SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The inspiration for Nobel Prize-winning author Han Kang's new novel came to her in a dream.
HAN KANG: I could see the black tree trunks in the plain, and it was snowing. It seemed like torsos, arms and legs were cut off, and I could see the burial mounds, more than tens of thousands of burial mounds, behind all the black torsos of the dead trees.
SIMON: And like her chilling vision, "We Do Not Part" is hauntingly dreamlike, and it brings back pain and loss from Korean history. It follows the narrator, Kyungha. As a snowstorm covers her island home and clouds her mind, she gets an urgent request to save a friend's beloved white bird named Ama, and that friend is very far from home.
HAN: She is injured. So she's living in Jeju Island in the very remote village, but because she was injured and she is now hospitalized in Seoul.
SIMON: We become aware, as the story goes on, that at the heart of it is a massacre that occurred in 1948 - the Jeju Island Massacre. Can you tell us about that?
HAN: So there was the liberation from Japanese colonization in 1945, and the USA and the Soviet Union divided Korean Peninsula into two. So in the southern part, in 1948, there was the individual election for the government. And Jeju people didn't like the idea and they wanted a unified country and not divided two countries, so they boycotted the election at the time. Because of this act, Jeju Island was recognized as the communist island. So the massacre occurred in that winter - 30,000 civilians were killed. So it has been tabood for a long time, and it was kind of a hidden history of South Korea for a long time.
SIMON: Does Kyungha begin to see an influence left by the massacre in her own life?
HAN: Yeah, Kyungha wrote a book about the massacre which happened in 1980 in Gwangju. And because she had to deal with the basement of humanity for a long time, she has nightmares, and she is now facing her own despair at this moment. But now she has to rescue her best friend's pet bird, so she's risking her death and on her way to the cottage in the darkness and the heavy snow. So this novel deals with the massacre, which is heavy, but I wanted to deal with light things like snowflakes and the bird and its feathers and the shadows and the weightless flame.
SIMON: There is a lot of snow in this novel, isn't there?
HAN: Right. I thought over the snow much while writing this book. So it falls between the sky and the earth and connecting the both, and it falls between the living and the dead and between light and darkness, between silence and memories. And I thought over the connection much. So there is this circulation of sea currents, and there is the circular flow of water and air. And it means we are all connected over this Earth. So I had this image of the snow. And I wanted the snow to fall from the beginning to the end, and I wanted even my characters to enter into that dream of snow.
SIMON: I have read that when you were 12, you learned about another massacre in South Korean history.
HAN: Yes. When I was 12, it was two years or almost three years after the massacre in Gwangju, which occurred in 1980. But the truth was extorted and hidden because of the strong censorship by the military dictatorship. So there was this photo book, which was circulated and secretly made by bereaved families and the survivors. So there was this secret photo book in the bookshelf at home, but I couldn't see the title because my parents didn't want their children to be affected.
I saw the photos of the people who were killed. Proofs of human violence, I felt. I didn't take it as a political thing. I had this shock with humanity. And there were proofs of human dignity as well because there were people who stood in opposition to violence. And there were people who wanted to donate their blood in spite of the danger. So it was kind of very difficult question about humans.
SIMON: Difficult questions about humans. Han Kang, the Nobel Prize winner. Her new novel, "We Do Not Part," now in English, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Thank you so much for being with us.
HAN: Thank you so much.
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