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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
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Han Kang's most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter of Korean history.
One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama.
A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon's house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend's house.
Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering,it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.
1
Crystals
A sparse snow was falling. I stood on flat land that edged up a low hill. Along the brow of this hill and down its visible face to the seam of the plain, thousands of black tree trunks jutted from the earth. They varied in height, like a crowd of people ranging in age, and were about as thick as railway sleepers, though nowhere near as straight. Stooped and listing, they gave the impression of a thousand men, women, and haggard children huddling in the snow.
Was this a graveyard? I wondered. Are these gravestones?
I walked past the torsos—treetops lopped off, exposed cross sections stippled with snowflakes that resembled salt crystals; I passed the prostrating barrows behind them. My feet stilled as I noticed the sensation of water underfoot. That's strange, I thought. Within moments the water was up to my ankles. I looked back. What I saw astonished me: the far horizon turned out to be the shoreline. And the sea was crashing in.
The words tumbled from my lips: Who would bury people in such a place?
The current was strong. Had the tide surged in and out like this each day? Were the lower mounds hollowed out, the bones long since swept away?
There was no time. The graves already underwater were out of reach, but the remains higher up the slope, I needed to move them to safety. Now, before the sea encroached further. But how? There was no one around. I had no shovel. How would I get to them all? At a loss, I ran through the thicket of black trees, knees cleaving the rising water.
When I opened my eyes, the day had yet to break. The snowy field, the black torsos, the flood tide were gone; the only thing that met my stare was the window of my darkened room. I shut my eyes. Another dream about G—, it had to be. At this thought, I covered my lids with the cold palm of my hand and lay there unmoving.
The dream had come to me in the summer of 2014, a couple of months after the publication of my book about the massacre in G—. Over the next four years, it had never occurred to me to question the dream's connection to that city. But this summer I began to wonder if there might be something more to it. If my quick, intuitive conclusion had either been in error or an oversimplification.
The sweltering night heat hadn't let up for three weeks. Once again, I was lying under the broken air conditioner in my sitting room, hoping for sleep. I'd already taken several cold showers, but though I lay on the bare floor, my sweat-drenched body wouldn't cool. Finally, around five in the morning, the temperature began to drop. It was to be a brief grace, as the sun would be up in another half hour. But I felt I might sleep at last, and had in fact nearly drifted off, when the plain rolled in beneath my closed lids: snow scattering over rows of black timber; glimmering snowflakes studding the severed torsos like salt; all of it before my eyes, as vivid as day.
I don't know what set it off, the shaking. My body seemed to be racked by sobs, though my eyes remained dry. Was this terror? Or anxiety, agitation, perhaps an abrupt anguish? No, it was a bone-chilling awareness. That a giant, invisible knife—the weight of its heavy blade beyond any human capacity to wield it—hung in the air, with me as its target. As I lay pinned and staring.
The black-blue sea billowing in to dredge the bones away from beneath the mounds—it occurred to me for the first time that this might not be an allusion to the massacred people and the decades that followed. It could simply be a personal omen. Yes, perhaps that landscape of flooded graves and silent headstones was an intimation brought forward in time, a sign of what remained of my life to come.
This very moment, in other words.
In the four years between the first time I had the dream and that early summer morning, I had parted ways with several people in my life. Some of these partings had been by choice, while others had caught me entirely unawares; I'd fought the latter with everything I ...
Excerpted from We Do Not Part by Han Kang. Copyright © 2025 by Han Kang. Excerpted by permission of Hogarth Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
We Do Not Part, originally published in 2021 and now available in an English translation by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, is the 11th novel of Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. It illuminates a dark time in Korean history while following the friendship between two women. The story, told in three parts, opens with our main character, Kyungha. Recurring dreams have been haunting her for years, having started after she began research for a book about a massacre in a city she refers to as "G–" and continued even after the book's publication: "Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively – brazenly – hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?" These dreams have seeped so deeply into Kyungha's life, despite her futile efforts to compartmentalize them, that they have resulted in her losing the people close to her, including her daughter. "I had parted ways with several people in my life," she says. "Some of these partings had been by choice, while others had caught me entirely unawares; I'd fought the latter with everything I had."
Spending her days alone in an apartment just outside of Seoul, Kyungha is agonized by a cycle of migraines, stomach spasms, and caffeine-rich painkillers. Failing to fight off despair, she works on writing her will, which she also refers to as her farewell letter: "I continued in the manner that those who left me had said they couldn't bear to witness." Out of the blue, she receives a text message from her friend Inseon, asking to meet her urgently. She complies, and learns Inseon has sawed off her fingers in a woodworking accident. Inseon asks Kyungha to look after her pet bird as she recovers in the hospital, before it dies of starvation and dehydration.
Kyungha agrees to care for the bird, Ama. However, Inseon's home is located miles from the nearest bus stop, and a harrowing and suspenseful journey in a blizzard awaits Kyungha, followed by a jumbling of reality and dream, past and present. The novel explores the treasure of friendship and love, and uncovers the distressing and haunting truth of the Jeju massacre (see Beyond the Book), showcasing the importance of memory in the process.
