by Han Kang (2021)
Kyung-ha, a troubled author who no longer has a job nor a family to look after, has sequestered herself in an apartment in Seoul, South Korea. Her current life of seclusion sees her sitting at her desk while regularly drawing up a will/suicide note only to rip it up and rarely leave her residence. The story unfolds with a description of a surreal recurring dream she’s had, the elements of which foreshadow/symbolize different aspects of her past, present and future in the later chapters. The dream features a scene of heavy snowfall in a forest field, with thousands of black tree logs placed along the bottom of a mountain ridge. Kyung-ha suspects these snowflake-covered tree logs and the burial mounds behind them are all tombstones for the dead and that this is a graveyard. As she turns around, she suddenly finds herself facing a beach in open ocean waters. As the waves keep crashing in, she feels a strong conviction to protect the bones buried near the top of the ridge and keep them from getting swept away before the tide comes in further. She then suddenly awakens, realizing it was all a dream. The first time she dreamt this was around two months after she released a book about a massacre that took place in a city. She’d always thought this dream was just about that city and its history. But in the past year she started to wonder whether it meant more.
Then one day in December, Kyung-ha receives a text message from an old-time friend named In-seon, a former documentary film student who later got into wood-making. They grew apart when In-seon moved to a remote village in South Korea’s Jeju Island where In-seon’s mother lived before she died years after she moved there. In-seon’s text asks Kyung-ha to come to a hospital in Seoul, where she was flown after a severe accident at the wood workshop at her home back in Jeju Island, which saw two of her fingers get cut off by a wood grinder. She was sent to the hospital in Seoul due to the complex treatment/surgery required. In-seon asks Kyung-ha to fly to Jeju to save her pet bird, for which only two days’ worth of food had been left behind, so In-seon urges Kyung-ha must immediately go to Jeju to save the bird.
Kyung-ha gets on a plane to Jeju and arrives amid heavy snowfall on the island. On her journey to find In-seon’s village, Kyung-ha recalls when In-seon told her about the time she ran away from home when she was 18 and how her mother’s entire family was killed when her mother was 13 by police who massacred everyone in the village. In-seon’s mother remembers seeing a thin layer of snow frozen on the faces of the dead bodies. Since then, In-seon’s mother associated the image of snow remaining on a person’s face with death. As the relentless snowfall continues, Kyung-ha eventually arrives at a bus stop where she can catch a bus to the village nearest to In-seon’s place. At the stop, there is an old lady who looks to be at least 80 years old, standing amid the snowstorm. She reminds Kyung-ha of In-seon’s late mother, whom she met during her previous visit to Jeju, while the mother had dementia. When they were introduced, Kyung-ha remembers In-seon’s mother saying “Enjoy your stay” in a polite but hollow tone. The bus eventually arrives and as it drives onward, Kyung-ha notices thousands of trees covered and shaken by the continous snowfall, reminding her of the tree logs from her recurring dream.
Suddenly Kyung-ha finds herself laying in the snow in the darkness of the night. It appears she had a bad fall en route to In-seon’s house after getting off the bus. She has also lost her mobile phone. Although she fell down a slope, bumping her head and body against stones and rocks, her thick padded coat and the padding of the snow managed to soften her fall and reduce the impact. Wondering what will keep her alive in this unforgiving snowstorm, Kyung-ha rolls her body into the shape of a ball, hiding herself inside her coat, including her head and cheeks, with her arms wrapped around her knees.
The snow on her face reminds Kyung-ha of In-seon’s mother seeing the snow remain on the faces of the massacred in her village. Kyung-ha feels herself getting sleepy. She can’t feel the snow falling on her face anymore and can’t keep her eyes open. Suddenly different moments from her life appear to simultaneously shine brightly before her eyes. She wonders if this is what’s meant to happen when a person is about to die. She wants to give into this trance-like state but is reminded there is still In-seon’s bird who must be saved.
Realizing she still has some feeling left in some fingers, Kyung-ha somehow reaches In-seon’s workshop, from where there is a bright light shining with the door open. Kyung-ha discovers In-seon’s bird is dead. She wraps it in a scarf and places it inside a tea can before burying it at the base of a tree. After burying the bird, Kyung-ha feels a sense of completion, thinking “There is nothing else left to do.” Kyung-ha hears the doors and windows of the house slamming amid the snowstorm. She realizes there is a power outage, which means the heating has also been cut off. She puts on extra layers of clothing from In-seon’s closet and lays down on In-seon’s bed, where she phases in and out of multiple dreams, including one where she tries to revive the bird. In another dream, Kyung-ha asks the bird “Shall we sing?” to which the bird immediately responds and starts humming. While the bird continues humming, Kyung-ha is on her knees, digging dirt out the ground with her bare hands. As the humming suddenly stops, she looks up into the darkness and sees wet snowflakes falling onto her forehead and lips.
She is awakened by the shattering of her teeth due to the cold. She hears the eerie words “Enjoy your stay” previously spoken by In-seon’s mother whispered inside her head. She remembers how cold the mother’s hands felt, like that of a dead person’s, when she held Kyung-ha’s hands while wishing her a nice stay. Kyung-ha starts to think the shaking of the windows and the doors of the house may not just simply be from the wind of the snowstorm. Kyung-ha wonders perhaps the house is attempting to drive people out of this home, to cut and pierce them (just how In-seon was cut up by a grinder recently and on other occasions). Kyung-ha believes she has been brought here to die…to be placed in pieces alongside the tree logs laid out at the workshop.