Affective Palimpsests: Sudden Showers from Hwang Sun-wŏn’s “Sonagi” to Kwak Jae-yong and Andrew Lau’s Daisy

This chapter explores the Sonagi Village tourist attraction in Yangp’yŏng, South Korea, dedicated to the Korean novelist Hwang Sun-wŏn’s classic postwar short story “Sonagi” (1959), and the way in which Daisy (2006), a collaboration between the Hong Kong director Andrew Lau and the Korean filmmaker Kwak Jae-yong, appropriates and adapts the traditional Korean trope of the sonagi, or sudden rain shower, for a new transnational context. The sonagi trope becomes reinscribed within the context of Hong Kong neonoir aesthetics in a film set in the Netherlands and shot with a cast of predominantly Korean actors. Based on Kwak’s screenplay, the film conjoins and combines these many layers of style and sensibility into what the chapter calls affective palimpsests, which foreground the complex itinerancy of affective tropes that travel from one context to another, and function to build new transnational affectivities that are increasingly disarticulated from the national contexts from which they initially emerged.