③ The Song of the Sword and the Nanjung Ilgi: Two Doors into Admiral Yi's Inner Life

Let me go back in time to a night in the early 2000s. Drunk, I was gazing at the moon from the rooftop of the four-story villa where I rented a home. And there, as if by fate, I met Admiral Yi Sun-sin, the commander who saved Joseon at sea during the Imjin War, for the first time — through his poem "Hansando-ga." I wrote about this first encounter in detail in the first and second posts of my earlier series, "The Last Two Years of Admiral Yi Sun-sin." If you have not read them yet, I recommend reading them first through the links below, and then continuing with this post.

[The Last Two Years of Admiral Yi Sun-sin] ① The Hidden Story Behind "Hansando-ga"

[The Last Two Years of Admiral Yi Sun-sin] ② "I Still Have Twelve Ships"

That night, after meeting the towering figure of Yi Sun-sin through "Hansando-ga," the first book I picked up was The Song of the Sword (Kal-ui Norae), a novel by the Korean writer Kim Hoon. The book had just been published in 2001 and was beginning to spread by word of mouth, so my meeting it was perfect timing. Thanks to that timing, over the long twenty-five years since, my journey of studying Admiral Yi on my own never lost its way and kept to the right direction.

The Attitude Toward History That The Song of the Sword Taught Me

The Song of the Sword is the book that taught me the most basic attitude for studying history.

It is a way of not merely looking at a historical figure objectively from a distance, as if flying a drone high in the sky, but walking directly into that person's head and heart — no, "becoming his very body" — and feeling and understanding the times he lived through.

Because the novel is told in the first person, I naturally breathed in the deep inner life and loneliness of Yi Sun-sin the human being the whole time I was reading. There are countless books about Admiral Yi on the market, but even now, when someone asks me, "Which book should I read first?", I recommend this one first without hesitation. It is the book that lets you feel and understand best not the Admiral's outward appearance, but his painful inner life.

The Song of the Sword

The Song of the Sword and the Nanjung Ilgi: The Bewilderment of First-Time Readers

What is interesting is that when I recommend this book, people's reactions split to opposite extremes. Those who have basic knowledge of the historical flow around Admiral Yi pour out praise and admiration. On the other hand, those who come to the book without the essential knowledge sometimes shake their heads, saying the story is dull and they can't tell what it's talking about.

This is not true only of the novel. I believe that anyone who wants to explore the Admiral deeply on their own must keep The Song of the Sword and the Nanjung Ilgi, Admiral Yi's own war diary, on their bookshelf and read them closely. They are essential books to take out whenever there is time, or whenever the heart turns toward him again. But these two great books have one high threshold: whether or not you have background knowledge.

If, with no background knowledge at all, you come one day upon a sentence in the Nanjung Ilgi that the Admiral seems to have tossed off casually, how could you fully understand the tearful emotion that short sentence holds? So I want to make it clear that these two books are ones whose power doubles only when you read them after your study of Admiral Yi has reached a certain level.

In truth, until 2011, when I became the head of my company's German subsidiary and lived in Düsseldorf, I had not yet realized this. I simply recommended these two books to everyone I met whenever I had the chance.

Then one day, four Korean subsidiary heads gathered for dinner at a Korean restaurant in Düsseldorf. That evening I talked to everyone there about Admiral Yi and the Jeongyu War — the second Japanese invasion of 1597 — for almost four hours. They were all amazed at how much I knew and enjoyed it, and they said they wanted to learn about the Admiral too and asked which books they should read. Of course, I recommended The Song of the Sword and the Nanjung Ilgi.

Two weeks later, curious, I contacted them and asked whether they had bought and read the books. One said he had become so enthusiastic that he had bought several more related books besides those two, and the others said they had bought the books too. But the feedback that followed was unexpected. All of them said with one voice, "The books are difficult and not much fun."

For a moment I was taken aback, but soon I could see the reason. The cause was exactly "whether or not you have background knowledge." Leaving out the fascinating historical causes and context I had laid out for four hours, they had jumped straight into refined, lonely diary entries and sentences, so the books could only feel difficult and dry.

Why The Song of the Sword and the Nanjung Ilgi Are Books to Own and Read

The period covered by The Song of the Sword runs from the time Admiral Yi was taken to the Uigeumbu, the royal tribunal for grave crimes, and suffered there, through his time serving as a common soldier in disgrace, to his death in the final Battle of Noryang. By chance, this is exactly the same period as the background of my series "The Last Two Years of Admiral Yi Sun-sin."

If anyone wants to read The Song of the Sword and the Nanjung Ilgi even now, I strongly recommend that, for these two books at least, you buy them yourself and keep them for life rather than borrowing them from a library.

In the case of the Nanjung Ilgi especially, there are countless editions and translations on the market. If you have a serious wish to explore the Admiral's breath yourself, I suggest choosing "a book that contains only the diary itself," without other people's interpretations or explanations added. You first read only the raw sentences the Admiral pressed down with his brush on each day. Then you can fill in, step by step, the historical background and knowledge hidden between the lines, using more popular history books as stepping stones. That is the fastest way to reach the soul of Yi Sun-sin the human being.

👉 Next post: ④ Korean Money and the 100-Won Admiral Yi

— Momcheolhak