We Do Not Part, by Han Kang, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth, 256 pages)

It was inevitable that after K-pop, or Korean pop music, conquered America, K-lit would soon follow, with a suitable time for translation. But one of these things is not like the other. Unlike the frothy music genre, the latest Korean novel to be published in the U.S. is a serious work that challenges readers to confront evil and pain, while not closing our eyes to love and beauty.

At the center of Han Kang’s We Do Not Part are two friends who had fallen out of touch, an urgent request and a small white bird.

The events of a short but precarious journey are woven into a larger tapestry of a horrifying period in the history of South Korea, in which an estimated 10 percent of the population of Jeju Island were murdered in a violent campaign in 1948 that, like 9/11, came to be known by its date: Jeju 4.3.

The story begins with the nightmare of the narrator, Kyjunga, who repeatedly dreams that she is seeing a graveyard about to be overtaken by water. In her dream she is desperate to save the remains. She is unsure whether the nightmare — a “black-blue sea billowing in to dredge the bones away beneath the mounds” — is her mind processing a book she had written in the past, or an omen of horrors to come.

Kyjunga once had a family — people to cook for and dine with — but now lives alone in Seoul in poor health and suffering from insomnia and migraines. She is spending her days writing, and perpetually rewriting, a will and letters to be sent after her death. It is all she can do to summon the energy to leave her home and get a meal every now and then. It is all she can do to go on living.

One day, however, she gets a text from a friend she has not communicated with in a while, asking her to come to a hospital and bring an ID. Kyjunga leaves immediately and goes to her friend, who is being treated after a horrific accident. The friend, named Inseon, asks Kyjunga to travel to her home in Jeju to feed her bird, a white budgie (or parakeet) that has now been alone for several days and is likely near death without food or water.

It is an enormous ask. A fierce snowstorm is moving in, Inseon’s home is not easily accessible, and she wants Kyjunga to not just check on the bird but to stay with her for several months, until her treatment is complete. But Kyjunga cannot say no, not only out of pity for her friend and the bird, but also because she is, in a convoluted way, partly responsible for the accident her friend suffered.

And so she sets out in a snowstorm that is rapidly shutting down public transportation, leaving her friend to endure an agonizing treatment alone, and hoping she can find the house, which she has not visited in some time, and that the bird will still be alive.

Along the way, we learn more about the two women’s lives — how they met on a work assignment (Kyjunga is a writer, Inseon a photographer and filmmaker) and supported each other over the years. Kyjunga knows a little about Inseon’s complicated relationship with her mother, whose immediate family members perished in the JeJu Massacre. She had met her mother, at a time when the mother was descending into dementia. But neither woman had a complete understanding of what Inseon’s mother had suffered as a child, a story that is revealed in slow-motion over the course of the novel.

Snow is a secondary character in this novel — coating the faces of the dead, clinging “desolately” to Insenon’s hair as the friends walk together, and providing an eerie and tangible link from the present to the past. At one point Kyjunga reflects on how the snow falling around her is the recycled water from decades past and might well have fallen on the mounds of bodies bloodying the ground in 1948: “Who’s to say the snow dusting my hands now isn’t the same snow that had gathered on their faces?”

Kang, the first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was honored in 2024 for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Kang has said that she herself had the dream that haunts Kyjunga, and that We Do Not Part came from it. She wrote the novel over two years while living in a rented room on Jeju Island. The questions the novel is probing, she said in her Nobel speech, are “To what extent can we love? Where is our limit? To what degree must we love in order to remain human to the end?”

We Do Not Part arrives in the U.S. four years after it was first published in Korea — late, perhaps, but exceedingly welcome. Kang and her translators have crafted an achingly beautiful story that will send readers to her previous novels, which include 2017’s Human Acts and The Vegetarian, published in the U.S. in 2016. Bring on the K-lit. A

Featured Image: We Do Not Part, by Han Kang