The Vegetarian

by Han Kang

  —

  Preceded by the sound of quick, purposeful footsteps, a young doctor wearing a white gown approaches from the other end of the corridor. He sketches a shallow bow when In-hye stands up to greet him, gesturing toward the consulting room with an expansive sweep of his arm. She follows him inside.

  The doctor, who is in his late thirties, has a healthy, robust physique. The set of his jaw and his manner of walking speak of a certain self-confidence; he sits behind the desk and stares over it at her, his brow furrowed. Sensing that the tone of the discussion will not be positive, she feels her heart become heavy.

  “My sister…”

  “We’ve done our very best, but her condition hasn’t improved.”

  “In that case, today…” She blushes as if having committed some embarrassing blunder.

  The doctor doesn’t wait for her to continue. “Today we’ll try feeding her intravenously, and if we’re lucky her condition might improve just a little. Otherwise there’ll be nothing else for it but to transfer her to one of the critical wards at the general hospital.”

  “Before that, would it be all right for me to try to talk to her, to make her see sense?” she asks.

  His eyes show that he holds no great hopes for her attempts at persuasion. He seems worn out, trying to conceal the anger he feels toward those patients who fail to live up to his expectations. He glances at his watch. “I’ll give you around thirty minutes. If you’re successful, please let them know in the nurses’ room. Otherwise, I’ll see you at two.”

  She expects him to get up immediately and sweep out of the room, but instead he chooses to drag the conversation out a little longer, perhaps mindful of having been a little abrupt. “I know I told you this last time, but fifteen to twenty percent of anorexia nervosa patients will starve to death. Even when they’re down to nothing but skin and bone, the subject is still convinced that they’ve put on weight. There can be all manner of psychological factors at play; a power struggle with a domineering mother, for example…but Kim Yeong-hye’s is one of those particular cases where the subject refuses to eat while suffering from schizophrenia. We were confident that her schizophrenia wasn’t serious; there was honestly no way for us to predict that things would turn out the way they have. In cases where the subject is paranoid about being poisoned, they can usually be reasoned with. Or else the doctor can eat the food in front of them, let them see that it’s fine. But we’re still not sure exactly why it is that Kim Yeong-hye is refusing to eat, and none of the medicines we’ve given her seem to have had any effect. It wasn’t an easy decision for us to make, but there’s no other way. Our first duty as doctors is to preserve life…and we simply can’t be sure of keeping her alive here.” The doctor makes as if to stand up, then hesitates. “Your complexion doesn’t look healthy. Are you not sleeping well?” His question seems motivated by professional habit, and she cannot think of a quick answer. “Carers have to look after their own health too, you know.”

  They exchange bows, then the doctor opens the door and strides away. By the time she leaves the room, his retreating figure is already disappearing down the corridor.

  When she returns to the long bench in front of the reception desk, a flashily dressed middle-aged woman is just coming in through the front door, on the arm of a similarly aged man. Have they come to visit a patient? The next instant, an unbroken stream of invective starts pouring forth from the woman’s mouth. Seemingly well accustomed to her cursing, the man pays no attention as he gets the medical insurance certificate out of his wallet and slides it under the window at the reception desk.

  “Wicked little shits! You won’t be satisfied even when you’ve sucked my insides dry! I’m going to emigrate. I can’t spend another day with shits like you!”

  If the process of admittance is completed in time, the woman will probably end up spending the night in the secure room. More than likely, her limbs will be bound and a tranquilizer will be administered. In-hye stares at the garish flower-patterned hat worn by this shrieking woman. All of a sudden, she realizes how blasé she’s become when it comes to the mentally ill. In fact, after all these visits to the hospital, sometimes it’s the tranquil streets filled with so-called “normal” people that end up seeming strange.

