Dog Days
Dog Days by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, translated by Janet Hong and published by Drawn and Quarterly, is at once heartwarming and heart-wrenching. It is, simply put, a narrative of the dogs that have come into Gendry-Kim’s life over the past few years. This simplicity is as accurate as it is a glaze over what proves to be the complex and riveting story of numerous lives drawn together under the peculiar relationship that humans have with their dogs. On the one hand, the humans are the masters with the dogs legally more of a possession. On the other paw, many of us would do anything for our dogs, as Gendry-Kim shows.
“Just wait and see, you’re going to become a bigger dog lover than me,” comes the warning already on page 11 as Gendry-Kim and her partner, “Hun,” pick up Carrot from a pet store. The name is inspired by the dog’s corgi pedigree making for short legs and a long body, “like a carrot.” The name sticks, and on the first night the two already fib to each other about needing to go to the bathroom so they can go check on the puppy.
More dogs appear as Gendry-Kim and Hun move to the countryside. They meet littermates, whom they nickname Slice 1, Slice 2, and Slice 3 since they all look so similarly like slices of bread, kept in a kennel by their neighbor. A puppy is left on their doorstep, whom they cannot help but adopt and name “Potato.” Blackie and Elvis are roaming dogs they meet on their walks. Then comes the most dramatic meeting of all, Choco, whom another neighbor has pinned up and clearly does not want, feeding her kimchi scraps and providing no medical care.
Each of the dogs has their own personality, and dog people will quickly fall in love with similarities they recognize from their own experience. Carrot wolfs down food so fast that not even slow-eating methods will prevent it. Gendry-Kim wonders if that came from battling for resources in a puppy mill, but there is no way to ever know. Choco, pinned up for so long, fears the outside world, and it takes a whole regimen of trust-building and psychological recovery to get her to adapt to a new, much more comfortable life.
A running theme through Dog Days, and especially in Gendry-Kim’s afterword, is the eating of dogs in traditional Korea. She notes some dogs disappearing from the neighborhood and shows the dog-buying truck driving through with its PA blaring in a terrifying scene of commonplace horror. Things have certainly changed with newer generations who did not know the desperation of the era of wars where any kind of food was a blessing, and now dogs are often treated more like children with strollers and outfits in major cities. It is hard to imagine that the dog meat industry was banned in Korea only in 2009.
The art throughout Dog Days beautifully matches the subject. The inks are vibrant, standing out boldly with lines and dynamic poses that almost seem like motion on the page. During the monsoon season, Gendry-Kim goes even further with blotches of gray to represent the nonstop water. Her work is especially finely detailed in the still-lives and backgrounds, but it is clearly the portraits of dogs that readers will love the most.
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