Originally published in 2007 and praised for its layered, Kafkaesque surrealism, The Vegetarian by Han Kang received the 2016 Man Booker International Prize the year after it was translated into English from Korean by Deborah Smith.
Kang was the first Asian woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 2024. Needless to say, her work has rallied readers and, in the process, won well-deserved acclaim.
The Vegetarian follows the story of Yeong-hye, an unhappily married woman who becomes vegetarian after a dark, bloody, and guilt-ridden dream. The novel begins with the resentful thoughts of her husband, Mr. Cheong, then transitions to the obsessive interior dialogue of her sister’s husband, and ends with the point of view of her older sister, In-hye.
“Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way.”
Yeong-hye falls into a trance-like state of delusion and apathy, which eventually turns into resistance. Her vegetarianism is something more than a mere dietary transition; it is a profound spiritual and corporeal protest against social expectations, performative gender roles, and carnality. This dissonance ends with Yeong-hye’s fading health, sense of personhood, and abandonment by all but one person who remains with her until the mysterious end.
From the start, Kang explores the expectations placed upon Yeong-hye by her husband, who wants her to be submissive, reliable, and ordinary.
“Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way.”
Mr. Cheong is displeased at Yeong-hye’s transformation, and so there brews within him an aggrieved sense of entitlement, which point toward the wider issue of gender inequality, especially within the confines of the marital social contract.
Mr. Cheong laments, “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. . . . She put up a surprisingly strong resistance and, spitting out vulgar curses all the while, one time in three I would manage to insert myself successfully.”
Sexual assault and problematic consent are omnipresent in the novel, hammering home the central motifs of agency and the body with painful poignancy. Not only does Yeong-hye’s husband try to make her play house with him, but when her family is summoned to coax her out of her vegetarian decree, her own father forces meat into her mouth.
Yeong-hye ponders her sovereignty: “It’s your body, you can treat it however you please. The only area where you’re free to do just as you like. And even that doesn’t turn out how you wanted.”
When the men in her life can’t control her and the invisible patriarchal hold weakens, she is deemed a lost cause — a hysterical and unreasonable woman.
During this descent from the respectable wife to the rebellious exile, Yeong-hye’s basic humanity begins to dissolve; as she eats less and less, her power wanes. Lycanthropic scenes of animalistic immediacy redden the page.
Her nightmares linger: “But the fear. My clothes still wet with blood. Hide, hide behind the trees. Crouch down, don’t let anybody see. My bloody hands. My bloody mouth. In that barn, what had I done? Pushed that red raw mass into my mouth, felt it squish against my gums, the roof of my mouth, slick with crimson blood.”
After Yeong-hye’s husband leaves her and her health degrades, In-hye and her husband take on a greater caregiving role. But even this takes a twisted turn as Kang creates a labyrinthine fantasy of forbidden desire, artistic expression, and questionable decency.
The narrative tone throughout is one of contemplative surrealism. Ties between human nature and morality, of self-control and restraint, are drawn and dissected.
Kang writes of In-hye’s husband, “He was becoming divided against himself. Was he a normal human being? More than that, a moral human being? A strong human being, able to control his own impulses?”
The narrative tone throughout is one of contemplative surrealism. Ties between human nature and morality, of self-control and restraint, are drawn and dissected. The self-appointed agency Yeong-hye exercises is the key point of contention on which her life hangs.
She bemoans her self-possession, “Just like her life had never belonged to her. Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance, no more real than a television drama. Death, who now stood by her side, was as familiar to her as a family member, missing for a long time but now returned.”
The writing is poetically visceral and exposes the fragility of not only the human body, but the relationships that tie us together. We are encouraged to regard the social contracts we abide by, and which allow us to maintain control, from a new angle. Kang prompts the reader to question what it means to renounce something we’ve taken for granted as normal and to examine the myriad ways in which personal autonomy and agency threaten the status quo.
“What she had renounced was the very life that her body represented.”
If you enjoy psychological fiction such as Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica and Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, add The Vegetarian to your list.
