In Han Kang’s latest novel, a character saws off the tips of two of her fingers in a woodworking accident. Surgeons reattach them but the treatment is gruesome and agonizing. Every three minutes, for weeks on end, a caregiver carefully, dispassionately sinks needles deep into the sutures on each finger, drawing blood, to prevent the fingertips from rotting off.
“They said we have to let the blood flow, that I have to feel the pain,” the patient tells a friend. “Otherwise the nerves below the cut will die.”
In her fiction, Ms. Han has probed at the seams of her country’s historic wounds. She has burrowed into two of South Korea’s darkest episodes: the 1980 massacre in the city of Gwangju, which crushed a pro-democracy movement, and an earlier, even deadlier chapter on Jeju Island, in which tens of thousands of people were killed.
Ms. Han has attracted a wider audience, both at home and abroad, since being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October. An English translation of the novel set on Jeju, “We Do Not Part,” is being released this week in the United States, more than three years after it was published in Korean.
