A woman meets her next-door neighbor and loans her a spatula, then starts suffering horrific gaps in her memory. A man, feeling jilted by an unrequited love, becomes obsessed with sorting through his neighbors’ garbage in the belief that it will teach him how to better relate to people. A landlord decides to raise the rent, and his tenants hatch a plan to kill him at a team-building retreat.
In ten captivating, unnerving stories, Flowers of Mold presents a range of ordinary individuals―male and female, young and old―who have found themselves left behind by an increasingly urbanized and fragmented world. The latest in the trend of brilliant female Korean authors to appear in English, Ha cuts like a surgeon, and even the most mundane objects become menacing and unfamiliar under her scalpel.
"These mesmerizing stories of disconnection and detritus unfurl with the surreal illogic of dreams―it’s as impossible to resist their pull as it is to understand, in retrospect, how circumstance succeeded circumstance to finally deliver the reader into a moment as indelible as it is unexpected. Janet Hong’s translation glitters like a blade.” —Susan Choi
In even the most mundane lives, spectacular and shocking things can happen.
This is a collection of 10 unsettling short stories by Korean author Ha (Traversing Afternoon, 2017), one of the new wave of Korean women writers, thoughtfully translated by Hong. Ha has a gift for infusing elements of the fantastic into her tales of unremarkable people. Her protagonists are housewives, schoolgirls, and seemingly bland office workers whose daily lives eventually veer off into the surreal, the macabre, or the downright bizarre. Like those of the American auteur David Lynch, Ha’s characters seem to exist in another dimension. As these stories unfold, things become more surreal and eccentric. In the title story, “Flowers of Mold,” the hero, or maybe antihero, is a man who meticulously searches through his neighbors’ garbage bags looking for clues to their lives and personalities. His fervor goes up a notch when he becomes obsessed with his next-door neighbor and her ex-boyfriend. “Waxen Wings” is a modern retelling of the tale of Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun, from the perspective of a former female gymnast. She longs to fly but grows too tall to compete and finds a much more extreme alternative. “Your Rearview Mirror” is the story of a department store security guard’s obsession with a pretty female customer who he eventually discovers has more than one dark secret. “The Woman Next Door” begins with a polite request to borrow a spatula and ends in a spiral of jealousy, shoplifting, and possibly madness. Even though this is a book of short stories, it’s definitely a page-turner, as readers encounter one strange, unsettling saga after another, always wondering, “What can possibly happen now?”
If you're looking for a book that will make you gasp out loud, you’ve found it. - Kirkus
It must have been quite a while since I read a story collection, to be honest; I don’t tend to attach myself to them conceptually as much as longer constructions, for whatever reason: perhaps the continuous disconnection of starting and stopping that less intuitively-joined sets of stories require, rather than enabling reading in short bursts, as seems to be the major trend now, dissuades me from coming back, without the nails in the flesh that longer works allow; the trail of crumbs, the glue between. With a title like Flowers of Mold, though, and with the evocative descriptions of Ha’s “disturbing just below the surface” approach, I let myself in, and was pleasantly moved by the mechanics of what the construction of these stories, which do intertwine in oblique ways, allow to synthesize and build.
The most surprising thing, for me, about Ha’s method is her ability to create a logical, clear-uttered world that nonetheless continues to undo and reform itself simply by the bizarre range of sentences and details she weaves in. Surprising twists in sentence-ry are no new thing, for sure, and in fact can get old in being predictable in their surprising-ness, which all too fast becomes not-surprising because we are already used to being supposedly surprised, thanks to the late 90s wave of American short story makers who inadvertently co-signed the quirky voice that would, and often still does, characterize a certain kind of McSweeney’s-adjacent voice. So much of it eventually being mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting something by now commodified to be “the way that we get weird,” which of course isn’t weird at all unless you haven’t read it: the state of many.
