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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/p>\n
In 2022, South Korean writer and translator Bora Chung was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for Cursed Bunny, her acclaimed short-story collection translated by Anton Hur. Spanning magical realism, horror and science fiction, the book showcased Chung\u2019s inventive use of fantastical tropes to respond to the abuses carried out by powerful forces in contemporary society.<\/p>\n
A similar critique runs through Chung\u2019s latest work The Midnight Timetable, also translated by Hur but presented as a novel (the US edition is subtitled \u201cA Novel in Ghost Stories\u201d). It consists of seven interlinked tales, bound together by a sinister research facility. A blind sunbae (senior colleague) regales the unnamed narrator, a night guard at the research centre, with spooky anecdotes about former employees. She discovers other macabre tales while patrolling the building.<\/p>\n
The claustrophobic opener, \u201cYou Can\u2019t Come in Here\u201d, follows Chan, an introverted queer man forced into conversion therapy by his family. After finishing his overnight security shift, he ignores the stranger who tries to block his entry to the institute\u2019s car park, jumps on his motorcycle and rides off, only to become trapped in a tunnel where the distance to the exit keeps increasing. Chan\u2019s brush with mortality unexpectedly opens a path to self-acceptance. <\/p>\n
Several characters in the book receive phone calls predicting their death. Chan is asked when he\u2019d like his coffin to be delivered. In \u201cCursed Sheep\u201d, DSP, who specialises in streaming paranormal phenomena, receives a call inquiring \u201cwhat time will you board the hearse?\u201d <\/p>\n
Like much of Chung\u2019s work, one of the stories explores gendered violence and the subjugation of women<\/p>\n
Other stories are set in the distant past. Fairytale retribution is meted out in \u201cBlue Bird\u201d, inspired by an account\u00a0in the Historical Records of the Three Kingdoms,\u00a0which Chung discovered\u00a0in the database of Korean history. A captain murders a noble family, but their infant daughter survives and, raised by a poor couple, becomes a talented seamstress. Commissioned by her enemy\u2019s son to embroider a satin handkerchief for his bride-to-be, she is imprisoned when he decides to take her as a concubine. The wedding is cursed; a flock of birds take revenge on the captain and his family. Like several of Chung\u2019s stories, it explores gendered violence and the subjugation of women.<\/p>\n
In the harrowing \u201cSilence of the Sheep\u201d, the facility\u2019s deputy director recalls being followed by prophetic sheep, victims of animal testing covered in gruesome wounds. She is missing the fingers of her right hand after a work accident, and the sheep are protective towards her, one even saving her from a rapist.<\/p>\n
Cursed items recur as potent motifs \u2014 from the embroidered handkerchief to a single tennis shoe \u2014 stored in numbered rooms in the labyrinthine building. In \u201cSunning Day\u201d, the final story, these items are laid on the lawn, exposed to the weather and examined for changes, until the dead who haunt them are freed or simply melt away. The narrator delights in the banality of the \u201cmismatched objects\u201d, their strangeness dissolving in daylight, reminding her of \u201ca lost and found center\u201d.<\/p>\n
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Chung tells us in an afterword that the title came from an English sign in the empty ticket office of her local bus terminal: \u201cthese two words in juxtaposition felt very poetic and mysterious to me\u201d. In an interview with Ramona magazine, Chung described the book as \u201ca Covid novel\u201d, shaped by the period\u2019s \u201catmosphere of fear and emptiness.\u201d Her characters grapple with terror and isolation as they confront various existential crises: sexual identity, poor decisions, dysfunctional families and financial woe. <\/p>\n
The Midnight Timetable lacks the verve and sophistication of her earlier work, and a few nuances are lost in English \u2014 at one point \u201ccarer\u201d is rendered as \u201ccaretaker\u201d. Still, several stories have a satisfying feminist edge, and Hur\u2019s translation captures their eerie tone and quietly unsettling atmosphere.<\/p>\n
The Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur, Dialogue Books \u00a314.99\/Algonquin Books $18.99, 208 pages<\/p>\n
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