Seochon Hanok Village

This guide to Seochon in Seoul walks the tiled hanok alleys west of Gyeongbokgung Palace, a quarter that once housed court ladies and minor officials serving the aristocracy over the ridge, then became a haven for painters and poets too unconventional for polite society. It centers on Yi Sang, an architect turned fever-driven fiction writer whose tuberculosis forced him from his job in the 1930s, and follows him from these lanes toward a much stranger destination in Tokyo. Listen for the baffling fifteen-poem sequence, Crow's Eye View, that made his name before he ever left the neighborhood.