Man-Sik Ch'ae, Kyung-Ja Chun, Carter J. Eckert

Acknowledgments; Introduction; Chapter 1 Master Yun's Route Home; Chapter 2 Getting a Free Ride: A Feat of Skill; Chapter 3 The Festival of Great Singers in the Countries of the West; Chapter 4 Let Everyone Else Go to Hell; Chapter 5 A Slum of the Heart; Chapter 6 Reports from the Front Line; Chapter 7 And Oxen Breed Iron ...; Chapter 8 Three Old Coins and ...; Chapter 9 Frugality for Its Own Sake; Chapter 10 An Anecdote of No Significance; Chapter 11 A Surplus of People and a Shortage of Goods; Chapter 12 A Brief History of the Universal Trade; Chapter 13 Though the Ax Handle Rot... (Or, Latter-day Immortals at Play); Chapter 14 The Sun Sets on the Great Wall; Chapter 15 Seek Not Far for the Agent of Your Doom;

Originally published in Seoul in 1938, soon after the outbreak of the Pacific War, "Peace Under Heaven" is a satirical novel centering on the household of a Korean landlord during the Japanese colonial occupation. Master Yun, embodying the traditional ambitions of a standard Korean paterfamilias, by being projected fast forward into a modern urban environment, caricatures the increasing irrelevance of Confucian mores to 20th-century social reality. Depicting the anomic lives of the Yun household in colonial Seoul, Chase Man-Sik, one of modern Korea's best-known writers, uses black comedy to underscore the collapse of ritualistic traditional values in the face of capitalist modernisation. The decadence of the nouveau riche pseudo-aristocrat Master Yun is interwoven with insights into the customary bases of oppression of Korean women into the self-deceptions underlying collaboration by Koreans with the Japanese oppressor. The savage hilarity of Chae's style lends force and historical relevance to his insight into the attitudes of the milieu in which his narrative is set.