Lim Sunwoo's With the Heart of a Ghost features eight intriguing, unpredictable stories, each narrated in chatty first person, as if intimately inviting readers to listen, even join, quirky conversations. A prize-winning debut in Korea, Lim's collection arrives translated by Chi-Young Kim, who also brought the groundbreaking Korean titles Please Look After Mom and Whale to Anglophone audiences.
In the titular opening story, a bakery worker realizes she's not dead, just face-to-face with her own ghostly self, whose constant companionship helps her release her debilitating past and embrace new relationships. In "Summer, Like the Color of Water," a movie theater worker returns home to find the previous tenant's boyfriend rooted (he's literally a tree) in her studio apartment. In "Go Sleep at Home," a runaway pet gecko sparks a temporary, culinary-based friendship among three men. In "Even Though It's Not Alaska," a woman who believes she's a cat trains as an assassin to take revenge against the wild dogs who murdered her feline family. In "Curtain Call, Extra Inning, Last Pang"--perhaps the collection's most affecting-- a recently dead woman rescues a ghostly should-have-been K-pop star from a vacuum cleaner and orchestrates the young singer's debut just before she passes on to the next world.
Lim's author's note describes "vignettes" that inspired her fiction, as concrete as "water gushing" and as esoteric as "day-like nights and the many night-like days." Her engaging prose alchemizes the quotidian into fantastical, seemingly impossible narratives--human hibernation, irresistible jellyfish causing transmutation, and exactly 100 hours to settle unfinished business in case of sudden death--that prove delightfully convincing. --Terry Hong