The Naked Tree

by Matt Peters

The trauma of violence can linger decades later, waiting for the slightest reminder to bring it back to the surface. A resemblance of something from the past can steal the survivor from the present, forcing them to relive a separation, a loss, or an atrocity.

Clinical terms like post-traumatic stress disorder can’t fully describe how the experience permeates a survivor’s life, turning the past into something inescapable. It can haunt not only survivors but also their posterity, as behavioral cues and epigenetic markers—chemical changes to DNA—are passed on to the next generation, causing the initial shock to replay itself in more insidious ways. Insomnia, fear, anxiety, and depression are common in the aftermath, both for survivors and their children.

For some writers, entirely new terms were needed to describe trauma’s relentless haunting and the survivor’s painful journey through past and present. For Roberto Lovato, writing about the Salvadoran civil war and its aftermath, it was “unforgetting.” For Toni Morrison, writing about slavery, lynching, and the brutality of systemic racism, it was “rememory.” For Kurt Vonnegut, writing about World War II, it was being “unstuck in time.”

Like those authors, Keum Suk Gendry-Kim turns time on its head—making storytelling more visceral than chronological—in The Naked Tree, a graphic novel that is being released in translation this month by Drawn & Quarterly. The Naked Tree is a story within a story, both an adaptation of Park Wan-suh’s novel of the same name, first published in 1970, and a reimagining of how she came to write it.

Where Lovato, Morrison, and Vonnegut crafted new terms to tell their stories, The Naked Tree relies solely on metaphor to make up for the shortcomings of plain language. The graphic novel’s title grows in meaning as the story progresses, as does Gendry-Kim’s cover image of a solemn character with a wind-up crank protruding from her back.

With the help of that imagery, Gendry-Kim uses themes of loss and trauma effectively, but she focuses much of her narrative on wartime youth who are navigating the ups and downs of romance, while at the same time adjusting to a society suddenly changed by the foreign soldiers living among them.

The graphic novel begins in 1969, on a seemingly ordinary morning in Park’s life. Her husband, sleepily looking at the day’s newspaper, is jolted from his slow awakening by a headline. Park Su-geun, an artist they both knew from their youth, has died unexpectedly on the eve of his next art exhibition. Park Wan-suh shares her husband’s shock initially, but she soon turns pensive, deciding to write a novel in honor of the late artist.

The line between novel and memoir is quickly blurred. Park turns herself into a character named Kyeonga. She turns the painter she once loved into Ok Huido. But she calls the novel “a portrait of my stormy youth.”

From that scene in 1969, the reader is taken back to 1951. The Korean War is quickly introduced as the backdrop to the story, which takes place near the 38th parallel, where U.N. forces, the Korean People’s Army, and the People’s Volunteer Army have battled to stop advances from northern forces. Kyeonga describes her city, Seoul, as a place where noncombatants have experienced “terror, fear, and hunger.”

In spite of that introduction, the narrative soon turns to quieter tensions. Once busy streets are now abandoned by the many people who have fled the city for safer parts of the country. Kyeonga works at a portrait studio where she has multiple disagreements with the painters, the customers, and her supervisor. She has an uneasy relationship with her aging mother, and a visit from an uncle heightens their unease.

It’s at the portrait studio that Kyeonga is introduced to a new painter, Ok Huido, and she soon develops a romantic interest in him. As the two get to know each other, the story builds to a whirlwind of events and starts to depart from a linear timeline. Those events underscore the many costs of war, from mass casualties to the futures that are stolen from the living. The fingerprints of sacrifice and despair are abundant.

Gendry-Kim offers sparing reprieve from those heavier themes. Some scenes at a Myeongdong toy store, as well as her epilogue, carry a lighter tone. But even those vignettes could seem quietly tragic to many readers. Perhaps the story’s greatest sense of closure comes at the beginning, when Park Wan-suh decides to pen a novel in memory of Park Su-geun. “Carefully, I coax out the story,” she writes, exorcising the trauma that haunts her—and honoring all who were lost to it.

The Naked Tree is a moving reminder of the “Forgotten War,” the period of conflict often overshadowed by World War II and the Vietnam War. Much of Gendry-Kim’s inkwork has an unadorned quality to it, which is well suited for capturing the feelings of shock, loss, and guilt that outlast other details that are lost to time. Readers who want to deepen their understanding of war, trauma, and Korean history will find much to treasure—and remember—in The Naked Tree.

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Matt Peters is a project manager and communications coordinator at Health Sciences Design, an interdisciplinary health innovation program at the University of Arizona. He is a longtime Marvel fan whose interest in comics and health communication drew him to the graphic medicine community.