We Do Not Part. By Han Kang. Translated by e. yaewon and Paige Morris. Hogarth; 272 pages; $28. Hamish Hamilton; £18.99
MOST VISITORS to Jeju island arrive by plane. The sea foams as you descend onto the runway, close to the black basalt coast. More than 13m people come to this island, south of South Korea’s mainland, every year; many will not be aware of what lies beneath the tarmac. Between 2007 and 2009 investigators dug up part of the airport and uncovered the bodies of hundreds of people massacred there by government forces some 60 years earlier.
“We Do Not Part”, Han Kang’s latest novel, probes the killings that took place on Jeju in 1947-54. The author has made the violence humans inflict on each other a theme of her books, including “The Vegetarian”, which won the International Booker prize in 2016, and “Human Acts”, about the killing of student protesters in 1980 in her hometown of Gwangju. In October Ms Han became the first South Korean author to win the Nobel prize in literature: the committee praised her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.
The story in “We Do Not Part” revolves around the friendship between two women. One, Inseon, is a lapsed documentary film-maker. She moves to Jeju to look after her ageing mother, who survived the slaughter. The other, Kyungha, a writer in Seoul, suffers from migraines and haunting dreams after writing a book about “the massacre in G—”. (Ms Han has also long suffered from debilitating migraines.)
Inseon summons Kyungha to a hospital where doctors are trying to reattach the tips of her fingers, which she sliced off while trying to bring one of Kyungha’s dreams to life on film. She asks Kyungha to travel to her village in the mountains of Jeju to feed her pet bird before it starves. Kyungha lands on the island in a blizzard. Her harrowing journey to the house becomes a surreal voyage through the island’s tragic past.
Following the end of the second world war and Japanese imperial rule, the Korean peninsula was cut in half. On April 3rd 1948 a group of leftist rebels on Jeju staged an uprising to protest against the division. That autumn Rhee Syng-man, the first leader of South Korea, unleashed a brutal crackdown; American advisers lent tacit approval, if not outright support, to what their own reports later described as “an indiscriminate reign of terror”. Hundreds of villages were burned down; as many as 30,000 residents were killed, some 10% of the island’s population at the time.
Jeju was a portent for how the division of the Korean peninsula would fuel division within South Korea itself, and for the fraught nature of South Korea’s relationship with America. But South Korea’s rulers suppressed any mention of the killings for decades. Sustained public discussion became possible only when the country democratised in the late 1980s; it took until the 21st century for a complete official inquiry to be conducted. The memory of state-sanctioned violence is one reason why South Koreans responded fiercely when Yoon Suk Yeol, the president, attempted to impose martial law last December; he was impeached and is currently on trial at the constitutional court.
What happened on Jeju remains largely unknown beyond east Asia: the events are a forgotten horror from the periphery of the cold war. Literature has played an important role in raising awareness. One of the first accounts came in “Death of a Crow”, a novel published in Japanese in 1957 by Kim Sok-pom, a Korean writer whose parents were from Jeju. “Sun-i Samch’on” (“Aunt Suni”) was the first work published in South Korea to address the tragedy. After its release in 1978 the novel was banned and its author, Hyun Ki-young, arrested and tortured.
Ms Han’s book and her Nobel prize are “catalysts” for renewed interest in the tragedy, says Chon Yeong-mi of the Jeju History and Culture Research Society. The peace memorial museum on Jeju now features a wall dedicated to Ms Han.
The power of “We Do Not Part” comes from Ms Han’s masterful fusion of the literary and the documentary. She spent seven years working on the novel, living part-time on Jeju for two of them. Scenes from the book gesture towards real people and locations. Inseon’s mother finds her younger sister, bloodied and barely alive, her jaw shattered by bullets—much as one prominent real-life survivor had her jaw blown apart.
Ms Han incorporates quotations from archival materials and descriptions of photographs into her novel. Inseon reflects on seeing a picture of the airport excavation, in which a set of bones is arrayed sideways: “Their knees were drawn up to their chest, just as we curl up when we’re unwell, or have trouble sleeping, or can’t quieten our minds.” Inseon takes to revisiting the image and assuming the same posture. The ritual warms her, “much like the lingering soft feel of cotton, feathers or baby skin”. Ms Han’s writing conjures a similar sense of seemingly incongruous feelings, at once unsettling and soothing.
The daughter of a novelist, Ms Han has been honing her lithe, lyrical prose since childhood. She draws inspiration from Korean modernists such as Yi Sang, a poet, and from other accounts of atrocities, such as Primo Levi’s work on the Holocaust. Her writing moves effortlessly between naturalistic descriptions of the massacre and spectral scenes where the boundaries between living and dead melt away. Beauty endures alongside tragedy.
Symbols recur throughout her work, building networks of associations. The colour white, which in Korean culture is associated both with birth and with mourning, plays an important role. (Another of her books, an elegy to a dead older sister, is called “The White Book”; it was also shortlisted for the International Booker prize.) Snow becomes a metaphor for trauma, the way it accumulates, disperses and changes form. Inseon’s mother recalls her sister wiping the snow from the faces of bodies while searching for their parents. “Who’s to say the snow dusting my hands now isn’t the same snow that had gathered on their faces?” Kyungha wonders in turn.
Back at the airport, Ms Chon of the research society laments that remains may still be trapped beneath the runway. Then she gestures toward the horizon, to Hallasan, the island’s largest peak. “They’re so beautiful, the snow-capped mountains,” she sighs. It is a Hanian vision: admiring beauty through tears. ■
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