Han Kang on Violence, Innocence, and the Human Desire to Become Plant

Last year, with her novel The Vegetarian, Han Kang became the first Korean author to win the Man Booker International Prize. The book, translated by Deborah Smith, unsettled readers across the world: a slender, hallucinatory narrative about a woman who stops eating meat, and then, slowly, stops being human.

For Yeong-hye, an ordinary Seoul housewife, a series of disturbing dreams transforms her life beyond recognition. She renounces meat, then all nourishment. Her mind fractures, her body withdraws from the human order, as she moves toward a vegetal state. In prose that is at once brutal and lyrical, Han Kang explores violence, innocence, madness, and the body’s rebellion against the logic of control.

When I spoke with her, she reflected on the novel’s reception, the weight of Koreanness, and the paradox of seeking purity in a world built on harm.

Your novel has been read and reviewed all over the world. How does it feel to see so many interpretations of your work?

The Vegetarian is a novel that poses questions rather than provides answers. Because of that, it has been understood in very different ways across cultures and contexts. I find that diversity both fascinating and beautiful.

Some critics have read it as a distinctly Korean book. Others insist it is universal. Where do you stand on that divide?

The novel operates on several levels, but its central question is this: can human beings ever truly reject the violence that lives within them? Our definitions of normality and madness determine how we understand, or fail to understand, one another. That question, I think, transcends national or cultural boundaries.

When I was writing The Vegetarian, I was not addressing a particular country. I was addressing humanity.

Does it frustrate you that critics insist on reading it through the lens of Korean patriarchy?

It does, somewhat. If we confine the novel to an analysis of Korean patriarchy, we narrow it too much. We lose its other layers. There is, of course, a woman’s voice in the novel, a silent cry. But that voice must be read alongside its other dimensions.

The book unfolds in three parts, each with a different narrator. Was it always conceived this way?

Yes, I always imagined it as a novel.

Then why publish it in parts, almost like separate stories?

In Korea, there is a strong tradition of literary journals, many of which are still very active. As a writer, I wanted to make use of that tradition. I published each section in a different literary magazine, with a different narrator, tone, and rhythm. Together, they form a composite whole, one novel with three distinct voices.

Is that a common practice in Korea?

Not very. It is possible, but rare. I have heard that in many other countries, publishing a novel’s chapters individually before the book itself would be almost impossible.

What are you working on now? Another trilogy?

Yes, another three-part work, though it is entirely different from The Vegetarian. Talking about an unfinished book is difficult. It demands caution. I might turn it into a tetralogy, or discard what I have written and begin again. At the moment, I am working on the second part.

“You have described a moment of inspiration while leaning against a tree that led to the conception of The Vegetarian. To what extent do you see the novel as emerging from your personal experience, and how do you distinguish between the personal and the philosophical dimensions in your act of writing?”

I write poetry, short stories, and novels. For me, poetry is the most personal form, because it engages language at its deepest level. Stories are personal too, but less so. They open, like corridors, toward the questions I have carried since childhood.

When I write fiction, though, I turn outward, toward the essential questions of human existence, not my own.

Yet the novel’s theme, the longing to become a plant, seems to echo something within you. Does Yeong-hye’s desire reflect, in some way, your own?

No, I do not share her desire to become a plant. Nor do I claim that we all should. We are human beings, and we must live as such.

But the novel contains both a question and an allegory. It imagines a woman who no longer wishes to be human, whose refusal is so absolute that she ceases to fear death. No one can understand her. That extremity is what gives the novel its allegorical force. It invites readers to reflect on what it means to be human.

Yeong-hye stands at the centre of the story, yet she never speaks in her own voice. Why did you deny her direct narration?

I deliberately withheld her voice. Because she is seen through three different narrators, readers must piece together her truth from their often contradictory impressions. I wanted her to reach readers not through self-definition, but through the imaginative power that arises in their attempt to envision her.

Yeong-hye renounces not only humanity but the human body itself. Is the novel, then, less about humanity than about the body?

For Yeong-hye, yes. But the novel as a whole is not an answer. It is a question. I wanted to leave that question open, to let readers complete it in their own minds.

There is also a persistent undercurrent of female experience. Is Yeong-hye’s desire gendered? Is her suffering specifically that of a woman?

She stops eating meat in order to reject human violence entirely. She believes that by becoming a plant she can purify herself, and in doing so, she moves toward death. When I imagined such a character, a woman seemed the most natural embodiment of that extremity.

I do not believe universality and femininity are opposed. To be universal and to have a woman’s voice is not contradictory. As a writer, I see no tension between my identity as a woman and my identity as an artist.

Yeong-hye’s father, a Vietnam War veteran, is also marked by violence. How did you conceive of him?

He is a man who has internalised violence completely, not as a symbolic Korean father, but as an individual. The family scenes in the novel are intentionally distorted and exaggerated. I wanted to make clear that the book is not a sociological portrait of Korean society.

When we imagine becoming a plant, are we uncovering something that already exists within us, or creating something entirely new? In other words, is there a plant inside each of us?

In the novel, the plant symbolises the only kind of being that can live without harming others. Humans can survive only by consuming something else, even minerals, stones, or soil. The fact that we live means we do harm. Violence is everywhere.

Yeong-hye cannot endure that truth. Through her own life, she tries to realise innocence, to reach a kind of purity. I believe that something of that innocence exists within us all. You could call it the plant inside us.

Do you see Yeong-hye as wholly innocent, or does she also contain violence?

She is not wholly innocent, but neither is she violent. She is someone who has devoted her life to rejecting violence altogether. She moves along the spectrum of human existence, from the sacred to the base, from cruelty to grace, and suffers because she remains human.

Can The Vegetarian be read as a call to awaken those who see humanity as the centre of the world?

In Eastern philosophy, humans are not masters of nature, nor its centre. Until my twenties, I studied Buddhism deeply, and that view became part of me. The idea that humanity is not central to the world feels completely natural to me, and I think that sense is naturally reflected in the novel.

You end the novel with a striking image: Yeong-hye, in an ambulance, turning her furious gaze toward the world outside. Why finish there?

In the final scene, In-hye, Yeong-hye’s sister, looks out the window toward the trees, as though searching for an answer, as though resisting something. Her gaze carries a question: in a world where beauty and violence are so entwined, how far can humanity still go? For the full interview in Turkish https://www.k24kitap.org/

Photograph of Han Kang by Gorm Kallestad