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Asia Times
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Asia Times
In We Do Not Part, Han Kang faces historical traumas with compassion
It's daunting to review a novel written by someone who, in 2024, received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize was awarded for Han Kang's 'intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life': a description that applies equally to this newly translated work. We Do Not Part tells the story of Kyungha, a writer of 20th-century South Korean history, and her longterm friend Inseon, a documentary filmmaker and photographer. Both women are increasingly choosing isolation over the busy professional and social lives they had lived. Kyungha has pretty much withdrawn from her professional life. She is suffering from depression and anxiety, restless nights and exhausted solitary days. She is losing contact with those she loves. Inseon had moved from Seoul to the remote island of Jeju several years earlier to care for her ageing mother. After her mother's death, she chose to remain on the island and switch from screen-based work to furniture-making. The novel is told in three parts. The long first section, titled Bird, opens with a dream sequence. It goes on to recount a comparatively linear narrative of past and present. The shorter middle part, Night, is a deep dive into the horrors of history. The ending, Flame, is very short, told in fragments. The novel ends with what seems to be a dream, where the two women light a candle in the dark, in the depths of snow. The dream that opens the novel is of 'thousands of black tree trunks jutted from the earth.… Stooped and listing, they gave the impression of a thousand men, women and haggard children huddling in the snow.' Trees that represent people; children who are haggard: these are worryingly bleak images. In the distorted reality of the dreamworld, Kyungha wonders: 'Was this a graveyard? … Are those gravestones?' The dream moves on, and she finds that she is walking through water. First her feet are wet, then she is ankle-deep, and then the 'graves' are underwater, being washed away by the sea, and she alone must try to preserve any that can be saved. This sets the stage for all that is to come: evidence of massacres, nature turned into a stage for terrible events, a bone-chilling awareness of sorrow. This might sound like an unpromising entry point for a novel, but let me assure readers that the story offers real rewards. I was a touch undone by the first chapters, but the beauty of the prose kept me going. The thoughtful, engaging portraits of the generosity, integrity and courage of the two key characters, too, provided an appealing path on which to follow the narrative. In the early chapters, Kyungha presents as a person suffering from PTSD. She has been flirting with death for some time. What is keeping her alive is that she can't find a way to write what she believes to be 'a proper letter of farewell, a true leavetaking.' The elements and circumstances seem to conspire against her peace. Through the novel's first chapters, Kyungha is surviving a hot humid summer. All she is able to do is shower, shred the drafts of her farewell letters, and lie on the floor imagining snow. She has been brought to this point as a result of her researching and writing about a massacre in a place she names G— (perhaps Gwangju, the site of a massacre in May 1980, which Han Kang addressed in her 2014 novel Human Acts). Kyungha's account of how she is – barely – managing day-to-day life reads like a textbook case of vicarious trauma. She speculates that translating the dream-image into an art work might break its grip. Kyungha approaches Inseon, who has a long record of producing interesting if financially unviable projects. Inseon agrees to collaborate with her on this dream project. But four years go by without them ever managing to synchronise their schedules or begin the work. Then, after some months of silence, a text from Inseon pings into Kyungha's phone. It asks her to come to a Seoul hospital. Inseon is there, being treated for an accident involving an electric saw. She has turned to her old friend to ask Kyungha to travel to Jeju and save her budgie, which will otherwise die of thirst. The novel then enters what can loosely be read as a quest narrative. It is now mid-winter and a wild snowstorm is on the way. Inseon's home is in a village a long way from the airport, and snow is threatening to shut down the roads. Nonetheless, Kyungha agrees to take up the quest. She finds herself in an unfamiliar location with a looming frightening weather event and no practical knowledge about how to reach Inseon's home. As she struggles to reach the destination, she finds herself spiraling like the snow in this winter storm. There is neither precision nor even clarity here: Much as the story leaps back through decades, then feels its way back to now, Kyungha stumbles through a landscape that she cannot map and plunges precipitately off the paths. Snowdrifts obscure the roads and 'snowflakes resembling a flock of tens of thousands of birds appear like a mirage and sweep over the sea.' Scratched, bruised and almost frozen, Kyungha finds herself at Inseon's door, where she is completely isolated: 'When I looked back,' she says, 'the lone path that bore