On December 3rd, 2024, at 10.27pm Korea time, Yoon Suk Yeol, the president of South Korea, declared martial law during a televised address. He accused the majority political party in parliament of engaging in “anti-state activities” and collaborating with “North Korean communists”.
The attempted coup was short-lived, but for South Koreans it was a terrifying reminder of a brutal past that many would prefer to forget. Han Kang – winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2024 – is among those who would rather remember, both to bear witness to the previously nameless dead and to warn against the dangers of forgetting.
Kyungha, a leading character in Kang’s latest novel, receives an urgent message from her close friend Inseon, asking her to come and see her in hospital where she is being treated for injuries sustained in a wood-chopping incident. Inseon, a documentary film-maker, wants Kyungha to go her house on the island of Jeju to feed her pet bird, Ama, who is in danger of dying for want of food and water.
Kyungha undertakes the journey, which coincides with a severe snowstorm on the island. When she finally makes it to Inseon’s house she is gradually initiated into the sombre history of the civilian massacres that were carried out on the island by the South Korean military, police and far-right militias in the late 1940s and that would claim the lives of almost 10 per cent of the island population.
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The atrocities were a prelude to further massacres of alleged communist sympathisers in 1950, this time on the Korean mainland; these would result in the unlawful killing of more than 200,000 people. US military authorities were complicit in providing logistical support for the killings, and US civilian authorities – haunted by the Cold War spectre of the red peril – systematically turned a blind eye.
Han Kang is preoccupied with the persistence of violence in human societies and the way we deal with its legacies and traumas
The citation for the Nobel Prize awarded to Han Kang spoke of “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. We Do Not Part is an exceptional example of this poetry-infused prose that is never merely gratuitous or decorative, but unfailingly precise in capturing a mood or a sight or an almost perceptible shift in setting.
The organising metaphor for Kyungha’s journey into discovery is snow, which Kang makes both intensely real for the reader, in its almost overwhelming physicality, and persuasively abstract as a figure that captures truths – emotional and historical – that are covered over and brought to light. The snow obliterates but it also preserves. On the snow-covered path to her friend’s house, Kyungha is reminded of the wind blowing on an earlier visit: “With each step, I felt [the wind], like a shadow that could take shape and manifest at any moment, an ink stain smeared on the reverse side of stillness.”
Kang’s fictional world is also a shadow world, where the living cast complex, emotional shadows over each other’s existences while the shadows of the unmourned dead become tormenting, living presences. Kang’s female characters acknowledge the power of the spirit, but they do not want to be consigned to the shadows. Kyungha in her writing, Inseon in her filmmaking, Inseon’s mother in her unyielding pursuit of the truth about the Jeju Island massacres, all resist fear, subterfuge and the fearful omerta of the survivors to hold sections of Korean society to account for past crimes.
[ Human Acts by Han Kang review: a Korean tragedy with its own flawsOpens in new window ]
When Kyungha and Inseon go on a hike to a mountainous region they become aware of three large standing stones, which legend has it were three women who, for different reasons, wanted to cross the mountain but were turned to stone when they turned back. Kyungha asks her friend: “When do you think they turned to stone? The moment they looked back? Or do you think it took a little more time?”
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Kang’s women are not afraid to look back. They are aware of the dangers of facing the dark underside of modern Korean history, but they are not petrified. They will not become the dolmens around anyone’s childhood, reverent but unspeaking. The title We Do Not Part references the emphasis on female and transgenerational solidarity in the novel but also an expressed desire not to part ways with the search for difficult truths.
In Human Acts (2016), based on the violent suppression by the South Korean military of the Gwangju pro-democracy uprising in May 1980, Han Kang had previously shown her willingness to confront the less palatable elements of her country’s history. Yet, the author of The Vegetarian (2015) is more generally preoccupied with the persistence of violence in human societies and the way we deal with its legacies and traumas.
In this memorable, probing and exquisitely detailed novel, Han Kang has confirmed herself to be more than worthy of the Nobel accolade. Yoon Suk Yeol has not had the last word.
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
