Where Han Kang’s Nightmares Come From

In 2016, the South Korean novelist Han Kang won the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian, the first of her novels to be translated into English. The novel, in which a woman who suddenly refuses to eat meat is treated as if she were mad, was read as a parable of the modern condition, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis or “A Hunger Artist,” updated for the age of feminism and ecopolitics. In October, with three more of her novels now available in English and at least 20 other languages, the Swedish Academy awarded Han the Nobel Prize, elevating her to the empyrean realm reserved for writers of what is sometimes called world literature.

Internationally famous authors need no pity, but the status comes with vulnerabilities. Having been turned into global ambassadors for their culture, they are often accused of becoming deracinated and defanged. Han has dodged the charge so far. But suspicion fell on the English-language translator of The Vegetarian, Deborah Smith, when the novel was propelled into the spotlight. Smith mistranslated some words, but her harsher detractors accused her of betraying Han’s limpid, understated style, torquing it so as to hold the attention of Western readers.

Works transposed into foreign languages—and cultures—inevitably suffer omissions and distortion. That doesn’t make them less authentic. But if you’re trying to understand what Han is up to, adjudicating the stylistic accuracy of the translation is less important than deepening your knowledge of the work’s context, which, like South Korea itself, is at once decidedly Korean and very cosmopolitan.

In The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century, Adam Kirsch argues that “globalism is not just a fate thrust upon writers, but a theme that writers see it as a duty and an opportunity to explore.” What makes a novel global is not that its author has become a worldwide brand, but that it originates in a consciousness of living and writing in a world with permeable borders, and a desire to make sense of that experience. By Kirsch’s definition, Han writes global novels. Most of them deal—some more obliquely than others—with South Korea’s bloody past as a pawn in great-power politics and the war against Communism.

Perhaps that sounds didactic; rest assured that her novels foreground richly specific narratives about individual characters. History still seeps in, and all the more so when the details have largely been forgotten or obscured. Memories of horrors that younger South Koreans can no longer name produce uncanny symptoms in their bodies and dreams. Han, who is also a poet, commands an impressive arsenal of literary devices, and in her hands, the national repression of trauma—what Milan Kundera called “organized forgetting”—even affects the weather. The pathetic fallacy hasn’t been put to such good use in fiction since Wuthering Heights.

Weather plays a major role in, and may in fact be the main character of, Han’s latest novel, We Do Not Part, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Much of the action takes place during a massive blizzard, and the wind and precipitation and skies all have an eerie salience. The snow, though, is most saturated with meaning. It exhibits both agency and pathos, as if possessed by ghosts. Snow blocks the narrator’s way during an urgent journey. It effaces the features of people and landscapes the way amnesia erases memories, and yet it also awakens recollections, many of them unbearable, in those it falls upon. Snow clings desolately to eyelashes and noses. It even weeps, blowing into eyes and melting into tears.

We Do Not Part opens with a nightmare that torments the narrator, Kyungha, night after night, and always makes her wake up in a panic. She is standing before a plain containing vast numbers of ink-black lopped-off tree trunks. Suddenly the sea rises and starts to flood the plain. She knows, with the certainty of a dream, that the mutilated trees mark graves, and that she must stop the water, right now, from dredging up and desecrating the bones. But how?

Kyungha is a writer who published a book about a massacre that took place in a city referred to as G—. As it happens, Han wrote a novel Human Acts, about a pro-democracy movement led by students and activists in Gwangju in 1980 that was put down with extreme violence. Possibly as many as 2,000 protesters (the exact number is not known), most of them young and all deemed to be Communists, were murdered. The novel describes, among other barbaric acts, how soldiers and police threw bodies carelessly into trucks that carted them off to be hidden or burned. Kyungha’s research into G— has left her in a suicidal fugue. She has lost touch with friends; her husband has abandoned her and seems to have taken their daughter with him. Now she lives alone in a tiny rental apartment just outside Seoul, if endlessly rewriting her will and not eating or sleeping can be called living. She is as helpless in life as she is in the nightmare.

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Kyungha comes up with a project that she thinks will exorcize it. She will collaborate with a friend, Inseon, a documentary filmmaker, on an art film. The plan is to re-create the dream, setting up dozens of tree trunks on a large piece of land, and then wait for winter and shoot the snow falling over the trunks, “as white as cloth to drape down from the skies and blanket them all.” Han doesn’t interpret the dream or its remedy for us, but we understand that the trunks and bones are meant to stand in for the unburied dead of G—, and that the snow is to serve as their shroud.

Han’s novels vary in style, but they form an unusually interconnected whole—in an interview, a member of the Nobel Prize committee noted “a continuity as to themes that is quite remarkable”—and the color white is a motif in all of them. It is mostly associated with birth and death. Han’s brief, lyrical novel The White Book, about an older sister of the narrator who died a few hours after she was born, begins with a list of “white things,” each of which then becomes the subject of a short meditation. Included on the list are “shroud” and “snow,” as well as “white bird”; along with the enshrouding snow, white birds play a role in We Do Not Part.

The temptation to read the white things of this novel as metaphors or omens is hard to resist. They do function figuratively. Looking through the window of an airplane at an approaching blizzard, for instance, Kyungha mistakes the swirling snow for “tens of thousands of white-feathered birds flying right along the horizon.” They could be albatrosses hovering over the Ancient Mariner.

