Korean author Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, returns with We Do Not Part, her poetic, starkly beautiful fifth novel to be translated into English. Kyungha, the book’s narrator, wanders through a bewildering internal dreamscape, haunted by a recurring nightmare of graves inundated by rising water. She has lost or cut off most relationships, and spends her time alone, shedding her belongings and rewriting her will and final instructions. Then a texted summons brings her to the hospital bedside of her friend Inseon.
Kyungha has known Inseon for more than 20 years as a work colleague, friend and, now, artistic collaborator. Though their current joint project, inspired by Kyungha’s nightmare, has begun to lose Kyungha’s interest, Inseon had persevered, until she severed her fingers with a power saw while preparing sculptures for their installation. She asks Kyungha to travel from the hospital in Seoul to her home to save the life of her bird, Ama, left without food or water after her accident.
It is a near-impossible task. Inseon lives to the south, on Jeju island, where she had moved to care for her mother until her recent passing. Kyungha arrives on the island in blizzard conditions. She struggles to reach Inseon’s remote and isolated house, slipping and falling unconscious in the snow more than once, then somehow arriving in the cold, dark building to find both Ama and Inseon inside.
We Do Not Part moves to its own disorienting rhythms, and at this point in the narrative, a reader will likely be both spellbound and unsettled. We feel the chill and isolation of the snowbound island. We see the shadows of birds projected on the walls by candlelight. We read the dry, crumbling documents gathered by Inseon’s mother detailing horrors perpetrated not so long ago by the Korean government on Jeju’s people. We sense the love between Kyungha and Inseon, along with their deepening understanding of the steely perseverance of that older woman, who was, in life, seemingly quiet and subdued.
For readers unfamiliar with the history, at least 30,000 people—10% of the island’s population—were massacred on Jeju between 1948 and 1949 by the U.S. Military Government in Korea and then by the South Korean Army under Syngman Rhee. Google Jeju and this fact is not among the top hits. Han, however, considers this history with fierce humanity. She writes beautifully, with profound moral authority. Of course she should have a Nobel Prize.