An encounter with the phantoms of South Korea's brutal military past

Telegraph

09-02-2025

Since she won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for her novel The Vegetarian (as translated by Deborah Smith), Han Kang's reputation beyond her native South Korea
Han's 2014 novel Human Acts took as its subject the 1980 uprising in Gwangju – during which workers and students were murdered by the Republic of Korea Army while protesting against the imposition of martial law – and this new work wrestles with another violent episode in that nation's modern history. In this instance, it's the 1948-9 massacre, again by the military, of 30,000 citizens on the island of Jeju. Unlike Human Acts, though, a novel in which past horrors are reanimated and made immediate, We Do Not Part takes a slanting and somewhat disorienting approach.
A woman named Kyungha is on a journey in aid of her injured friend, Inseon. She has agreed to travel from Seoul – where she lives, and where Inseon is currently in hospital – to Jeju, where Inseon's pet bird has been left without food or water. Already hurrying against the clock, Kyungha finds her journey becoming all the more arduous when a blizzard envelops the island shortly after her arrival.
Befuddled and exhausted by her struggles through the snow, and battling with an incapacitating migraine, Kyungha seems to lose her grip on reality. Inexplicably, Inseon herself appears, a presence Kyungha accepts as an apparition both of and not of this world. The phantasm reveals the terrible story of Inseon's family's suffering and loss during Jeju's blood-soaked history, and the long, traumatic shadow this has cast – first over Inseon's mother, and now over Inseon herself.
There's a description early on of the people whom Inseon, who used to be a documentary film-maker, took as her subjects: 'women whose lives had intersected with history'. 'Intersected' is a strange term, but given the crystalline quality of the prose throughout – rendered in English with poise by E Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris – I can't believe the translation is sloppy. Rather, I say 'strange' because it sets up a ­separation between people and events, and past and present, that the subsequent narrative well and truly dismantles.
While I found that dismantling a convincing move, the second half of the book – in which Han relates the horrifying details of the massacre – ultimately falls rather flat. Prior to that, Kyungha's desperate journey through the snow and ice has been written with extraordinary beauty and edge-of-one's-seat compulsion. Han renders Jeju both dream-like and viscerally real at once. Take this description of snowflakes melting into wet asphalt 'like a trailing sentence at the close of a conversation, like the dying fall of a cadence, like fingertips cautiously retreating before ever landing on a shoulder, the flakes sink into the slick blackness and are soon gone'.
By comparison to the immediacy and tangibility of these initial action-heavy pages, the massacre and its after-effects are related at a remove – stories from the past filtered through various tellings and retellings, all of which conspire to create a more workman-like feel. We're told of the long shadows these horrors have cast, yet they remained, for me, at a distance.
More so than the secrets of Inseon's family's past, I was compelled by the mystery that is Kyungha and her life. There are the enigmatic occlusions in her own history; her lonely, isolated existence; her mental and physical fragility. They all combine to create a porousness through which Kyungha – and we – can access experiences beyond her or our own. 'When someone who hasn't slept soundly in a while, who is stumbling through a period of nightmares blurring with reality, chances across a scene that defies belief, they may well initially doubt themselves,' she admits early on. We Do Not Part is a novel of doubt, distrust, hauntings – though who's being haunted by whom, or by what, isn't straightforward at all.
We Do Not Part by Han Kang, tr E Yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris, is published by Hamish Hamilton at £18.99. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0330 173 5030 or visit