The Vegetarian

Plot

The Vegetarian tells the story of Yeong-hye, a home-maker who, one day, suddenly decides to stop eating meat after having experienced human brutality in a nightmarish dream. This abstention leads her to excuse herself from a number of common human activities including the essential process of daily food intake, and eventually a radical refusal of human cruelty and destruction. It is told in three parts - "The Vegetarian", "Mongolian Mark", and "Flaming Trees" - narrated respectively by the protagonist's husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister.

"The Vegetarian"

Yeong-hye's husband, Mr. Cheong, considers his wife to be "completely unremarkable in any way". He explains that when he first met her, he was not even attracted to her and that suits him just fine. Mr. Cheong is content meandering through life; it seems as if his only goal is to live a conventional, unremarkable life. He chooses to marry his wife since he thinks she would prove to be a good, dutiful wife who would fit nicely into the kind of lifestyle he seeks. For several years things unfold in the way he imagines but then, Mr. Cheong comes home one day to find his wife throwing all meat products out. He demands an explanation, and Yeong-hye replies that she had a dream. From this point on, things unravel. She later has a meal with her family, during which her father attempts to force her to eat meat. After her intense rejection, she slits her wrists.

"Mongolian Mark"

The husband of Yeong-hye's sister In-hye is an artist, and remains unnamed in the book. He imagines a love-making scene between two individuals, with their bodies decorated by painted flowers. He comes to learn that Yeong-hye has a birthmark shaped like a flower petal – bluish in color – and he then starts imagining her to be the woman of his dreams. His obsession with Yeong-hye not only negatively affects his relationship with his wife's sister but ultimately destroys his marriage. He sleeps with Yeong-hye after convincing her to pose for his video art. His wife discovers the tapes and phones the mental hospital.

"Flaming Trees"

Yeong-hye's elder sister, In-hye, manages a chain of cosmetic stores. She narrates how Yeong-hye's vegetarianism grows to severe levels of madness, in which she starts abstaining from many social norms including the daily intake of food, sex, and other worldly activities. After her father tried to force-feed her and the suicide attempt, Yeong-hye is admitted to a mental hospital, where, despite receiving high-level treatment for mania, she sticks to the belief that being a plant is the best way to both avoid human brutality (by no longer being a human) and avoid causing it (by no longer having to consume meat). At the end, Yeong-hye happily proclaims herself to be no longer an animal. Her sister takes her away from the hospital by train, where she observes the trees as they pass by.

Writing

Kang first got the idea of writing about vegetation or plants when, as a university student, she came across the work of the noted South Korean writer Yi Sang. In particular, she was struck by the quote "I believe that humans should be plants." Kang's lifelong exploration of the themes of violence and humanity are also sampled in the book, which primarily deals with human beings' natural and daily choices in terms of food. Talking to Saraii Siiin for The White Review, she said, "While writing The Vegetarian, I was harboring questions about human violence and the (im)possibility of innocence. On the reverse side of the protagonist Yeong-hye’s extreme attempt to turn her back on violence by casting off her own human body and transforming into a plant lies a deep despair and doubt about humanity." In February 2016, while talking to Bethanne Patrick of Literary Hub, Kang explained, "The idea for the book originally came to me as an image of a woman turning into a plant. I wrote a short story, “The Fruit of My Woman,” in 1997, where a woman literally turns into a plant. After several years (2003 - 2004) I reworked this image in The Vegetarian, in a darker and fiercer way."

In a February 2016 interview with The Guardian, Han Kang said, "As a teenager I suffered typical questions: why pain, why death? I thought that books held the answers, but curiously I realized they contain only questions. Their writers were weak and vulnerable just like we were." Writing the book was a difficult task, she said, with the main cause being her joint problems which started in her mid-30s. She wrote the entire novella in longhand. Kang received help from a video artist and a psychiatric hospital when researching the book. The second part of the book is primarily inspired by Kang's experiences with the aforementioned artist whose body of work was extensively studied.

The Vegetarian was first published in Korean in 2007 in South Korea as Chaeshikjueuija by Changbi Publishers. ASIA Publishers subsequently bought the rights to the book and published the English translation for distribution in South Korea. It also published the English versions of Kang's short story "Convalescence", and her 2016 novel Human Acts.

Publication history

Chaeshikjueuija [The Vegetarian] published by Changbi Publishers in 2007, while the title is Chaeshikjueuija [The Vegetarian] as the first short story of the novel is the title piece of it, contains all the three short stories each of which was published previously in 3 separate South Korean literary magazines, and it is the original script translated into English by Deborah Smith.

Translation

The Vegetarian has been translated into eleven languages since its publication in 2007. Following is a list containing information about the translated works.