  She remembers the day she first brought Yeong-hye here. A bright afternoon in early winter. The closed ward of Seoul General Hospital was actually quite near her house, but the admittance fee was more than she could scrape together, so she’d asked around a bit before settling on this hospital, where the treatment was apparently quite good. It was when she’d met with the doctor at the other hospital, who wanted Yeong-hye to be discharged, that she’d been advised to consider outpatient care.

  “So far, the results that we’ve observed directly have been good. She probably isn’t in a position yet to return to any kind of social life, but the support of her family will be a great help.”

  “That’s what I was told last time, too,” she told him. “I believed it, and had Yeong-hye discharged. But now it seems like that was the wrong thing to do.”

  Though the ostensible reason for her not wanting Yeong-hye to be discharged, the reason that she gave the doctor, was this worry about a possible relapse, now she was able to admit to herself what had really been going on. She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminded her of. She’d been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.

  Luckily, Yeong-hye was in favor of being admitted. Dressed in everyday clothes and telling the doctor in a distinct voice that she was comfortable there in the hospital, she had seemed calm. The look in her eyes was clear, and the set of her mouth was firm. It was almost impossible to tell her apart from ordinary people, aside, of course, from the fact that, skinny to begin with, she was at that point alarmingly thin. In the taxi on the way there she’d gazed quietly out of the window, showing not even the slightest hint of unease, and when they sent the taxi away she’d obediently followed her sister as though they’d simply come out for a stroll. She’d looked so normal that the receptionist had actually had to ask which one of them was the patient.

  While they waited for Yeong-hye’s documents to be processed, In-hye said to her sister, “The air is good here, it’ll give you more of an appetite. You’ll be able to eat a bit more and put on some weight.”

  Yeong-hye, who at the time was just beginning to speak again, cast her gaze toward the zelkova tree on the other side of the window and said, “Yes…there are big trees here.”

  Having been called down by the receptionist, a strong-looking middle-aged nurse came and checked through their hospital bag. Underclothes, everyday clothes, slippers, toiletries. He spread the clothes out carefully, going through them one by one, seemingly to check that there weren’t any strings or pins. He removed the long, thick woolen belt from the coat In-hye had packed, and asked the two of them to follow him.

  The nurse unlocked the door to the six-person ward and led them in. Yeong-hye remained composed as her sister greeted each of the nurses in turn. Eventually, she set the hospital bag down and went over to the window, which had a heavy-looking set of bars running vertically across it. Just then, she was discomfited to find herself struck by a guilty conscience, which she’d so far managed to avoid. Suddenly it was there like a lump in her chest, weighing her down. Yeong-hye walked up soundlessly and stood beside her.

  “Ah, you can see the trees from here too.”

  You will not be weak, In-hye told herself, her lips pressed tightly together. At any rate, she is a burden you cannot bear. No one blames you. You’ve done well to make it this far.

  She didn’t look at Yeong-hye as she stood beside her. Instead, she looked down at the bright early-winter sunlight as it splint
ered over the larches, which had not yet shed all their leaves.

  “Sister,” Yeong-hye said, her voice low and calm as if intending to comfort her. Yeong-hye’s old black sweater gave off the faint scent of mothballs. When In-hye didn’t answer, Yeong-hye whispered one more time. “Sister…all the trees of the world are like brothers and sisters.”

  —

  She walks past the second annex and stops in front of the door to the first annex. She sees the patients pressing themselves against the glass door and peering outside. They’re probably feeling a bit claustrophobic, the rain having kept them cooped up inside for the past few days. When In-hye presses the bell, a nurse in his late thirties comes out from the nurses’ room by the ground-floor lobby, carrying a key.

  The nurse closes the door quickly behind him, inserts the key and locks it. In-hye notices a young female patient staring out at her, her cheek pressed against the inside of the locked glass door. Her two empty eyes scrutinize In-hye as though trying to bore through her skin; there was no way she could look at a stranger like that if her mind were sound.

  “How is my sister at the moment?” she asks as they climb the stairs to the third floor. The nurse looks back over his shoulder and shakes his head.

