Flowers of Mold is a collection of ten short stories written by Ha Seong-nan.

[1][2] Featuring separate characters and settings, each story contains different angles of Korean culture and life.

She eventually quits the team and begins to focus on a new future as her dream of attending gymnastics nationals crumbles.

She searches for a man with a cut, hoping the swing she took at her attacker with a clock left an identifiable mark.

Finally, her attacker comes in the night again and she stabs him in the back with the shears and crushes his head with a shovel.

Following a meeting with the tenants about an annual retreat, Kwak argues with the building director about his plans.

Unbeknownst to him, the tenants, whose livelihoods depend on their tenancy in the building, are plotting in parallel to kill Kwak before he can evict them.

Despite her effort to fix her memory, Myeonghui seems to replace Yeongmi as a mother and wife by fulfilling the forgotten duties.

Yeongmi is caught shoplifting (she is unsure if it was due to the scouring pads she stuffed into her bra or the gum planted in her shopping bag) and begins repeating the capitals and countries she memorized.

At the outage location, he climbs up the assigned pole and finds the clothing of a man and a journal in the pocket of the trousers.

But as he pulls out of the vehicle display, he realizes too late that he did not open the glass doors he had polished, and he crashes through them and into a streetlight.

As he watches over the various areas in the shopping center in which he is stationed, he takes interest in a woman who he sees admiring a grey dress.

Deciding to quit the job for the magic act, the man and Choi Sun-ae break into the shopping center where he worked, steal the dress she was looking at previously, and drive off.

The drunk man returns, and they both search outside the complex for a statue that the woman used to break the balcony door.

The main character was previously in the military, and spent most of his service guarding a rooftop surrounded by advertising billboards.

The man, who is late for his job, steps into the screening room at the advertising company for which he works and watches their new ad for toothpaste.

Three high school girls join him in his subway car, and they act casually and ignore the man.

After exiting the subway, the man uses a map that the delivery driver made to find landmarks near the destination.

While walking to the address, the man catches up to one of the high school girls from the subway, who is the daughter of the client who ordered the package.

[6] This story opens up with a flash-forward of two policemen investigating a crime scene, which they allege is a double suicide.

The theme of rot is significant in the plots, particularly in the short stories "Nightmare" and "Flowers of Mold".

In "Nightmare", critics argue that the ripening and rotting of pears on the orchard mirror the value the workers and the people of the city give her as she sexually matures.

Likewise, "Flowers of Mold" presents the theme of rot to show a duel meaning; the progression of the neighboring couple's relationship and the parasitic nature of the man that goes through the trash.

In stories like "The Woman Next Door" and "Early Beans", the unbearable heat of summer both tempts and confines.

The mother in "The Woman Next Door" is trapped in her sizzling apartment for the majority of the story, yet the heat also tempts her to stuff her bra with the cold scrubber, which leads to her breaking point.

Ha Seong-nan uses these sources of imagery and their duality to create suspense, the consistent ominous tone, and lend commentary on the Korean lifestyle.

[4] Analyzing these common themes and their implications, some critics argue that Flowers of Mold acts as a model of the divide in socioeconomic status as well as the gender norms of the time.

Others claim that the collection highlights the issues of urban living in South Korea and the symbolism of apartments in the modern world.

[citation needed] Following publication in the U.S., reviewers have given the collection praise for its use of seemingly normal situations with unnatural circumstances.