my deep footprints lay in silence.' And there she remains, trapped by the weather, haunted by the stories of those she had interviewed for her book on the G— massacre. Stories of running from bullets, bodies being piled up, hiding for years in forests and caves: all the unendurable things that people nonetheless endured. The second part of the novel begins with a version of the initial dream of the sea and tree trunks that are metaphors of the dead. Kyungha wakes from this dream to find herself in a sort of ontological uncertainty. Inseon has (impossibly) joined her at the cottage. Kyungha can't determine whether this is another dream, or if Inseon has died and is visiting her as a spirit, or if she herself has died is only imagining that she is alive and present. What is not in doubt, though, is the historical record. Kyungha finds that she is not the only person who has been researching state-sanctioned massacres. Inseon has been busy investigating what is known as the April 3rd uprising and the long massacre that followed from 1947 to 1954. This massacre was organized and undertaken by the US military and the new Republic of Korea, based on the flawed notion that the Jeju islanders were communists. It resulted in the deaths of around 30,000 people. Citizens of Jeju awaiting execution, May 1948. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Nietzsche warned that 'if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you'. Han Kang's version of this idea is, as she writes in We Do Not Part, that 'looking squarely at the injury made it all the more excruciating'. Here it is Inseon's nightmares that dominate: This is where her family and people died and where their traces remain. But both women are carriers of nightmare stories. Both stagger under the weight. They have both looked squarely at the excruciating injuries of state-sanctioned murder and they carry the wounds of those histories. This is an issue Han Kang has been tracing through her novels. Her stories engage, one way or another, with the problem of violence. As she writes in Human Acts, she sees the tendency to 'uniform brutality' as something 'imprinted in our genetic code.' But she also notes, in her Nobel Lecture, that we humans 'simultaneously stand opposite such overwhelming violence.' Yes, we do terrible things, but we also do generous and compassionate things. We live simultaneously in the scarred world of human history and in the less-damaged natural world. We Do Not Part portrays massacres and trauma, contrasted with trees and seawater, walks in forests and glorious hymns to snow. It is a novel that depicts a beautiful world, one worth living in, and for. It is a novel that looks, perhaps too squarely, at recent history, while finding consolation in small acts of kindness and community, and in the assurance that, however we understand the phrase, we do not part. Jen Webb is a distinguished professor of creative practice in the Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
New York Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Book Club: Read ‘We Do Not Part,' by Han Kang, With the Book Review
Humanity has a funny relationship with history: We never quite know what to do with it. Let the past be the past, some say. If we don't learn from history, we're doomed to repeat it, others counter. But history doesn't care what we want; it will make its presence known, whether we like it or not. That's certainly the case in the Nobel laureate Han Kang's new book, 'We Do Not Part.' The novel, which was translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, is a pet-sitting quest gone surreal. The story follows Kyungha, a writer and documentarian who is summoned to a hospital in Seoul by her close friend and former collaborator, Inseon. Inseon, it turns out, has sliced off her fingertips while working in her carpentry workshop. She's now stuck in the hospital undergoing a painful treatment that will keep her bedridden for weeks. Worried about her pet parakeet, Ama, who was abandoned at home in the emergency and has most certainly run out of food, Inseon asks Kyungha to travel to her house and care for the bird. The only issue? Inseon's house is hundreds of miles away, on the island of Jeju, and there's a blizzard barreling toward it that will soon cut off access to the area. Despite the perilous trip, Kyungha makes it, but once there, she doesn't just find the bird. She also finds an apparition of Inseon, who has a devastating history to tell. Transforming real life into a haunting dreamscape, 'We Do Not Part' is about grief, tragedy, the weight of the past, and the painful but essential work of remembering, delivered by one of the most electrifying writers working today. (Han's 2016 novel, 'The Vegetarian,' won the International Booker Prize and was recently named one of The New York Times's Best Books of the 21st Century.) In March, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss 'We Do Not Part,' by Han Kang. We'll be chatting about the book on the Book Review podcast that airs on March 28, and we'd love for you to join the conversation. Share your thoughts about the novel in the comments section of this article by March 20, and we may mention your observations in the episode. Here's some related reading to get you started: We can't wait to discuss the book with you. In the meantime, happy reading!
