SHADOWS OF A SOUND Stories <i> by Hwang Sun-Won (Mercury House: $17.95; 237 pp.) </i>

This collection spans five decades of work by Korean novelist, poet and short-story master Hwang Sun-Won. The early pieces were written under a Japanese-occupation ban on writing and were hidden for a seemingly distant future when publication might be possible. The secret stories seem to have set Hwang on a path to intimate writing; they have a private quality, as if the author were whispering to himself. “Snow,” written at the end of World War II, begins with a return to the narrator’s native village. He spends evenings with the men: “Our talk is limited to ordinary subjects. The season being what it is, our conversations tonight concerned production quotas of rice. The men all talked as if everyone else’s worries were their own and their own worries were everyone else’s.” The prosaic talk, however, only frames the main story of the evening: a parable-like tale of how hard it snows in the province of which one of the old men is a native. A traveler is forced to spend a long blizzard in a house he passes; when the roads are finally passable, he meets at an inn the man whose house has sheltered him. The host is returning home, having been similarly prevented by the storm from reaching his destination. Upon hearing that his wife has survived the winter, the host is unable to express his appreciation for the good news. Returning to the real time of winter, 1944, the narrator’s simple story concludes: “The great flakes of snow continued to tumble down outside. The men who had gathered here earlier had quit talking and were sitting quietly, as if contemplating how they might survive the winter, piecing together threads of hope for the coming year’s unrewarding crop. Once again I stirred up the dying embers in the earthen brazier.”

In the extremely painful story “Clowns,” Hwang distills in a few pages the despair of a refugee family shunted from house to house as they seek shelter. Their dignity is first affronted when the mistress of the house where they have taken a room bars them from using the toilet. When a child’s shoe disappears, they fear that the owners of the house are performing folk magic at the refugee family’s expense. The misunderstandings and humiliations grow more profound as the family is passed from house to house, each time becoming more burdensome. At every new misfortune, they feel they must have sunk as low as possible, but each time another depth opens. In the end, when they take shelter under a bridge and the young son demonstrates how easy it is to barter with the GIs, the narrator in quiet hysteria sees his family as a pitiable circus troupe, performing their tricks in the open road.

Hwang’s stories, rendered in English by various translators, make the language transition with uniform grace; they all read beautifully.