By skyforbes 
On hunger, silence, and what it means to stop performing humanity.
I picked up The Vegetarian thinking it was about food.
Maybe it’s about an extreme diet thing or some critique of Korean society’s obsession with appearance. At one point I even wondered if it was about murder, judging by the “terrifying” blurbs and thriller tags on the back.
Long-lost assumption.
It isn’t. It’s about what happens when the body says no — to appetite, to touch, to being seen. Han Kang tells it through three people who can’t understand her, and somehow that’s the point.
PART I — Her Husband
The first part is maddening. The husband, Mr. Cheong, is shallow, self-serving, wrapped up in his own “order.” He didn’t just end up with Yeong-hye by accident. He chose her because she was ordinary. Because she was safe. Someone who wouldn’t demand too much or take up too much space. He liked that she blended in. That’s what he wanted. A simple quiet wife, something stable, something he could predict.
His love is transactional: she is useful so long as she keeps the system intact, keeps him comfortable.
Overall, he values Yeong-hye only for the comfort and order she provides as a wife, never as an individual with her own will. When she stops eating meat and begins to withdraw from ordinary life, he sees her not as someone struggling to redefine herself but as something broken and inconvenient.
The violence is in how little he thinks it matters.
The marriage breaks, sure. What’s worse is how natural the breaking feels, like it was never really love in the first place.
PART II — Her Brother in Law
The second section is more disturbing. It’s told from Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law, this so-called artist.
His fascination with her Mongolian birthmark twists into obsession, then into something uglier. He calls it “art,” but it’s a lie — he gropes, paints, films, devours. A cheater, a creep hiding behind canvas and camera.
The worst part is, he does it with someone who’s already gone, someone not even in her right mind anymore. There’s no interest in who she is, only in how still she can stay. Such a creation as consumption.
What gets me is how darkly funny it all is — in that sick, hopeless way. The symmetry. In the first part, Yeong-hye’s husband keeps fantasizing about her sister, convinced she’s the “better” version: brighter, cleaner, more woman-shaped. Then it flips. Now it’s the sister’s husband drooling over Yeong-hye, projecting all his filth and fantasy onto someone barely there.
I almost want to laugh at the irony: two men, in different parts of the same family, each fetishizing the woman they are not married to. Each coveting the woman he shouldn’t. They orbit around the same shallow desires, unable to see the devastation they cause.
Han Kang makes it clear. Under their gaze, women blur together. None of them are seen whole. They’re just reflections of what these men want to feel about themselves. The husband in the first part wants control. The brother-in-law in the second wants transcendence.
Both claim to “love” what they only want to possess.
PART III — Her Sister
The last part hits different. If the first two sections show how men consume, the last one shows what’s left behind. The aftermath of survival.
In-hye’s story feels slower, almost tired. She’s the one who survives, though it doesn’t look like much of a win.
She was the eldest, the one who learned early how to keep things running. Their father, drunk and angry most nights, forgave her more easily because she could act like their mother. Calm, quiet, taking care of everything. That was her role. Be useful and you’ll be safe.
Yeong-hye never learned how to play that part. She was the middle child, stuck between obedience and family chaos, the one who took the blows that didn’t land on anyone else. When she finally stopped trying, everyone called it strange, as if breaking wasn’t the most natural thing to do after a lifetime of being invisible.
In-hye carries that guilt. She couldn’t save her sister from their father and later, couldn’t save her from herself. And then the other betrayal — her husband’s. The man she trusted disappearing into the same sickness that destroyed Yeong-hye. Cheating with someone who couldn’t even consent, who was too far gone to fight back.
She had to live through that too. Cleaning up what he left behind, again. Raising their son alone, answering the same question over and over — Where’s Dad? Every time, the words catch in her throat. That coward of a father who ran after breaking everything. And she’s still here, trying to build something out of the wreckage.
Watching her sister’s body fade into nothing but bone, shrinking into something that barely belongs to this world. Every rib showing. It doesn’t feel insane anymore. It starts to make a kind of sense.
She understands it, even if she can’t say so. That wish to disappear, to just stop being a body everyone wants something from. She’s felt it too. Before her son was born, she almost slipped out of it. Motherhood dragged her back, gave her something to hold but it also chained her to the same life she once wanted to leave.
Han Kang leaves her hanging there. Not mad. Not healed. Just breathing in that thin space where women are supposed to live. Holding everything together because no one else will.
How surviving can look so much like disappearing?
Human as Tree
At the center of The Vegetarian lies a haunting metaphor, what if becoming a plant is a way to escape being human? Trees do not hunger, desire or dominate. They exist without inflicting harm. The idea of becoming a tree recalls Ovid’s ‘Daphne’, who escapes pursuit by surrendering her body to bark and root. Her transformation saves her from Apollo’s assault at the cost of silence. That weight runs through this story.
Han Kang’s imagery connects with Korean shamanistic traditions too, where trees are sacred vessels of rebirth. Yeong-hye’s transformation feels almost ritualistic, an act of purification. It also reflects the recent 4B Movement in South Korea, where women refuse dating, marriage, sex and childbirth as a radical form of self-preservation. Like Yeong-hye, they are rejecting a cycle of social and bodily ownership.
In the end, the image of the tree leaves a question behind. If creation and reproduction have always been seen as the measure of meaning, what happens when one chooses not to create at all?
Perhaps the refusal itself becomes its own form of life, rooted but free from reach.
Afterthought
My take is that The Vegetarian isn’t about becoming something else at all. I realize there was never a “self” to begin with — only the roles, the appetites, and the violences that others stitched onto the body. Yeong-hye’s desire to become a plant feels less like transformation and more like a way of stripping everything that isn’t truly hers.
We like to call her madness. It’s the opposite. Maybe it’s the clearest thing in the book. Everyone else keeps moving, keeps pretending, keeps performing their small, acceptable versions of normal. Yeong-hye just stops. She stops wanting, stops playing along, stops being readable. She refuses to keep being a person in a world that never let her be one.
I keep thinking about that. Of how much of being human is just performance. How much of what we call choice is just repetition. Yeong-hye chooses nothing. The only choice that makes sense for her.
My Rating: 7.5/10
I rate based on five things: plot and structure, characters, message, style and emotional impact.
The structure and writing are incredible. The characters feel painfully real. But the story keeps you at a distance on purpose. You never get inside Yeong-hye’s head and that makes it haunting but also hard to feel fully connected.
Cold and layered. It’s not the book you “enjoy.” You’re always outside watching, trying to understand her who refuses to be understood.
So yeah, 7.5 out of 10 feels right. Obviously, not comforting. It doesn’t want to be.