Bluebeard's First Wife

A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of 2020Disasters, accidents, and deaths abound in Bluebeard’s First Wife. A woman spends a night with her fiancé and his friends, and overhears a terrible secret that has bound them together since high school. A man grows increasingly agitated by the noise made by a young family living in the apartment upstairs and arouses the suspicion of his own wife when the neighbors meet a string of unlucky incidents. A couple moves into a picture-perfect country house, but when their new dog is stolen, they become obsessed with finding the thief, and in the process, neglect their child. The paranoia-inducing, heart-quickening stories in Ha’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed Flowers of Mold will have you reconsidering your own neighbors.

Publishers Weekly, Top Ten Book of 2020

“Ha’s outstanding collection delivers heavy doses of guilt, hope, and pain. . . . Dark, strange, and simultaneously cohesive and diverse, these stories show a superb writer in full force.”

Terry Hong, Booklist, starred review

“Despite a significant body count, Ha’s provocative narratives never devolve into the maudlin, showcasing instead sly moments of macabre fascination and startling dark comedy.”

Laura Adamczyk, The A.V. Club

“happy” ending that the original Bluebeard story provided for far grimmer conclusions. As with her previous collection, last year’s Flowers Of Mold, in Bluebeard’s First Wife, Ha favors ruin and decay over tidiness, defying narrative expectations and crafting nightmarish visions that spark with dark energy.”

and Hong's ability to translate

“The stories in Bluebeard's First Wife, which is Korean literary star Ha Seong-nan's second collection to appear in English, skate on the edge of fairytale. . . . Ha's writing derives its strength not from updating or subverting known tropes, but from her ability to create

Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

“This beautiful collection of short stories takes us into the dark side of Seoul’s suburbia, where petty resentments flare into unpredictable and shocking violence, and momentary lapses have long-lasting implications. Ha Seong-nan stunned me with her debut collection, Flowers of Mold, and her second set of stories to reach the US promises to be just as wondrous a combination of the horrifying and the banal.”

one marked by disappointment, loneliness, and loss.”

“Ha is not concerned with updating fairy-tales, she is not seeking to transport readers to a mythical realm. A concise lesson, the neat happy bow of a fairy-tale ending, is never offered. She instead uses myth to make visible the human condition

Hannah Weber, Words Without Borders

“After an acclaimed debut, Bluebeard’s First Wife is a forceful and impressive second collection. These stories succeed in unsettling us, not only by exposing our worst nightmares about what lies behind forbidden doors, but also by asking us whose fault it was to enter. The answer is clear, isn’t it?”

Kristen Allen-Vogel, Shelf Awareness

“In stark, unflinching prose, Ha plumbs feelings of isolation in a modern world in which characters often find themselves bent under the force of traditional expectations, with new dangers looming every day. This is a uniformly captivating collection of stories that could be incidents from a local paper, but which are no less haunting for it.”

Regina Lim, Berkeley Fiction Review Praise for Ha Seong-nan

“In Bluebeard’s First Wife, Ha explores big cities and small rural towns where ambition, familial responsibilities, and expectations of marriage coalesce to reveal hidden sides to neighbors, wives, and husbands. The ordinary lives of middle class peoples in such cities and towns gain fairy-tale quality as Janet Hong’s translation renders Ha’s uneasy stories with haunting details and precise prose.”

it’s as impossible to resist their pull as it is to understand, in retrospect, how circumstance succeeded circumstance to finally deliver the reader into a moment as indelible as it is unexpected. Janet Hong’s translation glitters like a blade.”

"These mesmerizing stories of disconnection and detritus unfurl with the surreal illogic of dreams

or, rather (and this latter option becomes increasingly convincing), as if something is not right with you."

"Flowers of Mold shows Ha Seong-nan to be a master of the strange story. Here, things almost happen and the weight of their almost happening hangs over the narrative like a threat. Or they do happen, and then characters go on almost like they haven't, much to the reader's dismay. Or a story builds up and then, where most authors would pursue things to the last fraying thread of their narrative, Ha elegantly severs the rest of the story and delicately ties it off. And as you read more of these stories, they begin to chime within one another, creating a sense of deja-vu. In any case, one is left feeling unsettled, as if something is not right with the world

or something odder and less reassuring than a tidy end, of which there are few in this wonderfully unsettling book of 10 masterful short stories.."

"Be forewarned: it might make you reconsider your interest in your neighbors, because it could lead to obsession and madness

Rhian Sasseen, Paris Review Joining a growing cohort of notable Korean imports, Ha’s dazzling, vaguely intertwined collection of 10 stories is poised for Western acclaim.”

"Ha lends a critical eye to capitalism, advertising, and gender in contemporary South Korea, and in each story, she combines the ordinary with the extraordinary to truly disquieting effect."

Publishers Weekly, starred review

"This impressive collection reveals Ha’s close attention to the eccentricities of life, and is sure to earn her a legion of new admirers."

