At a dinner gathering in May, my wife introduced me to someone who, like me, grew up in Buffalo, New York. My new friend immediately had a book recommendation: fellow diasporic Buffalonian Ed Park’s novel, Same Bed Different Dreams. He warned me the book could be challenging, since it’s three interwoven stories in one, but I was intrigued to hear that part of the plot involves our beloved, perennially frustrated hockey team, the Buffalo Sabres.
A couple days later, Same Bed Different Dreams was named a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Was it coincidence I had first heard about the book from someone I had never met and within days encountered it in the news? Or was something deeper afoot? Just to be safe, I ordered my copy right away.
In the novel, something deeper is always afoot. Every event is connected, and no one is who they seem to be. The most conventional thread, titled The Sins, is the story of Soon Sheen, a former writer in the present-day Hudson Valley who works for a technology conglomerate called GLOAT. Sheen’s job is to devise seemingly lighthearted “challenges” that prod GLOAT’s users to reveal ever more information about themselves. Armed with these profiles, the company may not only better sell its customers ads. “It could probably predict the day you would die,” Sheen says.
Another thread, 2333, focuses on a Korean War veteran named Parker Jotter. Jotter had been piloting an F-86 Sabre over North Korea’s MiG Alley when he saw what may have been a UFO and then was shot down and detained for months. When Jotter returns to Buffalo to run an appliance store, he begins writing a series of science-fiction novels inspired by a muse he calls “the Freak” — the “frequency” on which ideas come to him. The heroine of Jotter’s series is Greena Hymns, whose name is an anagram of Syngman Rhee, the first president of South Korea. The novels sell poorly but draw the interest of wealthy, shadowy figures who seem, above all, to want Jotter’s final, lost volume.
Sheen comes to possess the manuscript of a different novel, Same Bed, Different Dreams (note the addition of the comma), by an unknown Korean author who goes by the moniker Echo. This becomes Park’s third thread. It’s told as a series of “dreams” that lay out a secret history of the Korean Provisional Government, a historical organization that was formed in 1919 and ostensibly disbanded once the Japanese occupation of Korea ended in 1945.
In the dreams, however, the KPG has been active for centuries, playing a role in events as disparate as political assassinations and the Friday the 13th movie franchise. Secret agents of the KPG in this telling include such unlikely figures as Leon Czolgosz (who killed President William McKinley in Buffalo in 1901), General Douglas MacArthur, Marilyn Monroe and Ronald Reagan. Jotter and Sheen are unwittingly caught up in this alternate history, too.
It can be difficult to keep up with Park’s array of characters, some of whom appear in multiple narrative threads and frequently change identities. In fact, no fewer than three characters are named, at one point or another, Taro Tsujimoto. When one Taro encounters another, everything falls into place: “He has finally glimpsed Taro Tsujimoto — the real Taro Tsujimoto — and understands that nothing is by accident. There’s a reason they met on this plane.”
Park, a founding editor of The Believer magazine, did not choose the name at random. In the 1970s, Buffalo Sabres management, bored by the interminable process of drafting young players who would likely never play for the team, decided to pull a prank. Late in the draft, they selected a forward for the Tokyo Katanas named Taro Tsujimoto. No other team’s scouts had heard of him. When the new season began, the Sabres set up a locker for him, but he never showed. In fact, he never existed. The team’s public relations director had made him up; the Tokyo Katanas themselves were fictional. But for decades, Taro Tsujimoto remained an inside joke for Sabre fans.
Echo, the author of the KPG’s alternate history, sees great significance in the draft-day stunt — and indeed in many key events in Sabres history. “Can it be a coincidence,” Echo asks, “that the brothers who started the Buffalo Sabres hockey franchise, Seymour and Northrup Knox, had the initials S.K and N.K., as in South and North Korea?”
Reading the chunks of the book that deal with hockey, I started to think nothing was a coincidence. “We believe that the Korean War (1950-?) never ended, just as we maintain that the National Hockey League’s 1998-99 season continues to this day, absent a legitimate victor,” the KPG’s history states.
This line delighted me to no end. The Sabres played the Dallas Stars in the Stanley Cup Finals that year, losing on an overtime goal by Stars winger Brett Hull that was disputed, video-reviewed and upheld. Sabre fans have insisted that Hull’s skate was inside the goal crease at the time he shot the puck. “As this violated league rules at the time,” the KPG continues, “we consider the game, series, and season to be unresolved.”
Park doesn’t address the Sabres’ more recent history, but his convolutions set me dreaming, too. In 2011, the team was bought by the married couple Terry and Kim Pegula. Kim was born in South Korea and adopted by an American family at age 5, with no recollection of her birth name. She was the first Korean American majority owner of a big-league North American sports team. She later was named the team’s President. Kim Pegula: Her name is almost Kim P. Gula, KPG.
In 2014, the Pegulas bought the Buffalo Bills football team, outbidding two other potential buyers: 1980s rock star Jon Bon Jovi and real-estate and reality-TV mogul Donald Trump. Trump said in 2016 that if he had bought the team, he would not have entered politics. In 2019, he crossed the demilitarized zone into North Korea, becoming the first U.S. president to set foot in the country.
Given such tantalizing material, it’s a bit surprising Park makes no use of it. Or perhaps he recognizes that setting out a loopy conspiracy theory is one thing when the stakes are low and the key events lie safely in the distant past. It’s something else when living people are involved. In 2022, Kim Pegula had a medical emergency that caused a serious brain injury. Her daughter Jessica, the tennis star, said it was cardiac arrest. Kim has rarely been seen in public since.
The question “What is history?” frames Same Bed Different Dreams. “One damned thing after another,” is one answer, though not one Park offers explicitly. The events of the world do not provide their own meaning; we must concoct it ourselves. This is difficult. Longstanding, widely accepted narratives like the march of freedom and progress have lately broken down. You try to tell a coherent story of the world, and you find you’re left with stray bits of unnerving evidence, like extra pieces of hardware that remain after you’ve assembled a bed frame.
Conspiracy theories and secret histories appeal to us because they make all the pieces fit. That power can turn malignant, as when it makes us all too certain about whom we can trust and who’s a villain. But they have a benign form, too. They allow us to think that the things we care about, however overlooked, actually matter — that a longsuffering sports team or a small country surrounded by superpowers is, to those with eyes to see, the axis of history.
Jonathan Malesic is the author of The End of Burnout, as well as essays in The New York Times, The Atlantic, America, Commonweal and elsewhere. He teaches writing at Southern Methodist University.