But the white things do more than symbolize. Like the snow, white birds participate in the action as full-fledged characters. Inseon, who lives alone on Jeju Island, off the coast of the Korean peninsula, is devoted to a pair of white budgerigars—a kind of parakeet—that are nominally pets, but really companions; they speak in words because that’s what parakeets do, but maybe there’s more to it than that. Kyungha is flying into a storm because Inseon, who has been evacuated to a mainland hospital after a horrible accident, has asked her to travel to her remote mountain home to rescue one of the budgies (the other died earlier). Kyungha is incredulous that she agreed to undertake such a dangerous expedition just to save a bird. As she transfers from the plane to a bus, from which she will transfer to another bus and then walk to Inseon’s house, the wind picks up and the snow falls ever more heavily.

Kyungha’s trip to Jeju Island turns out to be merely a frame narrative for a much more terrifying journey, which is into history: Inseon’s history is bound up with the history of the island, which in turn recapitulates the history of South Korea itself. Over the course of the novel, Inseon tells Kyungha how she pieced together a past that her mother had shielded her from. Han’s ability to drop references to momentous events offhandedly, as if they were part of everyday life, is on full display here. As an angry teenager who develops a passionate hatred for everything about her life, particularly her stooped, seemingly subservient mother, Inseon runs away to Seoul, falls through a snowbank into a pit, and nearly dies. When she wakes up in a hospital several days later, her mother is by her side. She had known that something had happened to Inseon, she tells her daughter, because she’d dreamed that she saw her with snow on her face.

A little later, Inseon explains why her mother would have had that dream: “When she was young, soldiers and police had murdered everyone in her village.” (Most of Inseon’s stories are in italics, at least in the translation.) Inseon’s mother and her older sister had been away visiting cousins in another village; when they came home, snow had fallen on the corpses heaped on the grounds of the elementary school, covering their faces, and the sisters couldn’t figure out which were the bodies of family members. So the older sister took out her handkerchief and told Inseon’s mother that she’d wipe the faces, and “you get a good look at them.” And that, Inseon says, is how her mother, as a child, learned that when people died, “snow remained on their cheeks, and a thin layer of bloody ice set over their faces.”

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As Inseon follows clues left by her mother, whom she cared for during the last years of her life, We Do Not Part turns into a mystery and a ghost story. It’s a mystery because what happened on Jeju Island—in reality, not just in this novel—is not well known in South Korea, any more than it was to Inseon: In the run-up to the Korean War, the authorities suppressed an uprising there with shocking brutality, in the name of anti-Communism. Historians still aren’t sure whether the death toll was 30,000 or upwards of 80,000, out of a population of about 300,000—far more deadly than the outcome in Gwangju. For half a century afterward, well into the 1990s, few people talked about the slaughter on Jeju Island or dared to search for the dead and missing, because to do so was a crime punishable by torture and imprisonment. In the novel, Inseon learns that her quiet mother had, over the course of decades and in the face of real danger, been active in the movement to recover the remains, inspired by the disappearance of her brother, whom Inseon had never even heard of.

The novel is also a ghost story because hauntings are involved, both the usual kind and others that are the product of Han’s singular imagination. Once Kyungha makes it to Inseon’s home, the place turns out to be suspended between life and death. Neither Kyungha nor the reader is sure whether she is being visited by the revenants of the house’s previous occupants or has already joined them in the afterlife. Outside the house, the wind howls and the snow falls and, having fallen, muffles all sound, and we grasp that the elements are animated by the restless spirits of the tens of thousands who were never accounted for or given a proper burial.

Beyond that, a very large specter broods, palpable even though it never quite comes into view. You could call it the ghost of global history. The proximate cause of the war crimes chronicled in Han’s novels is South Korea’s succession of authoritarian governments, their soldiers and police; on Jeju Island, these were joined by gangs of right-wing thugs. But some of us in the West may have forgotten who the occupying power was at the time, and those who have not forgotten may never have known the extent to which it propped up those regimes and participated in anti-Communist counterinsurgency campaigns—including on Jeju Island. I knew very little of this history when I began to read Han’s novels, nor was I aware that during the Vietnam War, the same foreign government used more than 300,000 Korean troops, essentially as mercenaries, among them soldiers later accused of committing atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. Some Korean veterans of that war were also involved in suppressing uprisings such as the one in Gwangju. These discoveries came as a shock, because the occupier I’m talking about is, of course, the United States.

With her characteristically light touch, Han alludes to American culpability only in passing. In The Vegetarian, we learn that the protagonist’s abusive father earned a medal for his service in Vietnam, but the significance of that fact is not explained. In Human Acts, a character recounts a story about Korean soldiers burning Vietnamese villagers alive and adds, “Some of those who came to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times.” A line in We Do Not Part informs us that American military planes released propaganda leaflets over Jeju Island promising amnesty to rebels who turned themselves in; they were arrested anyway.

People in one country often fail to realize how implicated they are in the personal histories of people in countries halfway around the world. Han’s novels never make direct accusations, but her very tact makes the implied indictment all the more devastating. She draws American readers into foreign calamities that their own forebears had a hand in creating, and then offers a very limited kind of redemption—the chance to discover, for themselves, that legacy of shame. Better yet, we do so from the edges of the drama, not the center, where so many American movies about interventions in places like Vietnam seem determined to put us. Globalization is responsible for many bad things, but as Han demonstrates, the global novel is not one of them.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “Where Han Kang’s Nightmares Come From.”