Despite our best efforts, it’s safe to say that the task of being human remains collectively difficult—a condition explored with empathy, humour, and a jolt of surreal whimsy in Korean author Lee Yuri’s Broccoli Punch, a short story collection translated by Amber H.J. Kim and released in English by Héloïse Press last year.

I meet Lee—who grew up reading Daniel Defoe and Jules Verne in the rural Gangwon Province—at a restaurant around the corner from her Korean publisher. Moonji, a literary press, is headquartered in Seoul’s Mapo district, which I describe to tourists as the fun neighbourhood, meaning ‘fun’ of the classically hedonistic variety, by night a dizzy kaleidoscope of neon and soju. By day it’s subdued, much like the author herself, who’s low-key despite her fame. (We’re assisted in our conversation by the swift and skilled interpreter and translator Sarah K. Yoo.)

The people of Broccoli Punch share a certain loneliness and longing, over the eight stories building a curious portrait of present-day Korea—the global entertainment powerhouse, flashy on its surface but, internally, reckoning with decades of trauma. To me, an outsider living here, Korea feels perpetually haunted, hurtling forward while reconciling almost a century of colonial occupation, war, poverty, and a string of dictatorships ending in 1987, only a few years before Lee’s birth. While Lee’s stories don’t feel explicitly political, these decades of loss stream like a current beneath her characters, who are reacting to their increasingly commodified, high-pressure society. The mysterious, almost otherworldly mood Lee creates in the pages of Broccoli Punch feels like an antidote to the sugary hallyu offerings on repeat the world over. This is not to say they lack charm. Lee gives us stories like ‘Red Fruit’ about a deceased father reincarnated, through his planted ashes, as his daughter’s talking houseplant, and ‘Fingernail Shadow’, rooted in Korean folk culture, where an ex-boyfriend is conjured back into the life of its protagonist.

• Tags: Issue 43, Lee Yuri, Megan Peck Shub, South Korea