The Vegetarian

by Han Kang

  More Praise for Han Kang’s

  The Vegetarian

  “A horror story in its depiction of the unknowability of others—of the sudden feeling that you’ve never actually known someone close to you….Its three-part structure is brilliant, gradually digging deeper and deeper into darker and darker places; the writing is spare and haunting; but perhaps most memorable is its crushing climax, a phantasmagoric yet emotionally true moment that’s surely one of the year’s most powerful. This is an ingenious, upsetting, and unforgettable novel.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is. An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Like a small seed, Han Kang’s startling and unforgettable debut goes to work quietly, but insistently. Her prose is so balanced, so elegant and assured, you might overlook the depths of this novel’s darkness—do so at your own peril.”

  —Colin Winnette, author of Haints Stay and Coyote

  “A stunning and beautifully haunting novel. It seems in places as if the very words on the page are photosynthesizing. I loved this graceful, vivid book.”

  —Jess Richards, Costa First Novel Award short-listed author of Snake Ropes

  “Poetic and beguiling, and translated with tremendous elegance, The Vegetarian exhilarates and disturbs.”

  —Chloe Aridjis, author of The Book of Clouds

  “Dark dreams, simmering tensions, chilling violence…This South Korean novel is a feast…It is sensual, provocative, and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colors, and disturbing questions…Sentence by sentence, The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience…[It] will be hard to beat.”

  —The Guardian

  “This is an odd and enthralling novel; its story filled with nihilism but lyricism too, its writing understated even in its most fevered, violent moments. It has a surreal and spellbinding quality, especially in its passage on nature and the physical landscape, so beautiful and so magnificently impervious to the human suffering around it.”

  —Arifa Akbar, The Independent

  “This short novel is one of the most startling I have read…Exciting and imaginative…The author reveals how nature, sex, and art crash through this polite society…It is the women who are killed for daring to establish their own identity. The narrative makes it clear it is the crushing pressure of Korean etiquette which murders them…[A] disturbing book.”

  —Julia Pascal, The Independent

  “Shocking…The writing throughout is precise and spare, with not a word wasted. There are no tricks. Han holds the reader in a vice grip…The Vegetarian quickly settles into a dark, menacing brilliance that is similar to the work of the gifted Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa in its devastating study of psychological pain…The Vegetarian is more than a cautionary tale about the brutal treatment of women: it is a meditation on suffering and grief. It is about escape and how a dreamer takes flight. Most of all, it is about the emptiness and rage of discovering there is nothing to be done when all hope and comfort fails….A work of savage beauty and unnerving physicality.”

  —Irish Times

  “The Vegetarian is a book about the failures of language and the mysteries of the physical. Yet its message should not undermine Han’s achievement as a writer. Like its anti-protagonist, The Vegetarian whispers so clearly, it can be heard across the room, insistently and with devastating, quiet violence.”

  —Joanna Walsh, The New Statesman

  “[A] strange and ethereal fable, rendered stranger still by the cool precision of the prose…What is ultimately most troubling about Yeong-hye’s posthuman fantasies is that they appear to be a reasonable alternative to the world of repression and denial in which everyone around her exists.”

  —Times Literary Supplement

  “The Vegetarian is so strange and vivid it left me breathless upon finishing it. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel as mouth-wateringly poetic, or as drenched in hypnotic oddities, taboos, and scandal. It seems to have been plucked out of the ether, ready-made to take us all by surprise. Exciting and compelling.”

  —Lee Rourke, New Humanist

  “The Vegetarian combines human violence and the possibility of innocence…[A] frightening beauty of a novel.”

  —British Council Literature

  “Uncanny.”

  —The Australian

  “Kang belongs to a generation of writers who aim to discover secret drives, ambitions, and miseries behind one’s personal destiny…[The Vegetarian] deals with violence, sanity, cultural limits, and the value of the human body as the last refuge and private space.”

  —Tiempo Argentino

  “[A] bloodcurdlingly beautiful, sinister story.”

  —LINDA.

  “The almost perverse seduction of this book originates in the poetry of the images. They are violently erotic and rather nightmarish; the novel is like a room full of large flowers, where the musky odor takes you by the throat.”

  —De groene Amsterdammer

  “For the fans of Haruki Murakami.”

  —Gazet van Antwerpen (starred review)

  “The Vegetarian has an odd kind of silent power that makes you want to finish it in one go and continue to think about it.”

  —NRC Handelsblad (starred review)

  “A shocking, moving, and thought-provoking novel.”

  —Trouw

  “Outright impressive.”

  —HUMO

  “One of the most impressive novels I have read recently…You need to read this book.”

  —Arnon Grunberg in De Volkskrant

  “The Vegetarian is exciting and original.”