Shelf Awareness

"Ha's ability to find startling traits in seemingly unremarkable characters makes each story a small treasure."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"Bluebeard's First Wife"The wardrobe was so heavy the three movers struggled for a long time outside the front door, sweating and catching their breath. I hovered by the entrance, afraid they might chip the corners. All I could do was cry, “up,” “down,” “left,” and “right,” which pretty much summed up my English. But whenever the wardrobe tilted or came dangerously close to scraping the doorway, Korean sprang from my mouth. “Josim haseyo!” After repeated maneuvers to get it in the house, my twelve-foot-wide Paulownia wardrobe that had made the long journey from Incheon’s port to Wellington, New Zealand, finally occupied one side of our bedroom. The move took half the day, since there were more things shipped from my parents’ house than I’d thought. After the men brought in the last box filled with knickknacks like my old journals and high school yearbook, I sat hugging my knees on the corner of our bed and gazed at the wardrobe. I could almost smell the morning air from back home. I could even hear the wind sweeping through the forest. Whenever I heard the wind, lines from a poem I’d read as a child would come to me. Who has seen the wind?Neither I nor you: But when the leaves hang trembling, The wind is passing through.My heart swelled. I’d brought the Paulownia tree, which had stood on the hill behind my childhood home, across thousands of miles to our bedroom in this foreign land. My father, who had been an elementary school teacher, had planted the sapling on the hill behind our house when I’d been born. The Paulownia grows fast and is used to make furniture and musical instruments because the wood doesn’t split or warp, but Father wanted to turn it into a wardrobe for me when I got married. The forest behind our home was full of chestnut trees; in order to easily find the Paulownia among the chestnuts, he even had a plaque made. On it was written my name, as well as the date the sapling was planted. The life of my tree was nearly cut short. If things had gone according to plan, I would have married at the early age of twenty-two, before I graduated from university. But as the wedding day approached, both my fiancé and I changed our minds. His short height, which had made him appear only sweet, suddenly struck me as unsightly, and his field of study―astronomy―which seemed to guarantee he’d stay wholesome and romantic, felt all at once like an awfully impractical choice. The wedding gifts our families had exchanged were returned, and all ties were severed. I never heard about him again. And the tree, whose life should have ended when I was twenty-two, was allowed to grow for another ten years before it was chopped down to become a twelve-foot-wide wardrobe. Just as Mother said, a wardrobe was best at twelve feet. The wood grain flowing like a quiet stream in the light, pumpkin-colored timber was lovely. Not a blemish was to be found anywhere. I still remember the moment it was cut down. It resisted stubbornly as the chainsaw dug its teeth into the trunk. The saw spun in place, bending as though it would snap. Woodchips sprayed in all directions. The whine of the saw was deafening, and the air was heavy with the smell of sap. When the thirteen-meter tree, which had grown uninterruptedly for thirty-one years, began to tip over, the people laughed and cried: “Timber!” Inside the wardrobe beneath the hanging space sat three large drawers. Because they were new, they didn’t slide out smoothly. I placed my journals and yearbook my mother had been storing for me in the drawers. To be honest, when I first arrived at the Wellington International Airport, I felt both nervous and excited. Staring about like some country bumpkin, I’d hurried after Jason so that I wouldn’t lose him. But these drawers will open easily soon enough. By then, this foreign land will have become our children’s home. Jason, who had come home late, seemed stupefied by the wardrobe that took up an entire side of our bedroom. “This is what you’ve been waiting for?” You couldn’t exactly say the bulky, pumpkin-colored wardrobe complemented the white wooden house. As I picked up the clothes he tossed onto the bed, I launched into an explanation about the Paulownia. “The first tree you cut down is called a modong. When it re-sprouts from the stump, it’s called a jadong. When it re-sprouts again, it’s called a sondong. Sondong Paulownia is the best, in terms of quality. I’m going to watch over that tree, and make a wardrobe for our daughter out of the jadong and one for our granddaughter out of the sondong.” Of course he didn’t understand any of this. Jason had lived in New Zealand since the tenth grade. When I explained everything again, slowly this time, Jason waved his hands in the air, drew his lips together in a small circle, and enunciated, “No thanks.” I wasn’t sure if “no thanks” referred to children or the wardrobe, but either way, he didn’t seem too fond of the wardrobe.

About the Author

Ha Seong-nan is the author of five short story collections—including Bluebeard's First Wife and Flowers of Mold—and three novels. Over her career, she's received a number of prestigious awards, such as the Dong-in Literary Award in 1999, Hankook Ilbo Literary Prize in 2000, the Isu Literature Prize in 2004, the Oh Yeong-su Literary Award in 2008, and the Contemporary Literature (Hyundae Munhak) Award in 2009.Janet Hong is a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. Her work has appeared in Brick: A Literary Journal, Literary Hub, Asia Literary Review, Words Without Borders, and the Korea Times. Her other translations include Han Yujoo's The Impossible Fairy Tale and Ancco's Bad Friends.

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