Ha’s weirdness, though, sentence-to-sentence, is all its own. For once, the weird-for-weird’s sake (which I do dig when done right) isn’t the mechanism, but seems to be instead just the way her stories must be told. The sentences are clear, describing action that sometimes connects to larger movements within the story, or the set of stories, but also may just be the way the information comes together, seeming chaotic when in fact it is of-order; the same way that Lynch’s films have a logic all their own. She seems, often, to be describing many different strands of action all at once, without always bothering to connect them directly, logically, above-board, but to instead leave gaps where the reader can jump right alongside her, creating vast momentum in small space... - Blake Butler
These aren’t bedtime stories. Indeed, reading them before bed might not be a good idea at all.
The ten well-crafted works of short fiction collected in award-winning Korean author Ha Seong-nan’s Flowers of Mold are not so much horror stories as just horrible. There is a bit of a Roald Dahl vibe to the collection: the characters and the situation in most cases start out as normal, but things are not the way they initially seem and the plots take a detour through a darker underbelly, deflecting attention along the way, ending as often as not with a twist.
But if Dahl’s stories were characterized by plot (as at least they were for me), Ha’s are mostly characterized by atmosphere: they make the skin-crawl—not by overly explicit description, although there can be that too, but rather by imbuing her characters with a certain inescapable creepiness.
Ha achieves this effect in different ways. In one of the most Roald-Dahl like stories, “The Retreat”, the residents of a run-down commercial block fear their landlord is about to turf them out so the lot can be redeveloped. We meet the proprietors of two rather seedy eating establishments on the ground floor, a similarly seedy billiard parlor, the director of a cram school. A “tenants’ retreat”, a sort of group outing, is planned—a tradition established by the current owner’s father—and the thought arises that certain action might be taken. But they are not the only ones with thoughts of homicide.
Ha takes a slower, more psychological approach in “A Woman Next Door”. This starts off entirely domestically:
A new neighbor’s moved into number 507. I’d just taken out the laundry and was about to hang it on the clothesline. The washer is junk now. Whenever it goes from rinse to spin, it gives a terrible groan and shudders, as if it might explode any second. Over the years, it’s shifted about twenty centimeters from its original spot. Since it’s done nothing except wash, rinse, and spin for ten years, no wonder it’s in bad shape.
But is becomes immediately clear that maybe the narrator is a bit strange:
I pat the top of the washer and mutter, “Yeongmi, I know you’re tired, but let’s get through it one last time.” The washer wrings out the water and barely sounds its end-of-cycle buzzer. Yeongmi is the name I’ve given the washer. It’s also my name…
The next-door neighbor comes by and borrows a spatula. Yeongmi seems to think she’s found a soulmate, but strange things start happening. Things get lost, memories get lost, her initially critical husband starts to bond with the neighbor, the narrator loses whatever touch with reality she had.
If, that is, one can determine what is reality and what not. At the other extreme, “Nightmare”, is tale of what might be sexual assault followed by a delayed fatal revenge or which might be delusion; the victim is convinced of the former, her father apparently the latter. But the telling is distanced and dispassionate. Madness flecks the story but whence the madness comes isn’t clear.
Ha finds inspiration anywhere and everywhere: the opening story, “Waxen Wings” is, as the title might indicate, a retelling of the Icarus myth with an erstwhile gymnast whose growth spurt denied her the ability to fly as she wished. Several stories deal with commercialism: department stores, a Chrysler showroom, billboards, advertising. The men are among the more abject members of their gender; the women often put upon by circumstance. The tales are littered with the detritus, physical and moral, of the human condition.
The stories, it must be said, are uncomfortable if not unpleasant: some readers will enjoy the frisson they deliver, while others may admire their craftsmanship without necessarily finding them to their taste.
Janet Hong’s translation deserves more than a mention. It is fluent to a degree that one might never guess it is a translation at all. There is a distinct voice—whether it is the original author’s is something only someone who knows Korean as well can determine—but there is no feeling this is a work that passed through a filter.
