Lee Tae Jun's "Crows"

Some stories stay with you long after you finish reading them. Not because they are dramatic or full of plot twists, but because something inside them lingers—like a sound in the distance you can’t quite forget.

For me, one of those stories is “Crows” by Lee Tae-jun.

I first read it several years ago, and ever since then, every time I hear a crow calling somewhere in the distance, I think of that story. It’s strange how literature can do that—how it quietly attaches itself to the everyday world. A sound, a season, a passing moment—and suddenly you find yourself inside a story again.

Lee's short story, first published during the 1930s, unfolds in a bleak winter landscape. The narrator, a writer, retreats to a remote rural area to escape the noise and pressures of the city. The countryside he arrives in is cold, silent, and nearly empty—one of those winter places where the wind moves across the fields, and the sky seems unusually wide.

There, he meets a woman who is gravely ill with tuberculosis—what people in those days called consumption. The two form a quiet connection born less from romance than from shared solitude. Both exist at the edge of things: the narrator withdrawn from the world, the woman slowly fading from it.

Around them stretches the winter countryside, and above it—circling or perched in bare trees—are the crows.

Their dark shapes move across the pale sky, their cries breaking the silence of the empty fields. The narrator notices them, but he does not react strongly. To him, they are simply part of the landscape, another presence in the winter air.

"They weren't as pleasant to look at as magpies or doves. But he didn't feel it necessary to wish them ill out of hand, just for their black color and the strident call that nature had given them."

For the woman, however, the crows seem to carry a deeper meaning. Their cries trouble her. They feel like signs, reminders of something approaching that she cannot escape. The birds appear again and again in the story, hovering over the quiet countryside like a shadow that never quite lifts.

That tension is what gives the story its haunting power. The narrator observes the world with a kind of detached calm, while the woman feels the weight of what the crows represent. In the end, when she dies, the reader cannot help but remember those dark shapes in the winter sky and the uneasy feeling they carried with them.

In some ways, the story invites comparison to Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem The Raven. Both works feature black birds lingering at the edge of mortality. But Poe’s raven belongs to the world of gothic drama and psychological obsession, while Lee's crows belong to the ordinary landscape of life. They sit in bare trees, fly across winter fields, and call out into the cold air.

Their symbolism is quieter, more natural—and perhaps more unsettling because of that.

Likewise, the narrator’s thought of marrying the woman seems to arise from a sudden mixture of pity and shared loneliness. Seeing her illness and isolation moves him to imagine giving her companionship and dignity, even though the impulse feels fleeting and uncertain. It reflects less romantic love than a momentary desire to do something meaningful in the face of her approaching death.

"Sorrowful maiden," he silently called to her, "if you must die, then die loving me. Sadder still to die alone than to die leaving a lover behind...You've struggled so long with the germs that have infected you, my beloved--you couldn't have had a lover."

The story can also be read as a reflection of the historical moment in which it was written. Lee lived and wrote during the period of Japanese colonial rule in Korea, a time when Korean writers often expressed feelings of isolation, uncertainty, and quiet despair. The bleak winter setting of the story seems to echo that mood, though Lee never states it directly.

Like the crows themselves, the meaning moves through the story quietly.

What surprises me most is how deeply the story has stayed with me. Years have passed since I first read it, yet every time I hear a crow somewhere—on a winter morning, or calling from a distant tree—I remember that lonely landscape and the fragile woman who lived there.

That is the strange magic of literature.

A story written nearly a century ago attaches itself to a sound in the present. A crow calls somewhere in the distance, and for a moment, the winter fields of that story return.

And the story lives again.