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.In a section of his 2008 book The Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell describes some horrific plane crashes that Korean Airlines sustained, and in trying to explain why that company had the worst safety record of any airline through the 1980s and '90s, Gladwell shared a fascinating conclusion: the power structure within Korean society is so rigid that junior officers were incapable of warning their superiors of fatal errors; even as they knew their plane was heading for a mountain or running out of fuel, they would rather die than correct someone of higher social standing. It is within this same society that Korean author Han Kang's The Vegetarian is set, and as we watch a young woman, “unremarkable in every way”, defy her family and society by giving up meat, this powerful short novel – filled as it is with disturbing and hallucinatory scenes of abuse and gore – feels like a peek into the collective Korean subconscious; sometimes, choosing to die is the only power a person can exercise. Little wonder this book won the Man Booker International Prize for 2016. This will be spoilerful.
As far as I was concerned, the only reasonable grounds for altering one's eating habits were the desire to lose weight, an attempt to alleviate certain physical ailments, being possessed by an evil spirit, or having your sleep disturbed by indigestion. In any other case, it was sheer obstinacy for a wife to go against her husband's wishes as mine had done.The Vegetarian is told in three sixty-page sections. The first is told from the point-of-view of Mr. Cheong – a young businessman who often works until midnight or later – and this section has a matter-of-fact tone as he unemotionally reports his wife's descent into strange behaviour. As he eats most of his meals at the office, having no meat in his house isn't the worst part of his wife's dietary change, but her willfulness provokes him to abuse and forces him to seek the intervention of her family. When Yeong-hye's father slaps her and tries to force meat into her mouth, she slices her wrists with a fruit knife and is committed to a psych ward for the first time. Mr. Cheong exits the picture.
The birthmark was thumb-sized, imprinted on the upper left buttock. How could such a thing still be there after all these years? It didn't make any sense. Its pale blue-green resembled that of a faint bruise, but it was clearly a Mongolian mark. It called to mind something ancient, something pre-evolutionary, or else perhaps a mark of photosynthesis, and he realized to his surprise that there was nothing at all sexual about it; it was more vegetal than sexual.The second section is from the point-of-view of Yeong-hye's brother-in-law; a digital artist who, after years of no inspiration, becomes obsessed with the mental image of Yeong-hye's Mongolian mark that had persisted into adulthood; a rare circumstance his wife had mentioned in passing. As a woman living alone and recently released from psychiatric care, the artist's request to paint and film her naked body (alone and with partners) stretches the concept of consent, but as the flowers that he colours onto her body seems to help Yeong-hye to deal with the terrible dreams that had led her to give up meat in the first place, it doesn't quite seem like abuse; but it doesn't quite seem right, either. This section contains fantasy sequences and the tone is energetic and urgent. When Yeong-hye's sister discovers what her husband has been up to, he moves to throw himself off a balcony, and although this suicide attempt is unsuccessful, the unnamed artist exits the picture.
If her husband and Yeong-hye hadn't smashed through all the boundaries, if everything hadn't splintered apart, then perhaps she was the one who would have broken down, and if she'd let that happen, if she'd let go of the thread, she might never have found it again. In that case, would the blood that Yeong-hye had vomited today have burst from her, In-hye's, chest instead?The third section follows Yeong-hye's sister, In-hye, as she visits her in yet another mental asylum. By this point, Yeong-hye has not only given up meat, but as she has become convinced that she is a tree (“I'm not an animal anymore, sister”), Yeong-hye insists that all she requires is sunlight and water. Considering that Yeong-hye had been abandoned by her husband and parents, as In-hye watches her sister violently struggle against the doctors who would forcefeed and sedate her, it becomes impossible for her not to recognise that, ultimately, even if there is mental illness involved, choosing what to eat and choosing when to die are the only real choices allowed to each of us. This section is told from an omniscient third-person POV and that serves to present an impartial overview of these final events.
But all that is just the plot. I was intrigued by the glimpse into everyday Korean life – the long work hours, the varieties of bowing, the social etiquette involved at meals – and I wish I knew better the reasons for the ways in which characters were labelled: from the unnamed artist who referred to his colleagues only as “J” and “P”, to Yeong-hye's husband being called “Mr. Cheong” by his inlaws, to In-hye introducing herself repeatedly as her son, Ji-woo's, mother; these were interesting details for me that seemed to highlight how unimportant individuality is in this world. I enjoyed the shifting points-of-view and how they briefly overlapped each other, serving to refocus the action through another character's lens. It was fascinating to me that, in a book that seemed to be about self-control and self-determination, the only time we know what is going on in the title character's mind is when she shares her dreams (with the reader, not her family); each instance every bit as disturbing as images from the creepiest of Asian horror movies:
Dark woods. No people. The sharp-pointed leaves on the tree, my torn feet. This place, almost remembered, but I'm lost now. Frightened. Cold. Across the frozen ravine, a red barn-like building. Straw matting flapping limp across the door. Roll it up and I'm inside, it's inside. A long bamboo stick strung with great blood-red gashes of meat, blood still dripping down. Try to push past but the meat, there's no end to the meat, and no exit. Blood in my mouth, blood-soaked clothes sucked onto my skin.So much of what happens in The Vegetarian is surreal and subliminal – from Yeong-hye's gory dreams, to In-hye's frequent nightmares of having blood dripping from her eye, to her husband's fantasy of having sex with Yeong-hye that ends with sap covering his body – and it would seem that within this strictly controlled society, Yeong-hye's biggest mistake was to share her dream and act on it. This book worked for me on every level but I can totally see why it wouldn't be for every reader.
Her skin was pale green. Her body lay prone in front of him, like a leaf that had just fallen from the branch, only barely begun to wither. The Mongolian mark was gone; instead, her whole body was covered evenly with that pale wash of green.
He turned her over onto her back. A dazzling light came from her naked body, making him squint, and he couldn't see the area over her breasts -- as though the source of the light was somewhere around her face. He spread her legs; her thighs parted with an ease that could only mean she was awake. A green sap, like that which oozes from bruised leaves, began to flow out from her vagina when he entered her. The acrid sweetness of the grass was so pungent he found it difficult to breathe. When he pulled out, on the point of climax, he saw that the whole of his penis was stained green. A blackish paste was smeared over his skin from his lower stomach to his thighs, a fresh sap which could have come from either her or him.Intriguing and disturbing, the artist's sex fantasy is Kafkaesque in its forecast of Yeong-hye's transformation from animal to plant. How weird is that scene?