This is combined with a certain “placelessness” to the stories themselves: the odd Korean name and reference to a price in won apart, there is little to indicate that the flat, subway car, bus or run-down commercial building is in Seoul rather than, say, the less-glitzy outlying parts of an American conurbation. This can itself be destabilizing and adds to the overall sense of disorientation that the stories produce. - Peter Gordon
https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/flowers-of-mold-stories-by-ha-seong-nan/
If you have ever lived in an apartment building and wondered about your neighbors, perhaps those living right next door or just across the hall, the title story of Flowers of Mold (Open Letter, 2019) by Ha Seong-nan, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong, is for you. Be forewarned: it might make you reconsider your interest in your neighbors, because it could lead to obsession and madness — or something odder and less reassuring than a tidy end, of which there are few in this wonderfully unsettling book of 10 masterful short stories.
The unnamed protagonist in “Flowers of Mold” is curious about the other people living in the 90-unit apartment building. Ha’s descriptions are always precise: “She is deep in concentration, like a student solving a math problem.” Some stories begin with a matter-of-fact observation. “Nightmare” starts innocuously enough: “The alarm didn’t go off this morning.” Other stories, as in “The Retreat,” pull us right in: “The drunken words spewed by a regular of Good Chicken were to blame.”
Each story is like a rollercoaster ride. Initially, Ha moves slowly from one observation to the next, as in the opening paragraph of the first story, “Waxen Wings.”
Your watch stopped at 3:14. The second hand fell off when the glass cover shattered. Within minutes you were unconscious. During what seemed like a nap that went on a little longer than usual, the seasons changed in the front lawn, right below your hospital window.
Frankly, the first paragraph won me over because I knew I could not predict what was going to happen next, and the only thing to do was succumb to the flights of Ha’s wild imagination. And yet, there is nothing fantastical about this paragraph. All of its parts fit together, though not in a narrative sense. Something feels slightly cockeyed. Instead of conveying realism, each sentence functions like a small, methodical piece of a puzzle. A picture emerges from the accumulation of details.
Another distinct picture emerges in the next paragraph. The author moves back and forth in time. You go with her. You follow the logic and, perhaps, like me, you fall in love with her sensuous descriptions of an unsettling reality, as perceived by the protagonist in “Flowers of Mold,” as he goes through his neighbor’s garbage bags: “Food rich in protein smells the worst. The foul stench of fish heads, entrails, and chicken bones is unbearable.”
In many of the stories, Ha describes the odors, shapes, and contents of garbage bags and dumpsters. “Liquid leaked from the bags and flowed down the asphalt and hardened in chunks. To avoid getting his dress shoes dirty, the man leapt over the stains like an athlete competing in the triple jump event.” The struggle between cleanliness and order and dirt and decay is heightened and never ending. The garbage is one reminder of how repellent the world the characters live in has become, and how they have all accommodated themselves to these extreme but commonplace conditions.
In “Waxen Wings,” we learn how a young woman in the hospital ended up there. At no point did I feel the story betray itself and say too much. By the end, its fragmented recounting and reticence became all the more poignant. What makes these stories so powerful is Ha’s ability to reveal, often microscopically, the slight, almost imperceptible slippage between the actual events and the protagonists’ perception of them. Eventually, whatever bonds exist between the protagonist and her or his reality are torn asunder, leaving the individual vulnerable and hopeless. The characters are at the mercy of other forces, over which they have no control.
The constant slippage between the protagonists’ perceptions and the reality of the things around them carries through all the stories. The outcome of that ever shifting slippage is what keeps our attention. How does Ha get from the first sentence to the last? In “The Woman Next Door,” the first sentence reads, “A new neighbor’s moved into number 507.” The story ends with: “Myeonghui, the woman next door. Who is this stranger?” The story’s 20 pages reveal different relationships and power struggles.
My husband says things that show how much he doesn’t understand: The washing machine does the laundry and the rice cooker cooks the rice, so what do you do all day?
Myeonghu, the woman next door, comes to borrow something and the protagonist thinks:
A spatula. I’m stunned once more. Although I’ve lived here for six years, no one’s ever come to borrow a spatula. It’s totally put of place, as foreign as, let’s say, the name Remington rifle.
Not once has a spatula come up in conversations with my husband. And would I need I ever need to mention it to my six-year-old son? So of course it would sound alien to my ears.
At another point, the protagonist states: “At the same time, it isn’t good for boundaries to be so unclear from the start.” This porousness between one person’s reality and another’s — in which very little is agreed upon — is at the heart of the narration, with the author changing the angle of her focus slightly this way and that.
