Review: Flowers of Mold
Ha Seong-Nan’s stories grow from a country of disquiet
Flowers of Mold
By Ha Seong-Nan
2019, Open Letter Books
South Korea is having a cultural moment. K-pop is perpetually trending; Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite is an international sensation, having won the first best picture Oscar ever given to a non-English-language film. Bong’s success follows on that of the novelist Han Kang, who won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for her novel, The Vegetarian — a book that placed her among the most important novelists working in the world today, and sparked new global interest in Korean literature in translation.
I picked up Flowers of Mold by Ha Seong-Nan on an impulse at Type Books Junction in Toronto (whose staff were smart enough to recognize the allure of its spore-laced cover and had it on prominent display). I lived in South Korea for two years, on the island of Jeju-do. It’s an extremely weird place, by most standards. There’s a dormant volcano in the middle, and as a popular honeymoon destination it has accumulated a rash of garish tourist attractions, like a huge outdoor park of sexually explicit plaster statues, or a museum where you can see The Last Supper staged with teddy bears.
A lot of recent Korean culture resonates with a particular, offbeat frequency — a worldview that might strike some western audiences as an inherent weirdness, but which creates the possibility for novel kinds of narrative. Witness The Vegetarian, a sociopolitical allegory in which the protagonist slowly becomes a tree. Parasite, which blends comedy, social drama and horror, is another good example. But the last two decades or so of Korean culture are filled with others, from the films of Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy) and Lee Chang-Dong (Peppermint Candy) to the work of writers like Kim Young-ha (whose 1996 debut novel is called I Have the Right to Destroy Myself).
Older cultures, I think, are more open to stories that contain supposedly conflicting moods and genres. In Korea, a nation with millennia of wars and invasions behind it, now suspended in a state of rift, happiness and sadness grow into each other like fungus, layering atop one another in a shifting fractal of emotional experience.
It’s hard to pinpoint precisely how Ha Seong-Nan’s stories express this same uncanny tone, except to say that they feel fundamentally strange. Flowers of Mold, Ha’s first collection in English, was originally published in 1999; Open Letter’s translation only came out in May of last year, but the stories read as timely and unsettling. “The Retreat”, in which the tenants and landlord of a run-down building scheme against one another, would make a fine companion to Parasite. Both feature characters whose lives are bathed in disappointment and organized according to social codes and structures that offer them little control.
“Nightmare”, meanwhile, points at the #MeToo movement by refracting a story of sexual assault and extreme gaslighting through the explicit frame of the horror story. A girl claims that a man has climbed into her room at night and raped her. Her parents, desperate to save face and reputation, repeatedly shrug off the attacks as the product of nightmares. By the end of the story, although no supernatural line has been crossed, it’s as though even the trees and the rain are conspiring to deny the girl’s story.
Often, Ha builds strangeness through structure. Narratives swing in time, repeat in echo and reveal themselves in odd configurations. “Flag”, which interrogates the culture of work and desire, begins with a man who finds a bunch of clothes hanging on subsequent rungs of an electrical pole, flashes back to the diary entries of the man who left them there, then returns to the first man for a brief, chilling coda. A billboard that features prominently in “Flag” reappears in the later story, “Toothpaste,” revealing new secrets. The collection’s closer, “Onion,” is layered as its title suggests, following multiple characters’ stories through a concentric narrative.
In places, this technique has the effect of bringing out character elements in objects or places. In “Retreat,” it’s the building that houses all of the characters’ businesses, with its duelling fried chicken and skewer shops at street level, recalling something out of a J.G. Ballard novel. In the title story, in which a man becomes obsessed with sifting through his neighbour’s trash, garbage itself becomes a character, offering up bits and pieces that ultimately grow into a sort of ghost in the narrative, the spectre of a transient self.
Throughout, Ha deploys a range of modes: humour, horror, absurdity, and a current of social realism etched in the details of the characters’ modern worlds, which are steeped in alcoholism, status anxiety, sexism, an obsession with youthful beauty, and, most of all, loneliness. Janet Hong’s translation appears to preserve Ha’s language faithfully, its origins revealed in certain tics; but it is clear and sharp and gives an edge to Ha’s sinister and surprising turns.
Perhaps what occurs to western readers like me as a lingering unease in Korean literature is just another manifestation of the complex sadness in the history of the nation’s many wounds. They heal in odd shapes: bulbs, flowers, spores.
Ha Seong-Nan’s new collection in translation, Bluebeard’s First Wife, will be published in June 2020 by Open Letter Books.
