Longing for an Untold Story

Empires crumble. Love dies. Myth is eternal.
A historian mourning the death of his wife. His young colleague, searching for her own path. Four witty deities who have much to say, but no time to listen. Kingdoms and dynasties, vainly struggling for survival in the swirl of chronicles. And a mysterious storyteller, able to create an entire world through the power of imagination... Spanning thousands of years, numerous voices, and stories within stories, intricately intertwined, the novel shows how people and entire nations lose and find themselves through narratives.


«Kan Minsu skillfully plays with well-known motifs, weaving together antiquity and the present, initially evoking the feel of an American series with its typical themes and dialogues. Yet the conclusion brings these seemingly incompatible threads into such a powerful resonance that one wants to reread the novel immediately and savor the details that only seemed apparent upon first reading». —Maria Osetrova, orientalist, author of the TG channel «Reading and Writing about Korea»

«This book requires nothing from the reader at the start, but gives an incredible amount, primarily — an understanding of the cultural code of the peoples of East Asia through a literary mélange, where China, Korea, and Japan dissolve into one another, and secondly — the awareness of the subtle boundaries between myth, history, and the everyday reality we live in day by day without noticing it. What appears to be a straightforward "tale" turns out to be a profound, yet remarkably accessible meditation on how illusory the ideological space we exist in is». —Kirill Batygin, translator-orientalist, two-time laureate of the «Yasnaya Polyana» award, author of the TG channel «The Music of Translation», literary editor of «Longing for an Untold Story»

«Academic historians, unlike storytellers, are not necessarily skilled narrators, yet Kan combines the strengths of both professions. In his textual tapestry, heterogeneous threads of mythological plots from the East, classical literary works, and the everyday life of a university professor intertwine, while gods and heroes acquire a human dimension. Similar to Far Eastern mytho-historical chronicles, the narrative of the exploits of idle dragons and deities flows into battles that determine the future of a country, and mythological plots come to life in modern realities, where battles for history continue».