Good evening, and welcome back. It’s 10:10 PM in Seoul, but a century ago tonight, the city carried a different weight. Two days earlier, colonial Korea had lost one of its brightest young literary voices — a novelist not yet twenty-six. Tonight, we step into the Gyeongseong of August 28, 1926, a Saturday caught between grief and the ordinary rhythm of a late-summer weekend.

On August 26, novelist Na Do-hyang died at his home near Namdaemun-tong, at just twenty-five, after a battle with stomach illness. Author of “The Mute Samryong” and “The Watermill,” Na had debuted in the literary magazine Baekjo in 1922 and, in barely four years, carved out a lasting place in modern Korean fiction. The exact date of his funeral is not confirmed in available records, but the sense of mourning among fellow writers appears to have lingered into this Saturday.

Meanwhile, the colonial press faced its own troubles. Six days earlier, on August 22, a single line in a newspaper’s satirical column “Hoengseolsuseol” drew official wrath: its writer was charged under the Security Law, and the editor-publisher under the Newspaper Law, with a verdict expected September 8. Reporters worked knowing the censor’s blade could fall at any moment.

Beyond Gyeongseong, the shadow of summer-long arrests still hung heavy. Since the June Tenth Movement — the mass protests that erupted during Emperor Sunjong’s funeral procession — investigators had kept pursuing organizers through the hot months. Kwon O-seol, who had helped plan the demonstrations, had already been captured in early June and was under preliminary examination; word of a further roundup planned for early September kept the socialist movement on edge.

That same August, in Tokyo, activists Ahn Kwang-cheon and Ha Pil-won of the Ilwolhoe group joined the Leninist League, giving rise to a new faction later known as “ML.” This cross-border realignment would help lay the groundwork for the Third Korean Communist Party.

Across the ocean in New York, just the day before, an estimated two million people lined the streets to welcome home twenty-year-old Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel — beating the fastest men’s time by two hours. The city’s mayor compared her feat to Moses parting the Red Sea. In the same city, mourning for silent-film idol Rudolph Valentino, who had died five days earlier, had not yet subsided.

In Europe, power shifted quickly: Marshal Józef Piłsudski purged Poland’s military leadership, while in Greece, General Theodoros Pangalos’s dictatorship was toppled by General Georgios Kondylis.

Korea’s grief over a censored press and a silenced young writer echoed across other colonized societies of the era. In British India and Ireland, nationalist writers and journalists likewise navigated press laws designed to contain dissent, while a literature of resistance quietly took root regardless — a pattern colonial administrations from Seoul to Dublin to Manila struggled, and ultimately failed, to fully suppress.

Born Na Kyung-son in 1902, Na Do-hyang abandoned medical studies in Japan to pursue writing, debuting with “A Young Man’s Season” in 1922. His stories — spare, unsentimental portraits of Korea’s poor and powerless — remain staples of Korean literature classrooms a century later. He died of stomach illness on August 26, 1926, at twenty-five.

On Jongno’s bookshop row that Saturday afternoon, more customers than usual asked for Na’s stories; booksellers pulled his titles back to the front of their stalls. In back-alley cafés, young literary hopefuls gathered to talk in low voices about the writer they’d lost. As evening fell, the theater district filled as it did every Saturday — though theater owners wore uneasy faces over recently raised censorship fees. Trams rattled past the Hwasin shopfronts on the main street, children chasing behind them, grief and ordinary life running side by side.

Na Do-hyang’s life was brief, but his short stories are still assigned reading a hundred years on. How much has changed between that Gyeongseong and today’s Seoul?

Tomorrow, Sunday, August 29, 1926, brings its own story — grief and ordinary life, still moving side by side in colonial Korea. Same time tomorrow evening. Good night from a century ago.