The Vegetarian

The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.

What threw him was the way that his brother-in-law seemed to consider it perfectly natural to discard his wife as though she were a broken watch or household appliance.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, In-hye could see that the role that she had adopted back then of the hard-working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter had been a sign not of maturity but of cowardice. It had been a survival tactic.

She’s a good woman, he thought. The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive.

“I don’t deserve you,” he used to say, before they were married. “Your goodness, your stability, how calm you always are—the way you just get on with things, and make it look so easy…” Respect—that was what she’d taken his words to connote, but might they not in fact have been intended as a confession, that whatever it was he felt for her, it was n

Her calm acceptance of all these things made her seem to him something sacred. Whether human, animal or plant, she could not be called a “person,” but then she wasn’t exactly some feral creature either—more like a mysterious being with qualities of both.

Yells and howls, threaded together layer upon layer, are enmeshed to form that lump. Because of meat. I ate too much meat. The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there. Blood and flesh, all those butchered bodies are scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my

She’d been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.

“I didn’t, you see. I thought trees stood up straight…I only found out just now. They actually stand with both arms in the earth, all of them. Look, look over there, aren’t you surprised?”