  “She’s stopped talking. She’s also been trying to pull the IV needle out, so we had to get her into the secure room and give her a tranquilizer before we could put it back in. How she has the strength to shake us off…”

  “So she’s in the secure room now?”

  “No. She woke up a little while ago, so we moved her back to the ward. They told you they’re putting the nasal drip in at two, right?”

  She follows the nurse into the third-floor lobby. On fine days there are elderly patients sitting on the long bench by the window and soaking up the sun, others engrossed in a game of table tennis, cheery music filtering in from the nurses’ room. But today all of that liveliness seems to have been smothered by the incessant rain. Perhaps because the majority of the patients are in their wards, there isn’t much going on in the lobby. The table tennis bats lie unused on the table.

  She looks down along the ward’s western corridor, where, right at the end, the afternoon sunlight shines through the large window more brightly than in any other spot on sunny days. When In-hye came to see Yeong-hye last March, just a few days before the latter disappeared into the rainy woods, Yeong-hye refused to come to the visiting room. When In-hye contacted the head nurse from reception, the nurse said that, oddly enough, Yeong-hye hadn’t wanted to leave the ward for several days now. Even during the hour when an unaccompanied walk was permitted, a time that all the patients always looked forward to, she’d kept to the ward. When In-hye asked if she could just go and look at her sister’s face, given that she’d come all this way, the nurse came down to reception to accompany her.

  When she came upon the unexpected sight of a female patient doing a handstand at the far end of the western corridor, it never even crossed her mind that it might be Yeong-hye. Only when the nurse, with whom she’d just spoken on the telephone, guided her in that direction had she been able to recognize Yeong-hye’s long, thick hair. Her sister was upside down and balancing on her hands, her face flushed almost puce.

  “She’s been at it for thirty minutes already,” the nurse said, seeming impatient. “It started two days ago. It’s not that she isn’t aware of her surroundings, or that she doesn’t speak…she’s different from the other catatonic patients. Up until yesterday we’d been having to force her back into the ward; but no matter what we did she just started up with the handstands again as soon as she was in the ward, so…so we can’t even force her to stop.” Before he went back to the nurses’ room, the nurse said, “She’ll fall over if you give her a little nudge. Give it a try if you can’t get her to talk to you. We would have had to push her over to get her back in the ward, anyway.”

  Left alone with Yeong-hye, In-hye squatted down and tried to look her sister in the eye. Anyone’s face will look different when they’re upside down. Yeong-hye’s face certainly looked odd, with what little flesh she had on her cheeks pushed down toward her eyes. Those eyes were glittering and sharp as Yeong-hye stared into space. She seemed unaware of her sister’s presence.

  “Yeong-hye.” No reply. “Yeong-hye. What are you doing? Stand up.” She reached out a hand to Yeong-hye’s flushed cheek. “Stand up, Yeong-hye. Doesn’t your head hurt? For goodness’ sake, your face is bright red.” With nothing else for it, she gave her sister a gentle push. Just as the nurse had said, Yeong-hye immediately tumbled to the floor, and In-hye quickly lifted her head up, supporting her neck as you would with a baby.

  “Sister.” Yeong-hye’s face was wreathed in smiles, her eyes shining as though she’d just woken up from a happy dream. “When did you get here?”

  The nurse, who’d been watching the two of them, came up and led them to the meeting room that adjoined the lobby. This, she explained, was where family members could meet with the patients whose symptoms were so severe that it was difficult for them to go down to the visiting room in reception. In-hye guessed that it was also where consultations with the doctor took place.

  When In-hye laid the food she’d brought out on the table, Yeong-hye said, “Sister. You don’t have to bring that stuff now.” She smiled. “I don’t need to eat anymore.”

  “What are you talking about?” In-hye stared at her sister as though she were possessed. It was a long time since she’d seen Yeong-hye’s face shining like this; no, in fact, it was the first time. “What on earth were you doing just now?” she asked.

