Contemporary International Writers

I really enjoyed reading this novel, it had such a wonderful plot line and I think the narration style was incredible and unique. I want to talk about the ways in which becoming a vegetarian/vegan can be incredibly eye-opening, and yet can have such a detrimental impact on the way one views the world post lifestyle change. […]

Read Full Post »

“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. ― Han Kang, The Vegetarian In reading this novel, I immediately found the characterization of the women […]

Read Full Post »

The Vegetarian is a novel that contains many aspects of Korean culture. Of course, this is the case, as it was written by Han Kang, a South Korean author, originally in Korean. The storyline surrounds Yeong-hye’s choice to no longer consume meat after having dreams of the abuse animals face at the hands of humans, and the […]

Read Full Post »

The Vegetarian by Han Kang is a novel with more than one twist. Not only do we not read the book from the main character’s point of view, we read it from three separate narrators who all have a connection to the main character. The first point of view we read through is the husband […]

Read Full Post »

A theme in The Vegetarian is the exploration of the two “sides” that exist in every human being. The more primitive part of our being that deals with our wants and needs is selfish and doesn’t consider the effects that our actions will have on the people around us. Then there is our more socially acceptable side […]

Read Full Post »

Food, especially the Korean attitude towards food, is a large part of The Vegetarian.  It is also one of the many example of how Korean culture impacts the novel.  Food is a very important part of Korean culture, and we see this early on in the first section.  Kang writes: I couldn’t think of her […]

Read Full Post »

The Vegetarian by Han Kang is a small novel with a disproportionately large load of controversy.  The translator who helped create the English version of the novel, Deborah Smith, had only begun to learn Korean six years prior to her work on The Vegetarian, and many reviewers who were familiar with the original language were surprised […]

Read Full Post »

Han Kang’s The Vegetarian was translated into English in 2015, bringing about a lot of criticism regarding the translation. The translator, Deborah Smith, made many changes (and some errors) when translating the work from Korean to English. One of the most notable changes was that of the novel’s opening sentence. Originally, Yeong-hye’s husband stated that […]

Read Full Post »

In a 2018 review of The Vegetarian, Jiayang Fan brings to light the challenges of translating books from the language in which they were written. At one point in the article, she mentions, “But her writing, too, is rooted in in Korea’s history. This, according to Charse Yun, is what risks getting lost in translation.” […]

Read Full Post »

Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is a three-part novella that shatters Western culture’s ideas of what literature should look like; this haunting account of a woman’s choice to become vegetarian is told through every viewpoint but her own. The first installation is written in the first person point-of-view of her husband, the second through the third […]

Read Full Post »

“Every country has serious problems, so to keep those problems from spreading all around the world, they decided that each country should solve its own problems by itself.” This concept was so interesting to me and I really wanted to focus on it in today’s blog post. I feel that I talk about politics far […]

Read Full Post »

In Yoko Tawada’s novel The Emissary, the concept of a dystopian Tokyo is explored through the eyes of an elderly survivor, Yoshiro, and his great-grandson, Mumei. In reading this book, it impressed me how Tawada’s description of a crumbled society, although pushed to the extreme, seems have real ties to the concerns of modern day Japanese […]

Read Full Post »

While reading this novel, I couldn’t help but compare how similar the environments of both this one and The Giver were. What makes this novel a distinctive piece is the focus of language, imagining how language can be warped in extreme social circumstances, resulting in the use of s certain use of language to be more […]

Read Full Post »

Yoko Towada’s The Emissary is a chilling novel set in dystopian Japan where the elderly (young, middle, and aged) have corrupted the earth and its environment for the young “because they’d been so feckless” (93). The older generation’s “feckless” ness in this novel has resulted in a general and devastating decline in the health of Japan’s […]

Read Full Post »

In her novel The Emissary, Tawada is using the absurd. This is an interesting notion especially in literature as it has been used multiple times and in different cultures. If we go back to the beginning of the twentieth century when the notion of absurd in literature was theorized in Europe, we see that it was […]

Read Full Post »

The Emissary is based on a futuristic world where nature and society have been turned on their heads in every way. The young are weak, the old are strong, parents acting like children and children acting like adults, and never knowing if you are going to wake up as the same gender you were when you went to bed. […]

Read Full Post »

In Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary, Tawada creates a dystopian world in which the old never die and the young are weak and sickly. Keeping in mind that this work has been translated from Japanese to English, Tawada’s gives us a vivid view of this dystopian Japan. She tells us that Japan has become completely isolated from the world, […]

Read Full Post »

One element of craft that I was very impressed by in this book is the pacing. Right from the beginning, I had so many questions about the world Yoko Tawada has placed us in. What has happened to the planet? Why are the children crippled, and where are their parents? Why is Japan so isolated […]

Read Full Post »

Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary takes place in a post-apocalyptic society in which Japan has closed itself off from the rest of the world.  In many ways, the people of this society are becoming opposites of what they once were.  The elderly live for well over a century, but maintain their vitality and work the jobs […]

Read Full Post »

One of the plot points in The Emissary is the fact that Japan is now an isolated country completely cut off from the rest of the world. As a result, it is unknown whether or not any outside countries have the ability to help any of the afflicted people of Japan. Japan is adamant that […]

Read Full Post »

In the book The Emissary, the main characters live in a dystopian society in Japan. There are many aspects of this book that differ from typical dystopian novels. One of the more obvious differences between Yoko Tawada’s novel and other dystopian books is that the technology component is missing/severely limited in the communities. A common theme […]

Read Full Post »

The Emissary is a short novel which focuses on Japan after a disaster strikes the country. This calamity has created an alternate universe, set far in the future, where children are so weak they are almost unable to walk, the elderly (who are healthier than the kids) having to look after them day by day. […]

Read Full Post »

According to a book review on Words Without Borders, Yoko Tawada’s novel The Emissary is greatly inspired by Kenzaburo Oe’s Nobel Prize winning A Personal Matter. A Personal Matter is a semi-autobiographical novel about a man who has to come to terms with the birth of his mentally disabled son. Published in 1964, the novel […]

Read Full Post »

“The law of gravity doesn’t forgive us. So hard to say I love you these days. I love you with urgency. I want to make a side. Without doubts. And without traps. To say I love you. Like that. Plainly.” In this day and age it feels harder to say “I love you” than it […]

Read Full Post »

The voice mentions moments of beauty and joy that infuses the poem, as if to say that there can be unity and hope in journey that seem hopeless. “And the sky calm like sea when it sleep and a breeze like a laugh follow mi. Or the man find a stream that pure like a […]

Read Full Post »