Han Kang is a South Korean writer of eight novels, three short story collections and one poetry collection, to date. She was born in Gwangju and grew up in Suyuri. Han is a graduate of Yonsei University where she studied Korean literature and in 1998 was a student at the University of Iowa International Writing Program (Han, nd.). Some of her works have now been widely translated, while others are available only in the original Korean. Her most widely translated work, The Vegetarian, won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for Fiction in its English translation by Deborah Smith (2015). Two further book-length works have since been translated into English by Smith: Human Acts in 2016, and The White Book in 2017, also shortlisted for the Man Booker International.
Prose Form
Han’s first two translated works have been explicitly marketed as novels with the familiar ‘a novel’ label on the cover of most editions, while the The White Book has been categorised as poetry by booksellers. All three texts are formally ambiguous, but I suggest more recognisable as examples of short story cycles than novels or prose poetry. Jennifer J. Smith observes that “such labels indicate publishers’ anxieties that short stories do not sell and that readers need to know how to read these volumes” (2018, p. 3). Indeed, none of Han’s short story collections – as opposed to her cycles or “novels in stories” – are yet to appear in translation outside of Korea, Japan and China. Framing a potentially problematic literary form with the “a novel” label appears to be the Western publishing industry’s strategy for marketing Han Kang’s formally challenging and culturally “other” works.
The Vegetarian, whose origins are in the short story “The Fruit of My Woman” (1997; trans. 2016), is a “novel” presented in three parts, all of which can stand alone and have been published as separate short stories in the original Korean – these are: “The Vegetarian”, “Mongolian Mark” (winner of the Yi Sang Literary Award 2005 as “Mongol Spot”), and “Flaming Trees”. This structure adheres to the short story cycle model which presents as a book-length piece of prose divided into sections where each section can be considered a complete self-contained story in and of itself. When the collection is read together the individual pieces construct a larger, cohesive narrative through connections between setting, characters and/or themes. A short story cycle can thus take advantage of the potential for breadth and continuity afforded by length, while simultaneously exploiting the fragmentation, ambiguity, economy and ellipses characteristic of the short form within its individual parts. In The Vegetarian this is most notable through the shifts in narration. The stories are united by the woman Yeong-Hye, but her story is told almost exclusively by way of others – her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister. The story, if read in the order printed, is chronological, but there are temporal gaps. Together the stories narrate Yeong-Hye’s journey from a seemingly innocuous decision to become vegetarian to her impending death through self-imposed starvation. Han herself has described the structure of the work as a “trilogy” (Peschel, 2016) and various reviews have used terms such as “trilogy of stories” or “inter-linked novellas” (Walsh, 2015; DasGupta, 2016).
Human Acts also follows a largely chronological trajectory and uses temporal gaps and shifts in focalisation and narration. Each chapter or story can stand alone but, like The Vegetarian, are unified by a specific character – this time “the Boy” who narrates the first chapter, Dung-ho, and to whom each subsequent character has some direct or indirect connection. More broadly, the stories are united by the horrific military suppression of the Gwangju protests in 1980 during which Dung-ho is killed. The text is wide-ranging and the individual stories only loosely connected, but, as Krys Lee writes, this is a text “focusse[d] less on plot and more on the nature of memory, guilt, and the way survivors memorialise and mourn” (2016).
The White Book picks up on similar themes as the writer-narrator – associated very much with Han – comes to know the city of Warsaw and its tragic history. While doing so she remembers her mother telling her the story of the death of her older sister just hours after birth. The book is divided into three parts, each of which is then sub-divided into smaller titled sections, some no more than a paragraph in length, and none running to more than 3 pages. The first part introduces the city and connects the death of a “six year old boy in the Jewish ghetto” (Han, 2017, p. 33) to the story of the narrator’s sister. The second part replaces the narrator with the deceased sister and imagines the things – the white things – she would have encountered had she lived. The third section returns to the writer-narrator and could be read as offering a commentary on the second section’s experiment of “replacing one life with another” (Buchanan, 2017). The inside book flap introduces this as a “book like no other”, a “thing”. A reviewer for the New internationalist remarks that it is “ostensibly a novel …[but] better described as a poetic meditation” (JL, 2017). While the individual vignettes might suggest a prose poetry sequence, its inclusion of images taken from a performance by Han suggests it might be better categorised as a composite novel which, as defined by Dunn and Morris, combines several genres to form an extended narrative. The other element in this composite is the white space of the blank pages that separate each vignette. It is through the sequential arrangement of the flash fictions, images and white spaces that the larger narrative of the writer-narrator’s experiment becomes clear.
