This was Mat Steeples’s choice for October’s Trafalgar Street Book Club (TSBC). Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the book itself won the International Booker Prize and a number of other literary awards. Suffice it to say, it had a lot to live up to. I suppose it’s great for sales when a book gets this kind of attention, but it also inevitably means that one approaches it with sky-high expectations. Han Kang is one of Korea’s leading novelists, but I had not heard of her before Mat chose her book. It’s not surprising since I’m barely aware of the current literary scene and pay no attention to fiction book awards. It is fair to say that I would have been unlikely to read it if it hadn’t been for the TSBC, but I guess that’s the joy of a book club: to be taken out of one’s rut and exposed to new things. I ordered my copy from Amazon. It’s a thin paperback of 183 pages, well under the TSBC maximum of 300, with a very dull monochrome cover. I guess you don’t need to be gaudy when you’ve won the Nobel Prize. I read it over four days.

It tells the tale of a young housewife, Yeong-hye, who suffers from a kind of psychosis. She becomes a vegetarian after she has nightmares and intrusive hallucinations about rooms full of raw meat. The book cleverly tells her story from the point of view of her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister, who have a chapter each. The husband’s story is told in the first person, but the other two switch to a third-person narrative. Yeong-hye only gets her own voice for a couple of short paragraphs where her dreams are related, but the rest of the time she is merely the subject of others’ observation. It’s a very clever literary device, and emphasises her isolation, and the lack of empathy that the two men show her. We feel complicit as readers, since we can only observe her. Her husband is a one-dimensional male chauvinist, who thinks of her more as a domestic appliance than a person. He finds her change to vegetarianism inconvenient and perplexing, and her symptoms of mental illness, obvious to the reader, simply infuriating. At one point he rapes her when she refuses his sexual advances. Finally he takes her for a meeting with her family, as if he’s returning a faulty toaster. The family are similarly unsympathetic, especially her father who tries to force-feed her meat. In the struggle she attempts to commit suicide by slicing her wrist and is only saved by the quick action of her brother-in-law.

The second chapter, narrated from the point of view of the brother-in-law, finds her a year later, after a spell in hospital, recently settled in her own apartment. The brother-in-law is a video artist, struggling with creative inspiration, when he learns through his wife that Yeong-hye has a “Mongolian mark”, a birthmark on her buttock very common in East Asian children, but which normally fades in early childhood. He becomes sexually and artistically obsessed with her and persuades her to star in a pornographic art movie. Initially he asks a friend of his to play the male role, but when the man gets cold feet, he takes the part. He paints her naked body with flowers and gets a friend of his to paint his own body before they have sex. She is a willing participant, and even says that the flower paintings have stopped her bad dreams. They are discovered together in bed the next morning by Yeong-hye’s sister, the man’s wife. She is obviously shocked and has Yeong-hye re-committed to a psychiatric hospital.

The final chapter is told from the sister’s point of view. She is at last somewhat sympathetic to Yeong-hye. We travel with her, another year later, to visit her sister in hospital. During the journey she meditates on her own life with all its struggles and disappointments. How she had tried to be a good wife and mother, but had been ignored and then cheated on by her distracted husband. After she discovered them together, he ran away, leaving her to single-handedly care for their young son. She herself now suffers from constant insomnia and depression and worries that she might be going down the same path as Yeong-hye. She reflects on their childhood and how they’d been terrified of their tyrannical father. At the hospital Yeong-hye has been refusing to eat, insisting that she is a tree and can get all her nutrients from the soil. In the final scene the sister watches as she is brutally force-fed by the hospital staff.

As a story it’s quite a grim read. There’s little to like about any of the characters. Yeong-hye, while described in much of the commentary on the book as looking for her own identity and an escape from her oppressive life, actually appears to be suffering from severe mental illness. The male characters have no redeeming characteristics, and the husband is especially one-dimensional. People like that undoubtedly exist, but I wonder if the book wouldn’t have been more effective if he’d been a more rounded character. I suppose it’s best read as a kind of Orwellian allegory, with the characters representing the extremes of Korean culture. I’ve read before about the contrast between Western, Christian, “guilt” cultures, and Eastern, “shame” cultures. The contrast is well represented here, with the husband mostly concerned about how Yeong-hye’s unusual behaviour will reflect badly on him. When he asks for support from her family, they express the same concerns: Yeong-hye is bringing shame on them by being a bad wife. If the men’s behaviour in the book is a reflection of general male attitudes in South Korea, it’s hardly surprising that its birth rate is so low. What woman would willingly sign up for that kind of treatment? It’s interesting that in many ways South Korea is one of the outstanding success stories of the past 75 years. After the Korean War it was one of the poorest countries in the world, but is now a wealthy, developed country with one of the world’s most impressive economies. Are the cultural dislocations a symptom of the breakneck speed of change they’ve experienced over just a few generations? So yes, a grim read, but a very thought-provoking one.