'Sumi' and the unnamed many: the joy and sorrow of ordinary lives in extraordinary times

A wooden building that seems to have stopped time. In a 1960s Kyushu mining village known as Arirang Hill, there is Sumi's barbershop. Sumi — steadfast as a violet — dreams of a beauty salon bearing her name, but for now her shop holds only a single red chair, room enough for one customer at a time.

Her father lies on a wooden platform that takes up half the shop all day long. Her husband, left with gas-poisoning aftereffects, screams through the night. Her younger sister wears herself out tending to her own husband, who lost both his age and his name to the same disaster. More sorrowful days than joyful ones, yet Sumi lives each day believing "something better is waiting tomorrow." Even at the bottom of tragedy, she lights the fire, cooks the rice and combs the scattered hair back into place — all while carrying in her heart the dream of a Sumire (the Japanese word for violet), a beauty salon that smells of the barbershop, not of pomade.

"Brighter! Stronger!"

Director Jeong Eui-shin of the play "Sumire Beauty Salon" (running through Saturday at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts) repeated those words countless times to actor Choi Ji-yeon, who plays Sumi, during the two to three months of rehearsals before the production opened on the Korean stage.

"I thought of Sumi as a woman who stands her ground no matter what happens. Not someone who is shaken or swept away by grief at every turn, but a woman who carves out her own way of living even through storms," Jeong said.

Director Jeong and lead actors Choi Ji-yeon and Seo Dong-gap sat down for an interview recently and said they wanted "to convey the beauty of people who never let go of each other's hands and held their ground even amid the storms of history."

A 1950s leprosy sanatorium. 1970s Osaka. A 1965 Kyushu coal-mining village. These are the settings of "Like Flowers Blooming in the Field" (2007), "Yakiniku Dragon" (2008) and "Sumire Beauty Salon" — three works collectively known as Jeong Eui-shin's Zainichi Korean trilogy.

Jeong, who was born and raised in Japan, has built an artistic world spanning theater and film and is regarded as a master of his craft. He has received Japan's Medal with Purple Ribbon, awarded for contributions to the arts and culture. Yet he still holds South Korean citizenship and continues to tell the stories of Koreans in Japan.

"Keeping my Korean citizenship comes down to the influence of my father, my mother and my grandmother. I have no intention of acquiring Japanese citizenship and becoming Japanese at this point. I was not born and raised in Korea as a pure Korean, but my father, mother and grandmother are Korean, and I do not want to deny that. It is because I love them," Jeong said.

Not all of Jeong's work centers on the lives of Koreans in Japan, but the identity and experiences passed down from his parents' generation are woven deeply into his art. "Sumire Beauty Salon," making its Korean premiere, traces how the harsh history of a brutal era runs like capillaries through individual lives.

The play is colored by the survival story of ethnic Korean residents whose world was shattered by the 1963 Miike mine explosion. Rather than focusing on the grand narratives driven by states and power, Jeong turns his gaze toward the tenacious daily vitality of people who must go on living even as tragedy piles upon tragedy. "Within the great currents of history, each individual person is very small," he said. "But the sight of those small human beings fighting desperately against the waves of history is great."

"Grand, capital-H History does not interest me. What I seem to write about is the way small human lives are born and then erased within history — the small 'Zainichi stories' that no one would ordinarily pay attention to, and the joys and sorrows of life hidden inside that smallness," Jeong said.

The play draws directly from real stories gathered on the ground in the mining villages. It was there that Jeong found the original model for Sumi.

"A woman had been caring for her husband, who had become a carbon monoxide poisoning patient. She told me that at night, when he would have seizures and thrash about, she would throw a blanket over him, take her two daughters and walk through the night. But she did not tell that story in a mournful or sad way — she recounted it calmly, almost as if telling an old tale. That really left an impression on me," Jeong said.

That encounter shaped the Sumi of "Sumire Beauty Salon" and came alive in the dialogue throughout the play — through Sumi's husband Naruhiro and through Shohei, the husband of Sumi's younger sister Harumi. Fragments that made no apparent sense — like "spinning mandu" — words a brain-damaged patient had uttered unconsciously, were kept in the script as the bones of the play's onstage reality.

"It is a phrase neither Korean nor Japanese audiences would understand, but I trusted the persuasive power of language that an actual patient had spoken and left it in as it was," Jeong said.

The cast met for the first time on July 29. Faced with a script running to 195 pages and an overwhelming volume of lines, everyone shook their heads.

"None of the actors had ever met before, yet at the very first read-through every single one of them had memorized all their lines. I still cannot forget that day. You have never heard of a director like that in Korea, have you?" Choi said with a laugh.

The tempering in the rehearsal room was relentless. The very next day, scripts disappeared from the actors' hands. They moved straight into blocking rehearsals, and everyone was transported to a 1960s Kyushu mining village.

Jeong's stagecraft is remarkably meticulous and precise. Actors inhabit their characters completely, each in their exact place without a hair's breadth of deviation. Backstage, he has a reputation as a tenacious director — one he himself acknowledges, often saying he is "probably the second most tenacious director in Asia, perhaps in the world." The reason he does not claim first place is that he leaves the spot open for "whoever the most tenacious director out there might be." Seo Dong-gap, who plays Naruhiro, laughed and suggested that first place probably belongs to "Jeong Eui-shin the writer."

