But it does make Human Acts much more than an account of the most appalling of acts it is also a haunting, circling essay on what it is to be in a human body. This is not necessarily a consolation during those passages when the body undergoes brutal torture at the hands of soldiers or interrogators: the soul, like the body, is fragile, and can shatter (‘like glass’). The body is a container, a piece of meat the soul a ‘fluttering winged thing’. There is, for Kang, a complex relationship between the body and the soul. This scene is something of a mise-en-abyme, a foil for the rest of the novel emblematic of one of Han Kang’s themes, which is forever resurfacing. There is a stark division between the internal and the external: the government can attack, score through, and erase the body of the text (the offending pages are ‘thrown onto a fire and left to blacken reduced to little more than a lump of coal’) but the memories and the ideas persist in the mind. A girl sits in the audience and, having typed-up the now-censored play for publication, she can hear the each of the erased lines in her head. The play, performed in 1985, five years after the massacres of May 1980, was almost entirely erased by the government’s censors, but the director would not be intimidated, and performed his play in silence. Buried in the middle of Han Kang’s Human Acts is a play that, like Kang’s book, dramatises the democratic uprisings in Gwangju, South Korea, and their merciless suppression.

Human Acts by Han Kang