The Vegetarian

the vague memory of an old emotion.

Only the violence is vivid enough to stick.

Hello?” He was finding it difficult to force the words out. “Sister-in-law, it’s me. Ji-woo’s mum is…” He despised himself, all his hypocrisy and trickery, but fought this down and continued speaking. “Well, she’s worried, you know.”

She’s a good woman, he thought. The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive.

Every exhibition, film, performance, came to feel dull and flat, for no other reason than that it wasn’t this

The naked bodies of the men and women were brilliantly decorated, covered all over in painted flowers, and there was something simple and straightforward about the ways in which they were having sex. Without the taut buttocks, tensed inner thighs, and the skinny upper bodies that gave them a dancer’s physique, there would have been no more suggestiveness about them than there was with spring flowers. Their bodies — he hadn’t drawn in faces — had a stillness and solidity that counterbalanced the arousing nature of the situation.

Though her face was missing, the woman in his sketch was undoubtedly his sister-in-law. No, it had to be her. He’d imagined what her naked body must look like

I prized open her clenched right hand. A bird, which had been crushed in her grip, tumbled to the bench. It was a small white-eye bird, with feathers missing here and there. Below tooth marks that looked to have been caused by a predator’s bite, vivid red bloodstains were spreading.

When I eventually succeeded in falling asleep, I had a dream. In the dream, I was killing someone. I thrust a knife into their stomach with all my strength, then reached into the wound and wrenched out the long, coiled-up intestines. Like eating fish, I peeled off all the squishy flesh and muscle and left only the bones. But in the very instant I woke up, I ceased to remember who it was that I had killed.

don’t know why that woman is crying. I don’t know why she keeps staring at my face, either, as though she wants to swallow it. Or why she strokes the bandage on my wrist with her trembling hands.

My wrist is okay. It doesn’t bother me. The thing that hurts is my chest. Something is stuck in my solar plexus. I don’t know what it might be. It’s lodged there permanently these days. Even though I’ve stopped wearing a bra, I can feel this lump all the time. No matter how deeply I inhale, it doesn’t go away.