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
We Do Not Part by Han Kang review – a harrowing journey into South Korea's bloody history
When Han Kang published her International Booker-winning The Vegetarian (2015), translated by Deborah Smith, about a South Korean housewife who gives up meat and wants to become a tree, the novel slotted into a wave of English-language fiction about female appetites and male control. But the books that came next were harder to pin down. After Human Acts, about the 1980 massacre of student protesters in Han's native Gwangju, came The White Book, in which a Han-like novelist reflects on the death of her baby sister while musing on wartime Warsaw. Then came 2023's Greek Lessons, riddling to the point of opacity, about a divorced poet's inability to communicate. We Do Not Part, Han's first novel to be translated since winning the Nobel prize for literature last year, has elements of all these books. Stark as well as ethereal, chronologically discontinuous, full of nested narratives – often structured as remembered conversations about remembered conversations – it exhumes historical horror but also swerves into hallucinatory magic realism without breaking the plausibly autofictional frame with which it begins. Our narrator is the Seoul-based author Kyungha, whose life has gone off the rails after publishing a novel that sounds a lot like Human Acts (it's about 'a massacre at G–'). Even watching passersby is traumatic, reminding her of life's fragility ('The flesh, organs, bones, breaths passing before my eyes all held within them the potential to snap, to cease – so easily, and by a single decision'). She can't shake the memory of the survivors she wrote about, putting herself in the place of mothers who sheltered from gunfire with their children in a well. 'In retrospect it baffles me. Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively – brazenly – hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?' This is all happening at an unspecified point in the recent near-present. Kyungha, having previously held down a job to support her family, now doesn't have to – not only because her daughter's no longer a child, but also because of some coyly hinted-at domestic rift in the wake of her breakdown. She's struggling to think of anyone she can name in her will – a symbol of her predicament – when out of the blue comes a text from Inseon, an old colleague from her journalism days. A visual artist living alone on Jeju Island, about 300 miles away, she's now in hospital in Seoul after an accident at her studio, and she needs Kyungha to go and take care of her abandoned pet bird – a request Kyungha accepts, despite the hazardous snowbound trek it entails. Thus does the novel's musing give way to a quixotic rescue mission ('Inseon had told me that to save her I had to get her water within the day. But when does the day end for a bird?'), shifting in tone yet further once Kyungha arrives only to find Inseon – or a vision of her – already there, and ready this time to elaborate on the horror that their previous conversations only circled: the state's mass murder of civilians in Jeju during anti-communist violence in the late 1940s, prior to the Korean war, a bloody history that scarred Inseon's family, not least her late mother, whom she nursed through dementia. The harrowing testimonies she presents Kyungha ultimately constitute We Do Not Part's main business. In contrast to Human Acts, the stories of violence don't come to us via narratorial recreation, exactly; they instead emerge solely from quotation in the form of interviews with the eyewitnesses and relatives whose accounts Kyungha hears from Inseon and then passes to us – a storytelling technique that, while no less a performance on Han's part, gives the impression of being less presumptuous, more ethically scrupulous. When Han won the Nobel, she said she couldn't celebrate amid war in Gaza and Ukraine. John Banville puckishly responded by saying the committee should take back the award, but it would be hard to read We Do Not Part and not think her words heartfelt. Even at its most seemingly inessential – witness the repeated lingering descriptions of snowflakes – the book insists quietly on the necessity to pay attention, to never turn away, to look, to see. As a message, it risks appearing somewhat frictionless, even self-serving, offering reward without cost, but it's worth remembering how this strange and unsettling novel begins: with the nightmare-haunted protagonist, alone. We Do Not Part by Han Kang is published by Hamish Hamilton (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Telegraph
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
An encounter with the phantoms of South Korea's brutal military past
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
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Haunting Fiction of Han Kang
