E2024-G005
Sapyeong Station: A Fictional Place, a Literary Memory
Narrative
Namgwangju Station, located in southern Gwangju, was closed in 2000 and disappeared from the map. Yet it inspired poet Gwak Jae-gu (1954- ) to create Sapyeong Station, a fictional setting in his poem “At Sapyeong Station”. Reflecting on the solitude of the waiting room and those who endure life’s hardships in silence, the poem evokes sorrow rooted in historical pain. It was first published in the JoongAng Ilbo in 1981 and later included in the 1983 poetry collection At Sapyeong Station by Changbi Publishers.
The poem later inspired novelist Im Chul-woo (1954- ), who wrote a short story of the same title. Set in a desolate train station on the city’s edge, the story extends the poem’s mood into prose, quietly restoring fragments of forgotten memory. Both Gwak and Im experienced the May 18 Democratic Uprising, and Im would later depict the full scope of that event in his novel Spring Day (1998), a powerful narrative of collective trauma and remembrance.
Though Sapyeong Station is fictional, it lives on in literature as a symbolic site of Gwangju’s memory, shaped by those who bore witness to a painful chapter in modern Korean history.
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