Kang, Han. We Do Not Part. Munhak Donghae, S Korea , 2021. English translation E Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, Hogarth, London/New York 2025. F; 3/26.

This is a powerful semi-historic novel by a Korean writer who received the Nobel Prize for literature. Its historic basis is the Korean War, centered on the South Korean island of Jeju aka Cheju. That war has always been from a North American point of view partly ignored and misunderstood or even forgotten. My own recollection of it as a child is essentially blank, and I needed to read up on it a bit to get the historic template clearer (I’ll do a short review of Bruce Cumings The Korean War; A History which helped fill in some blanks for me).

Some of those blanks existed after reading this novel because the overlying or intertwined human story presented here is intentionally ambiguous. Beautiful, but as cryptic as the dreadful history of the war in that isolated corner of South Korea.

Two female friends Kyungha the narrator and Inseon are the main characters. Kyungha was a writer, academic, and as part of a conventional family but she loses touch with that life through her writing about later atrocities. She experiences a terrible time in a city for four years with relentless heat and horrifying dreams which are repetitive and involve an ocean, and trees which are truncated, black and corpselike.

Inseon has skills as a filmmaker and is working on a film project which represents her friend’s dreadful dreams. Kyunga tells her no, I don’t want to proceed with this, but Inseon insists. Insedon is also a woodworker but loses several fingers in a shop accident and is admitted to a hospital for the fingers to be re-implanted. The treatment involves long treatment with painful (a bit clinically weird) every-three-minute injections into her fingers. She calls her friend urgently and begs her to go to her home on Jeju Island to save one of her pet birds who will die quickly without water.

(Kyunga wonders) was I really the only person she could ask? The only person who could drop everything at a moment’s notice to spend close to a month in Jeju looking after a bird, someone who no longer had a job or family or meaningful daily routine to attend to? No matter the reason, one thing was certain. I couldn’t turn her down.

Kyungha takes on the emergency trip to the island and travels to and across it with great difficulty through blizzards and on questionable transit. PLOT ALERT Kyunga reaches the house late at night and finds the bird dead.

She buries the bird outside, sleeps on the floor, but wakes in the morning to find the bird chirping and alive. Plus Inseon strangely appears at the house without her injury and the two discuss Inseon’s mother’s struggle after everyone in her village is murdered and the houses are burned. END PLOT ALERT.

In the part of the story where the two friends explore the consequences of the murders and destruction in 1948 we are led through Kyunga’s description of dreamlike events where Inseon seems to be comfortable with ambiguous reality and Kyunga struggles with the weird nature of what seems to be going on. It was Inseon’s mother who experienced the tragedy and many subsequent decades of trying to discover the remains of her brother. The mother at age 11 had returned with her teenage sister from being away to find everyone in the village shot dead. The girls must sweep the snow off the dead people’s faces to see if they can identify family members.

The writing through all this is vivid. Symbolism featuring trees, knives, shadows, the birds, but most especially snow. This up-front fictional style could seem contrived but it’s handled so well that it works as a base of emotional consistency in situations where reality, dream and even death are all represented, and may exist simultaneously.

A few things seem to emerge for me from this tale of horror and somehow redemption. Family members even when some are brutally and senselessly killed “Do Not Part”. Friendship endures. Like some of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction stories about terrible things can come to be paradoxically magnificent.

Lately when I read historic fiction especially taking place somewhere I’ve never been and don’t know much about I try to get my hands on some history of the location but as I want to point out in my review of one of the history books often there’s controversy about historic “fact” that rivals even some of the ambiguity and creative fiction.

Highly recommended 9.0/9.1