Ha fully inhabits her very different protagonists. She registers the beginnings of their unraveling; she follows them as they begin to spiral, wobble, and slip into their isolated realities, cut off from everyone around them. And yet, I would not say they descend into madness — or, perhaps more accurately, I would say madness only tells part of the story. Although the author seldom gestures toward the global reality her characters inhabit — a divided country still technically at war with itself — I could not but feel that that instability haunted everyone I encountered in these stories, from the housewife who gives the washing machine her name to the man who “had come up with a hit soju commercial twenty years ago.”
Flowers of Mold was originally published in Korea in 1999. It feels as contemporary as the news reports and accompanying films and photographs of President Donald Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un standing on North Korean soil on June 30, 2019, in Panmunjom, Korea. Ha knows that whatever we see on film will be spun many different ways, with all of the views containing at least one small grain of truth. This everyday unreality is what the author is sympathetic to.
According to her biography, Ha Seong-nan is the prize-winning author of five short-story collections and three novels. I would like to believe that Flowers of Mold — which has been translated into sparkling English by Janet Hong, who would hopefully continue as Ha Seong-nan’s translator — receives the reception it deserves and this leads to her other books being translated into English, introducing her works to a larger worldwide audience. - John Yau
https://hyperallergic.com/508280/the-unreality-of-everyday-life/
Though steadily published in South Korea for over twenty years, Ha Seong-Nan was not easily available to English audiences until translator Janet Hong and publisher Open Letter Books released 2019’s Flowers of Mold. Praised upon publication, Flowers of Mold exhibited the author’s flirtations with unsettling subject matter and her placement of characters at the edge of normal life. Now, Hong and Open Letter return with a second collection of Ha’s stories, Bluebeard’s First Wife, originally published in 2002. This latest translation frequently soars; Bluebeard’s First Wife continues to showcase the talents of Ha Seong-Nan, whose chameleon-like abilities allow her to comfortably fiddle with narrative tropes, and whose daring imagination infuses each story with unpredictable developments that often shed light on real world concerns.
Misdirection abounds in the collection, a technique which naturally—and delightfully so—acts in juxtaposition to the author’s straightforward writing style. While beautifully crafted, most of Ha’s sentences are succinct in structure and detail, with only occasional pitstops for mischievous flourishes—one man introduced as someone who could “make the perfect Santa Claus, if he’d had a white beard and a red costume,” for example, and later, a security guard described as “resembling a dairy cow.” “Joy to the World” is one of several stories in the collection that hinge initially on spousal (or partner) suspicion and which employ misdirection at their cores. During a birthday celebration for her fiancé, a nameless woman meets three of her soon-to-be husband’s childhood friends and overhears talk between the quartet of a potential murder committed by the group, fifteen years prior. The conversation sets off her radar, but rather than build a story around this revelation, Ha employs this threadbare mystery-thriller cliché to stun the reader with a powerful examination of patriarchal power. Months after the night of blackout-drunk celebration, the protagonist misses her period. When she approaches her fiancé to tell him the good news, he claims she slept with one of his friends at the party and ends the engagement. She seeks out the three friends for explanation, only to be greeted with the same story: each claim they saw her sleeping with one of the others in the group. The woman is banished, and the potential crime from fifteen years earlier serves as little more than a hint of the danger certain men pose, particularly when bound by loyalty to each other.
