The Haunting Fiction of Han Kang

An awakening of sorts arrives when Inseon texts her from a Seoul hospital where she’s recovering from emergency hand surgery. Kyungha sprints to her bedside, and, before the day is out, she’s en route to Jeju to feed and care for Inseon’s pet bird. She understands that this request will tax her immensely. Just getting to Inseon’s house is a colossal challenge. She has a migraine; it’s snowing in Jeju; she’s not sure how to get to the house; and she’s going to stand out immediately as an outsider on the island, which is culturally distinct from the mainland in many ways. Jeju has its own language, Jeju-mal, which is related to but not mutually intelligible with Korean, and which Morris and yaewon occasionally include in their text. Inseon sometimes refers to her parents as umung and abang, not mother and father, a translation decision that lets Anglophone readers feel the distance between Jeju and the mainland that Kyungha feels.

Still, she’s drawn to Jeju. Despite her supposed inability to register beauty, she narrates her trip through the snow, which involves a plane, a bus, and a walk through the woods, gorgeously. Kyungha’s hike to Inseon’s house transforms the novel, and Han gives the scene a patient, poetic loveliness that is common in her work, but rare in contemporary literature; it’s among the reasons she won the Nobel, but earlier in her international career, it raised some eyebrows. Han’s English debut, The Vegetarian (2016), was translated by Deborah Smith, then a Ph.D. candidate unknown in the industry. She got flak—some of which was tinged with sexism toward both her and Han—for the liberties she took in her work, especially in descriptive passages. (Never mind that Han approved the manuscript, or that English and Korean, like any two languages, have varying standards of beauty and strategies for creating it.) Smith translated Han’s subsequent novels, Human Acts and The White Book (2019), and co-translated Greek Lessons (2023) with yaewon. All three are quite image-driven, but none as much as We Do Not Part, which is propelled largely by its visual elements: the dream of tree trunks, Inseon’s injury, her bird’s shadow, the icy woods surrounding her house. As Kyungha trudges through the snow, she looks around her, admiring the sunlight that “reflected off the lustrous camellia leaves, whose angles shifted from moment to moment. Vines of maple-leaf mountain yam wound around the cryptomeria trunks and climbed them to distant heights, swaying like swing ropes.” Such prose, which continues at length, is a treat, but not only that. Han’s abundance of detail adds a layer of ethical failure to her readers’ experience: Every moment spent appreciating her imagery is one spent forgetting that Kyungha, stumbling through unfamiliar, frigid woods with a headache that makes it difficult to see, is in real danger of freezing to death.

Or maybe she does freeze. Han makes it impossible to tell. Kyungha eventually, miraculously arrives at Inseon’s house, where the bird, Ama, is dead in her cage. She sews Ama into a shroud and buries her, but within a handful of pages, Ama is flying around the kitchen, and Inseon, who is—according to ordinary chronology—receiving treatment in Seoul, is somehow brewing tea. Here, We Do Not Part begins to strongly resemble Pedro Páramo, whose narrator has to have his own death explained to him. Kyungha catches on herself: Drinking tea with Inseon, she “wondered if the tea was spreading through her insides too. If Inseon had come to me as a spirit, that would mean I was alive, and if Inseon was alive, that would mean I was the apparition.”