  —De Standaard der Letteren (starred review)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  English translation copyright © 2015 by Deborah Smith

  Copyright © 2007 by Han Kang

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in Korean as three separate novelettes and then compiled into a novel, 채식주의자 (Ch’aesikjuuija), published in 2007 by Changbi Publishers, Inc. Copyright © 2007 by Han Kang. This translation originally published, in somewhat different form, in Great Britain by Portobello Books, London. This edition is published by arrangement with Portobello Books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Han Kang, 1970–

  [Ch’aesikchuuija. English]

  The vegetarian : a novel / Han Kang; translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith.

  pages cm

  I. Title.

  PL992.26.K36C4313 2015

  895.73'5—dc23

  2015002206

  ISBN 9780553448184

  eBook ISBN 9780553448191

  Cover design by Christopher Brand

  Cover photograph by 100/Moment/Getty Images

  v4.1

  ep


  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part 1: The Vegetarian

  Part 2: Mongolian Mark

  Part 3: Flaming Trees

  Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way. To be frank, the first time I met her I wasn’t even attracted to her. Middling height; bobbed hair neither long nor short; jaundiced, sickly-looking skin; somewhat prominent cheekbones; her timid, sallow aspect told me all I needed to know. As she came up to the table where I was waiting, I couldn’t help but notice her shoes—the plainest black shoes imaginable. And that walk of hers—neither fast nor slow, striding nor mincing.

  However, if there wasn’t any special attraction, nor did any particular drawbacks present themselves, and there was no reason for the two of us not to get married. The passive personality of this woman in whom I could detect neither freshness nor charm, or anything especially refined, suited me down to the ground. There was no need to affect intellectual leanings in order to win her over, or to worry that she might be comparing me to the preening men who pose in fashion catalogues, and she didn’t get worked up if I happened to be late for one of our meetings. The paunch that started appearing in my mid-twenties, my skinny legs and forearms that steadfastly refused to bulk up in spite of my best efforts, the inferiority complex I used to have about the size of my penis—I could rest assured that I wouldn’t have to fret about such things on her account.

  I’ve always inclined toward the middle course in life. At school I chose to boss around those who were two or three years my junior, and with whom I could act the ringleader, rather than take my chances with those my own age, and later I chose which college to apply to based on my chances of obtaining a scholarship large enough for my needs. Ultimately, I settled for a job where I would be provided with a decent monthly salary in return for diligently carrying out my allotted tasks, at a company whose small size meant they would value my unremarkable skills. And so it was only natural that I would marry the most run-of-the-mill woman in the world. As for women who were pretty, intelligent, strikingly sensual, the daughters of rich families—they would only have served to disrupt my carefully ordered existence.

  In keeping with my expectations, she made for a completely ordinary wife who went about things without any distasteful frivolousness. Every morning she got up at six a.m. to prepare rice and soup, and usually a bit of fish. From adolescence she’d contributed to her family’s income through the odd bit of part-time work. She ended up with a job as an assistant instructor at the computer graphics college she’d attended for a year, and was subcontracted by a comics publisher to work on the words for their speech bubbles, which she could do from home.

  She was a woman of few words. It was rare for her to demand anything of me, and however late I was in getting home she never took it upon herself to kick up a fuss. Even when our days off happened to coincide, it wouldn’t occur to her to suggest we go out somewhere together. While I idled the afternoon away, TV remote in hand, she would shut herself up in her room. More than likely she would spend the time reading, which was practically her only hobby. For some unfathomable reason, reading was something she was able to really immerse herself in—reading books that looked so dull I couldn’t even bring myself to so much as take a look inside the covers. Only at mealtimes would she open the door and silently emerge to prepare the food. To be sure, that kind of wife, and that kind of lifestyle, did mean that I was unlikely to find my days particularly stimulating. On the other hand, if I’d had one of those wives whose phones ring on and off all day long with calls from friends or co-workers, or whose nagging periodically leads to screaming rows with their husbands, I would have been grateful when she finally wore herself out.

  The only respect in which my wife was at all unusual was that she didn’t like wearing a bra. When I was a young man barely out of adolescence, and my wife and I were dating, I happened to put my hand on her back only to find that I couldn’t feel a bra strap under her sweater, and when I realized what this meant I became quite aroused. In order to judge whether she might possibly have been trying to tell me something, I spent a minute or two looking at her through new eyes, studying her attitude. The outcome of my studies was that she wasn’t, in fact, trying to send any kind of signal. So if not, was it laziness, or just a sheer lack of concern? I couldn’t get my head around it. It wasn’t as though she had shapely breasts which might suit the “no-bra look.” I would have preferred her to go around wearing one that was thickly padded, so that I could save face in front of my acquaintances.