Ha’s use of misdirection in “Joy to the World” also guides the reader into the thick of South Korean gender politics. Gender plays an important role in each of the stories within Bluebeard’s First Wife, where female protagonists often take the form of wives hamstrung by rude and verbally assaultive husbands, and male protagonists, few as they are, tend to define themselves by their jobs. This recurring character type, as well as Ha’s use of similar inciting scenarios, ties the collection together into a cohesive volume. One can see these techniques at work in “The Dress Shirt” and “On That Green, Green Grass,” two stories which include vanishings. In the first, a woman, Eunok, comes home from work one evening to find her recently unemployed husband, who once claimed “he had always wanted to become a deadbeat,” missing from their apartment. In lieu of looking for the man, however, Eunok rejoices in her newfound freedom, for she “no longer ha[s] to go through the trouble of rewashing certain dishes, all because her husband had noticed a grain of rice or red pepper flake that hadn’t come off.” With the run of her home in her own hands, Ha bestows a certain amount of authority onto Eunok in these opening scenes. Yet this control is fleeting, as a few pages later a schoolgirl throws herself off of the apartment building’s roof and lands on Eunok’s car. The teen’s suicide subtly reinforces the stress placed on women by the sway of men, and once more, Ha tinkers with the expectations of gender. In the end, the story is less about the missing husband and more about Eunok’s personal development, with the two threads converging only for the story’s final paragraphs. Meanwhile, “On That Green, Green Grass” opens with the theft of a family’s dog. As opposed to in “The Dress Shirt,” Ha sticks with this plotline throughout the story, sending her female protagonist on the hunt for a white van seen in the neighborhood during the incident. Yet the dog’s disappearance turns into something of a tease for the true consequences of the story. Though the protagonist’s actions are meant to satisfy her husband, he belittles her throughout the story, eventually yelling, “What the hell have you been doing?” when their disabled child, left alone and ignored during her escapades, also goes missing. No matter her effort, or her detective skills, the woman is still seen primarily as a mother who belongs at home. In the eyes of her husband, their marriage unravels and their child ends up in a great deal of danger because of the woman’s search.
Ha upends reader expectations in both of these stories; what begin as familiar narrative paths quickly diverge into surprisingly fresh territories that double as social commentaries. Perhaps the best example of this technique comes in the story “A Quiet Night,” which shares some initial narrative beats with “The Dress Shirt,” with a narrator protagonist, another nameless wife, contending with an unemployed husband. In “A Quiet Night,” the husband quits his job at a bank to become a carpenter. The narrator supports his decision, yet he spends his days lounging around their new apartment, accomplishing little. For a lesser storyteller, such laziness would act as the domestic conflict propelling the narrative, yet Ha makes this story succeed by pulling multiple rugs on her audience from this point forward. The husband’s idleness is back-burnered for a new revelation: the upstairs neighbors make so much noise that the couple can’t sleep. Soon, a verbal war erupts between the two households. Chaos ensues; by careening her characters down this bewildering path, Ha concocts emotional drama that would have been impossible to achieve in a standard lazy spouse scenario. What would have been limited to additional notations on patriarchal power (or lack thereof) in the unemployed husband balloons into a story that evolves to explore the violence lurking within men. Ha brilliantly builds a sense of uncertainty when the woman questions her husband’s capability for hurting others after an accident befalls one of the neighbor’s children. It is a devastating move that spins the story into a creepy realm that seems impossible from the vantage point of its opening sentences.
Upon first blush, the stories of Ha Seong-Nan appear both accessible and familiar in ambition. They rely on common narrative sparks and are presented without stylistic overkill. Yet this veneer permits Ha to shake each story like a snow globe, blurring the obvious and constructing something new and unpredicted. Whether submerging her characters into detective stories, like in “Flies” and “Night Poaching,” or narrating from the perspective of a dead teenager, like in the breathtaking closer, “Daisy Fleabane,” Ha’s persistence in highlighting disparities and leaving the reader off-kilter never tires. We can all only hope that Janet Hong’s terrific translations continue and that they provide the English-speaking world opportunities for enchantment by a master storyteller for years to come.
https://kenyonreview.org/reviews/bluebeards-first-wife-by-ha-seong-nan-738439/
Ha Seong-Nan was born in Seoul in 1967 and made her literary debut in 1996, after her graduation from the Seoul Institute of the Arts. She is the author of five short story collections—including Bluebeard's First Wife and The Woman Next Door—and three novels. Over her career, she's received a number of prestigious awards, such as the Dongin Literature Award in 1999, Hankook Ilbo Literature Prize in 2000, the Isu Literature Prize in 2004, the Oh Yeong-su Literary Award in 2008, and the Contemporary Literature (Hyundae Munhak) Award in 2009.
