We Do Not Part (2025) is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning Korean author Han Kang. Kang has published widely in Korea, but she catapulted to international fame in 2016 when her novel The Vegetarian became the first Korean novel to win the International Booker Prize for Fiction. Kang is additionally known for Human Acts, a novel that explores the Gwangju Uprising of 1980. 

We Do Not Part’s protagonist, Kyungha, is a writer and historian struggling to cope with the emotional impact of writing her recent book on a student uprising that was violently suppressed by the government in an unnamed city that she refers to as G——. Although a standalone novel, We Do Not Part is in dialogue with Human Acts, continuing the latter’s exploration of mass killings on the Korean peninsula. We Do Not Part employs surreal imagery that blurs the boundary between dreams and reality to interrogate long-concealed acts of state violence in Korea. Its narrative structure is often ambiguous and purposefully disorienting, meant to mimic the difficulty that the characters Kyungha and Inseon have in their search to uncover the truth about Korea’s past. The novel follows the two as they attempt to piece together a coherent narrative of the state-sponsored massacres in Gwangju, Jeju, and Gyeongbuk from historical documents, photographs, newspaper articles, and letters. The novel delves into some of Korea’s most violent historical events and their impact on individuals, families, and Korean society. It explores themes related to Historical Memory and Collective Trauma, Grief and Loss, and Friendship and Human Connection. 

This guide refers to the 2025 hardcover edition published by Hogarth, translated from Korean by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Norris.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, illness, animal death, and death.

Plot Summary

As the novel opens, protagonist Kyungha dreams that she is on a snowy seashore looking at thousands of black tree trunks jutting up out of the earth. The trunks are stooped and varied in height, and they remind Kyungha of bodies that are half buried in a mass grave. She wakes with a start and realizes that she has been dreaming. Since beginning to write a book on the massacre at G——, she has been troubled by this recurring nightmare. Kyungha lives alone in an apartment on the outskirts of Seoul. She no longer has a job or a family, and she suffers from severe migraines and abdominal spasms. Too ill to cook for herself, she subsists on delivery food, although she is often too nauseated to eat.

Kyungha receives an email from her friend Inseon, a documentary filmmaker turned carpenter. The two met while working at a magazine and have stayed in touch throughout the years, developing a close bond even though they are no longer coworkers. Several of Inseon’s films, interrogations of women’s roles during wartime, garnered high praise and public attention. However, after her last film, which was more personal, was poorly received, Inseon quit filmmaking to become a woodworker. She moved back to her childhood home on Jeju Island to take care of her dying mother and stayed after her mother died, building a workshop and devoting herself full-time to carpentry. In her email, Inseon tells Kyungha that she has sustained a serious injury and asks if Kyungha will visit her in the hospital.

When Kyungha arrives, Inseon explains that she would like Kyungha to travel to Jeju to check on her pet bird, whom she fears will die while she is in the hospital. Although Kyungha wonders if someone on Jeju might be able to help her instead, she complies with her friend’s request and purchases a ticket to Jeju. A fierce snowstorm has begun to impact travel and transportation, and when she arrives on the island, she struggles to make her way to Inseon’s home. She takes multiple buses and then finishes her journey on foot in the dark. When she finally arrives at the house, she finds Inseon’s pet bird, Ama, dead in her cage. Kyungha searches through Inseon’s house for materials to help give Ama a proper burial. She sews Ama a tiny shroud, places her in a tin, and then digs in the nearly frozen earth to bury the bird.

The cold intensifies, and the house loses power. After a fitful, dream-filled sleep, Kyungha wakes to find Inseon in the house. Not sure whether she is awake or still dreaming, Kyungha begins to talk to her friend. Inseon shares details from her family’s history and a series of documents detailing the history of Jeju Island. Kyungha realizes that Inseon has been researching state-sponsored massacres in Gyeongbuk and on Jeju and that Inseon’s own family was deeply impacted by the violence. She learns that Inseon’s mother kept boxes of materials about the massacres, partly to locate missing family members but also because she was interested in piecing together a coherent timeline of the tragedies.

At one time, Kyungha and Inseon discussed making a documentary film featuring an installation of tree trunks meant to evoke the image of half-buried bodies. Although Kyungha decided that she did not want to make the film, she finds that Inseon has continued to work on it, and the two talk further about moving forward with the project. The storm intensifies as the two women continue to dig through Inseon’s mother’s boxes. 

Inseon takes Kyungha to a spot near her house that she frequented with her mother and shares more details about the final months of her mother’s life: It was only as she neared death that Inseon’s mother began to share information about their family’s experiences during the massacre, and Inseon developed an interest in making a film about it. During this conversation, Inseon shares her belief that the dead and missing are never really gone and that people can exist in two places at once. The two women notice that their last candle is about to go out, and after some difficulty, Kyungha manages to relight it.