Cover of Han Kang's "We Do Not Part" / Courtesy of Penguin Books

Since Han Kang's Nobel Prize win was announced in October, discussion of her and her work has been everywhere in Korea and internationally. While she was still involved in its day-to-day running, the bookshop she co-ran with her son was swamped with fans, and many curious new readers found themselves challenged by her lyrical and often enigmatic writing.

Han's previous work to appear in translation was "Greek Lessons," a short yet challenging novella that sometimes strays into passages of abstract poetry. "We Do Not Part" is a much longer novel in comparison and is Han's most accessible work available in translation to date. That's not to say that Han has sacrificed anything to create a more accessible work. "We Do Not Part" is also her most moving, ambitious and intriguing novel in translation.

Kyungha, the novel's protagonist, lives in Seoul and, like many of Han's protagonists, has withdrawn from much of contemporary life. Haunted by a harrowing book she wrote, she suffers from symptoms of depression and anxiety. But when Kyungha's close friend Inseon has an accident, she asks Kyungha to go to Jeju Island to feed her pet bird before it dies. Unfortunately, it's the dead of winter, and Korea is blanketed in snow. When Kyungha arrives on Jeju, there is a huge blizzard — Han uses this to conjure a sublime vision of nature dwarfing and engulfing us and the things we have built, somehow terrifying and comforting at the same time.

Han uses the simple premise of a journey across Korea to rescue a cherished pet bird to explore certain signature issues: intense friendship, historical trauma and the fragility of life itself. Even the color white is of significance to Han (one of her previous novels is called "The White Book"), so aficionados of her previous work will find all kinds of conceptual continuity between "We Do Not Part" and her other novels.

Kyungha and Inseon's friendship is partly based on their common interests. Both characters are storytellers interested in unearthing real stories from Korea's violent past, stories that were officially suppressed for a long time and which many wanted understandably to forget. Kyungha's book dealt with a massacre in a Korean city rendered in the text as "G___." This creates an intriguing parallel with Han herself, whose own novel "Human Acts" deals with the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and subsequent massacre. Meanwhile, Inseon is a documentary filmmaker: her film dealt with violence perpetrated by South Korean soldiers during the Vietnam War.

With state-sanctioned violence very much on both women's minds, returning to Jeju will entail confronting another painful episode in modern Korean history: the Jeju Uprising, a bloody chain of events in the late 1940s in which the Korean government used mass violence to suppress a rebellion on the island. Kyungha is already deeply sensitive to historical trauma, and now she must face close proximity to these brutal events.

South Korean writer Han Kang reads on stage at The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden, Dec. 12, 2024, a few days after receiving her Nobel Prize in literature. AFP-Yonhap

While Han's other novels have lyrical passages often rendered in italics, here, the italicized text is reserved for Inseon's stories, retold as Kyungha remembers them. It's as if the extreme whiteness of the blizzard blots out everything else, leaving Kyungha to focus on the few things that matter to her: saving the bird's life, and her relationship to Inseon. Inseon's narration gradually reveals that the Jeju Uprising is of deep personal significance to her and her family.

"We Do Not Part" was published in Korean in 2021, and e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris provide the English translation. The novel is not an easy read; the descriptions of mass violence are brutal and unflinching, yet Han is reflective in writing about this violence. The modern-day descriptions of insomnia and migraines bear the mark of one who knows those symptoms too well.

However, this is a comparatively accessible work by Han, and it is, therefore, an ideal starting point for readers curious about her in the wake of her Nobel Prize win. More crucially, it's a powerful book that is best experienced rather than described. It deserves a series of superlatives like powerful, moving, cathartic, thought-provoking and exquisitely written, but even these don't convey the full experience of taking the journey with Kyungha through the blizzard and into the heart of tragedy and hope.

"We Do Not Part" is available in paperback and hardcover through dbbooks.co.kr.

John A. Riley is a writer and former university lecturer who spent over 10 years living and working in Korea. He has written for The Asian Review of Books, The Chap, The Dark Side, Popmatters and numerous other publications.