When Han Kang won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2024, the book I found in a bookshop in Buenos Aires, published in 2012 by the independent publisher Bajo la luna, became a sought-after collector's item. It was first translated into a Western language by the Korean-Argentinian Sunme Yoon, who came across The Vegetarian and decided to translate it before she had even finished the first chapter.

The Vegetarian – the title of the book and of the first chapter – is the name that otherness takes on for the husband, when one night he finds his wife in her nightgown, in front of the fridge, throwing all the meat in the bin.
"Before my wife became vegetarian, I'd always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way."¹ He had chosen someone who did not disturb him; only her refusal to wear a bra baffled and excited him a little. Yeonghye's refusal to eat meat opens a hole, presentifying something totally foreign. He responds by insulting her: "Are you crazy?", enjoying himself by forcing her sexually. But she sharpens her senses and escapes. She will not stay in the hospital bed when she is admitted there, after her father put meat in her mouth, and her passage to the act of cutting herself with a knife.
Finding her naked in the sun, sitting by a fountain, licking her wound, clutching a bird with a blood-stained bite mark in her hands, all veils are torn away. "I thought to myself: I do not know that woman. And it was true, it was not a lie."²

"I had a dream…"³ Yeonghye replies when asked why she has stopped eating meat.
Spoken by her, a few sayings, nightmares and childhood memories written in italics pierce the plot. Brief, bloody scenes, a stew made with the meat of the dog that bit her as a child, the eyes of beasts.
"… again those eyes. Rising up from the pit of my stomach. Shuddering away, my hands, I need to see my hands. […] Can only trust my breasts now. I like my breasts, nothing can be killed by them. […] With my round breasts I'm ok. […] So why do they keep on shrinking? […] Why are my edges all sharpening -what I am going to gouge?"⁴
A murderous body, a murdered body, a sharp body, which finds a respite from nightmares when covered by the flowers her brother-in-law paints around the Mongolian spot she still has on her buttock. But they were erased. And in the hole of what there is not, dreams once again draw what there is: a body and its jouissance. The vegetarian becomes vegetable. She no longer needs to eat, only water.
"Leaves are growing out of my body, roots are sprouting out of my hands … they delve down into the earth. Endlessly, endlessly … yes, I spread my legs because I wanted flowers to bloom from my crotch; I spread them wide…"⁵

^[1]Kang, H., The Vegetarian, London: Portobello Books, 2015, p. 3.

^[2] Ibid., p. 52.

^[3] Ibid., p. 11.

^[4] Ibid., p. 33.

^[5] Ibid., p. 96.