Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, published in South Korea in 2007 and translated into English by Deborah Smith in 2015, begins as follows: “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I had always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way”. This impeccable sentence was enough to hook me on this book.
Sure, there have been several books that captivate us in their opening sentences. But this one, in particular, was so remarkable that with every word, I felt more enchanted and disturbed at the same time. In every sense, Han Kang’s storytelling and Deborah Smith’s translation are brilliant. True to its literary marvel, the book has won the international Booker prize, and the author a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024. And several other accolades along the way.
Yeong-hye, the protagonist of The Vegetarian, is a young woman living an unremarkable life in Seoul with Mr. Choong, her office-going husband. They are both ordinary people. He wakes up every morning to go to the office, just as his wife cooks, cleans and takes care of the household—day in, day out.
But, on one not-so-usual day, Yeong-hye suffers from a disturbing dream of the death of animals. In the morning, she declares that from now on, she will not eat any meat, which was unheard of in Korean culture. Mr. Cheong, the narrator of the book’s first section, begins to be repulsed by his wife’s behaviour. And thereby, punish her: physically, mentally, and sexually.
What Yeong-hye considers a choice—not to eat meat—her husband and father come to see as disobedience and an embarrassment. Her sister considers this choice an illness, and her mother thinks the choice is the cause of her bodily weakness. As a remedy, the father slaps Yeong-hye twice and forces a piece of meat into her mouth. In disgust, Yeong-hye grabs the fruit knife and cuts her hand.
After her stint at the hospital, Yeong-hye continues to choose things she considers natural: avoiding sex, walking bare skin, letting an artist paint flowers over her body, and, thereafter, slowly descending into chaos and horror.
For instance, even though Yeong-hye has stopped wearing a bra, there is always a certain lump in her chest. No matter how deeply she inhales, it doesn’t go away.
She adds, “Yells and howls, threaded together layer upon layer, are enmeshed to form that lump. Because of meat. I ate too much meat. The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there. Blood and flesh, all those butchered bodies are scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my insides.”
In the second section, which follows the narration from the viewpoint of the brother-in-law. Yeong-hye’s older sister, In-hye, is married to a video artist (whose name is a mystery in the novel) with a peculiar interest in painting bodies with flowers.
The second section deals with his oddly erotic obsession with Yeong-hye, who seems to have a Mongolian mark (very unusual for her age) on her, and which appeared to have been the cause of his attraction for her. Everywhere, and every time he thinks of her, he wants to engulf that Mongolian mark—and with it, her, who holds it. So, he seeks Yeong-hye as a model for his project, wherein he would get to paint flowers on her.
When In-hye’s husband starts to paint Yeong-hye, he thinks: “This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated. But this was nothing so crass as carnal desire, not for her—rather, or so it seemed, what she had renounced was that very life that her body represented.” This section is the most sexually perverse and disturbing of all the novel. Towards the end of this session, Yeong-hye is admitted to a mental asylum.
The story’s third section is a narration from the viewpoint of the sister, In-hye, whose husband, she believes, had scandalised the whole family. In-hye, since her childhood, has been a responsible child. She worked hard. She managed the household. And even when her artist husband, good-for-nothing and penniless, roamed around with his infatuations, In-hye took care of everything—the kid, the house, the shop, and everything in between.
But the third section is about In-hye’s encounter with Yeong-hye in the depression ward at the mental hospital. Yeong-hye has now tried to run away in the forest once. She has even stopped declaring that she would no longer eat food, and all she needs is water. And mindlessly, for half an hour, she would do headstands. When In-hye asked her to eat, she said she no longer needed food; she is a plant. And she loves to be around plants. And that she no longer wants anything to do with human-like food.
As In-hye sits staring at Yeong-hye lying on the bed after she reveals her desire to become a tree, she thinks:
“Had Yeong-hye mistaken the hospital’s concrete floor for the soft earth of the woods? Had her body metamorphosed into a sturdy trunk, with white roots sprouting from her hands and clutching the black soil? Had her legs stretched high up in the air while her arms extended all the way down to the earth’s very core, her back stretched taut to support this two-pronged spurt of growth? As the sun’s rays soaked down through Yeong-hye’s body, had the water that was saturating the soil been drawn up through her cells, eventually to bloom from her crotch as flowers? When Yeong-hye had balanced up-side down and stretched up every fibre in her body, had these things been awakened in her soul?”
Simultaneously, the story goes back and forth in the part, trying to pity Yeong-hye and understand what caused all this chaos, what may have spiralled out of control, and what would have otherwise been done differently. Each word in this novel is woven together so meticulously as to articulate discomfort, defiance, suffering, resistance and desire on every page.
The Vegetarian by Han Kang is a novel that defies all forms of social taboos. In doing so, Han Kang’s novel easily complicates and tackles social realities, expectations, and choices, opening us up to a new future. No doubt the story is bleak and gloomy. There are also things that cause so much discomfort as one reads them. But for what it is worth, The Vegetarian is too brilliant.