Flowers of Mold: Stories

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Ten stories about ordinary people — housewives, schoolgirls, office workers — whose mundane lives gradually veer into the surreal, the macabre, or the simply unbearable. Ha Seong-nan writes with microscopic precision about the sights, sounds, and especially the smells of compressed urban life: rotting garbage in apartment stairwells, mould creeping across bathroom tiles, heat that won’t break. Her characters are trapped in the gap between what their lives are and what they were supposed to be, and the tension builds not through dramatic events but through the accumulation of small, suffocating details. This is Korean literary fiction at its most unsettling — not because anything supernatural happens, but because the ordinary world, observed this closely, turns out to be strange enough. The mould of the title is not a metaphor. Or rather, it is — but it’s also real, and it’s spreading.