There’s a strong sense of déjà vu in Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, the first novel in translation since her 2024 Nobel Prize win. Like in The Vegetarian, the protagonist here is of fragile physical health and mental state. She finds it difficult to eat or sleep, and is in profound discomfort with the heat and cold of the changing seasons. “Nothing one human being did to another could ever shock me again”: a line that instantly reminded me of Han Kang’s 2016 novel Human Acts. Based on the 1980 massacre of student protestors in Gwanju, it is, to me, her best work. In her 2017 book, The White Book, the protagonist reflects upon the death of her baby sister in wartime Poland. Mourning a new life with the virgin whiteness of salt, snow, and white birds becomes a stark reminder of the fragile nature of life. Snow is the most hazardous natural obstacle in We Do Not Part, salt, a life-sustaining food, and white birds, its beating heart. An opaque muteness is at the centre of Greek Lessons (also co-translated by e yaewon) – an impairment that ails our new protagonist as she lapses into long periods of silence and resolutely ignores human contact.
On Jeju Island
This long creative history of discomfort, silence, and mourning culminate in We Do Not Part. Though Han Kang’s previous novels have nothing to do with her latest, familiarity with her work makes the reader sensitive to the author’s sensibilities. When she was awarded the Nobel Prize last year, Han Kang refused to celebrate citing the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine. In many ways, she seems to find it impossible to move on from the violence that human beings so unthinkingly inflict on each other. There’s something to be said about revisiting the most painful moments of your country’s history – from the long years of imperial violence to orchestrating massacres of your own. There is resilience in this grief and from this spouts tremendous courage that seems to propel Han Kang towards the most terrible truths of human nature.
She uses her usual disjointed narrative style in her latest novel too. Time is circular, conversations are remembered and imagined, and the setting is almost fable-like.
The narrator Kyungha is an author who lives in Seoul. She is also a mother to a girl but we do not know much about her family life. We find her in the throes of despair after publishing a novel about “a massacre at G—” (is Han Kang alluding to her own self post Human Acts?). Kyungha cannot even bear to look at other people. Days go by without her eating a proper meal or getting any sleep. The survivors she wrote about bleed into her consciousness. The book is no longer an object that she has merely created: “…How could I have so naively – brazenly – hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?”
The memories of deaths make her conscious of her own. She decides to draw up her will but struggles to name inheritors – who would want to be burdened with the business of the dead anyway? It is during this strange time that a text message arrives from Inseon, a colleague-turned-friend she’s known for nearly 20 years. She lived on Jeju Island by herself and her birds – Ama and Ami – before a freak accident during a carpentry project left her with chopped fingers. Now cooped up in a Seoul hospital, Kyungha must do her a favour by taking care of her lone pet bird Ama. Ami died a while ago.
The winters on Jeju Island are unforgiving. Naturally, Kyungha is not too keen to make the journey. However, she’s duty-bound to her friend and accepts. Thus begins an almost quixotic quest to rescue an unspeaking animal. This is not entirely true – the bird has learnt to mimic voices and seems to understand human language too. Saving Ama would mean saving a life. A near-impossible journey commences through snowstorms, stranded flights, and repeated warnings of strangers.
On Jeju Island, she meets Inseon. Not the one stuck in Seoul, but a vision of her. A sceptre maybe. They start talking about the horrific history of the island. Particularly, the memories of the anti-communist violence in the 1940s. Just a few years before the more widely known Korean War. From this moment on, Han Kang adopts a reportage voice as Inseon sifts through her own memories and the memories of her mother who was a survivor of the violence. An estimated 30,000 people – or nearly ten per cent of the population – on the island were killed. Inseon recollects what her mother had told her – people were shot by the sea so they would be washed away. Her mother remembers going back to the site of massacres to see if any child had survived. The water, as it was bound to, had removed all traces of life.
Bearing witness
The desperation of saving Ama’s life feels just as urgent. The countless atrocities that Inseon’s mother bore witness to compound this urgency. It does not matter that Ama is only a bird – as long as a creature has a beating heart and the capacity to feel love and hunger, it is worthy of living.
In We Do Not Part, Han Kang dissolves the author-character. Kyungha’s training as a writer is immaterial after a point. No attempt is made to intellectualise the massacres – they happened, they were terrible, their impact still intact after many years. Like survivors of the Partition who carried the trauma all their lives and passed it on to their children, we see similar repercussions in Inseon. Despite never having witnessed such a scale of violence, Inseon cannot dismiss how the past has definitively shaped her presence. As a child, she often thought of her mother as “weak” but in the course of learning her family history she comes to terms with just how serendipitous her existence is – her mother had quite literally survived the odds.
The natural world takes precedence in this novel. Especially snow which in turns is a thing of beauty and a threat to life. There is something deeply unsettling about its whiteness. It is the “dying fall of a final cadence” and unforgiving in its brutality – blood soiling its pristine whiteness is an image that will never be forgotten. The cold permeates the bones.
We do not know what happens to Inseon or Kyungha. There are no hints as to whether Kyungha overcomes her grief or if Inseon’s fingers have fully healed. The bird survives, but its companion is long dead. “Love is a terrible agony,” says Kyungha. It is perhaps even more agonising to keep a record of our bloody history, to remember the times we have bared our fangs at each other, to witness the easy agility with which we draw each other’s blood. One has to ask – how does Han Kang do it?
We Do Not Part, Han Kang, translated from the Korean by e yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, Penguin Random House.
