Ha Seong-Nan's FLOWERS OF MOLD (Tr by Janet Hong)

Today I bought a dress with lots of buttons. After I'd done them all up and was about to button the last one, I discovered there was no hole to put it through. I looked in the mirror and saw the back of my dress was wrinkled around the neck. I'd put the third button in the fourth hole. So I had to undo them all and start over. As I was doing them up, I had a thought: When did the button of my life go in the wrong hole?

First of all, let's take a moment and bask in this book cover. Open Letter Books, the American publisher of Ha Seong-Nan's short story collection Flowers of Mold, give good book cover. Some of the best in the business, for my money (so much of my money!). But lest my typical reader jump to the conclusion that I did at first sight, Flowers of Mold is not fungal fiction, nor is it weird fiction. It's down to earth and domestic and literary and grounded. Very, very grounded. And occasionally a bit gross, because...

Whether it's drawing profound metaphor from everyday annoyances like in the passage I quoted above or painting entire word portraits of the wear and tear daily life exercises on things we're all too tired or demoralized to even try to make to last these days, Ha Seong-Nan is the greatest poet of kipple since Philip K. Dick or J.G. Ballard.*

The stories in this collection are thematically linked through various explorations of what we've thrown away or allowed to wear away or destroyed through inattention to detail, both in material terms and in terms of the misused, if not outright wasted, potential of individual human lives, which should make Flowers of Mold an absolutely exhausting and maybe nauseating read, but there are little bits of humor here and there that shine through. We get to watch a lot of people trying to dig up things after misremembering where they've been buried, which is always at least a little bit funny, for instance, and several times Ha lets us enjoy watching everything build to a Mexican shoot-out of a climax with just enough comic timing to let us know that she's in on the joke. But for every little chuckle, we get a lot of weariness and despair even as we wonder if, like Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories a few years ago, we're seeing quite as many individual characters as we think we are. Might these all be about the same thin, pretty but uncertain woman who can't seem to find a place in this world, and the same tired, kind of creepy and washed-up-before-his-time man?

Except, of course, there are a few stories like my favorite "The Retreat" which have a larger cast of characters, tenants all of a run-down building in a middling location who are getting ready to go on the building's annual retreat with the owner when the rumor surfaces that he's probably going to sell the building out from under them and never mind that the fried chicken lady just spent all her money renovating her restaurant on one floor, or that the academy upstairs probably couldn't afford to relocate or that everybody's been faithfully paying rent for years and years. But of course the guy who runs the academy could be our washed-up man, who has, in other stories, to take a job as a store detective-cum-mannequin in a store, a car salesman, a second-rate writer of advertising copy, couldn't he? And maybe the lady on the other floor who makes her precarious living keeping a handful of barflies happy is the same we see mysteriously showing up as a stage magician, a model (several times), a failed gymnast? Even her names (or at least her family name) are similar as we proceed through the stories -- Choi Sun-ae (in "Your Rearview Mirror"), Choi Jiae (in the collection's title story "Flowers of Mold"), Choi Myeong-ae (in "Toothpaste")... or maybe they're sisters? "Choi" isn't the rarest surname in Korea, but this still feels like a deliberate choice. See what I did there.

Meanwhile, don't crack this one open too close to mealtime, unless you've got a very strong stomach. Ha is a poet of kipple, but also of just plain refuse:

The foul stench came from the dumpsters. Uncollected garbage was piled around like pyramids around the apartment complex. At night, rats came out to gnaw at the trash. 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.

And this isn't even from the story in which we meet "the man" as an anthropologist of garbage, whose sorting through his neighbor's trash has given him the kind of insights into their inner lives we mostly associate with hackers and spies. That's in the title story, "Flowers of Mold." Our garbage vaulter populates a later story, "Early Beans," the title of which I'm still struggling to correlate with its story, which explores the descent into corruption of a human soul as much of the mere stuff with which he interacts as his day goes way, way off track long before he gets on a train. 

But lest I still Ha as merely an artist of decay and abandonment, she (and translator Janet Hong) has a way with livelier things, too, as our triple jumper gets caught in a flood of small energetic bodies bursting out of a school at dismissal time:

Each child was like a lightning strike. With lightning, there are no warnings. There are only two ways to avoid getting electrocuted: you have to lie flat on the ground or put up a lightning rod. He drove with his foot resting on the brake pedal to ward against this human lightning, which could strike any time from the alleyways...

I'll never head-on-a-swivel through a school crossing in the afternoon without thinking of this passage again, I'm pretty sure. 

And speaking of things I'm not going to forget in a hurry, there's one story that needs a definite trigger warning, the collection's second, "Nightmare" in which not only the story's other characters but the very environment itself all seem bent on making its very young protagonist disbelieve the sexual assault that is the story's inciting incident. 

The world Ha shows us is thus very squalid and, no story ends on what we'd call a hopeful or inspiring note. Indeed, I can imagine some readers being dissatisfied that many of these stories do not resolve so much as just stop, often on an arresting single image or the sight of a van load of people driving off to a hinted-at destiny we don't get to witness, but I'd argue that these non-endings give the collection more verisimilitude, as well as reminding us that it's not just the achieving heroes and the problem solvers who are always deserving of our admiration, but also the ordinary schmoes slogging through it all, like Dick's boob-heroes or Ballard's passive observers, barely making it through by chance as much as anything, but still intending to schlep through it all again tomorrow, not so much out of the hope for better things as out of the uncertainty that there's any other way to be. 

Not the worst note to begin a new year on. 

*Her characters, however many there are or aren't, all seem like they just emerged from the building in Ballard's High-Rise and at least one of them totally returns home to that building at the end of his odyssey, anyway!