Shin Kyung-sook plagiarism questions

       Somewhat late in the day, Please Look After Mom and I'll Be Right There-author Shin Kyung-sook finds herself embroiled in a growing plagiarism scandal. As Lee Sun-young reports in the K Pop Herald, Plagiarism charges haunt Korea's literary icon as she has been accused of 'lifting' a passage from Mishima Yukio's Patriotism in a 1996 work -- dredging up memories of previous accusations of plagiarism as well, such as a 2000 story that: "was revealed to contain six paragraphs lifted from another book with only a few changes".
       Some of this seems to be getting rather silly: the Yonhap story Plagiarism suspicions raised on novelist Shin Kyung-sook reports that:

Yonhap News Agency found on Monday that [...] the titles of two of her short stories published in the March-April 1990 issue of the Korean Literature magazine and the autumn issue of Munye Joongang in 1992, were identical to those of two poems published in 1987 and 1989 by Yoon Hee-sang

       But others, like the borrowings from Luise Rinser (!) in Please Look After Mom (and another work) seem more serious.
       The Dong-A Ilbo piece, Cartel within writers' community interrupts eradication of plagiarism, suggests that the South Korean system leads to such cases being hushed-up in the closed circle of writers, "due to secrecy and cronyism involved in the process":

Many writers sought to keep good terms with publishers, believing that even though Shin Kyung-sook disappears from the stage, publishers will remain in power forever.

       Complicating matters:

Another cause for repeated suspicions over plagiarism is the lack of specific criteria that allows for defining of plagiarism due to lack of standards for plagiarism in literary works. "There are no specific standards in provisions in Korean copyright acts that clarify 'overlapping of a certain number of words or phrases constitute plagiarism'"

       The one interesting observation from a US publishing standpoint: despite its apparent success, Please Look After Mom publisher Alfred A. Knopf did not continue to publish her in the US (a big surprise to outside observers); it's unclear whether they were outbid for the next book (doubtful) ... or whether maybe they had other concerns .....

       And I am curious when this story -- which, by now, is a 'story' -- gets picked up by US/UK media. (Knowing who is 'inspired' by reads this weblog, I figure: by Wednesday at the latest.)