A woman is walking along a cold seaside plain lined with thousands of black tree trunks. Together, the trunks create 'the impression of a thousand men, women, and haggard children huddling in the snow.' Surely, she tells herself, this is a graveyard. If it is, though, what will happen to the bones buried under the trees when the tide comes in? When she wakes up, we learn that this dream is not new to her. In fact, it's among the nightmares that have haunted her for years. Kyungha, the protagonist of Han Kang's novel We Do Not Part, is a writer; in 2012, six years before the book starts, she began a novel that she describes only as 'my book about the massacre in G—.' Her research gave her violent dreams that led her to rush through the project, hoping the nightmares would end on publication. This did not happen, and she also began to suffer from debilitating migraines and suicidal ideation. Nearly everyone in her life, including her family, left her, telling her 'they couldn't bear to witness' her state. Kyungha takes her suffering as punishment for the hubris of telling herself she could move on from her novel. 'Having decided to write about mass killings and torture,' she reflects, 'how could I have so naively—brazenly—hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?' Any reader familiar with Han's work would be tempted, at this early point in the novel, to conclude, wrongly, that Kyungha is a stand-in for her creator. Han is divorced and Kyungha appears to be, too; both have one child; both suffer from migraines; and Kyungha, like Han, wrote a book about a 'massacre in G—' that came out in Korean in 2014. In real life, this novel is Human Acts, an astonishing polyvocal narrative about the Gwangju Uprising, a 1980 student protest against the dictator Chun Doo-hwan, whose military reacted by slaughtering students and other demonstrators. (As I drafted this piece, in early December, South Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law for the first time since the Chun regime ended, reminding many Gwangju survivors of that period.) Han won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2024, and We Do Not Part is her fifth novel to appear in English, rendered with somber yet startling beauty by co-translators e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Within Han's translated body of work, We Do Not Part reads as a companion to Human Acts. While the other three novels are narrower and more domestic in focus, We Do Not Part also takes on a tremendous historical trauma. Its central subject is the suppressed memory of another mass killing, the Jeju Massacre, a yearslong extermination of suspected leftists on the island of Jeju after the Korean Peninsula was partitioned. Around 30,000 people, roughly a tenth of Jeju's population, were murdered. Although the Korean army carried out the executions, South Korea was under U.S. military rule at the time; the United States has never admitted responsibility. We Do Not Part bears witness—or, rather, demands that Kyungha bear witness—to these deaths. In that sense, it is a straightforwardly political novel, but that by no means requires it to be a straightforward one. It certainly isn't a direct investigation of either Han's life or the effect that writing Human Acts had on her. Kyungha may share some biographical details with her creator, but what matters more is her commonality with countless readers: Burdened by what she's learned about her country's historical atrocities, she badly—'resolutely,' as she repeatedly puts it—wants to avoid learning more. She can't. Fate won't let her. We Do Not Part is as supernatural as it is historical. It's a tale of ghosts and omens, of dreams bearing messages, of many linked kinds of haunting. The novel takes Kyungha on a terrifying journey toward knowledge, one that manages to thin the line between life and death while leaving the one between past and present impassably thick. It has as much in common with the Mexican modernist Juan Rulfo's pitch-black masterpiece, Pedro Páramo, an eerie critique of caciquismo set in a town where everyone is dead, as it does with Human Acts. Both books ask the same question of their protagonists and their audience alike: After an atrocity, what does it mean to bear witness—and when do witnesses get to close their eyes?Han Kang was born in Gwangju in 1970. Her family moved to Seoul when she was nine, mere months before the uprising; she didn't learn what had happened in her hometown until she was 12. Her discovery affected her profoundly. Deborah Smith, who translated or co-translated all of Han's novels to appear in English before We Do Not Part, describes Han in the foreword to Human Acts as 'a writer who takes things deeply to heart.' What this means, on the page, is an unremitting emotional intensity and moral rigor. Han does not write with levity. If she allows her reader a rest of any sort, it's through lyricism, description, and dreams such as the black-tree one that appears, like the chorus of a song, throughout We Do Not Part. Still, Han isn't given to writing heroes or paragons. With the exception of some figures in Human Acts, her characters aren't unusually brave. Kyungha certainly isn't. Despite the political conviction that led her to research and write about the massacre in G—, she shied away, throughout the process, from studying any other moments of violence in South Korea, including the Jeju Massacre—though her best friend, a photographer, documentarian, and woodworker named Inseon, is from Jeju and has made a triptych of films about war and memory that includes one in which she describes her own family's trauma during and after the killings (she denies, however, that it's about the massacre more broadly). Kyungha admires the triptych, if somewhat dispassionately. She doesn't quite seem to recognize that it investigates the same question of her novel, one that is central to Han's body of work: As Han wrote in a 2017 New York Times opinion piece, 'I wanted to ask what it is that makes human beings harm others so brutally, and how we ought to understand those who never lose hold of their humanity in the face of violence.' At the beginning of We Do Not Part, Kyungha may be close to losing her humanity, though the only person she wishes to harm is herself. Although she has decided to reenter the 'lived-in world' rather than killing or permanently isolating herself, she has no job, family, or friends to attend to except Inseon, who has moved to rural Jeju and from whom she has drifted significantly. Formerly, their relationship was a mix of sisterhood and creative collaboration: For years, they've discussed making a piece of video art that replicates Kyungha's tree-trunk dream, but Kyungha backs out. Inseon proceeds regardless, and Kyungha refuses to engage, even with the knowledge that she's further harming her friendship with Inseon. Her creativity, it seems, has vanished; she can feel that 'the wiring inside me that would sense beauty was dead or failing.' She's utterly disconnected from her life and surroundings. An awakening of sorts arrives when Inseon texts her from a Seoul hospital where she's recovering from emergency hand surgery. Kyungha sprints to her bedside, and, before the day is out, she's en route to Jeju to feed and care for Inseon's pet bird. She understands that this request will tax her immensely. Just getting to Inseon's house is a colossal challenge. She has a migraine; it's snowing in Jeju; she's not sure how to get to the house; and she's going to stand out immediately as an outsider on the island, which is culturally distinct from the mainland in many ways. Jeju has its own language, Jeju-mal, which is related to but not mutually intelligible with Korean, and which Morris and yaewon occasionally include in their text. Inseon sometimes refers to her parents as umung and abang, not mother and father, a translation decision that lets Anglophone readers feel the distance between Jeju and the mainland that Kyungha feels. Still, she's drawn to Jeju. Despite her supposed inability to register beauty, she narrates her trip through the snow, which involves a plane, a bus, and a walk through the woods, gorgeously. Kyungha's hike to Inseon's house transforms the novel, and Han gives the scene a patient, poetic loveliness that is common in her work, but rare in contemporary literature; it's among the reasons she won the Nobel, but earlier in her international career, it raised some eyebrows. Han's English debut, The Vegetarian (2016), was translated by Deborah Smith, then a Ph.D. candidate unknown in the industry. She got flak—some of which was tinged with sexism toward both her and Han—for the liberties she took in her work, especially in descriptive passages. (Never mind that Han approved the manuscript, or that English and Korean, like any two languages, have varying standards of beauty and strategies for creating it.) Smith translated Han's subsequent novels, Human Acts and The White Book (2019), and co-translated Greek Lessons (2023) with yaewon. All three are quite image-driven, but none as much as We Do Not Part, which is propelled largely by its visual elements: the dream of tree trunks, Inseon's injury, her bird's shadow, the icy woods surrounding her house. As Kyungha trudges through the snow, she looks around her, admiring the sunlight that 'reflected off the lustrous camellia leaves, whose angles shifted from moment to moment. Vines of maple-leaf mountain yam wound around the cryptomeria trunks and climbed them to distant heights, swaying like swing ropes.' Such prose, which continues at length, is a treat, but not only that. Han's abundance of detail adds a layer of ethical failure to her readers' experience: Every moment spent appreciating her imagery is one spent forgetting that Kyungha, stumbling through unfamiliar, frigid woods with a headache that makes it difficult to see, is in real danger of freezing to death. Or maybe she does freeze. Han makes it impossible to tell. Kyungha eventually, miraculously arrives at Inseon's house, where the bird, Ama, is dead in her cage. She sews Ama into a shroud and buries her, but within a handful of pages, Ama is flying around the kitchen, and Inseon, who is—according to ordinary chronology—receiving treatment in Seoul, is somehow brewing tea. Here, We Do Not Part begins to strongly resemble Pedro Páramo, whose narrator has to have his own death explained to him. Kyungha catches on herself: Drinking tea with Inseon, she 'wondered if the tea was spreading through her insides too. If Inseon had come to me as a spirit, that would mean I was alive, and if Inseon was alive, that would mean I was the apparition.' The question of who's the ghost is not what drives We Do Not Part forward. In fact, it hardly matters. Inseon is in Jeju to sit her friend down and demand that she hear and read about the massacre that took place there. Inseon herself, we learn, has had the same experience. She returned to Jeju