Review of We Do Not Part by Han Kang

*We Do Not Part* by Han Kang, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (2025). Published by Hogarth.

For the longest time, even before Han Kang won the Nobel Prize, I was reading her work. I read The Vegetarian early on before the rest of her work was translated, and then I ended up acquiring her other novels throughout the years. Greek Lessons I received as an advance copy, and I bought a copy of The White Book in the Incheon Airport one time.

That said, Korean literature has been my thing for a hot minute now. I collect works in translation, and whenever I am in South Korea, I try to pick up a few books in Korean here and there. My master’s thesis was even on women’s colonial and postcolonial literature in Korea, which shows how deep I am in this hole.

All of this is to say that I spend too much time with Korean literature. And I guess someone noticed throughout the years, as I ended up being sent an advance copy of We Do Not Part not long after Han Kang won the Nobel Prize. I was a very happy girl when I opened up my email and saw this opportunity.

And when it came time for me to sit down with the novel in October 2024, I devoured it. I had been to Jeju for the first time in July 2024, and after that trip I really wanted to learn more about Jeju history. However, there is a direct lack of that kind of work available in English—until this novel came out.

Outside of academic work, this is the first novel I’ve seen dealing directly with what happened in Jeju in the late 1940s.

Let’s get into the review—I can feel myself rambling already!

After a friend’s accident, Kyungha ventures to Jeju to save her bird—and must also confront the region’s tragic past.

This novel begins in the winter, when our main character, Kyungha, gets a text message from her friend. Later in the novel she would reflect upon why and how she would be the only one her friend, Inseon, would message immediately. But in the moment, she heads straight to the hospital.

There, she confronts an ugly reality: Inseon has cut off part of her fingers. Inseon is a documentary filmmaker and artist, and lately she has been creating objects out of wood that resemble the culture of Jeju. There were times that Kyungha would go to Jeju to visit Inseon and her now-deceased mother, who was suffering from dementia, and she’d see Inseon’s work at her home.

But now, in the present day, Inseon asks Kyungha to return to Jeju Island immediately. After the accident, which was forced to have her taken to a Seoul hospital because of the severity of it, her pet bird Ama was left alone. Inseon used to have two birds, but one passed, and Ama has been left alone in her cage in the midst of a snowstorm.

Kyungha agrees to the task, but this turns out to be quite the task. She arrives at the Jeju Airport as the snowstorm begins to intensify, the buses beginning to shut down because of how hard it is to get through the ice and snow.

As she ventures through the snow, taking the last bus available, Kyungha loses her phone and only relies on visual cues to get to where she thinks Inseon’s village is. Not only does she have to confront almost dying in the snow when she gets to the cabin, but there comes a revelation about the darkness that comes with Inseon’s familial history.

This is the point in the novel where we start weaving through past and present, utilizing Inseon’s background of meticulously documenting what went down to see the immense trauma Jeju went to. If you’re queasy about learning about mass murder, this book doesn’t spare many details. It goes all out.

And if you’re never heard of the Jeju Massacre, this is a great primer for diving deeper. The further Kyungha ventures into the snow and huddles inside of Inseon’s home, isolated from the rest of the island, the more she confronts this reality. We can see Kyungha is based a bit on Kang herself, as she wrote a novel on the Gwangju Massacre.

So not only is this about state violence and its horrors, as well as generational trauma, but this is a book about the unshakeable bonds that are created from this. From Inseon and Kyungha to Inseon’s family members who survived, this is an intricate web of connections going on here.

Overall Thoughts

This is a novel I adored. I loved Human Acts the most out of Han Kang’s work, but I think I liked this novel even better. It shows more maturity as a writer for Kang, and there are entire sections and paragraphs of this novel that are going to stick with me for a while.

That said, I do think this is a novel you need to take your time with. The descriptions of murder, children and the old alike, can be a lot to handle. This is also a novel that is worth visiting multiple times over and over again, picking up the smaller details. I believe there are some smaller points I definitely missed throughout this.

I think I’ll be buying a copy for my bookshelf, even though I have a digital advance copy. I think this is a worthy edition to my shelves, and I’ll be musing on this book for a while.

What I am trying to say here is pick this one up. I don’t think you’re going to regret it—there’s a lot of love and history pumped into this novel, and it’s important to read books like these for sure.

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