Health Warning! This is book is laceratingly painful! If like me you are unable to read Sylvia Plath because it just hurts too much, don’t read We Do Not Part either. It is extremely well written in terms of the dreamlike intensity and consistency of its imagery, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2024 – but it’s all pain, pain, pain.
The focus of this pain lies especially with the first character we meet, and whom we follow throughout, Kyung Ha. She is constantly in dire pain from migraines; she has a horrible stomach illness against which her only remedy is self starvation, but nonetheless while wasting away she vomits up bile and blood. Kyung Ha repeatedly endures accidental injuries that make her bleed. She suffers lacerating emotional wounds.
We don’t know how much of all this is psychosomatic and she certainly seems possessed of a withering self hatred – more on this later. She also seems extraordinarily lonely – she knows no-one and no-one knows her. It seems that the universe hates her and is out to get her! She is obsessed with writing a will so she can give herself permission to die. Every day in her agony and longing for death she drafts a new will.
Then an obligation arises that cuts through her torment and gives Kyung Ha something to do beyond endless will writing. A former colleague, Inseon, who is as close to being a friend as anybody can be in her empty world, is very ill in hospital. Inseon is deeply concerned that, back at home, she has a cagebird which, because of Inseon’s emergency hospitalisation, will die of starvation. Will Kyung Ha go to her home and take care of the bird before it is too late?
Kyung Ha accepts the task and sets off to Inseon’s home on the island of Jeju. All kinds of things go wrong on the journey, as might be expected: not least because it takes place in the depths of winter with loads of snow and darkness, both actual and symbolic. But Kyung Ha’s journey to Jeju also becomes a journey back in time, for this is a place where barbaric massacres took place during the Korean War. This part of the book is not fiction. Atrocities did take place here. People were rounded up on suspicion of sympathising with the enemy, taken away from their families, held in concentration camps, tortured and executed in very large numbers. Sadly, although the war was supposed to defend Korea from communism, the Western Allies imprisoned and killed more Koreans than the communists did.
When Kyung Ha finally arrives, the bird is dead, so she buries it – although the author hints that it may in fact still in some way be alive: I have no idea what this hide and seek approach is supposed to be about and would be grateful to hear from anyone who has some thoughts on it. Perhaps life and death are both illusions in Han Kang’s universe? However Kyung Ha is unable to leave, paralysed by winter, illness and existential pain.
Nonetheless Inseon manages to recover, leave hospital and arrive, in spite of all the obstacles. Surprisingly she doesn’t seem that bothered that her beloved bird has died, in spite of all the trouble she has put Kyung Ha through. However it turns out that she has been building up over many years a huge archive of information about the Jeju massacres. As she shares this information with Kyung Ha, the multitude of the murdered becomes a living and overwhelming presence in the minds of the two women.
What I think we’re seeing here is an expression of a Buddhist world view. Karma is present in the form of the suffering of previous generations and this is passed on to their successors and becomes their lived suffering too. The inescapable wheel of life, death and suffering means it can never go away. The only solution is to renounce action and desire in an act of enlightenment that in classical Buddhism is hard, at least for me, to distinguish from annihilation. The universe and everything in it is an illusion, a nightmare from which it is imperative that we wake up, either to absorption into a depersonalised deity-like force or into nothingness, depending on which school of Buddhism is followed: “The dewdrop slips into the shining sea.”
This is a long way from Buddhism as we have sentimentalised it in the West, transforming it into a New Agey, consumerist, wellness-based self-improvement programme which is all about enhancing the life of wonderful me. Nothing could be further from the actual teachings of the Buddha, who would have seen our narcissism as the direct opposite of what he was about, part of the illusion that binds us to the world and not at all of the enlightenment that frees us from it.
Korea having deep roots in Buddhist culture, I hope we can expect Han Kang to have absorbed Buddhism better than those who come to it from a very alien, individualist and consumerist Western culture. She seems to have grasped Buddhistic detachment much more completely than the Californians. Here she is reflecting on Inseon’s nursing of her aged and increasingly dementia ridden mother, who at the point described is so confused and frightened that she cannot sleep without Inseon embracing her tightly throughout the night. Inseon tells Kyung Ha that “Love is the greatest agony.”
This is pure Buddhism – don’t attach yourself to anything! Because the attachment will bind you ever more tightly to the intolerable wheel of karma, of death and rebirth, that makes suffering inevitable. Don’t desire anything and you cannot be hurt when, inevitably, it passes away.
This is very hard for somebody from a Christian culture to take, where love – of neighbour and of God – is the highest good because God is love. It remains the highest good in spite of the fact that it brings suffering because Jesus the Son of God also suffered the pain of love on the cross. For us the world is not an illusion from which we need to awake in order not to be bound to its suffering: it’s real, because God created it, but it has become alienated from God and from God’s love and therefore is broken. The Christian then longs for redemption rather than release. Unfortunately redemption, though on its way, is not yet here, so suffering and love must continue together for a while longer…
This actually implicates Christianity in the rise of the novel. Story is inherent in our overview of love and alienation, suffering and redemption, whereas, in Buddhism, story can only be part of the nightmare from which we must awaken. Human personality, character, choices, suffering and above all human relationships take on depth of meaning because we are the beloved of God who intends our redemption: but Buddhism expects all these to be illusions which must be shed. It’s interesting that in its twentieth century’s rejection of Christianity Western novelists also often rejected story, character and relationships in pursuit of various experiments - which I at least react to with greater or lesser degrees of boredom.
Is literature even possible in a Buddhism that remains faithful to its founder’s tenets? Surely it is part of the illusion in which we are ensnared? So one can imagine a literature focussed on jarring us out of illusion through oxymoron and paradox: “the sound of one hand clapping” makes us try to imagine that sound while rejecting the possibility of its existence: are all our perceptions then of no more value than mind games? Or the proposed Buddhist literature could be an elegiac for cherry blossom, lamenting that the beauty and pathos of creation are one part of the illusion that it is painful yet vital to be separated from? Or it could be the story of becoming enlightened, a journey of discovery into the torture of being bound to the wheel of existence - right up to the point of finally renouncing it and entering enlightenment?
I think Han Kang has taken on the second and third of these possibilities very powerfully in We Do Not Part. The anguish of her characters undergirds their longing for annihilation. There is an obsessive repetition of metaphors for death, including snow, cold, winter, darkness, blood, wounds, the dark tide that rises until it sweeps everything away, the colour black, the colour white, graveyards, lopped off tree trunks that in the wrong light resemble dead people…
Finally the two women set off into the freezing dark, armed only with a couple of matches. They spark briefly and go out. What is happening? A suicide pact? Annihilation?
My final problem with this as Buddhist literature is not philosophical but psychological. To me Kyung Ha seems driven not only by the constant agony that every experience of life brings to her, nor by a longing for enlightenment, but by self-hatred. I’m not a Buddhist nor an expert on Buddhism, but it seems to me that self-hatred is as much part of illusion as self-love, isn’t it? In Christian terms both are symptoms of our alienation from the love of God that, through the process of redemption, we need to rediscover as the very core of our identity. For someone to live their life in the grip of self-hatred is a most pitiable waste of their existence.
