my woman's fruit

Description

2024 Nobel Prize in Literature Winner Han Kang

Living as a human being in this world until the end,
About that miraculous event

A classic of Han River literature reborn
On the road, tie a knot quietly

A deep line drawn by connecting three dots

Reading the Han River of yesterday that made the Han River of today. This is a revised edition of all the short story collections (total of three volumes) published by Han Kang to date, who began her literary career by publishing the poem “Winter of Seoul” and four other pieces in the winter issue of the quarterly Literature and Society in 1993 and winning the short story “Red Anchor” in the Seoul Shinmun New Year’s literary contest the following year. Han Kang, winner of the Korean Novel Literature Award (4), Today's Young Artist Award (1999), Yi Sang Literary Award (2000), Dongni Literature Award (2005), Manhae Literature Award (2010), Hwang Sun-won Literature Award (2014), International Booker Prize (2015), Malaparte Literature Award (2016), Kim Yu-jeong Literature Award (2017), San Clemente Literature Award (2018), Daesan Literature Award (2019), Médicis Prize for Foreign Literature (2022), Émile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature (2023), Nobel Prize in Literature (2024), and more, resonates with our times as she examines the loneliness and pain at the root of life through her solid and delicate sentences.
The first Korean Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Han Kang, has published three short story collections so far. The three books, which contain works written over a period of 1995 years from 2012 to 17, were given a new look in 2018. It was an exercise in carefully connecting the three books, each with different colors and formats, and placing them on a single line. Han Kang’s first short story collection and her first book overall, Love of Yeosu, was published in 1, a collection of short stories that the author had written in a flurry for a year when she was 1995 or 5 years old. In her second short story collection, Fruit of My Woman, published five years later, Han Kang seems to have encountered “the simple truth that the process of changing like flowing water is me,” but soon asks again, “Who wrote each of these short stories?” (“Author’s Note”) And 12 years later, she published her third short story collection, Yellow Patterned Eternity. In the meantime, the full-length novels “Your Cold Hands,” “The Vegetarian,” “The Wind Blows, Go Away,” and “Greek Hour” were written.

The short story has something like a match spark.
First, pull the fire and watch with all your might until it goes out.
Those moments pushed me forward with all my might.
-'Author's Note' (2012), 『Yellow-patterned Eternity』

You can find the trajectory only by looking back. There are things that have changed and things that have not changed in Han Kang’s short stories while the three volumes of the collection of short stories were published. In “Love of Yeosu,” the lonely and isolated beings who desperately express their longing for humans and the world, and who leave, abandon, wander, and fall, are hurt and misaligned as they awkwardly try to accept the world and each other that they so desperately longed for in “The Fruit of My Woman.” And in “Yellow Patterned Eternity,” the vitality burns even stronger in the will for regeneration and despair. The dignified beings still suffer, but they finally try to embrace the other person. The place where they must eventually return, the leaves pushing up the veins, the flowers blooming in the recovery period, the natural changes and flow that they tried to capture during the “connecting the dots” work are in harmony with the work of photographer Lee Jeong-jin used on the cover.
On the other hand, isn't it Han Kang's fierce question that remains constant? 'I want to live, I have to live, how should I live?' He never lets go of the question, and asks about the existence of humans, life and death, and this world throughout twenty-one novels, but inevitably cannot reach the answer. However, the question itself, like a pale flame, the heat of loneliness and delicate sadness derived from the question, becomes the power that draws them in the work and loves and keeps us alive. It has changed but has not changed, so I carefully changed the arrangement of the novels and touched up some expressions, but I left what needed to be left as is.
In response to the author’s own question in “The Fruit of My Woman”, which asked “who” earlier, I will continue with the newly written author’s words in “Yellow Patterned Eternity.” I recommend that we retrace the trajectory together. Someone has been writing alone for over twenty years. The Han River is still walking.

I know. The twelve years I spent writing these novels will never come back, and I will never meet the vivid me who wrote all these sentences again. I don’t think that should be felt as a loss. This should never be a farewell, because I am someone who wants to continue writing and living.
-'Author's Note' (2018), 『Yellow-patterned Eternity』

*

To a place that is extremely simple, clean, and intuitive.
A refreshing sense of life that suddenly comes to you
"The Fruit of My Woman"

This is the second collection of short stories published five years after the first. It presents eight short stories, including “The Fruit of My Woman,” which became the seed of the “Vegetarian” series, with a new layout and refined expressions and sentences. In “The Fruit of My Woman,” humans are fragile beings that can be easily destroyed like small magpies, but they also fight for life by breathing life into their fragmented and torn lives and being reborn. Literary critic Kang Ji-hee, who is in charge of the new commentary, focuses on the female characters in Han Kang’s novels. “They do not give up in resignation or fight fiercely, but they are quietly situated, but they have a stronger and more vibrant desire than anyone else.” In the title story “The Fruit of My Woman,” the wife’s plan to dream of freedom comes to a halt when she puts her savings into the deposit. From the beginning, the husband treats the wife’s dream of going “the end of the world,” “the farthest place,” and “the other side of the world” as an unrealistic and romantic fantasy (p. 5). Married life was warm to the husband, like “the warm water of a bathtub where everything is moderately heated” (p. 19), but the wife gradually became silent, yearned for sunlight, and blue bruises spread all over her skin. On the day the husband returned from his business trip, the wife had become a plant. The wife who had turned into a plant became more vivid and full of strong energy. She had become an entity that could no longer be wounded or destroyed by anything. The ‘I’ of “Baby Buddha” who was tired of superficial married life, the woman who had to endure a listless time in “The River Flowing Through the Railroad”, the child in “What Do Dogs Feel Like at Sunset” who wanders with his father who went mad after his mother left, and the characters in the novel quietly and fiercely reject the difficult world that weighs them down, and dream of a leap into a clear and bright world through internal struggle.

Han Kang's novel is an exploration of what kind of being a human being, made of weak and soft flesh and material bones, can be. [...] Bones are a sign that humans, like all living things, cannot be eternal and will one day be returned to the material world of death, but when Han Kang speaks of 'white bones', it reminds us of something within humans that cannot be damaged, like snowflakes that never fall to the ground. The world may be nothing more than a dark illusion, but he believes that within humans, lonely white bones quietly reside and shine, and that there will come a moment when they unexpectedly collide with each other and make a beautiful sound. _Kang Ji-hee (literary critic)

I ran to the sink as if possessed. I filled a plastic basin with water until it overflowed. I returned to the veranda, pouring the water on the living room floor in a slosh, keeping pace with my quick steps. The moment I poured it on my wife’s chest, her body came alive, rippling like the leaves of a giant plant. I drew water again and poured it on her head. Her hair rose up as if dancing. I shook my head as I watched her sparkling green body blooming refreshingly in my baptism of water.
My wife has never been so beautiful. _「The Fruit of My Woman」(p. 30)

… … It’s very easy to make a person cold-hearted and ruthless. Do you think it will take several decades? At least five or six years? No. Two or three years, or six months at the fastest… … Depending on the person, it can be over in two or three months if you focus on it.
How to do this is to keep him busy. Make him so tired that he wants to fall asleep for decades, but don't let him rest when he wants to. Make him rest so little that it's painful, and make him constantly humiliate himself during his waking hours.
This is a film about a city that creates misfortune for millions of people, a city that spits out millions of tired people. I will title it 'Winter in Seoul.' A city that is only winter... ... This is a film about a city that I tried to love with my life on the line. _「River Flowing Through the Railroad」(pp. 361~62)