LITERATURE AND POLITICS are hopelessly entangled in the Korean peninsula, so when a North Korean detente appeared on the horizon during the summer, a softly spoken literary critic from South Korea decided to take the opportunity to cross the 38th parallel to meet writers from the North.
'This is the first time North and South Korean writers will get together,' says 64-year-old Yim Hun-young in the dingy Ma Po Holiday Inn coffee shop on the day before he's due to leave for Pyongyang. It's certainly the first time in recent history that writers from the North and the South have met openly and officially. There have been illicit rendezvous between individual writers over the years, but the last time there was anything resembling a pan-Korean literary meeting was in 1945.
A professor in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Chungang University, Yim exudes a controlled excitement as he anticipates the event, for which writers from the South will meet their counterparts from the North and together travel from Pyongyang to the symbolic Mount Baekdu straddling North Korea's border with China.
For Yim the trip will be a pilgrimage he hopes will turn into a celebration. 'Drink,' he says. 'This is the peak of the trip. The most exciting time will be when we're drunk. I want us all to get drunk and sing songs and dance and embrace each other.
'We need not have slogans or discourse or manifestos. If we can shake hands and look each other in the eyes, at that moment, we can realise our country's reunification.'
Yim says he's looking forward to meeting the North Korean writers. 'It's great to meet you,' he says he'll tell them, with a laugh that makes his eyes crinkle. 'Maybe, it will be the same as meeting Southern writers. We're the same nationality. There shouldn't be a distance between us.'