Han Kang Talks About Her Jeju Book, ‘We Do Not Part”

In Han Kang’s latest novel, a character saws off the tips of two of her fingers in a woodworking accident. Surgeons reattach them but the treatment is gruesome and agonizing. Every three minutes, for weeks on end, a caregiver carefully, dispassionately sinks needles deep into the sutures on each finger, drawing blood, to prevent the fingertips from rotting off.

“They said we have to let the blood flow, that I have to feel the pain,” the patient tells a friend. “Otherwise the nerves below the cut will die.”

In her fiction, Ms. Han has probed at the seams of her country’s historic wounds. She has burrowed into two of South Korea’s darkest episodes: the 1980 massacre in the city of Gwangju, which crushed a pro-democracy movement, and an earlier, even deadlier chapter on Jeju Island, in which tens of thousands of people were killed.

Ms. Han has attracted a wider audience, both at home and abroad, since being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October. An English translation of the novel set on Jeju, “We Do Not Part,” is being released this week in the United States, more than three years after it was published in Korean.

Her works on South Korea’s authoritarian past have seemed all the more relevant since December, when the president briefly imposed martial law. He has since been impeached and arrested.

Ms. Han, who has largely shunned the limelight since receiving the Nobel, said in a rare interview that she was still contemplating the recent events. In her books, she said, it was never her intention to turn from one tragic chapter of modern Korean history to another.

But after “Human Acts,” the Gwangju novel, was published in 2014, she was plagued by a nightmare. Trying to make sense of its haunting images — thousands of forbidding, dark tree trunks standing on a snow-covered hill as the sea encroaches — led her to Jeju, a southern island with aquamarine waters, now mostly known as a balmy travel destination.

It was there that between 1947 and 1954, after an uprising, an estimated 30,000 people were killed by police officers, soldiers and anti-Communist vigilantes, with the tacit backing of the U.S. military. About a third of the victims were women, children or elderly people.

In “We Do Not Part,” the protagonist, Kyungha, a writer who is tormented by a recurring nightmare after publishing a book about a city called “G—,” plods her way through heavy snow engulfing Jeju, on a journey that leads to revelations about multiple generations of a family afflicted by the massacre.

Writing about deeply individual encounters with some of South Korea’s painful moments, Ms. Han said, left her feeling profoundly connected to the experiences of victims of atrocities everywhere, and to the people who never stop remembering them.

“It’s pain and it is blood, but it’s the current of life, connecting the part that could be left to die and the part that is living,” she said in Korean in a video call from her home in Seoul. “Connecting dead memories and the living present, thereby not allowing anything to die off. That’s not just about Korean history, I thought, it’s about all humanity.”

Theresa Phung, the general manager of Yu & Me Books in Manhattan’s Chinatown, said the store had been seeing a level of excitement about Ms. Han’s works, and a surge in sales, that doesn’t always follow a Nobel.

“One of the most impressive traits is her ability to take very specific scenarios and cultural contexts and bring you into that moment, but she’s very aware that those hyperspecific moments are repeats of history,” Ms. Phung said. “Whether you’re reading about what’s happening in Gwangju or around a dinner table, those are lives you see everywhere and problems that you see everywhere.”

Born in Gwangju to a novelist father, Ms. Han spent a couple of years early in her career as a magazine reporter, while also working on her poetry and short stories. As she was trying to write her first novel at 26, she rented a modest room on Jeju, overlooking the water, from an elderly woman who lived downstairs from her.

During a walk to the post office one day, her landlady pointed to a cement wall near a hackberry tree at the center of the village and said matter-of-factly, “This is where the people were shot and killed that winter.”

That memory returned to Ms. Han as she struggled to understand her feverish dreams, which she came to realize were about time and remembrance, she said.

“It comes up like that out of nowhere,” she said. “In effect, everyone in Jeju is a survivor, a witness and a grieving family member.”

Ms. Han, 54, first rose to broad acclaim among English-speaking readers in 2016 with her novel “The Vegetarian.” Its transfixing language and unflinching tale of a housewife’s quiet revolt against violence and patriarchy captured readers around the world, and it won her the International Booker Prize for fiction that year. Her works have been translated into 28 languages. The latest release, “We Do Not Part,” was translated into English by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris.

In South Korea, Ms. Han had been an established writer of poetry, short stories and novels for more than two decades. But her global success broadened her readership at home, where her deft recounting of Gwangju — a foundational moment for South Korea’s democracy — landed her on a blacklist of authors and other cultural figures.

She speaks, as in her books, with the discipline of a poet, choosing each word and phrase with deliberation and care. Kim Seon-young, who edited the Korean version of “Human Acts” and has since become a friend, recalled that Ms. Han once jokingly told her that if her plane crashed, Ms. Kim was forbidden to change a syllable they’d disagreed about, even if the grammar was slightly off.

Ms. Han’s Nobel, the first for a South Korean author, has been celebrated like an Olympic feat, with her books selling out, giant banners around the country congratulating her and throngs of TV cameras flocking to the neighborhood bookstore in Seoul that she had quietly run for six years. Her son, who is in his 20s, felt so besieged by the attention that he asked her not to mention him in interviews, she said.

Since receiving the prize, she has been trying to get back to her quiet life of writing, mostly in a sunlit room with wooden beams looking out over a small yard. She said a scant snow was fluttering down, dusting the wildflowers she planted last year, which had bloomed white before shriveling in a cold snap.

“Being able to stroll around freely and to observe how people live, under a degree of anonymity, free to write without any burdens, that’s the best environment for a writer,” Ms. Han said.

The Nobel came during another tumultuous period for South Korea, which has yet to come to a conclusion, and which looked at one point as if it could result in bloodshed. Two days before Ms. Han left for Sweden for the ceremony, President Yoon Seok Yul declared martial law and sent armed troops into the National Assembly — something that hadn’t happened since the time of the Gwangju massacre.

Ms. Han said she watched the developments unfold, on edge, until the National Assembly repealed the martial law decree in the early morning hours.

“The memories of ’79 and ’80, whether they experienced it directly or indirectly, they knew it should not be repeated, and that’s why they took to the streets in the middle of the night,” she said, referring to the lawmakers and protesters who resisted Mr. Yoon’s decree. “In that way, the past and present are connected.”