Form and Context
Scholarly and popular accounts of modern Korean literature invariably point to the influence of European modernism which was introduced through Japanese colonial rule in the early part of the twentieth century (Cho, 2017; Kim, 2018; Lee, 1990). However, recent studies argue that modern Korean literature is hybrid, encompassing European modernist influences while at the same time constructing a national literature through and in opposition to the censorship imposed by the Japanese colonial regime, which amongst other things sought to eliminate the Korean language altogether (Lee, 2018; Yang, 2014). Han’s work certainly reflects the “fragmented, cyclical and episodic” nature of literary modernism; but such features are also equally characteristic of the short story cycle, a form that precedes and supersedes modernism (Smith, 2018, p. 10). Her literary motives might also be interpreted as distinctly modernist in that they “question the ability of a mind to apprehend violence and the ability of language to represent that reality” (Kim, 2018); but Han’s modernist, even Kafka-esque (Perschel, 2016), aesthetics are utilised to represent a specifically Korean political and cultural postcolonial context. Indeed, while the short story cycle is often associated with American literature, it might be more appropriate to postcolonial writing.
Sue Marais writes that the short story cycle form is particularly suited to places where “a nascent regional or national identity is in the process of being forged” (2005) and Jennifer J. Smith points to the “correlations between the cycle and national, gendered, and ethnic formations [which] suggest that the genre repeatedly emerges during moments of embattled identity-making” (2018, p.7). Han’s three translated works offer the her-stories of postcolonial and patriarchal experience by way of a form that is able to capture the polyphonic voices of the oft silenced:
Characteristics of the short story cycle, such as the open-ended lapses between stories, and the focus on minor narrative arcs, make it a suitable form through which readers may piece together disjointed and sometimes inconsistent detail to achieve some sense of knowable truth about women whose lives contain aspects that remain unarticulated. (Kadmos, 2014, np.)
Han’s works are concerned with contemporary experience, often female, within a culture caught between pre-modern patriarchal traditions and a version of Western modernity introduced by way of Japanese colonial rule and rapid industrialisation and urbanisation; this is compounded in the latter half of the century by the ongoing division and unrest between the North and South, as well as the South’s still recent history of US sanctioned military violence – a history that has largely remained unacknowledged in Korea and conspicuously neglected by the West – a history and loss that is thus uninterrogated and un-memorialised. Han confronts these cultural and political tensions in her stories, aided by a form that can capture multiple and proliferating responses across one subject, whether that be personal, such as a woman’s refusal to eat meat, or political, such as the Gwangju uprising, or both, such as a meditation on one’s dead sister while living in a city marked by the holocaust. By multiplying the experiences and responses to the unifying subject, Han presents a variety of truths, a series of differently nuanced responses each echoing specific aspects of the stories that have come before and adding new or different facets to expand and diversify the narrative.
