NOT SOUL FOOD FOR THIS VEGETARIAN

This week I picked one of the most celebrated books by the first South Korean literature Nobel laureate, Han Kang, and I'm left wondering what I'm missing. Why didn't I find The Vegetarian satisfying?

The Vegetarian by Han Kang. Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith. Published by Hogarth in 2015. (Originally published in 2007)

Born in South Korea, Han Kang wrote The Vegetarian in 2007. Following its translation by Deborah Smith and the book’s publication in English, Kang won the Man Booker Prize for the work in 2016. Just two weeks ago, on October 11, the Nobel committee named Han Kang this year’s laureate for literature.

When I finished reading Kang’s celebrated book, I wasn’t sure exactly how I felt about it. The Vegetarian is a tale about a middle aged Korean woman who takes her sudden decision to become a vegetarian to the extreme. We hear her story in three parts told through three different voices each of which Kang wrote as a novella. The opening page puts us in the head of her husband.

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.

This opener sucked me into the story in a second and it wouldn’t let me go until the last page which closes as follows, powerful in its implications while leaving room for interpretation by the reader.

Quietly, she breathes in. The trees by the side of the road are blazing, green fire undulating like the rippling flanks of a massive animal, wild and savage. In-hye stares fiercely at the trees. As if waiting for an answer. As if protesting against something. The look in her eyes is dark and insistent.

The Vegetarian narrates the story of the woman called Yeong-hye as understood through the eyes of three members of her family: her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister In-hye. A few years into their marriage, Yeong-hye, seemingly from out of the blue, tells her husband she can no longer bear to eat meat. She says she has had a dream. Accordingly, one morning, he finds her in front of the fridge one morning, catatonic and withdrawn.

Around her, the kitchen floor was covered with plastic bags and airtight containers, scattered all over so that there was nowhere I could put my feet without treading on them. Beef for shabu-shabu, belly pork, two sides of black beef shin, some squid in a vacuum-packed bag, sliced eel that my mother-in-law had sent us from the countryside ages ago, dried croacker tied with yellow string, unopened packs of frozen dumplings and endless bundles of unidentified stuff dragged from the depths of the fridge.

As Yeong-hye shuns meat, eggs, and dairy, her husband’s life descends steadily into hell. Their meeting with her family is also disastrous, with Yeong-hye’s militaristic father force-feeding her meat at the dinner table. Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat embarrasses her husband and her father and humiliates her mother who has taken extraordinary trouble to whip up a meal. It’s an unforgettably ugly scene, one in which it becomes obvious that conformity does not matter to her anymore.

In a family reunion that also turns bloody and hellish, we watch how one person’s decision to not conform to the norms of a society invariably spirals into private unhappiness and public tragedy. In Korean society, social conformity and filial piety are regarded as one of the most important social virtues.

The extreme descent into the lack of conformity is described in the second section that we experience in the voice of Yeong-hye’s brother in law, Im-hye’s husband. He’s a struggling artist who begins to see meaning in Yeong-hye’s decision to lead her life thus, to be who she wants to be. In fact, the artist recognizes himself in her struggles. The depravity let loose at that point is a suggestion of the extreme manifestation of exiting the boundaries drawn by society. The eroticism of this second section is altogether fascinating and repulsive. The artist wants to use his rebellious sister-in-law in his art work.

“It’ll be a video work, similar to my other ones. And it won’t take long. You just have to….take your clothes off.” Now that he’d finally come out and said it he felt suddenly bold, and was sure that his hands, which had already stopped sweating, would also become steadier. His forehead felt cooler too. “You’ll take your clothes off, and I’ll paint your body.” Her eyes, calm as ever, still gazed across at his.

“You’ll paint on me?”

“That’s right. You’ll keep the paint on until the filming is over.”

“Paint…on my body?”

“I’m going to paint flowers.” Her eyes seemed to flicker. Perhaps he’d made a mistake. “It won’t be difficult. An hour, maybe two—that’s all I’ll need. Whenever’s convenient for you.”

As the story closes, everyone, except her sister, has been alienated by Yeong-hye’s behavior. Every relationship that was sacrosanct has come undone. Yeong-hye is clearly a misfit in the world of human beings and the only place for such a person is to be incarcerated somewhere far beyond the ramparts of human civilization where no one may see them or visit them.

No one visits her, except In-hye who cannot bear to not do so even though she has been betrayed by her husband and her sister. The day she visits Yeong-hye at the psychiatric hospital, she discovers her sister standing upside down in the far end of the western corridor. The sight of this is as unsettling as it’s illuminating to an older sister who has always endured and conformed to the patriarchal expectations of her father, her brother, her husband, her family and her society. In-hye realizes, all of a sudden, that Yeong-hye has no fetters at all anymore and that, she, In-hye, is the one in a cage, after all.

“Look, sister, I’m doing a handstand, leaves are growing out of my body, roots are sprouting out of my hands…they delve down into the earth. Endlessly, endlessly…yes, I spread my legs because I wanted flowers to bloom from my crotch, 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.”

Hank Kang’s writing is brilliant, of course, and it strikes a delicate balance between tautness and lyricism. I have a weakness for the loopy, endless sentences often seen in the greatest Latin American writing but I’m equally intrigued by the rapier-hewn lines that seem to be the hallmark of Korean and Japanese literature.

If the measure of a book’s success is in its skill in hypnosis, The Vegetarian is certainly a winner. If the heft of a book is gauged by its meaning and philosophical underpinnings, I’m not sure I’m sufficiently moved even though I’ve now read the many glowing tributes to this and Han Kang’s body of work. All I will say is that I’m still processing the light from this gripping tale.