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4 February 2025

Han Kang’s radical empathy

As with all the Nobel Prize-winning South Korean writer’s stories, We Do Not Part rejects escapism to reach into the painful lives of strangers.

By Megan Walsh

When Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature late last year – for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”– it was paradoxically greeted with both shock and a sense of inevitability. There is, perhaps, no novelist working today who seems so devoted to interrogating the epistemic problem of suffering. Not why it happens, but how we live knowing that it is everywhere. Her books, and our engagement with them, carry an almost impossible hope. Reading and writing, she said in her Nobel acceptance speech, “stands in opposition to all acts that destroy life”.

This literary activism is often embodied by masochistic, empathetic female protagonists. The main character of her Booker-winning novel The Vegetarian is met with bafflement and violence by her family when she stops eating meat. Her simple but naive decision to no longer harm anything in the world results in her own body becoming a sacrificial lamb. It is hard to say whether there is a theological foundation to her brutal and only sometimes redemptive stories. Han, and her characters, are drawn to a kind of all-encompassing empathy that often makes their lives physically and psychologically unendurable – which can in turn make them difficult to empathise with.

Reading Han’s work is a moral undertaking, often provoking a guilty hope that she might show us a little mercy and not take us into such frightening and dark places. But 54-year-old Han – who was raised in Gwangju, lives in Seoul and is the first South Korean writer (and the first Asian woman) to win the Nobel literature prize– has put Korean writing on the world stage with fiction that offers little escapism.

Her latest novel to be translated into English, We Do Not Part, is already expected to be one of the biggest, and most harrowing, books of the year. Having written about the violent suppression of the student uprisings in her hometown of Gwangju in Human Acts, this time she confronts another censored atrocity: the Jeju massacre of 1948. An estimated 30,000 adults and children were slaughtered on the volcanic island two years before the start of the Korean War.

We Do Not Part begins with a nightmare: black tree trunks, like graves or torsos, are carried away by the sea. The narrator, Kyungha, can’t tell whether this dream is an allusion to a massacre she has just finished writing about or a personal omen. The recurring images lead to psychosomatic migraines that “gouge out her eyes”, crippling abdominal spasms, insomnia and night terrors. She feels as if she is “face down on the ground… half-dead”.

An urgent text message from a work colleague and photographer, Inseon, brings Kyungha back into the world of the living, a process akin to “a snail coming out of its shell to push along a knife’s edge”. Inseon has severed her fingertips while cutting wood for their joint “black tree” film project and requires excruciating injections into her wounds every three minutes to prevent the nerves below the cuts from dying. In order to heal, she says, “I have to feel the pain”. Unable to leave hospital, Inseon begs Kyungha to fly from the city of Seoul to her isolated mountaintop home on the island of Jeju, to feed her pet budgie before it dies of thirst.

In a strange, almost farcical, twist, Kyungha embarks on a perilous odyssey to save her friend’s little bird. Arriving during a winter storm, with no access to public transport, she hikes blindly up the mountain, on which snow covers the tracks to the house, freezes her limbs and fingers, bloodies her raw face and disorientates her mind with new and disturbing images: faces of executed people obscured by snow. All the while, time is running out for the budgie.

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The second half of the novel marks a striking tonal shift to magical realism. It is not entirely clear if Kyungha survives or dies during the pilgrimage: once she reaches the house, time itself becomes suspended. Strange shadows appear. Three women – Kyungha, bed-bound Inseon and Inseon’s dead mother – start telling their stories, piecing together personal testimonies about missing relatives, hidden bodies and the wounds caused by silence as if conducting a séance between the living and the dead.

Details of the massacre emerge unadorned: 1,500 children shot in the head, another 3,000 executed in an old cobalt mine, young men used for target practice, pregnant women lined up and shot, their bodies falling into the sea. But the spectral fellowship of the three women is strange and abstract. Their time-bending union represents a mythical quest to rekindle lives snuffed out, or at least, to find an appropriate act of remembrance, a dive into deep waters, in which they might light a candle at the bottom of the ocean: “Past the reach of the light from the water surface. Past the point where gravity overtakes buoyancy.” The brilliant irony of much of Han’s prose is that it symbolises, and therefore defies, language’s inability to convey the unspeakable. In The Vegetarian, somatic violence becomes a language in itself. In Greek Lessons, a mute woman and a blind professor talk to each other through touch. In The White Book, the narrator communicates with a dead baby, who never learnt to speak, with eerie photographs of white objects.

We Do Not Part feels at times like a painstaking description of a cinematic art installation. Birds become symbols of fragile hope and dogged survival. Trees resemble corpses, waving their “menacing” limbs and writhing “as if being uprooted”. They possess “grey-white flesh stripped raw” and “brittle autumn leaves as big as young faces”. It is a terrifying landscape in which snow – a relentless motif – represents the water cycle, both destructive and regenerative. It is, as Han writes, “snow that had been falling for decades, centuries”.

This disorientating, deeply metaphorical world, obliquely concerned with specific atrocities in Korean history, must have been an immense challenge to translate. Just as with Deborah Smith, who translated Han’s previous four novels in English, we are indebted to the two translators of We Do Not Part – E Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris – for capturing Han’s unique voice and making it available for English-speaking readers. In fact, Han’s distinctive style and universal concerns lend themselves particularly well to translation. It is a process she explored in her previous novel, Greek Lessons, in which an alien language can bring clarity of thought and affinity with a new subject.

Han’s work – itself a radical form of outreach and connection, an attempt to feel into the painful lives of strangers – is highly original and moving. Although she refuses to look away from human cruelty, it is her glimmers of hope that are most affecting. The acts of inhumanity she depicts are countered by delicate, miraculous moments that dare to “defy all acts that destroy life”. She seeks out people who have been lost to history, those who died needlessly or violently, and gently awakens them in the reader’s imagination – ensuring that we cannot look away either.

We Do Not Part
Han Kang, translated by E Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris
Hamish Hamilton, 384pp, £18.99

[See also: Bill Gates vs Ren Zhengfei]

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This article appears in the 05 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The New Gods of AI