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Lim Sunwoo’s With the Heart of a Ghost is the latest in a recent streak of Korean SFT that shows no signs of slowing down. Science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and surrealism from Korea have shown Anglophone readers the rich genre tradition that has developed there for some time, with publishers like Honford Star and Kaya and translators like Anton Hur, Sora Kim Russell and Janet Hong bringing these stories to a whole new readership.

Lim’s collection, which includes a mix of genre and non-genre stories, reminds me of Bora Chung’s collections Cursed Bunny and Your Utopia in that both Chung and Lim drop us into fantastical worlds with a wry, deadpan, matter-of-fact voice. The first (and title) story in Lim’s collection does just this: in the very first paragraph, the employee of a bakery shop feels cold on a slow day and decides to get a blanket from the storeroom. When she returns to the counter, imagine her surprise to see herself “slumped on the counter, my eyes closed. So that’s how unattractive my curved shoulders and my gaping mouth must look to others. I wasn’t upset that I was dead. I’d just never imagined that I’d die so suddenly.”

And yet, she’s not actually dead–somehow, her ghost popped out of her, but now they can coexist. No one can see the ghost but her, and the two must stay together, otherwise the flesh-and-blood narrator becomes incredibly cold. As she and her ghost become emotionally closer, we learn about the narrator’s boyfriend, who has been in a coma for two years and how the narrator doesn’t know how to let go to end their relationship. The young girl who comes to the bakery just to talk (and eat, as an excuse for hanging around) also grows closer to the narrator, and we slowly see how the ghost helps her realize that she really isn’t as alone as she thought. When the narrator finally achieves this sense of closure with her boyfriend and opens up to her young friend, the ghost disappears.

The last story of the collection, “Curtain Call, Extra Inning, Last Pang,” has a similar theme, though this time the narrator actually dies, cut down by the defective sign hanging over a Chinese restaurant on a particularly rainy day. As she learns from a helpful pigeon, because she died so suddenly, she now has up to 100 hours to do whatever she wants in the world (as a ghost) before disappearing into the beyond (the pigeon can’t tell her what’s there). She doesn’t know what to do, at first, and her lonely, isolated life makes her feel like leaving this world won’t be too hard. Nonetheless, she encounters first one, and then another, ghost while attending a concert, and the three of them strike up an unlikely friendship.

Isolation dispelled by these strange friendships marks each of these stories, whether its a lost gecko bringing three people together for daily dinners or a tattoo artist’s ability to drill a hole in her ceiling with her thoughts. In a few of these stories, set in the crowded, hectic capital, people continue living together even after they’ve broken up, simply because they can’t afford to live alone. Others have become so used to isolation that a new friendship is difficult for them to cultivate, at first.

The second story of the collection, “You’re Not Glowing,” is the darkest of them all, set in a world in which humans are succumbing to a jellyfish invasion, turning into jellyfish themselves. Lim goes through all of the myriad ways in which humans respond to this horror, but focuses on how some people use it to commit suicide or kill family members. Running under the strange story about a woman who actively helps people turn into jellyfish in their own homes is the sad relationship she has to her boyfriend, who left Seoul and the music business with her. The woman’s desire to return to what she loves becomes stronger the more she sees how the jellyfish invasion is taking people’s humanity.

In “Summer, Like the Color of Water,” a lonely young woman comes back to her apartment one day to find a man who has literally put down roots there–tree roots. His girlfriend had lived there for a time before the current occupant, and he’s returned to try and win her back. For two weeks, the lonely woman and tree-man occupy the same apartment, she watering his feet, he telling her about his relationship and how much he wants to see his girlfriend again. Their unlikely relationship blossoms (pun intended) until one day when he is able to let go of his hopes and leaves the apartment.

Lim’s collection is engrossing in its wry tone and strange, unlikely scenarios, beautifully translated by Chi-Young Kim. Highly recommended.