From Elegy to Han
The working title of Human Acts was “Gwangju Elegy” and Deborah Smith has said that she “liked the fact that the etymology of ‘elegy’ implies something sung, which seemed to fit this polyphonic novel” (Smith, nd). Western literature’s most famous elegy – Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” (1850) – a non-linear, multi-sequential poem – had its own working title, “Fragments of an elegy”, emphasising how the individual lyric fragments come together to form the elegiac narrative but still resist an overarching narrative of consolation. Another famous “elegy” is Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse which, like Han’s The Vegetarian, is a “novel in three acts”, combining three distinct parts to make a wider narrative while, again like Han, experimenting with temporal representation and multiple shifts in perspective. In a letter to Vita Sackville West, Woolf writes: “I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel’. A new —— by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?” (DeSalvo & Leaska, 1992). Though not new, each new incarnation of the short story cycle tends to be heralded as such, evidencing “the influence of a modernist commitment to newness” (Smith, 2018, p. 2). For Woolf, the “newness” of her formal experimentation is suggestive of the elegy, just as it was for Deborah Smith when working with Han’s original text; however, Jennifer J. Smith, in reference to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), writes that that cycle’s “elegiac tone is undercut by the recurring depictions of characters whose lives are marked by those qualities, such as alienation, dislocation, and frustrated expression, usually associated with modernism” (2018, p. 27). Smith thus suggests that elegy be replaced with “critical nostalgia” whereby the notion that things were once better is qualified by the idea that things never change (p. 27). In Han’s work, the themes of remembering and memorialising which might suggest the elegy but are also fragmentary and mournful and her characters alienated, dislocated and frustrated. In addition, Han contends not only with the acts of remembering but also with the political and psychological obstacles to that remembering, such as censorship, oppression and trauma – and in a specifically Korean context. I suggest then that the “newness” of Han’s three short story cycles might be understood not through a lyrical or modernist elegy or even “critical nostalgia”, but through the uniquely Korean concept of han.
With reference to Teresa Brown’s The Transmission of Affect (2004), Sandra So Hee Chi Kim writes that
han is the word for sorrow in reaction to historical injustice against those who identify as Korean. Han is an example of how history becomes internalized in individuals while at the same time creating horizontal connections of empathy and identification. (2017, p. 274)
Han works through shared identification with the unresolved traumas of the past to shape a sense of both individual (modern) and collective (national) identity. The tension between the individual and collective that exists in han is mirrored in Han’s translated works – both formally, between the individual stories and the collected stories, as well as narratively, between the experiences of individual characters and a sense of national identity. In Human Acts, for example, one story/chapter features a female editor, Kim Eun-Sook, who has been beaten by interrogators after meeting with a man wanted by the authorities; the remainder of the story is shaped around her attempts to forget the seven slaps she received at the hands of the interrogator. During the story she relives the terrors of that night in Gwangju; the guilt she feels for surviving when so many others died; she remembers the aftermath of the uprising when she tried to demand the city fountain be turned off in respect of the dead; and, in the present, she edits a play that has been almost completely censored by the authorities; the play is performed anyway but in silence, the censored words defiantly mouthed by the actors but never spoken aloud. When reading the play’s manuscript, prior to the performance, she can just make out some of the words that have now been scrubbed from the text by the censor: “Now. A little more. Vaguely. Why did you. Remember? Gasping for breath in these interstices, tiny islands among language charred out of existence” (p. 83).
The words still visible in the charred manuscript, like the stories made apparent between the literal white spaces in The White Book, are offered as glimpses indicating the wider forgotten or erased story from which they have survived. The collating of individual stories of trauma into a collective cycle complements how the personal and discreet experiences of Han’s characters speak to a larger interconnected narrative of national trauma. As Kim writes, han “encapsulates the grief of historical memory - the memory of past collective trauma” (p. 257). In Human Acts, the story of Dong-ho’s death embeds itself in the stories of all the subsequent characters, acting as a “tiny island” around which at least some of the silenced and censored horrors of that night are gathered and, at last, find representation. Korean han is sadness and suffering but it is also the means of resolution; Han Kang’s books enact han to offer a way through and out of individual and national trauma.
Conclusion
Han’s three translated works encompass multiple perspectives and thus multiples “truths” rather than singular, authoritative historical narratives; they also indicate the silenced and censored stories that exist in the interstices, including those female narratives so often unrepresented. Han’s use of the cycle form demonstrates that no story exists in isolation and suggests that by connecting local stories of violence to one another we are better able to better grasp the global narrative of human violence and, together, work towards a new, global “human act”.
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Citation: Myler, Kerry. "Han Kang". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 October 2021 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=14035, accessed 18 July 2025.]
