Han Kang's Literary World: Why Is the World So Painful, and Yet So Beautiful?
Last January, while sorting her storeroom for an upcoming move, Han Kang (1970– ) found an old shoe box. Inside lay a thin pamphlet she had stapled together at the age of eight, with two penciled lines on its cover and the year 1979 on the back. One of the poems began: “Where is love? It is inside my thump-thumping beating chest.” The Nobel laureate who, ten months later, would stand at the Swedish Academy and ask the world why it is so violent and yet so beautiful, was already there — in the careful, awkward handwriting of a child who had not yet learned that this question would consume her life.
There is something almost unbearable about that scene. We tend to imagine the great writer as someone who arrived at her themes after long apprenticeship, after suffering, after the proper books had been read. Han's storeroom tells a different story. The questions were already there, waiting in a shoe box, while the country around her prepared the violence she would one day be sentenced to write about. Four months after her family left Gwangju in January 1980, the city she had just abandoned was emptied of its people. She was nine. The thread had already been spun.
To enter Han Kang's literary world is to accept an inheritance one did not ask for: the conviction that pain and beauty are not opposites but the same substance, examined under different light.
The two questions that refuse to be reconciled
In her Nobel Lecture “Light and Thread,” delivered in Stockholm in December 2024, Han identified the precise sentences that had governed her writing for decades. They were not slogans. They were not declarations. They were questions, and they refused to resolve.
Why is the world so violent and painful? And yet how can the world be this beautiful?
— Han Kang, Light and Thread (2024)
Anyone who has read Han attentively will recognize that her novels do not answer these questions. They sustain them. They keep them suspended in the same sentence, the same paragraph, sometimes the same image. A child is bayoneted in the municipal gymnasium of Gwangju, and the candle that someone lights over his body burns with a pale blue heart. A woman on Jeju Island wakes in a Seoul hospital, missing two fingers, and asks her friend to fly to her snow-covered house to keep a bird alive. The brutality and the tenderness arrive together, never permitting the reader the relief of choosing one over the other.
Critics often describe this as “lyrical violence” or “poetic witness,” and the phrases are not wrong, but they are slightly off. The lyric is not a decoration laid over the violence to make it tolerable. In Han's prose, the lyric is the form that violence forces upon a conscience determined not to look away. Beauty, here, is what remains when a writer refuses to be either an accountant of horrors or an aesthete of suffering.
Gwangju, Jeju, and the debt the living owe the dead
The decisive turn in Han's writing came in 2012, when she sat down to write what she described as a “life- and world-embracing” novel, “suffused with bright, transparent sensations.” She wrote twenty pages and stopped. Something inside her, she later said, would not let her continue. That something was Gwangju — the photographs she had seen as a twelve-year-old of citizens beaten and shot by paratroopers in May 1980, photographs that had lodged in her as “a fundamental question about humans.”
What she did next has a stark dignity. She obtained a volume containing more than nine hundred testimonies of survivors and bereaved families, and for a month, every day for nine hours, she read. The novel that emerged, Human Acts (Sonyeon-i onda, 2014), is not a historical reconstruction. It is something stranger: a book in which fifteen-year-old Dong-ho, killed at the provincial administration headquarters, is summoned by the Korean title's present-tense verb — onda, he comes — and walks toward us across forty-four years of suppressed mourning.
Han has spoken about how, during the writing, she copied two sentences onto the first page of every notebook. They were sentences she had carried since her mid-twenties.
Can the present help the past? Can the living save the dead?
— Han Kang, Light and Thread (2024)
By the time she reached the diary of Park Yong-jun, a young night-school teacher who stayed at the YWCA building until the soldiers returned and killed him, she knew the questions had to be inverted. Can the past help the present? Can the dead save the living? The grammar shifts; the ethical universe is overturned. The conventional sequence of memorial — we remember them, we honor them, we pity them — is replaced by something far more demanding. The dead are not the recipients of our compassion. They are its source.
This is the reversal that makes Han's work morally distinct from most fiction of historical atrocity. It is also what carries forward into We Do Not Part (Jakbyeolhaji anneunda, 2021), the Jeju 4·3 novel that descends, in the author's own architectural metaphor, from a horizontal journey across snow to a vertical descent into the ocean of 1948, when between ten and thirty thousand civilians on Jeju Island were killed by South Korean security forces and right-wing paramilitaries during anti-communist suppressions. The true protagonist of the novel, as Han has noted, is Inseon's mother Jeongsim, a survivor who spent her life searching for a single bone of her loved ones. “She who refuses to stop mourning,” Han wrote. “Who does not bid farewell.”
