The Vegetarian

by Han Kang

‘Your father went too far, you know. How can he hit his daughter in front of her husband?

She’s a good woman, he thought. The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive.

The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.

Somehow, it seemed this wound had in fact grown bigger than her, that her whole body was being pulled into its pitch-black maw.

It was a fact. Everything would be fine as long as she just kept going, just carried on with her life as she always had done.

Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance, no more real than a television drama. Death, who now stood by her side, was as familiar to her as a family member, missing for a long time but now returned.

There is no way for him to know how guilty it makes his mother feel, seeing such a young child go to such lengths just to wring a bit of apparent happiness from her, or that her laughter will all eventually run out.

The innumerable trees she’s seen over the course of all her life, the undulating forests which blanket the continents like a heartless sea, envelop her exhausted body and lift her up.

Even when she turned about on the spot and searched in all directions, In-hye hadn’t been able to find a tree that would take her life from her. Some of the trees had refused to accept her. They’d just stood there, stubborn and solemn yet alive as animals, bearing up the weight of their own massive bodies.

‘I have dreams too, you know. Dreams … and I could let myself dissolve into them, let them take me over … but surely the dream isn’t all there is? We have to wake up at some point, don’t we? Because … because then … ’

summer sunlight dazzles her eyes, makes them sting, and her gaze cannot follow the bird’s flight any more.