The Vegetarian

Han Kang's Seoul is a modern city of apartment towers and family duty, where a woman's decision to stop eating meat quietly pulls a marriage and a family apart. The map runs from the couple's flat and the parents' apartment across the two sisters' homes and a video artist's studio, then out to a psychiatric hospital in the wooded mountains on the city's northern edge.

Yeong-hye

The couple's apartment

The Vegetarian

The story opens in the small flat the narrator shares with his wife, an unremarkable married life in a high-rise city. After she throws out every scrap of meat in the kitchen and refuses to eat it again, the apartment becomes the first ground of the conflict. The novel gives no address, so this marks a representative apartment district.

Part One: The Vegetarian

inferred Han Kang never names the couple's district. Jamsil, a dense expanse of apartment towers on the south bank of the Han, stands in as a representative modern-Seoul home for an ordinary married couple.

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Yeong-hye

The parents' apartment

The Vegetarian

The family gathers at her parents' apartment for a meal, and the visit turns violent when her father, a Vietnam War veteran, tries to force meat into her mouth and strikes her across the face. This is the scene that fractures the family for good. The location is never given, so this marks a representative older residential district.

Part One: The Vegetarian

inferred The parents' home has no address in the novel. Suyu-dong, an older residential quarter below the northern mountains, is chosen as a plausible home for a traditional family of that generation.

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