English translation

The book was translated from Korean into English by Deborah Smith, a British translator, who has been translating Korean into English since 2010. She is the founder of Tilted Axis Press, a non-profit publishing house focusing on contemporary fiction specifically from Asia. Speaking at the Seoul International Book Fair on 15 June 2016, Smith said that a translator "must be unfaithful to some aspects in order to be faithful to others. I try to stay faithful to the spirit, and faithful to the letter as much as I can, without compromising the spirit." Talking about the process, Kang said, "Deborah usually sends me the file of her translation after she finishes, with notes and questions. And I send it back to her with my answers and notes. It is just like having a chat endlessly. I truly enjoy this process. I am lucky to have met Deborah, a wonderful translator who can render subtlety and delicacy." Smith has said that her first attempt at Korean translation involved "looking up practically every other word in the dictionary". Smith has translated some of Kang's other works, including Human Acts (2016) and The Elegy of Whiteness (2017).

Themes

The novella primarily deals with desire, shame, and empathy reflected by the characters' faltering attempts to understand the people around them. Charles Montgomery, a teacher in the English Interpretation and Translation Division of Dongguk University and the editor of the Korean Literature in Translation website, states that Kang's "description of some evil functions of life" is reminiscent of her previous book, "Convalescence", which is a short story about a group of people each of whom have suffered different kinds of trauma. Montgomery argues that "since it's written from the perspective of multiple narrators it achieves a kind of overall verisimilitude and three-dimensional character".

Contrary to what the title might suggest, the book only briefly touches on the philosophy of vegetarianism and the associated diet. The book subtly stresses the idea of a non-vegetarian person deciding to practice veganism. This showcases the current trend surrounding veganism around the world and especially in the Western world, where it has gone from a niche modus vivendi to a fairly common one.

On 12 February 2016, Han Kang talked to the Literary Hub, where she claimed that The Vegetarian is novel with many layers. She said that "questioning human violence and the (im)possibility of innocence; defining sanity and madness; the (im)possibility of understanding others, body as the last refuge or the last determination" were some of the themes addressed.

Reception

The Vegetarian received mainly positive reviews from critics.

Boyd Tomkin, chairman of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize judging panel, lauded the book for its "disturbing outlook on a subject of vast interest", and Smith's "creative effort for blending beauty and horror". He commented, "This compact, exquisite, and disturbing book will linger long in the minds, and maybe the dreams, of its readers. Deborah Smith's perfectly judged translation matches its uncanny blend of beauty and horror at every turn."

Julia Pascal, writing for The Independent said, "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. Han Kang is well served by Deborah Smith's subtle translation in this disturbing book." Porochista Khakpour, writing for the The New York Times, states that the book is nothing like typical stories about vegetarianism that end with "enlightenment". She compares the work with African-Australian author Ceridwen Dovey's novella Blood Kin, American author Herman Melville's 1853 short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener", Iranian author Sadegh Hedayat's 1937 cult horror story The Blind Owl, and various journals and works of Austrian author Franz Kafka, including A Hunger Artist.

Calling it "an extraordinary story of family fallout", Daniel Hahn of The Guardian wrote, "Sentence by sentence, The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience. Last year’s London Book Fair had Korea as guest of honour, in the hope of tempting English-language publishers to seek out more contemporary Korean novelists, but The Vegetarian will be hard to beat. It is sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colors and disturbing questions." Claire Fallon, writing for The Huffington Post, called it "an elegant tale, in three parts, of a woman whose sudden turn to veganism disrupts her family and exposes the worst human appetites and impulses". Calling it a melancholic tale of something more than vegetarianism, Thrity Umrigar, writing in the Boston Globe, described The Vegetarian as a tale of a woman torn between a stock of her own cautious and conventional life choices and her family members who are not as innocent as they seem to be.

Gabe Habash of Publishers Weekly called it an ingenious, upsetting, and unforgettable novel. He added, "There is much to admire in Han's novel. 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". He compared its parts to Patrick Süskind's Perfume, Herman Koch's The Dinner, and Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life respectively. Eileen Battersby, writing for The Irish Times, said, "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. For all the graphic, often choreographed description, Han Kang has mastered eloquent restraint in a work of savage beauty and unnerving physicality." Laura Miller, writing for Slate, compares the straightforward style of writing with works by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

Honors

In June 2016, Time included the book in its mid-year list of best books of 2016.

Awards

The second part of the novella, "Mongolian Mark", was awarded the Yi Sang Literary Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in South Korea.

2016 Man Booker International Prize

In 2016, the English translation won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction, with the judging panel citing it as "unforgettably powerful and original". The book became the first winner of the prize for which only one work of the author was judged, as compared to previous prizes which were awarded for collective works by an author. The novel beat The Story of the Lost Child by the Italian writer Elena Ferrante and A Strangeness in My Mind by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, both of which were considered as frontrunners.

The prize money of GB£50,000 was shared by Han and Smith. The prize catapulted the book's international sales, as a further 462,000 copies were ordered and printed by Changbi Publishers to assuage the demand. Commenting on the sales, Kang said, "I am overwhelmed. I had thought the previous 20,000 copies sold was good enough. I feel that Korean literature is starting to become a trend, now is just the beginning."

Adaptations

In 2009, The Vegetarian was adapted into a drama film with the same name by arthouse director Lim Woo-Seong with Chae Min-seo as Young-hye. It was Woo-seong's debut film, and also stars Kim Young-jae, Kim Yeo-jin, and Park Sang-yeon. It was produced by Blue Tree Pictures and Rudolf Film in association with Sponge Entertainment.