We Do Not Part impressed me with its accessibility. Within the first chapter, I felt fitted into the story alongside Kyungha and immersed in her life. Kang's strength lies in her ability to create vivid imagery that makes the characters seem real, and the stakes are set high through Kyungha's physical experiences: suffering from her body drenched in sweat due to sweltering heat or her jaw chattering from bone-chilling cold. Snow could be seen as the third character in the story with its prominence throughout — from its lightness and beauty to its connection to death: "That day, she came to understand something clearly. That when people died, their bodies went cold. Snow remained on their cheeks, and a thin layer of bloody ice set over their faces."
The prose is a blend of poetic and straightforward, offering appeal to a wide range of readers, but what keeps the story moving forward is the unmasking of realities behind the Jeju uprising. The first part primarily focuses on Kyungha's travels, while the second dives deep into the massacre, and the third attempts to provide some closure as we reckon with what we've learned. Kang doesn't shy away from the painful details of history but still creates a tone that doesn't feel too depressing. This is a story that teems with hope and resilience while uncovering a nation's painful past and profound loss, showing how people find ways to survive and live with tragedies.
Kang's writing takes on a hallucinatory effect as we question whether we can believe or trust what Kyungha is experiencing, from the opening chapter to her arrival at Inseon's home: "When someone who hasn't slept soundly in a while, who is stumbling through a period of nightmares blurring with reality, chances across a scene that defies belief, they may well initially doubt themselves. Am I actually seeing this? Surely this must be part of my nightmare? And: How much can I trust my own senses?" This creates ambiguity that might result in feelings of disconnection for some. It didn't dampen my reading experience, as I was invested in learning about Kyungha and Inseon's friendship, and the history of Jeju, where Inseon was born. Details of the massacre are gradually uncovered through fictional news clippings, memories passed down from Inseon's mother, and descriptions of items found among family belongings. The storytelling should be effective for readers open to living with slow pacing and some confusion.
Kang delivers a narrative that immerses us in Korea's history, filled with pain, trauma, secrets, sacrifice, love, and resilience. We eventually learn that Inseon's accident happened while she was working on a project Kyungha had asked for her help with, called We Do Not Part. It was an attempt to recreate the imagery in Kyungha's dreams: "the white snow over the plain, the seawater pushing in through the black trees." The project and its appearance in the book's title reflect the connection between Inseon and Kyungha, between Inseon and her mother, between a person and their history. Even as time goes by, and distance and complications are put between family, friends, community, and the past, we do not part from each other, and where we have come from — what bonds us is too strong.
Reviewed by Letitia Asare
Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Trust
Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic and The Seventh Veil of Salome
Han Kang's latest novel, We Do Not Part, delves into a dark part of Korean history known as the Jeju uprising, the Jeju massacre, or (in Korea) "Jeju 4.3," for the day it began. Jeju, Korea's largest island, located southwest of the Korean peninsula, is sometimes today called "the Hawaii of Asia." In the introduction to a recent article about Jeju by the author Gary Shteyngart, Condé Nast Traveler referred to it as "the world's most eccentric island paradise." However, only 75 years ago, it was the location of horrific and devastating political violence, when 10% of the native Jeju population was killed and many more displaced.
At the close of World War II, the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945) was ended by Allied forces, and the peninsula split between the United States and the Soviets. Many Koreans were determined to create an independent and united nation, and in Jeju, there was strong opposition to a divided Korea. What followed was a period of political upheaval as the US sought to counter Soviet and communist influence on the island. By 1946, the Jeju Island People's Committee (who were in favor of independence and a unified Korea) and similar groups were being intensely targeted by Jeju's police, which the US continued to invest in as right-wing paramilitary forces also grew.
A catalyst for the April 3rd incident was the police shooting of six people at the March 1st Movement anniversary rally in 1947. (The March 1st Movement began in 1919 and sparked Korean resistance to Japanese colonial rule. It resulted in a series of demonstrations for Korean national independence from Japan in the capital city of Seoul, which spread throughout Korea, and is still celebrated annually.) Authorities cracked down on resulting strikes and protests, leading to a mass rebellion on April 3rd of the following year that was met with widespread civilian massacres, and violence carrying on into the Korean War.
The southern part of the Korean Peninsula was under American military rule from September 1945 to August 1948, so many consider the US responsible for the massacre, and public efforts have been made to push the American government to apologize and acknowledge its role publicly.
For decades, the subject of the Jeju uprising was repressed in South Korea (by US-backed governments), and authors were arrested for publishing literary work with the incident as a theme. As is portrayed in We Do Not Part, many victims' families struggled to get any media representation for their loved ones. "They reported on how the victims' families were visiting the mine for the first time, ten years later, Inseon explained. The families took this picture at the time, but no outlet would print it, so they held on to a copy, hoping they would one day get it published."
Even after all these years, there are still many unanswered questions about the whereabouts of thousands of people who went missing during this time. We Do Not Part honors the true sentiments surrounding the harsh reality of the massacre: that many have still not found the remains of their loved ones. "In three years, around four hundred sets of remains were recovered before they halted the exhumations in 2009. Meaning more than three thousand people's remains are still down there."
It is a horrific part of history that shouldn't be forgotten, which is why stories like We Do Not Part are worthwhile and valuable, as they introduce readers across the world to what has happened in the past, in hopes of a better future and so the lives lost will not be forgotten.
Filed under People, Eras & Events
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