When rehearsals began, Jeong told the cast he would give notes after every single performance. Seo confided that he hears the director's notes so constantly he talks about them in his sleep.

Sumi is the heart of the play. Choi confessed that at the end of every rehearsal, "my notebook always had the same words: 'sad, still sad, depressed.'" It had been that way from the very first read-through. "I was so immersed in the work that I was reading the lines far too sadly, through a very Korean emotional lens. The performance now is completely different from how I felt back then," she said.

What Jeong demanded was not anguished tears or tragic sorrow but the power of sheer presence. The wooden platform that takes up half of Sumi's barbershop belongs to Hong-gil, the shop's permanent fixture — Sumi's father, who carries the grief of a man who lost his country yet refuses to give up his Joseon registry even while living in Japan. Veteran actor Jeon Mu-song, who plays Hong-gil, has few lines, yet his presence alone anchors the entire play. The weight of his experience shines through in every sparse word. "As you can see from watching Jeon Mu-song, what matters for an actor is not doing a great deal or showing off technique, but being solidly, weightily present in that space," Jeong said.

Hearing "brighter, stronger" until it was practically drilled into her, Choi reflected that she "struggled to calibrate a different shade of brightness for every single line" and that the process was "one of breaking through the wall of believing that shouting louder and widening your eyes makes you stronger."

The point on which Jeong was particularly strict was laughter. His stage brims with humor and comedy, yet he is anything but lenient when it comes to how that laughter lands.

"There is a foundation to laughter. What matters is the gap between laughs — the 'ma,' the pause — how you hold that space, the tempo and rhythm, how you use that silence. A lot of actors think too much with their heads. Choi Ji-yeon and Seo Dong-gap both overthink and it makes them stiff. You need a greedy desire to make the audience laugh by any means necessary," Jeong said.

That was also why, when Choi said she wanted to do more comedy, additional gag material was written into the script — only to be cut and restored to the original. "It just looked clumsy," Jeong said with a laugh. Seo, too, wrestled deeply with the humorous scenes. "Most Korean actors tend to dive deep into emotion," he said. "The director would say, 'Do you not laugh at something funny even at a funeral?' — he demanded an immediate, everyday shift."

For all his reputation as a meticulous perfectionist, what makes Jeong's stage special is that the entire process comes together as an ensemble. "The director only gives you the destination — he does not hound you about how to get there. He enjoys watching the actors find their own way. It was not a painful process," Choi said. She added, however, that "once he has confirmed you have reached something, if it does not come out the same way the next time, he will ask, 'Why were you weaker today?'" Jeong's tenacity lives in his relentless cry of "Again — once more."

"I call for 'again' many times because what the actor is doing must feel natural to the actor themselves and look natural to my eyes as well. That is my measure, and I am not sure it is always right. But I trust my own sensibility, and sometimes I build things by talking it through with the actors. That may be my style — though I believe everyone inside the work is building it in their own style," Jeong said.

"It's all fallen apart." (a line spoken by Naruhiro)

Tragedy does not arrive alone — it comes all at once. The mine accident shatters the lives of the villagers and their families. Shohei, a severe gas-poisoning patient left broken by the disaster, and Harumi, who tends to him without end. Hidehiro — Naruhiro's younger brother — lost a leg in the mine collapse and, belonging nowhere, is preparing to leave on the repatriation program sending Zainichi Koreans to North Korea. "Every time I deliver these lines, my chest caves in," Seo said.

Through "Sumire Beauty Salon," the actors look into a history they barely knew and embody the lives of ordinary people who endured it with quiet resilience. "Of all the director's works, 'Sumire Beauty Salon' is my favorite — the way industrial accidents, labor and disputes are woven into everyday life," Choi said.

"When ordinary people are caught up in a disaster they never wanted, no one helps unless they step forward themselves. It was the same with the Sewol ferry sinking, the Itaewon crowd crush, the humidifier disinfectant tragedy. Unless it happens to their own family, people of the same era treat it as a distant story and pay no attention. But the director keeps telling this story with the same steadfastness as Sumi. Even for the short time I lived as that character, I was able to plunge deep into an era and come back out. This work changed me a great deal," Choi said.

The play draws up exactly those stories — their stories, our stories. It sets a specific era and history on stage, yet "Sumire Beauty Salon" remains entirely relevant today. It is a story of the Zainichi experience, and also a story of immigrants, of everyone standing at a border — and particularly of ordinary people pushed to the margins. Where every tragedy has clawed its way through, the stage blooms again with hope, snowflakes drifting through the air.

"Sumi is an unremarkable ordinary person whom no one notices, but she is a profoundly beautiful human being who quietly protects her family and neighbors. I hope that nobility reaches audiences today," Choi said. Seo said, "Even in an age when lives scattered like fallen leaves, people still tried to live. Now, when we have so much, we more often lose the reason to go on. The simple sight of people living day by day will move you." Yet for all the actors' hopes, the director's expectations were more modest.

"Every line I have handed to the audience has already left my hands. I would be glad if it reaches them not as the story of a stranger in a faraway country, but as the story of a neighbor living right next door. Because you never know what tomorrow will bring," Jeong said.