Memories of My Ghost Brother

Ghosts and goblins are part of the 1960s Korean experience for this autobiographical novel's young protagonist. So are alcoholism, prostitution, racism and war. Insu (or Heinz, as he is known to his American schoolteachers) is the son of an American father, a blond G.I. stationed near the city of Inchon, and a Korean mother, a black-marketeer. Despite his marriage, Insu's father lives on-base, far from the haunted house the boy and his mother share with a handful of relatives. Insu encounters many spirits in dreams or in dreamlike episodes; perhaps the most enigmatic of these is the Japanese colonel who literally opens the boy's mind. Insu grows up wild, running with a pack of boys who splatter frogs on rocks, indulge in petty larceny and get into knife fights. His alcoholic uncle tells Insu long, terrifying anecdotes about goblins who gang-bang matrons and vampiric fox demons disguised as beautiful women. None of these, however, are as difficult for Insu to understand as is the Sunday-school world his father pushes at him. Insu's mixed blood causes him perpetual ambivalence, making him feel ""caught here in the boundary between the two Koreas, caught between North and South and East and West with my own blood mixed from the blood of enemies."" Although the book's story line is too episodic and its structure--broken into segments that alternate between childlike point-of-view and omniscient adult interpretation--a bit rigid, this is a stately, mature and understated first novel written with great sensitivity and assurance. (Nov.)