The Crows of Korea

Mornings in Korea often begin with the sound of crows.

Not a single call, but a chorus—harsh, echoing cries that bounce between apartment towers and telephone wires before the city has fully woken. 

They gather on rooftops and power lines, black silhouettes against a pale sky, watching the streets below with the patience of creatures that have lived alongside people for a very long time.

In winter they seem everywhere.

When the trees stand bare and the hills are the color of dust and cold earth, the crows appear in small black assemblies—like punctuation marks scattered across the landscape. They move through the city with quiet authority: hopping along sidewalks, lifting suddenly into the air, settling again on a railing or a streetlight.

In Korean folklore, crows were never just birds.

Long ago there was the three-legged crow, the samjok-o, said to live in the sun itself—a symbol of power, watchfulness, and the mysterious forces that move through the world unseen. Even now, something about the way crows gather makes you feel as if they know things we do not.

Perhaps that is why people notice them.

They appear where the city meets quieter spaces—along rivers, in temple courtyards, beneath the branches of old trees. From wires and rooftops, they watch everything below with bright, restless eyes.

And if you walk the same streets long enough, you begin to recognize their rhythm.

A crow lifting from a ginkgo tree.
Another gliding low across a quiet courtyard.
A sudden burst of wings scattering into the gray winter sky.

For many years, I hardly noticed them.

I lived in Seoul, and later in Daejeon, and the crows were simply part of the background—another sound in the city. It wasn’t until I wrote my thriller The Hatchet Man, which included a cemetery scene where crows appeared among the gravestones, that I began to pay attention to them.

Soon afterward it seemed I was hearing them everywhere.

On cold mornings.

Over quiet streets.

From rooftops I couldn’t see.

As if they had always been there, waiting to be noticed.

Around that same time, I began teaching a class at the SolBridge International School of Business (I believed business students should read literature) on the modern Korean short story. One of the works we read was Lee Tae-jun’s haunting story “Crows,” a quiet meditation on loneliness, illness, and the shadow of mortality. Ever since reading it, the sound of crows has carried a slightly different weight for me.

Cities change.

New buildings rise. Old neighborhoods disappear.

But the crows remain.

Black feathers against the morning light, calling to one another above the roofs of Seoul, Busan, Daejeon.

Witnesses to everything.

And perhaps, in their own way, keepers of the long memory of the land.