The Midnight Timetable is the latest collection of short stories / novel from Bora Chung translated by Anton Hur. Connected by a mysterious Institute and a narrator who is employed there, the stories are also linked via certain reported elements, yet, at the same time, each one stands alone quite comfortably. In an afterword, Chung recounts how enjoyable she finds writing ghost stories, remarking that they are a “good method of overcoming” writer’s block:
“Midnight Timetable was not a deadline or a chore for me, but a really fun amusement park of a book to work on.”
Despite the eerie atmosphere which pervades this volume, that pleasure is communicated in the flow of both the prose and the ideas, which are less demanding than Chung’s other work. The Institute houses a collection of supernatural objects, each with a story attached. These are revealed to us via a narrator which has recently joined to work the nightshift, who hears them for a ‘sunbae’ or senior member of staff (it’s not entirely clear why this word remains untranslated unless simply to add to the mystery) assigned with “showing [him] the ropes.” The physical unreliability of the Institute is introduced via a cleaning lady who meets a mysterious figure (“utterly nondescript”) who prevents her from entering underground car park, only to discover that going back up the stairs takes her down to the parking lot. Both the stairs and the figure will appear in a later story.
Rather than horrifying, the stories seek to unsettle the reader. In the first chapter another employee of the Institute, Chan, finds himself driving through a tunnel that gets longer the further he drives. A phone rings and, when he answers it, asks him, “Aren’t you about to be deceased?” In this case, however, the haunting prompts him to rethink his life as at…
“…the desperate moment he wanted to reach out to someone for help, how his desperation and will to live had focused on a single person.”
Moral lessons are never far from the supernatural occurrences Chung recounts. In ‘Handkerchief’ the titular object takes on significance when the second daughter insists that her mother’s last wish was to be buried with it. Her siblings agree, apart from the younger son who has relied on his mother throughout his life:
“He insisted the handkerchief was his. Wasn’t he the one who had talked to his mother the most, the one to whom she had given every object of value that ever passed through her hands?”
On this occasion he is overruled and the obsession he develops with possessing the handkerchief will prove his undoing. Things also do not turn out well for DSP, introduced in ‘Cursed Sheep’ as running a “streaming channel that specialized in ghostly spectra and other paranormal phenomena” who has sought a job at the Institute in search of content. He makes the mistake of removing an object from the Institute, a tennis shoe with a picture of a sheep on it, and he, too, receives calls foretelling his death:
“What time will you board the hearse?”
A sheep also features in ‘Silence of the Sheep’ (therefore fully justifying the cover design which echoes that of Cursed Bunny). Here its ghostly presence enables the deputy director (in her past life) to tell the future. Again, there is a moral dimension as the sheep is one of a group which has been experimented on, first spotted in a field near the veterinary school:
“The sheep were covered in wounds. Their wool was shorn bald in different places, and there were surgical looking wounds in those spots.”
Both ‘Bluebird’ and ‘Why Does the Cat’ might be considered revenge stories. The first is a historical tale which features the handkerchief from earlier; the second is a more modern story about a man who murders his wife and gets away with it:
“As with many murders where the reason is stated to be ‘She refused to see me,’ the incident was considered compulsive and unpremeditated in a court of law or by law enforcement.”
Chung uses the ironic haunting of the dead wife to highlight a misogynistic application of law. There is a hint to Chung’s wider intention in the book’s final story, ‘Sunning Day’, when the objects are taken outside for one day, when the narrator states:
“We return to the work of protecting the undead from the terrors of our daylight world.”
Generally, it is the actions of the living that are to feared rather than their supernatural consequences. This is delightful selection of ghost stories which are playful and imaginative enough to always entertain without being too gruesome for gentler minds.
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