That refusal is the political ethic at the heart of Han's literary world. In a culture that increasingly rewards the swift production of closure, that demands grief be efficient, therapeutic, monetizable, Han's people will not be efficient. They keep candles burning at the bottom of the sea.
The body as the smallest unit of resistance
Yet Han's importance cannot be reduced to historical witness, however essential that witness is. To read only Human Acts and We Do Not Part is to miss what happens in The Vegetarian (Chaesikjuuija, 2007), Greek Lessons (Huirabeo sigan, 2011), and The White Book (Huin, 2016) — works in which the violence is intimate, domestic, sometimes invisible, and where the resistance is conducted not through testimony but through the body itself.
Yeong-hye, the heroine of The Vegetarian, refuses meat after a dream. The refusal expands. She refuses food. She refuses speech. She refuses, in the end, the entire category of human. Her family responds with escalating violence — her father forces meat into her mouth; her husband withdraws; her brother-in-law converts her body into an aesthetic object. Han herself has framed the questions that drove the novel with characteristic precision: Can a person ever be completely innocent? To what depths can we reject violence? What happens to one who refuses to belong to the species called human?
These are not metaphors for something else. They are the questions, raw and unmetabolized, that the body asks when it can no longer be persuaded to participate in the ordinary cruelties of life. Yeong-hye's silence is not pathology. It is judgment. The novel does not endorse her path — the ambulance scene Han chose for the ending was precisely a refusal of finality, a way of keeping her alive against the logic of the story — but it refuses to pathologize her either. It listens to what the body says when the body has decided to say no.
What unites the works of historical witness with the works of bodily refusal is the conviction that the smallest unit of resistance is not the slogan or the demonstration but the breathing, mortal, sensing body. Han writes, she has said, by using her own. The taste, the cold, the warmth, the heartbeat, the grip of a hand. These are not literary devices. They are the channels through which the electric current of language reaches the reader. They are how the gold thread, the one her eight-year-old self had named, continues to be spun.
After the Nobel, in a country that does not want to remember
When the Swedish Academy awarded Han the Nobel Prize in Literature on October 10, 2024 — the first Korean writer and the first Asian woman to be so recognized — the reaction in South Korea was not uniformly celebratory. Within days, conservative commentators and online communities began circulating familiar lines: that Human Acts distorted the historical record of Gwangju, that We Do Not Part was propaganda, that the prize was political. The 5·18 Memorial Foundation publicly condemned the resurgent denialism. The pattern repeated in February 2025 when We Do Not Part won the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
This is the context in which Han's literary world must now be read. Her novels did not arrive into a serene republic of letters. They arrived into a society where the question of who is permitted to mourn whom, and for how long, is still actively contested by the state, the media, and the algorithm. In such a society, the simple act of writing a sentence that refuses to abandon the dead is itself a political position, whether the writer intended it or not.
Han, by all available evidence, intended it. The lecture in Stockholm did not soften under the lights of global recognition. It named Gwangju. It named Jeju. It named Park Yong-jun. It did what literature is supposed to do and so rarely does anymore: it spoke the names that power would prefer to keep unspoken, and it did so without raising its voice.
What love has to do with it
There is one more thing in the lecture that deserves attention. Toward the end, Han confessed that she had recently begun to doubt her own account of her work. For decades she had believed her core questions were the two she had identified — the violent world, the beautiful world. But three years before the prize, she began to suspect there was something underneath those questions. She returned to the eight-year-old's poem in the shoe box.
From my earliest novel to my latest, hadn’t the deepest layer of my inquiries always been directed towards love? Could it be that love was in fact my life’s oldest and most fundamental undertone?
— Han Kang, Light and Thread (2024)
This is not the sentimental discovery it might appear. The love Han describes is not affection. It is the substance that makes the pain possible. “Does love beget pain,” she asks, “and is some pain evidence of love?” If the answer is yes — and her entire body of work argues that it is — then the question of why the world is so painful and the question of why the world is so beautiful are not two questions. They are one question asked from two sides.
We hurt because we have been connected. We mourn because we have loved. The gold thread that the eight-year-old saw running between human chests is the same thread along which the candles of Jeju travel from wick to wick, from heart to heart. To read Han Kang is to be reminded that this thread has not been severed, however much the architecture of contemporary life is designed to make us forget it.
Readers walking with Han through these pages, you are likely to put the book down at some point and find yourselves unable to return to your day at the speed you had planned. This is not a failure of efficiency. It is the thread doing its work. The pain you feel at her sentences is, as she suggests, evidence of something you have not yet decided to call by its name.
The world remains violent. The candles remain lit. The question of which of these you will allow to organize your attention is the question her literature places, gently and without insistence, in your hands.
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