to care for her mother, ill with Alzheimer's. After her death, Inseon found that she had assembled an archive of reporting and testimonials about the massacre. Inseon dived into the archive, both consuming and adding to it. She (or her ghost) tells Kyungha (or her ghost): I retraced the sequence of events through U.S. Army records that had been declassified and made accessible after fifty years, the press reports of the time, the lists of prisoners from Jeju who had been incarcerated without trial between 1948 and 1949, and witness accounts and images of the … mass killings. At some point, as the materials piled up and began to take on a clearer form, I could feel myself changing. To the point where it seemed nothing one human being did to another could ever shock me again. Inseon's loss of shock is, of course, a loss of humanity. It's one Kyungha hasn't yet undergone. She's horrified, yet compelled, by the stories Inseon relates, which include her relatives' deaths, torture, and incarceration; by the testimonials she reads; and by the news clippings that Inseon's umung carefully saved. One shows a heap of bones unearthed from a pit beneath the tarmac at Jeju Airport. Initially, Kyungha sees the skeletal fragments as 'no longer human,' but she swiftly corrects herself, calling them 'what remained human even now.' What this means, to her, is that the crumbling bones deserve to have their suffering remembered. Justice may be out of reach, but they deserve witness of course, has spent years bearing witness to the bones' past, and one interpretation of We Do Not Part is that when she dies, her ghost travels to Jeju to pass the mantle to Kyungha. But although that may be accurate, it's too simple. By the time Kyungha sees the photographed bones, she's come to see that her tree-trunk nightmare was about Jeju, and that Inseon pursued it as an artistic project not to collaborate with her, but to create a memorial to her island's dead. Understanding this adds a layer to the novel's already-present surrealism: For years, Kyungha has been dreaming her friend's dream. Does this mean Inseon—or, perhaps, Inseon's mother, whom she met in a scene that echoes repeatedly through the story—has been haunting her? Or that history has? At no point do the victims of the Jeju Massacre appear in We Do Not Part as ghosts. What's past, in that sense, is past: They are irretrievably gone. And yet it seems possible, within the logic of the book, that the tree-trunk dream is their way of demanding that Kyungha, who resolutely ignored them while writing her novel about G—, witness what happened to them. Han answers none of these questions. She does, however, complicate them one step further. By the novel's end, Kyungha understands why Inseon rejected the idea that her film about her family was about the Jeju Massacre, and why she never made a documentary addressing the subject more directly. Refusing to engage the subject on camera saves her from engaging it imperfectly. In a film, Kyungha reflects, 'the smell of blood-soaked clothes and flesh rotting together … will be erased. Nightmares will slip through fingers. Excessive violence will be removed. Like what was omitted from the book I wrote four years ago.' Art creates only partial testimony, thinned and altered by the demands and limitations of its medium. Does this mean that creativity is the enemy of history? Or just that, like Kyungha herself, it's an imperfect, fallible friend? Such questions are of urgent importance in the latter half of We Do Not Part. They provide all the story's momentum—and, more crucially, its stakes. At the novel's end, we have one dead character, one living one. Han has already taught us not to care which is which, but now we understand why: If the dead deserve witness, then surely a dead novelist or filmmaker can still be a witness. If Inseon is the ghost, she's demonstrated that many times over. If Kyungha is the apparition, then she still has a responsibility to the dead of Jeju. It's her job—as a novelist; a Korean; a person—to tell their stories. If she does, her humanity will have survived all her trials, even if her body gave in to hypothermia long ago. Han is, as I've suggested, a solemn writer, and you could say this is a dire message with which to imbue a novel. Yet it also has an element of optimism. Depending on the reader and the day, it can be reassuring, exhausting, or both to imagine that humans can continue to carry out our moral obligations even from beyond the grave. It means we can never rest; it also means we can never fail. At the end of Pedro Páramo, the title character, a man so cruel as to be inhuman, is stabbed to death; the book's last line, as translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, is, 'He fell to the ground with a thud, and lay there, collapsed like a pile of rocks.' We Do Not Part, in contrast, ends with Kyungha lighting a match: 'Up leaped a flame. Like a blooming heart. Like a pulsing flower bud. Like the wingbeat of an immeasurably small bird.' All three of these images are vivid signs of life, utterly unlike Rulfo's pile of rocks. With them, Han tells the reader not to give up on the lived-in world. Kyungha hasn't. Whether she's a ghost or not, she knows her new role as witness is giving her another chance at life.
