Korean history is contested; not only do the two states occupying the northern and southern halves of the peninsula promote divergent accounts of their pasts, but Korean and foreign scholars struggle adequately to frame the colonial period (1910–1945), when Japan controlled what for millennia had been a single, unified country. Nobody would doubt that much changed during the colonial period. Confucian hierarchies and fossilized, backward-looking attitudes were bulldozed by the pillars of modernization – industrialization and urbanization. Previously isolated communities were brought into closer contact with the centre as transport and infrastructure was built. And yet, Koreans on both sides of the divide continue to focus on the repressive aspects of Japan's colonial rule. Commentators in South Korea insist that Korea's traditional culture was systematically destroyed, and the Korean language was banned. In the North, nationalism and resistance are said to have characterized groups on the left. However, the reality is that the first two decades of Japanese rule saw the emergence of new Korean literature, new philosophical ideas, popular culture, and even a systematization of the Korean language. The loose grouping of intellectuals involved, often referred to as cultural nationalists (the munhwa undong), would later be labelled as collaborators because of their accommodation to colonial structures.

Then, with Japan's move to a war footing, a “dark period” (amhŭkki) descended, “as if it were a black hole where conventional notions of time, and perhaps also responsibility, disappeared” (p. 4): Korean intellectuals, or at least the writers that Poole discusses here – Ch'oe Myŏngik, Sŏ Insik, Im Hwa, Yi T'aejun, Pak T'aewŏn, Ch'oe Chaesŏ and Kim Namch’ŏn – lost their vision of a future in which an independent Korea would rise and take its place in the world. When the Future Disappears is a close reading of specific works by this small set of essayists, poets, philosophers and literary critics from the dark period. They wrote during the “dusky evening”, living “the excesses of a global … movement as colonized subjects with combinations of silence, negotiation, and sometimes even an enthusiastic partaking” (p. 201). When liberation came, as the activist Ham Sŏkhŏn later put it, “as a thief in the night”, it was unexpected, and shook the modernist imagination that these writers forged, and the certainties and uncertainties that came from four decades of life, education, and expectation under Japanese rule. All but one of the writers settled in North Korea, where socialism soon brought new dangers for them all; several were later shot or purged. The one who remained in South Korea, Ch'oe Chaesŏ, continued to work as a critic and academic until his death in 1964, despite his tarnished reputation, simply because the southern regime did little to hold him, or other collaborators, to account. Today, several commissions have produced lists of collaborators. Public shaming has become common, and all those considered here are criticized.

When the Future Disappears is not primarily a book about history. Scholarly critique of literature has, at times, been put forward as a reasonable surrogate, but this volume is more that that. The ambition is, nonetheless, considerable and the author intends her account to be “part of the broad effort to rewrite the history of the late colonial period into the global history of modernity and fascist cultures” (p. 5). Poole sidesteps Fanon and Taussig in respect to the mimetic, and as she drills down into the motivations of writers, she illustrates her points with striking photographs, adding vignettes for poignancy. The epilogue, for instance, describes Pak T'aewŏn bed-bound in North Korea during his last decade of life, dictating a three-volume historical novel to his second wife. She had formerly been married to his close colleague, and after Pak's death his daughter exchanged photographs with, and then met through the Red Cross, her South Korean siblings who her father had abandoned, never to see again, when the United Nations counter-offensive reclaimed Seoul in late 1950. We hear how Im Hwa was shot in North Korea in 1953 for his earlier collaborations with the Japanese but also, it was claimed, because he was a spy for the United States; his wife was never able to retrieve his body. Ch'oe Chaesŏ had during the 1930s been a champion of new Korean writers, but as the dark period fell he gambled, foolishly, on Japanese being the language of the future and on Japan being victorious in its battles. And, Yi T'aejun had written of his nostalgia for objects from the past, but once he settled in post-liberation North Korea his attitude changed, and he rejected old-fashioned and outmoded things, “proclaiming the joy of being freed from old things” (p. 203). Ironically, his former home in Seoul survives today – as a flourishing traditional teahouse.

Poole resists a broad-brush approach. Her sheer erudition, which essentially sums up three decades of study, is at times daunting to a lesser mortal like this reviewer. Put a different way, the book's brilliance will without a doubt make it core reading for Koreanists, but others may find themselves unsatisfied: those concerned with geopolitics will expect more detail about political groups and alignments, those who explore colonialism will wonder about the lack of discussion on censorship and enforcement of policies designed to serve Tokyo, and the focus on the abstractions of literature will challenge historians who expect historical events to be foregrounded.

After an introduction, Ch'oe Myŏngik is the first writer on whom Poole focuses, chosen to illustrate the narrative fragmentation characteristic of the late 1930s. In his stories, Ch'oe describes objects in intricate detail, shifting understandings of utility to the urban everyday in ways that challenge the received wisdom from previous generations.

That Japan had colonized Korea to many implied a failure of tradition, and the second writer Poole features is Sŏ Insik, who uses philosophy – Japanese philosophy – to imagine a future. Retrospectively, we see hints of the illusive utopia that justifies the continued existence of North Korea today. Nostalgia features in the writings of Yi T'aejun, revealing the attraction of antiquarian objects collected, exhibited and enjoyed in the silence after his wife retires to bed. Nostalgia, though, has less place in the stories of Pak T'aewŏn, in which the new urban suburbs of Seoul demand a modernist narrative. Then comes Ch'oe Chaesŏ, responding to the colonial government's closure of the journal that he edited, a journal that published commentaries on local and European literature, by championing the imperial campaign itself in a collection of essays.

Each writer provides the focus for one chapter, with Ch'oe bridging from the fifth to the sixth, where he is responsible for publishing a narration, in Japanese, by the former communist leader Kim Namch’ŏn, on the birth of his son. The child becomes a metaphor for the future of Koreans and the Korean nation. And so we move onwards, for “when the future disappears time does not come to an end”, but enters “the entangled realm of an everyday life lived under colonial fascism” (p. 16). What Poole's book avoids doing, then, is to reduce these entanglements to a single timeline, or to fuse the constructions of colonialism into a shared memory that can account for the emergence of one or the other of the rival states that have, for the last seventy years, divided the Korean peninsula.