Martial law has been declared seventeen times in South Korea. The most recent instance, in December, was short-lived – it lasted barely one night – but it stands as a sharp reminder of the political violence on which the country was built. In November 1948, three months after the republic had been established, a state of emergency was declared to suppress a communist-led insurrection on the southern island of Jeju. The uprising precipitated the beginning of the Korean War, during the first months of which an estimated 200,000 civilians were massacred and buried in secret. In May 1980, the last time before 2024 that a state of emergency was imposed, hundreds of people, many of them students, were murdered by the military during demonstrations in Gwangju.

Han Kang, the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, makes just one allusion to this history in her best-known novel, The Vegetarian (published in Korean in 2007), in a passage ostensibly more concerned with art than with politics. The story centres on Yeong-hye, a young housewife in present-day Seoul, who suddenly resolves to stop eating meat. Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law, we’re told, is nicknamed ‘the May priest’ – a reference to the Gwangju killings – due to the style of the short films he makes. At the time The Vegetarian was published, there was little to suggest that Han would devote a whole novel to the May uprising. But in Human Acts (published in Korean in 2014) she did just that. If The Vegetarian is concerned with history as something that continues to affect the novel’s characters in the 21st century, Human Acts, which opens with a boy from Gwangju tending to rotting corpses, engages with the historical events themselves. Han has recognised that Human Acts represents a turning point in her work, away from novels of ‘light and warmth’ and towards explorations of historical slaughter and grief.

We Do Not Part develops this trend. The narrator, Kyungha, is a middle-aged writer living in contemporary Seoul. One day, out of the blue, her friend Inseon asks her to travel to her home on Jeju. Inseon, a documentary filmmaker, has cut off two of her fingers in a woodwork