We Do Not Part, Han Kang, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Hogarth (ISBN: 9780593595459) 2025
Summary: Kyungha makes a harrowing journey through a blizzard to save a friend’s bird, confronting the reality behind her nightmares.
The nightmares began a few months after Kyungha, a historian, published a book on a massacre. She is making her way in a blizzard through a field of erect torsos like tree stumps as the sea behind her rises…. In the years since, she has struggled with depression and considered suicide. But she shared her dream with Inseon, a photographer who collaborated with her on documentaries. Inseon, who has become a friend, agrees to create an installation that will remember the massacre that was the source of the dreams. Kyungha is not so sure about this idea and asks her friend to drop the project.
Then she receives a text from Inseon, asking her to come to a hospital. Inseon, a woodworker, cut off the tips of a couple fingers and is undergoing a gruesome set of treatments that will last weeks to try to save the tips of her fingers. She has a favor to ask of Kyungha. In the rush to get her to hospital, she left behind her bird, that will soon die without food or water. Inseon lives on the island of Jeju in a remote location by a remote village. Getting there involves flights, bus rides, and hiking a trail up to her remote home. There is no one back home who she can ask to do this.
There are some things you do not deny a friend of twenty years. Kyungha departs immediately only to discover that she is flying into a blizzard. She is not adequately dressed. She manages to get the last bus to the village. Then, in a blinding storm, she has to make her way up to Inseon’s house. Kyungha gets lost, falls, yet miraculously makes her way. She is cold with soaked shoes. She soon begins to feel feverish.
This sets the stage for the second half of the novel, which reads like something of a fever dream. She finds Inseon had not abandoned their project, having cut one hundred logs for the installation. More than that, through a series of visions/dreams/hallucinations, Inseon recounts her mother’s personal accounts of the massive genocide that occurred on Jeju in 1948-1950. The South Korean government, with assistance from the United States, embarked on an effort to cleanse the island of Communism, resulting in the deaths of over 300,000 people [this really happened].
Kyungha confronts the nightmare reality of which her dreams were but a figment. It’s a personal account of Inseon’s mother, father, and extended family, many of whom died. But she experiences something else–the bond between her and Inseon of which the title speaks. Han Kang juxtaposes unspeakable violence and enduring friendship. She captures something of both the unspeakable evil of which we are capable and the nobility that breaks through the darkness. The imagery of dark stumps, rising seas, blizzards, light, and flame powerfully convey that juxtaposition.
Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2024 for her earlier body of work: The Vegetarian, The White Book, Human Acts, and Greek Lessons. While I’ve not read her earlier works, the combination of imagery, the plotting, and the juxtaposition of a friendship with a horror of history reveals Han Kang’s skill and artistic vision.
