Translated by Janet Hong. Rochester, NY: Open Letter Books, 2020. 243 pages. $15.95.
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.