In the last Han Kang novel, a character cut off the tips of two of her fingers in a woodworking accident. Surgeons reattach them, but the treatment is gruesome and excruciating. Every three minutes, for weeks on end, a caregiver carefully, dispassionately sticks needles deep into the stitches on each finger, drawing blood, to prevent the fingertips from rotting.
“They said that we have to let the blood flow, that I have to feel the pain,” the patient says to a friend. “Otherwise the nerves under the cut will die.”
In her fiction, Ms. Han felt at the seams of her country’s historical wounds. She buried herself in two of South Korea’s darkest episodes: the 1980 massacre in the city of Gwangjuwhich crushed the pro-democracy movement and even earlier deadliest chapter on Jeju Islandin which tens of thousands of people were killed.
Ms. Han has attracted a wider audience, both at home and abroad, since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in October. The English translation of a novel set in Jeju, “We are not breaking up,” comes out this week in the United States, more than three years after it was released in Korean.
Her work on South Korea’s authoritarian past has seemed increasingly relevant since December, when she became president briefly introduced a state of emergency. Since then, he has been recalled and arrested.
Ms. Han, who has largely stayed out of the limelight since receiving the Nobel Prize, said in a rare interview that she was still reflecting on the recent events. In her books, she said, it was never her intention to veer from one tragic chapter of modern Korean history to another.
But after “Human works”, a novel by Gwangju, published in 2014, she was tormented by a nightmare. Trying to make sense of his terrifying images—thousands of terrifying, dark figures standing on a snow-covered hill as the sea surges in—led her to Jeju, a southern island with aquamarine seas, now mostly known as a pleasant travel destination.
Between 1947 and 1954, after the uprising, an estimated 30,000 people were killed by policemen, soldiers and anti-communist vigilantes, with the tacit support of the US military. Around a third of the victims were women, children or the elderly.
In “We Don’t Part,” the protagonist, Kyungha, a writer plagued by a recurring nightmare after publishing a book about a town called “G—,” makes her way through the heavy snow engulfing Jeju, on a journey that leads to the discovery of more a generation of families affected by the massacre.
Writing about deeply personal encounters with some of the most painful moments in South Korea, Ms. Han said, left her feeling deeply connected to the experiences of crime victims everywhere and to the people who never stop remembering them.
“It’s pain and blood, but it’s the current of life, connecting the part that could be left to die and the part that lives,” she said in Korean in a video call from her home in Seoul. “Connecting dead memories and the living present, not letting anything die. It’s not just about Korean history, I thought, it’s about all of humanity.”
Theresa Phung, general manager of Yu & Me Books in Manhattan’s Chinatown, said the store has noticed a level of excitement about Ms. Han’s work and a spike in sales that doesn’t always follow a Nobel.
“One of the most impressive qualities is her ability to take very specific scenarios and cultural contexts and bring you into that moment, but she’s very aware that those hyper-specific moments are history repeating itself,” Ms Phung said. “Whether you read about what’s happening in Gwangju or at the table, it’s the lives you see everywhere and the problems you see everywhere.”
Born in Gwangju to a novelist father, Ms. Han spent several years early in her career as a magazine journalist while also working on her poetry and short stories. While trying to write her first novel at age 26, she rented a modest room in Jeju, overlooking the water, from an older woman who lived downstairs from her.
While walking to the post office one day, her landlady pointed to a concrete wall near a cucumber tree in the center of the village and said gravely, “This is where people were shot and killed that winter.”
That memory came back to Ms. Han as she struggled to make sense of her fever dreams, which she realized were about time and memory, she said.
“It came out of nowhere,” she said. “In fact, everyone in Jeju is a survivor, witness, and bereaved family member.”
Ms. Han, 54, first gained widespread recognition among English-speaking readers in 2016 with her novel “Vegetarian.” Its poignant language and unflinching story of a housewife’s quiet rebellion against violence and patriarchy won readers around the world and won her the Booker International Prize for Fiction that year. Her works have been translated into 28 languages. The latest edition, “We Do Not Part” was translated into English by e. yaewon and paige aniyah morris.
In South Korea, Ms. Han has been an established writer of poetry, short stories and novels for over two decades. But her global success widened her readership at home, where her deft retelling of Gwangju—a seminal moment for South Korean democracy—led her to black list writers and other cultural workers.
She speaks, as in her books, with the discipline of a poet, thoughtfully and carefully choosing every word and phrase. Kim Seon-young, who edited the Korean version of “Human Acts” and has since become friends, recalled that Ms. Han once jokingly told her that Ms. Kim was forbidden to change a syllable they disagreed with if her plane crashed into , even if the grammar was a little off.
Ms Han’s Nobel, the first for a South Korean author, was celebrated like an Olympic feat, with sold-out books, huge banners across the country congratulating her and crowds TV cameras are rolling to the neighboring bookstore in Seoul, which she quietly ran for six years. Her son, who is in his 20s, felt so overwhelmed by the attention that he asked her not to mention him in interviews, she said.
Since receiving the award, she has been trying to return to her quiet life of writing, mostly in a sunlit room with wooden beams overlooking a small courtyard. She said the light snow was blowing, sprinkling the wildflowers she had planted last year that bloomed white before shriveling in the cold.
“Being able to walk freely and observe how people live, under a certain degree of anonymity, to write freely without any burdens, that’s the best environment for a writer,” Ms. Han said.
The Nobel came during another tumultuous period for South Korea, which has yet to end, and which at one point looked like it might result in bloodshed. Two days before Mrs. Han left for Sweden for the ceremony, President Yoon Seok Yul declared a state of emergency and sent armed troops into the National Assembly—something that had not happened since the time of the Gwangju massacre.
Ms. Han said she watched the developments from the sidelines until the National Assembly lifted the state of emergency decree in the early hours of the morning.
“Memories of ’79. and in ’80, whether they experienced it directly or indirectly, they knew it must not happen again and that’s why they took to the streets in the middle of the night,” she said, referring to lawmakers and protesters who resisted Mr. Yoon’s decree. “In this way, the past and the present are connected.”
