James L. Fleming: Essays on Korean & World Literature

The first sentence of Han Kang's The Vegetarian belongs to a husband, and in Korean it is little more than a shrug. Before his wife stopped eating meat, he says, he had never thought of her as anyone special. In Deborah Smith's English the same man remembers her as "completely unremarkable in every way", which is a harder thing to say about the person you chose to marry. I have read the two openings side by side more often than I would care to admit, and the gap between them has occupied me for years. It is not a large gap. It is the width of an adverb or two. Yet the novel is about nothing so much as the distance between what a woman is and what the people around her say she is, and on the very first page the English edition has already widened it by a notch. That English edition has had an extraordinary life. It shared the Man Booker International Prize with its author in 2016, the first year the award went to a single book and was divided equally between writer ...

The novel opens in a taxi stuck on an elevated expressway in Tokyo, with the radio playing Janáček's Sinfonietta , and the narrator observes, with a dryness I have always admired, that this is hardly the ideal music for a traffic jam. He is right. The piece begins with a fanfare of such brazen, bright brass that it sounds less like the start of a concert than a regiment arriving to liberate a town. To hear it while trapped between lorries, going nowhere, is to be told that something tremendous is about to happen at the exact moment nothing can. Murakami chose it, he later explained to Sam Anderson of The New York Times Magazine , precisely because it was strange. He had heard it performed live only once, with a small army of trumpeters ranged behind the orchestra, and the oddity stayed with him. He listened to it over and over while writing the opening scene. Then something happened that no novelist can plan for. The book came out in Japan in 2009, and the Sinfonietta , a work mo...