Punnakan Analysis

Abduction Close reading of Punnakan offers the key to understand what the mystery meant to Kim. Punnakan is assumed to be a former Court-Treasury-Secretary in Thailand who had escaped safely into the U.S. not to take on the responsibility of cooperating to Japan in WWII. However, he has disappeared again in this country where he had reached at the end of this journey. A literary agent and his secretary knew this incident and set out to trace his whereabouts as detectives in order to offer materials for the novelist they were taking charge of. The possible reasons of his missing were a voluntary disappearance, abduction, or a murder. But the way of the ending of Punnakan is quite similar to Kim’s other works we have referred.
The literary

For the latter has a self-referential circle which begins with the victim’s existence (result of aggressiveness) and ends with the arrest by the state power monopolizing the legitimate use of physical force (they send back aggressiveness to where it came from), after the nomination of the criminal by the detective. And Kim himself seemed to be aware of this analogy. For example, the agent who had been chasing the whereabouts of Punnakan talks as follows:

“There is, for example, a Club ‘Baker Street Irregulars.’ […] [Members] are all fans of Sherlock Holmes. […] Isn’t it like the Forton Institute, where theories of all sorts of situations and frustrations, sociobiological parameter and mental complex are dealt with? It’s a same game in science.” This opinion on Freud’s theory shows that Kim was also aware of the similarity of the structure between detective stories and psychoanalysis. The one is examining aggressiveness in a scientific manner, the other is transforming it into fictional object. Then, how can we regard Kim’s works, which are immanent in the genre of detective fiction and deviating from it at the same time, in the context of