Han Kang - The Vegetarian

“What about Yeong-hye, what’s the matter?” Her voice was laced with worry. She had never seemed to show much of an interest in her second daughter, but I suppose one’s children are one’s children, after all.

“The thing is, she’s stopped eating meat.”

“What did you say?”

“She’s stopped eating any kind of meat at all, even fish — all she lives on is vegetables. It’s been several months now.”

“What kind of talk is this? Surely you can always just tell her not to follow this diet.”

“Oh, I’ve told her, all right, but she still goes ahead and defies me. And what’s more, she’s even imposed this ridiculous diet on me — I can’t remember the last time I tasted meat in this house.”

My mother-in-law was lost for words, and I used her speechlessness as an opportunity to turn the screw a little tighter. “She’s become very weak. I’m not sure exactly how serious it is…”

“I can’t have this. Is Yeong-hye there? Pass her the phone.”

“She’s gone to bed now. I’ll tell her to call tomorrow morning.”

“No, leave it. I’ll call. How can that child be so defiant? Oh, you must be ashamed of her!”

After hanging up I riffled through my notebook and dialed my sister-in-law In-hye’s number.

My ears were assaulted by the sound of her young son bellowing “hello?” down the line.

“Please put your mother on.”

In-hye, who quickly took the receiver from her son, resembled my wife quite closely, but her eyes were larger and prettier, and overall she was much more feminine.

“Hello?”

Her voice as it sounded over the phone, always somehow more distinct than in person, never failed to send me into a state of sexual arousal. I informed her of my wife’s newfound vegetarianism in the same way as I had just done with her mother, listened to exactly the same sequence of astonishment followed by an apology, and put down the phone after accepting her assurances. I considered repeating the process by calling my wife’s younger brother, Yeong-ho, but decided that that would be overdoing it.

—

Dreams of murder.

Murderer or murdered….hazy distinctions, boundaries wearing thin. Familiarity bleeds into strangeness, certainty becomes impossible. Only the violence is vivid enough to stick. A sound, the elasticity of the instant when the metal struck the victim’s head…the shadow that crumpled and fell gleams cold in the darkness.

They come to me now more times than I can count. Dreams overlaid with dreams, a palimpsest of horror. Violent acts perpetrated by night. A hazy feeling I can’t pin down…but remembered as blood-chillingly definite.

Intolerable loathing, so long suppressed. Loathing I’ve always tried to mask with affection. But now the mask is coming off.

That shuddering, sordid, gruesome, brutal feeling. Nothing else remains. Murderer or murdered, experience too vivid to not be real. Determined, disillusioned. Lukewarm, like slightly cooled blood.

Everything starts to feel unfamiliar. As if I’ve come up to the back of something. Shut up behind a door without a handle. Perhaps I’m only now coming face-to-face with the thing that has always been here. It’s dark. Everything is being snuffed out in the pitch-black darkness.

—

Contrary to what I’d hoped, my mother- and sister-in-law’s efforts at persuasion had not the slightest influence on my wife’s eating habits. At the weekend, the phone rang and my wife picked up.

“Yeong-hye,” my father-in-law bellowed, “are you still not eating meat?” He’d never used a telephone in his life, and I could hear his excited shouts emerging from the receiver. “What d’you think you’re playing at, hey? Acting like this at your age, what on earth must Mr. Cheong think?” My wife stood there in perfect silence, holding the receiver to her ear. “Why don’t you answer? Can you hear me?”

A pan of soup was boiling on the stove, so my wife put the receiver down on the table without a word and disappeared into the kitchen. I stood there for a few moments listening to my father-in-law raging impotently, unaware that there was no one on the other end, then took pity on him and picked up the receiver.

“I’m sorry, Father-in-law.”

“No, I’m the one who’s ashamed.”

It shocked me to hear this patriarchal man apologize — in the five years I’d known him, I’d never once heard such words pass his lips. Shame and empathy just didn’t suit him. He never tired of boasting about having received the Order of Military Merit for serving in Vietnam, and not only was his voice extremely loud, it was the voice of a man with strongly fixed ideas. I myself, in Vietnam…seven Vietcong …as his son-in-law, I was only too familiar with the beginning of his monologue. According to my wife, he had whipped her over the calves until she was eighteen years old.

“In any case, you’re coming up next month so let’s sit her down and have it out then.”

The family get-together scheduled for the second Sunday this coming June was clearly going to be a very big deal. Even if no one said it openly, it was plain to see that they were all getting ready to give my wife a dressing-down.

Whether or not my wife was actually aware of any of this, she never seemed in the least bit perturbed. Aside from the fact that she deliberately continued to avoid sleeping with me — she’d even taken to sleeping in trousers — on the surface we were still a regular married couple. The only thing that had changed was that in the early hours of the morning, when I groped for my alarm clock, turned it off and sat up, she would be lying there ramrod straight, her eyes gazing upward in the darkness. After the meal at the restaurant, other people in the company had been noticeably cool toward me, but once the project I’d pushed through began to yield some far-from-negligible profits, all that unpleasantness appeared to have been entirely forgotten.

I sometimes told myself that even though the woman I was living with was a little odd, nothing particularly bad would come of it. I thought I could get by perfectly well just thinking of her as a stranger, or no, as a sister, or even a maid, someone who puts food on the table and keeps the house in good order. But it was no easy thing for a man in the prime of his life, for whom married life had always gone entirely without a hitch, to have his physical needs go unsatisfied for such a long period of time. So yes, one night when I returned home late and somewhat inebriated after a meal with colleagues, I grabbed hold of my wife and pushed her to the floor. Pinning down her struggling arms and tugging off her trousers, I became unexpectedly aroused. She put up a surprisingly strong resistance and, spitting out vulgar curses all the while, it took me three attempts before I managed to insert myself successfully. Once that had happened, she lay there in the dark staring up at the ceiling, her face blank, as though she were a “comfort woman” dragged in against her will, and I was the Japanese soldier demanding her services. As soon as I finished, she rolled over and buried her face in the quilt. I went to have a shower, and by the time I returned to bed she was lying there with her eyes closed as if nothing had happened, or as though everything had somehow sorted itself out during the time I’d spent washing myself.

After this first time, it was easier for me to do it again, but each time, I would be seized by strange, ominous premonitions. I was thick-skinned by nature, and certainly wasn’t in the habit of entertaining outlandish notions, but the darkness and silence of the living room would strike a chill through me all the same. The following morning, sitting with my wife at the breakfast table — her lips pressed firmly closed as per usual, clearly not paying the slightest bit of attention to anything I might be saying — I would be unable to conceal a feeling of abhorrence when I looked across at her. I couldn’t stand the way her expression, which made it seem as though she were a woman of bitter experience, who had suffered many hardships, niggled at my conscience.