The Mirror That Made Trouble

In Griffis’s comic opening, the capital Seoul dazzles visitors from the countryside. The imagined city is full of shops, crowds in fine clothes and proud gentlemen in stiff white robes. Some ride small ponies, a sight the narrator describes with deliberate exaggeration.

From morning to night the avenues hummed with business, and all the wonderful goods that traders brought from India, Japan and China could be bought there. Every day a thousand bulls loaded with dry grass and firewood came through the city gates, so heaped up that little could be seen of them but legs, tails and horns. At breakfast and supper, clouds of blue smoke rose from ten thousand low chimneys, and the rice, millet, fruit, sweets and pottery in the shops would have made a mountain. Palaces, pagodas, temples and fine mansions made the king’s city beautiful, and all around it ran high stone walls.

At sunset the gates were shut, with music from drums, fifes and trumpets and the tolling of the great bell, and no one could enter until morning. On the Great South Mountain a huge fire blazed, a signal that all was peaceful, and from hilltop to hilltop, all the way from the snowy northern peaks to the southern islands, flame answered flame to say that all was well. Griffis also pictures a period of the night when men and boys stay indoors while women and older girls stroll, visit and chat.

In this exaggerated picture, the people of Kim’s village imagine Seoul as the grandest place on earth. Even unfamiliar foreign capitals seem like villages beside it, and the children dream of seeing all the things its shops might sell.

Now in a village up north, which in English we might call Cucumberville, lived a miller named Mr. Kim and his wife, Cho. Kim had worked hard for many years and saved up heaps of iron and brass coins, which he kept hidden under a rafter. He had long meant to see the royal city, and his wife urged him on, for she wanted a new dress, a comb and a pair of shoes like the ones city people wore. His daughters wanted sashes, fur-trimmed slippers and silver hairpins. So Kim felt he really must go, to please himself and his family.

One fine May morning he set off on foot for Seoul. His wife and daughters bowed low and begged him to bring back the pretty things they had talked about so much, and something for himself as well. His wife warned him to watch out for thieves and not to leave his money lying about in the inns along the way. In Seoul he must keep out of the wine shops, stay away from the dancing girls and not waste his money, for she had heard there were rude people even in the capital; there was a proverb that said so.

Kim, for his part, told his wife to keep the kitchen fire going so that the house stayed warm and the girls did not catch cold. She must lock up well and bar the door at night against robbers and against any leopard or tiger prowling about. If she heard scratching on the roof or the pigs squealing in their pen, she was to beat the gong, and the village men would come running with torches to drive off the beasts, for tigers liked Korean pork even better than Korean people.

At home Kim was a fine fellow, sharp at a bargain when buying beans or rice and skilled at grinding barley. But once he was inside the walls of the great city, you would have thought he was carrying his head under his arm, as the narrator puts it. Dazed by all the strange sights and sounds, he stood gawking in the main street with his mouth hanging open, wondering where all these people came from and how they all made a living.

He soon found out that there really were rude people in Seoul, for one fellow shouted to ask whether he meant to swallow the moon, and some boys laughed that his mouth was like a birdhouse and something might fly in. When Kim asked the price of things in the shops, he nearly fainted and hurried on. Still, he bought some pretty things for his wife and daughters: a fan, a roll of silk for a dress, a box of hairpins, some amber beads and a silver ring, so that his eldest daughter, who was soon to marry, would have everything ready.

In the silk shop, the clerk saw that Kim was from the country and decided to have a little fun with him. He told Kim about fairies and pointed to a shop across the street. If Kim looked into the round thing the shopkeeper would gladly show him, he said, he would see and feel what he had never seen or felt before.

Kim went straight across to the shop, where bright, polished, silvery metal things were made, and there he stood before a round thing like the moon. In it was a man’s face, someone about his own age whom he felt sure he knew, though he could not think of his name. He spun around, hoping to catch a friend or neighbor from home, but no one was there. He looked again, and there the man was! Had his friend hidden and then come back? When Kim ducked aside, the face vanished, but when he stood in front of the round thing, there was the same man again. That round thing was a mirror.

When Kim laughed, the fellow laughed too. When Kim pulled faces, the other did the same, and no matter how quickly Kim turned to catch him, he was gone. Kim had never seen a mirror and had no idea what it was, but thinking it must be something like fairy magic, he bought the metal disk and carried it home.

When he got back, he first had to unpack the presents, for the girls could hardly wait to see what their father had brought. They were so taken with their gifts that they did not notice what he had bought for himself. He set the case with the mirror on the table, put some other things away in the big cabinet inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the best room and went out to see to his mill and his pigs, his donkey and his bull.

No sooner had the girls opened the mirror case than terrible things happened. The mother, standing behind her daughter, saw the face of a young woman and thought a stranger had come into her house. At once she flew into a jealous rage. “Your father has brought home another wife from Seoul to take my place! What does he mean by it?”

At the same moment the daughter saw a face in the shiny metal and cried, “No, Mother, we won’t have a strange woman in your place! Besides, she’s too young, and she’ll boss us about.”

Hearing the shouting and crying, Grandmother hobbled in to see what was the matter.

“Look for yourself at what Father has brought home to make us miserable!” cried the mother and daughter.

Granny peered into the mirror, and then she too burst out in a fury. “I won’t have this old woman in our house! It’s enough for my son to support me and his family. Oh, why did he ever go to Seoul?”

By now the four women, young, middle-aged and old, were wailing so loudly that each of them used up three paper handkerchiefs drying her tears. While they were still crying “Aigo, aigo!” at the tops of their voices, Grandfather came in, shaking his stick and ordering them to be quiet, and demanded to know what all the fuss was about.

“See for yourself,” said his wife, and she handed him the metal troublemaker, the first ever seen in the village.