  Yeong-hye met her question with another. “Sister, did you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “I didn’t, you see. I thought trees stood up straight…I only found out just now. They actually stand with both arms in the earth, all of them. Look, look over there, aren’t you surprised?” Yeong-hye sprang up and pointed to the window. “All of them, they’re all standing on their heads.” Yeong-hye laughed frantically. In-hye remembered moments from their childhood when Yeong-hye’s face had worn the same expression as it did now. Those moments when her sister’s single-lidded eyes would narrow and turn completely dark, when that innocent laughter would come rushing out of her mouth. “Do you know how I found out? Well, I was in a dream, and I was standing on my head…leaves were growing from my body, and roots were sprouting from my hands…so I dug down into the earth. On and on…I wanted flowers to bloom from my crotch, so I spread my legs; I spread them wide…”

  Bewildered, In-hye looked across at Yeong-hye’s feverish eyes.

  “I need to water my body. I don’t need this kind of food, sister. I need water.”

  —

  “Thank you so much for all your trouble,” In-hye tells the head nurse. “I really appreciate it.” She holds out the rice cakes she’s brought and greets the other nurses in turn. While she makes her usual inquiries regarding Yeong-hye’s condition, a female patient in her fifties who has mistaken her for a nurse hurries over from the window and gives her a shallow bow.

  “My head hurts; please tell the doctor to change my medication.”

  “I’m not a nurse. I’m here to see my sister.” The woman stares deep into In-hye’s eyes.

  “Please help me…my head hurts so much I can’t go on. How can I live like this?”

  Just then a male patient in his twenties comes and presses himself against In-hye’s back. It’s a common enough occurrence in the hospital, but it makes her nervous all the same. The patients pay no mind to conventional ideas about personal space, or it being rude to stare at other people. On the one hand, there are many of them whose utterly blank gazes indicate minds shut up in their own private worlds, but then again there are also a certain number who appear so lucid one could easily mistake them for members of the medical staff. Yeong-hye had been one of the latter kind, once.

  “Nurse, why on earth doesn’t anyone ever do anything about that guy?” a familiar female patient in her thirties shou
ts at the head nurse, her tone aggressive. “I mean, you know perfectly well how he’s always hitting me!” The woman’s persecution mania seems to get worse every time In-hye visits.

  In-hye bows to the nurses again.

  “I’ll just go and have a talk with my sister.” Judging by the nurses’ expressions, they are all well and truly fed up with Yeong-hye. Clearly, none of them is holding out any hope that In-hye’s attempts at persuasion will have the slightest effect. She threads her way out carefully between the patients, taking care not to brush against them. She walks down the eastern corridor outside Yeong-hye’s ward. The door to the ward is open, and when she enters, a woman with her hair cropped short comes up to her.

  “Ah, you’re visiting today?”

  The woman is Hee-joo, who is receiving treatment for alcoholism and hypomania. Her body is stout but her round eyes give her a sweet look, and her voice is always somewhat hoarse. In this hospital, the patients who are in good control of their faculties look after those with more acute psychological problems, and receive a little pocket money in return; when Yeong-hye had grown difficult to manage, refusing point-blank to eat, she had come under the care of Hee-joo.

  “Thanks for all your trouble,” In-hye says, and is about to force out a laugh when Hee-joo’s slightly damp hand clasps her own.

  “What can we do?” Hee-joo says, her round eyes filling with tears. “They’re saying Yeong-hye might die.”

  “How has she been?”

  “Just now she vomited some blood. She doesn’t eat, so her stomach acid is eating away at her stomach, and she constantly has these convulsions. And now this bleeding too?” Hee-joo grows ever closer to the brink of tears. “When I first began to look after her she wasn’t like this…perhaps she might have been okay if I’d taken better care of her, do you think? I didn’t know she would end up like this. Perhaps this wouldn’t be happening to her if I hadn’t been put in charge of her.”