Shin denies the plagiarism allegation to prosecutors

It was confirmed on Thursday that Shin Kyung-sook (see photo), a Korean novelist, said in an email response to prosecutors that she did not plagiarize passages from the novel of Yukio Asada (1925-1970), a Japanese aesthetic writer. The controversy over plagiarism started from the allegation that Shin plagiarized passages in her short story “Legend” from the Japanese writer’s “Patriotism.” It is the first time that she clarified her position to the investigators amid the controversy.

Prosecutors probed her emails while she was staying in the U.S. and received her response denying the allegation. They are said to reach a conclusion in the near future as they have completed a significant portion of a legal review over the case. If necessary, they will summon Shin who recently came back to Korea.

The controversy was triggered by Lee Eung-joon, a writer, who claimed that Shin plagiarized passages in her “Legend” published in 1996 from Mishima’s “Patriotism.” He claimed that sentences are similar. For example, while Mishima described, “As the two people were in fact the owners of a healthy and young body, their night was intense,” Shin wrote in her novel, “The two people were the owners of a healthy body. Their night was intense.” Back then, Lee claimed that it is clearly plagiarism as she copied the copyrighted “body of a novel” and pasted it to “her own novel.” In addition, Hyun Tak-soo, head of the Research Institute for Korean Social Issues, sued Shin for fraud and business disruption allegations, causing prosecutors to start an investigation.

Shin said ambiguously in an interview with a media outlet in June last year, “I desperately tried to recall my memory only to find that I haven’t read Patriotism, but now I’m in a situation where even I can’t believe my own memory.”

While agreeing on that there are some similar passages in the novel, it is the general view of prosecutors that it is not easy to punish her for criminal charges. Shin was sued for the allegation that she disrupted the business of the publisher by deceiving it and took unfair gains. Some say, however, that the publisher can hardly regarded as a victim in that millions of copies of her books have been sold.

The Supreme Court’s precedents also regard that a work that used a portion of an existing work does not infringe copyrights if it is an independent new work that has no practical similarity to the existing work. The Supreme Court overruled the petition for provisional disposition on publication and sales applied by a person who claimed that Kim Jin-myung, a writer, plagiarized in the novel “The Rose of Sharon Blooms Again” from his work in 1998.

장관석기자 jks@donga.com