Noticing Nature Everywhere
The Vegetarian
Han Kang Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith
Reviewed by Stuart Reigeluth
The 2024 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the 2016 winner of the Man Booker International Prize for her three-part novel called The Vegetarian, Han Kang is not a nature writer, but the way in which she envelops her characters in snippets from the surrounding environment is exquisite and enhances both her uncertain characters and the resilience of nature.
Reminiscent of the sensitivity found in Yasunari Kawabata when referring to the interjections of nature into the narrative, there is also a very visceral style to Han Kang that leaves her stories grounded and imprinted in your mind. Some of them are fleeting moments that are captured by the movement of the wind such as when the branches of the gingko trees are about to be rained upon at the beginning of Human Acts or a childhood memory of:
“Riding my bike beside the river, racing along with the wind strong in my face, parting it before me like a ship’s prow slicing through water. My white summer shirt flapping like a bird’s wing […] How I whooped with elation […].” (Human Acts, p.60)
Then she is back on a bicycle again, passing beneath “naked willow trees, exposing their delicate black skeletons, lining the riverbanks in groups” and “You were alive. Vividly alive, you were cutting through that sweltering air […] You felt the kind of joy that would make you scream like crazy for no reason.” (Convalescence, p.51) and she will close the curtains at her mother’s place “so as not to see the snow slowly descending in the alley like wings spread wide.” (Convalescence, p.61.)
The foreboding of the irrevocable end juxtaposed with the untamed release of life energy. And the unforgettable passage of the childhood bike-ride in which the second-person narrator goes by that bridge:
“… where you used to shelter from the rain. You see wild geese […] You see a red-crested white crane that has grown bigger since last summer. It has scarlet feet invisible now, under the water. After pedaling some more, you see an old gray heron standing still in the middle of the water and staring into the distance.” (Convalescence, p.55)
She used to stop and watch the birds, but now she doesn’t. She is in pain and wants to end that suffering. This is the leitmotif throughout Han Kang’s work: struggling with our suffering on a daily basis, without finding an agreeable solution or the real cause, just enduring the pain and finding solace in the flexibility and fortitude of nature that surrounds us all, if you choose to notice.
In The White Book, the white crane returns like an omen, not of death to come, or of life before, but rather as a snapshot of existence, of a friend now:
“A crane by the water’s edge, one Seoul summer’s day. Entirely white save for its bright-red feet. The bird was picking his way out of the water and up onto a smooth, broad rock. Was he aware of her gaze? Perhaps. And also that she meant him no harm? Hence his impassive expression as he faced the opposite bank, letting the sun’s rays dry his red feet.” (p.81)
What a wonderful recurrent image of the white crane and its (in)visible red feet underwater. Similar, but much softer, to the powerful passage in part three ‘Flaming Trees’ of The Vegetarian when the intensity of In-hye’s emotions causes her to see “in the waning afternoon light, the rain on the leaves glitters intensely, kindling a green fire.” (p.181) These ‘green flames’ and ‘green fireworks’ recur as the end approaches for her sister Yeong-hye:
“The innumerable trees she’s seen over the course of all her life, the undulating forests that blanket the continents like a heartless sea, envelop her exhausted body and lift her up. Only fragments of cities, small towns and roads are visible, floating on the roof of the forest like islands or bridges, slowly being swept away somewhere, borne on those warm waves.” (p.172)
Yeong-hye who chose one day to never eat meat again, who is ostracised by her family thereafter, who found beauty in trees and flowers, and having flowers painted all over her body, of doing headstands in the asylum claiming to be a tree extending into roots from her fingers into the ground, with leaves growing from her arms and legs, and with flowers blooming from her crotch. When she was nine-years old and got lost in nature with her sister, Yeong-hye wanted to remain in the mountains but In-hye was older and said they needed to get back because it was getting dark.
Han Kang addresses big themes, and her strength is in letting the reactions of other characters (and hence the reader) tell the story and create the emotions. In The Vegetarian, she does not make a case for or against eating meat; she simply shows how a person’s decision and actions can affect others who have been conditioned by society to see things in a certain way. It’s overwhelming to see the gap between perceptions and actions, and powerful to ask oneself: why do we eat animals, really?