The old man turned nearly purple with rage. “What!” he cried in his cracked voice. “Is my son so disrespectful as to bring another old man into the house? How can he support two fathers? Where will he find the kimchi and millet to feed the old fellow?” And he threw the mirror back in its box and slammed the lid.

All this time, as jealousy gnawed at them and threatened to tear the family apart, the noise grew so loud that the miller left his pigs and his mill and rushed in to see what was wrong. At once his wife, who was a very strong woman, flew at him, grabbed him by his topknot and dragged him across the floor, out the door and down the street, and she did not stop until she reached the judge’s house to pour out her troubles.

There, before the great man with the tall hat and the string of amber beads over his ear, she told how her husband had brought something home from Seoul to destroy the peace of his family. Surely he meant to go back to the capital and take a young wife! Her tongue never stopped for a moment. She accused her husband of every crime in the law books, though all she could actually prove was that he had brought something round and made of metal into the house. It was as full of evil magic as all the goblins put together, she told the judge. The rest of the family backed her up, swearing that every word was true, since all five witnesses agreed.

When the flood of words had died down a little, the judge, who had been puffing all the while on a brass pipe with a stem a yard long and a bowl no bigger than a chestnut, asked, “And in what form did this evil magic come?”

The miller’s old father brought out the box, opened it and handed the mirror to the judge. He had never seen such a thing either, for he had hardly ever left his district, except once, years before, to sit the examinations in Seoul, and even then he had been shut up so long in his little cell writing essays that he saw almost nothing of the city.

When he held the mirror up to his eyes, he flew into a rage just like everyone else in the courtroom. On its face he saw a man in the robes of a high official, with the tall, round hat that only magistrates wear and a string of twenty-eight big amber beads hanging from his right ear. When he lowered the mirror, he could see the embroidered breastplate, the little silver stork that held a judge’s robe together and the decorated sash around the waist.

He nearly choked with anger at the thought that another magistrate had come to Cucumberville to take his place. What would he do for a salary? If he lost his position, how would he support his old parents and his twenty-five poor relations? He saw himself a beggar in his old age. For at least half a minute, the courtroom was silent as everyone looked around to see what would happen next.

But the peace lasted only thirty seconds. The storm broke out in full force when the jealous wife grabbed her husband’s topknot to drag him home, for she feared the magistrate was so angry and jealous himself that he might close the court.

Just when the uproar was at its height, a messenger rushed in to announce that the royal inspector, sent by the king himself to tour the province, would be at the courthouse gate within five minutes. Instantly the wife let go of her husband’s topknot. The magistrate called for order and placed his officers where etiquette required for welcoming the king’s agent. Then, straightening his hat and topknot, which had been badly rumpled in his fury, he went out to greet the royal inspector and showed him to the seat of honor.

When all the bowing and greeting were over, the inspector asked what the trouble was. The local magistrate laid the mirror on a silk cushion and handed it to him. “If you please, sir, this is what has turned us all into demons of jealousy. What is it?”

The gentleman from the capital, who was used to all the comforts of the great city and the splendor of the palace, explained what a mirror was. He gave them all a mild scolding for their foolishness and sent them home, telling them that whenever any of them felt angry or jealous, they should go out and pull the tops off five turnips, or slowly drink a cup of rice water before saying a single angry word.

At that the miller’s wife bowed to the ground and begged her husband’s pardon, and the whole family, young and old, laughed heartily at their mistake all the way home. Their laughter lasted a long time, but after half an hour all was quiet.

After that, nearly everyone in Cucumberville who could afford it bought a mirror, and sooner or later every girl in the village had one. They looked into them so often that in many houses the oiled-paper floor in front of the mirror was soon worn through. In Seoul the mirror makers wondered what had happened in Cucumberville, a village famous only for its cucumbers, but they slapped their knees with glee and grew rich.

About this story

“The Mirror That Made Trouble” is retold from William Elliot Griffis’s Korean Fairy Tales (1922). Stories about country folk who have never seen a mirror are told across East Asia, and in many of them people mistake their own reflection for somebody else. The Japanese tale “The Matsuyama Mirror” uses the same idea in a gentle, tender way, while this Korean version plays it for laughs.

Griffis’s opening mixes city sights with comic exaggeration. Its universal statements and detailed night-time rules should not be treated as a verified account of every period of Seoul’s history. The mirror in this particular tale is polished metal, not glass; recognising that object is the key to the joke.

Read the original: Korean Fairy Tales (Project Gutenberg)

Suggested for ages 9–12 with an adult: the comic misunderstanding includes insults and a wife physically dragging her husband by his hair.

Everyone recognises a different threat

The wife fears a replacement wife, the grandfather a rival dependent, and the magistrate a rival official. Their interpretations reflect their worries. They agree that the object is dangerous, but their descriptions do not establish a single stranger hiding inside it.

The inspector succeeds because he understands the object, not because high rank automatically makes someone wise: the magistrate’s rank did not protect him from the same mistake. The wife’s later apology acknowledges a wrong, but dragging her husband by his hair is still harm, even in a comic tale.

Test an explanation

With an ordinary safe mirror, have one reader raise a hand and move sideways while another watches. List what changes in the reflection. Use those observations to explain the scene to Kim without mocking him. Then separate one character’s observation from the conclusion they jumped to.

Talk about it

• What did each person think they saw in the mirror?
• Why do you think everyone got so angry before asking any questions?
• What do you think of the inspector’s advice about turnips and rice water?

Related stories

• The Husband Who Was to Mind the House — another funny tale of a household turned upside down
• The King of the Sparrows — another tale from Griffis’s collection
• Topknots and Crockery Hats — more about the hats and topknots of old Korea