  Even in the summer, when I managed to persuade her to wear one for a while, she’d have it unhooked barely a minute after leaving the house. The undone hook would be clearly visible under her thin, light-colored tops, but she wasn’t remotely concerned. I tried reproaching her, lecturing her to layer up with a vest instead of a bra in that sultry heat. She tried to justify herself by saying that she couldn’t stand wearing a bra because of the way it squeezed her breasts, and that I’d never worn one myself so I couldn’t understand how constricting it felt. Nevertheless, considering I knew for a fact that there were plenty of other women who, unlike her, didn’t have anything particularly against bras, I began to have doubts about this hypersensitivity of hers.

  In all other respects, the course of our married life ran smoothly. We were approaching the five-year mark, and since we were never madly in love to begin with we were able to avoid falling into that stage of weariness and boredom that can otherwise turn married life into a trial. The only thing was, because we’d decided to put off trying for children until we’d managed to secure a place of our own, which had only happened last autumn, I sometimes wondered whether I would ever get to hear the reassuring sound of a child gurgling “dada,” and meaning me. Until a certain day last February, when I came across my wife standing in the kitchen at daybreak in just her nightclothes, I had never considered the possibility that our life together might undergo such an appalling change.

  —

  “What are you doing standing there?”

  I’d been about to switch on the bathroom light when I was brought up short. It was around four in the morning, and I’d woken up with a raging thirst from the bottle and a half of soju I’d had with dinner, which also meant I was taking longer to come to my senses than usual.

  “Hello? I asked what you’re doing?”

  It was cold enough as it was, but the sight of my wife was even more chilling. Any lingering alcohol-induced drowsiness swiftly passed. She was standing, motionless, in front of the fridge. Her face was submerged in the darkness so I couldn’t make out her expression, but the potential options all filled me with fear. Her thick, naturally black hair was fluffed up, disheveled, and she was wearing her usual white ankle-length nightdress.

  On such a night, my wife would ordinarily have hurriedly slipped on a cardigan and searched for her shower slippers. How long might she have been standing there like that—barefoot, in thin summer nightwear, ramrod straight as though perfectly oblivious to my repeated interrogation? Her face was turned away from me, and she was standing there so unnaturally still it was almost as if she were some kind of ghost, silently standing its ground.

  What was going on? If she couldn’t hear me, then perhaps that meant she was sleepwalking.

  I went toward her, craning my neck to try to get a look at her face.

  “Why are you standing there like that? What’s going on?”

  When I put my hand on her shoulder I was surprised by her complete lack of reaction. I had no doubt that I was in my right mind and all this was really happening; I had been fully conscious of everything I had done since emerging from the living room, asking her what she was doing, and moving toward her. She was the one standing there completely unresponsive, as though lost in her own world. It was like those rare occasions when, absorbed in a late-night TV drama, she’d failed to notice me arriving home. But
what could there be to absorb her attention in the pale gleam of the fridge’s white door, in the pitch-black kitchen at four in the morning?

  “Hey!”

  Her profile swam toward me out of the darkness. I took in her eyes, bright but not feverish, as her lips slowly parted.

  “I had a dream.”

  Her voice was surprisingly clear.

  “A dream? What the hell are you talking about? Do you know what time it is?”

  She turned so that her body was facing me, then slowly walked off through the open door into the living room. As she entered the room she stretched out her foot and calmly pushed the door closed. I was left alone in the dark kitchen, looking helplessly on as her retreating figure was swallowed up beyond the door.

  I turned on the bathroom light and went in. The cold snap had continued for several days now, consistently hovering around 14°F. I’d showered only a few hours ago, so my plastic shower slippers were still cold and damp. The loneliness of this cruel season began to make itself felt, seeping from the black opening of the ventilation fan above the bath, leaching out of the white tiles covering the floor and walls.

  When I went back into the living room my wife was lying down, her legs curled up to her chest, the silence so weighted I might as well have been alone in the room. Of course, this was just my fancy. If I stood perfectly still, held my breath and strained to listen, I was able to hear the faintest sound of breathing coming from where she lay. Yet it didn’t sound like the deep, regular breathing of someone who has fallen asleep. I could have reached out to her, and my hand would have encountered her warm skin. But for some reason I found myself unable to touch her. I didn’t even want to reach out to her with words.

  —

  For the few moments immediately after I opened my eyes the next morning, when reality had yet to assume its usual concreteness, I lay with the quilt wrapped about me, absentmindedly assessing the quality of the winter sunshine as it filtered into the room through the white curtain. In the middle of this fit of abstraction I happened to glance at the wall clock and jumped up the instant I saw the time, kicked the door open and hurried out of the room. My wife was in front of the fridge.