp. 29–30.

This theory of life history as a way of arriving at reality is oriented toward a worldview not of “selection” but of “multiplication.” Under these contradictory circumstances, the individual oral histories do not serve as a way of resolving contradictions; their meaning lies in how they multiply hypotheses as much as possible, broadening the boundaries of our imagination as it pertains to the situations described by human beings—or the boundaries of the truth. A full understand of humanity and the periods of history is only barely made possible when it rests on the “‘understanding’ that there is absolutely no need to minimize the harshness of the situation.’” Through the weight of the “personal stories” communicated in oral histories and life histories, we arrive at the reality of the history through which they lived. Seventy-six years have passed since World War II ended. Less than a century after its end, we still live side-by-side with people who bear the scars of that war inscribed on their very bodies. There are people alive who experienced war—who, more importantly, bore the physical experience of the war’s ravages. Their testimony more realistically establishes the truth of the war’s nature.  In the words of the Zainichi Korean author So Kyonshiku, we have been living in an “era of testimony.”

So Kyonshiku’s “testimony” is story-based witnessing; it is witnessing that connects the subject and communicator sharing it with the people whom the testimony reaches. To present a story sharing the witnessing of Japanese military “comfort woman” survivor Song Sin-do, he looks to his mother as an object of empathy. This leads him to the following statement: “Do not insult my mother.” We find various other indications of how deeply So has contemplated the questions of “objectification” and “consumption.” He repeats the same message, “Do not insult my mother,” in “On Responsibility” (Korea trans. Han Seung-dong, Dolbegae, 2019), a collection of his conversations with Takahashi Tetsuya.  At the same time, he also relates his concerns about the limitations in which this approach might result: “When I present my own mother as ‘material’ as someone born the same year as the former comfort woman Song Sin-do, I always have to confront the attitude that I might be ‘consuming’ my mother.” He goes on to explain, “The reason I have written this anyway is that I determined it might be necessary to imagine my own mother facing the same fate as Song Sin-do in order to inscribe on my own mind how the ‘comfort women’ were not objects of abstract opinions, but flesh-and-blood human beings.” What we can observe in common between Kishi and So’s statements is that the key element in the sharing of “witnessing” as a means of chipping away at mainstream histories is a “real” sense that is distinct from an “abstract” one. The “era of testimony” exists amid the transition from a history of abstract statements to a history of concrete senses.  

Published in 2016, Kim Soom’s novel “One Left” (Hyundae Munhak) is a work that announces a new turning point in the era of testimony. The story concerns a narrator who has lived throughout her life without ever speaking out about her own experience as a “comfort woman,” as she goes to meet the last known witness just before her death. Taking place around this imaginary last moment, the novel envisions a certain point that has been reached in the era of testimony. The book points out that the era of testimony is gradually reaching its end, characterizing this as the “twilight of testimony.” Drawing upon this twilight moment, it creates a worldview of “multiplication,” which may be seen as the foundation on which the era of testimony rests. What meaning is created by the multiplication worldview formed ahead of these final moments, and can it present us with meaningful realistic possibilities not only in literary terms but also social and historical ones?
 
“. . . add nine to forty-seven. . . But the sample math that works well enough when she’s pricing items at the market or in the shops has broken down.” - from Kim Soom, “One Left”

This scene refers to how the kinds of calculations that we have no trouble with when we are counting money to buy something at the market seem no longer to work when counting the number of “comfort women.” This is because the estimation of their number is not a quantitative matter. If we consider the situation in terms of the rules of arithmetic, their world is more akin to one of foregone defeat, where only negative numbers exist. The era of testimony is fated to fade away, unless there is some change to the fact that the people bearing witness to history are themselves approaching death. In a world where numbers continue to decline without any new variables appearing, the power of testimony is merely a temporary truth with clear limitations to it. Few people are listening to truths that are poised to disappear. What sort of imagination do we need to multiply these limited time frames? If Kim Soom regards testimony as a reflection of the multiplying worldview, this proliferation is not only a horizontal proliferation occurring solely within one generation, but a vertical proliferation leading from generation to the next. The protagonist traveling to meet the last witness in the novel may be someone who experienced the victimization herself, but in the time that follows, the people who go to meet her will not be. 

“I’m living proof, and I can’t help weeping in despair when I hear such an outlandish denial that no such thing happened! Which was why the woman [Kim Hak-soon] had decided to summon the pool of reporters and let the world know of her experience. [. . .] It seems only a few days ago that she heard 238 women had registered, so how is it there’s only one left? As she shakes her head she hears the ticking of the clock. She looks up at the clock on the wall, with its round face and dark hands. There’s no time.”  - from Kim Soom, “One Left”

The saying that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” applies to this moment as well. Where the era of testimony chipped away at the existing histories by means of “actual senses,” the twilight of testimony—and the absence of actual witnesses—will necessitate a new sense to take the place of actuality. The era of testimony is not over when the last witness dies; most of all, it cannot be allowed to end. Kim Soom’s novel itself shows the possibilities of the “post-testimony” era. The testimony in “One Left” is not an eyewitness record, since it is not the voice of a survivor as such. Yet neither can we use the term “fiction” to refer to a book that presents a “composed story,” and then places within it records that can be seen as coming from the witnessing archives. If, for the sake of convenience, we refer to “One Left” as “testimony fiction” in its position midway between fiction and record, then such fiction is a new means—the only means—of preserving memories of what has happened at a time when there are no longer any victims or survivors around to tell their stories. Literature is capable of abstracting one person’s memories into the memories of an era, and one era’s memories into the memories of a community.  This abstraction is quite different from the abstraction that existed before the era of testimony. In the first case, the aim is to leave behind a story; in the second case, it is to leave behind multiple stories.

I can still remember how I felt when I first read “One Left” all the way through. It felt like watching the conclusion of a sporting match, when a relief player who is not yet physically depleted bounds out onto the field. Many more athletes are still sitting on the bench, so there are no worries about what might happen if the game goes into overtime. As athletes are replaced by different ones, there may be some changes to the immediacy and consistency of the testimony. Even so, their testimony cannot be said to reduce the value of the survivors’ witnessing. By multiplying the possibilities of “harshness” in the face of histories that downplay brutality, stories will emerge to underscore the fact that they were there. Emerging through the power of metaphor and imagination, they are capable of becoming present-tense stories that gain more life with time. The works that are capable of bearing that weight become classics. “One Left” is just such a novel.