Human Acts: A Novel

Dong-ho, I need you to take my hand and guide me away from all this. Away to where the light shines through, to where the flowers bloom.

Whenever we had a toe war, I always won.

Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again.

I’m sorry. I thought I’d be able to finish the previous class early; in fact it went on longer than usual. Please have a seat. Can I get you something to drink? Yes, I knew the previous owner was one of Dong-ho’s teachers. I hadn’t realized you would know our story. To be honest, I was in two minds about the whole thing. At first I was worried that

It’s sunny over there, Mum, and there’s lots of flowers, too. Why are we walking in the dark, let’s go over there, where the flowers are blooming.

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaught

Looking at that boy’s life, Jin-su said, what is this thing we call a soul? Just some nonexistent idea? Or something that might as well not exist? Or no, is it like a kind of glass? Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That’s the fundamental nature of glass. And that’s why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all,

At that moment, I realized what all this was for. The words that this torture and starvation were intended to elicit. We will make you realize how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses

The censors had scored through four lines in the paragraph following that one. Bearing that in mind, the question which remains to us is this: what is humanity? What do we have to do to keep humanity as one thing and not another? Eun-sook could remember the precise thickness of the line that had been drawn through these sentences. She could recall