The Vegetarian

  After a while, the train went past the apartment complex where he lived. He’d never had any intention of getting off there. He stuffed the program into his backpack, rammed both fists into the pockets of his sweater, and studied the interior of the carriage as it was reflected in the window. He had to force himself to accept that the middle-aged man, who had a baseball cap concealing his receding hairline and a baggy sweater at least attempting to do the same for his paunch, was himself.

  —

  As luck would have it, the door to the studio was locked, which meant he had the place to himself. Sunday afternoons were practically the only times when he could use the space undisturbed. It was a small studio on the second floor below ground level of K group’s headquarters, provided as part of their corporate sponsorship drive; the four video artists who shared the space had to take it in turns to use the single computer. He was grateful to be able to use the overhead equipment free of charge, but his sensitivity to the presence of others, which meant that he could only become properly absorbed in his work when he was alone, was a major stumbling block.

  The door opened with a small click. He groped along the wall until he found the light switch. Making sure to lock the door behind him first of all, he took off his cap and sweater, put his bag down on the floor, then proceeded to pace up and down the narrow studio corridor for a while, his hands over his mouth, before finally slumping down in front of the computer and putting his head in his hands.

  He opened his bag and got out the program, his sketchbook and master tape. On that tape, which was labeled with his name, address and phone number, were the originals of every video work he’d made over the past ten years or so. It had already been two years since he’d last stored a new work on the tape. Not that two years was considered terminal as far as fallow periods went, but it was still long enough to make him anxious.

  He opened the sketchbook. The drawings filled scores of pages and, despite being based on fundamentally the same idea, were completely different from the performance poster in terms of atmosphere and artistic feel. 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.

  The image had come to him in a flash of inspiration. It had happened last winter, when he’d started to believe that he might somehow be able to bring his two-year-long fallow period to an end, when he’d felt energy start to wriggle up from the pit of his stomach, bit by bit. But how could he have known this energy would coalesce into such a preposterous image? For one thing, up until then his work had always tended toward realism. And so, for someone who had previously worked on 3D graphics of people worn down by the vicissitudes of late capitalist society, to be screened as factual documentaries, the carnality, the pure sensuality of this image, was nothing short of monstrous.

  And the image might never have come to him, if it hadn’t been for a chance conversation. Had his wife not asked him to give their son a bath that Sunday afternoon. Had he not watched her helping their son to pull on his underpants after toweling him dry and been moved to exclaim, “That Mongolian mark is still so big! When on earth do they fade away?” Had she not replied thoughtlessly, “Well…I can’t remember exactly when mine went. And Yeong-hye still had hers when she was twenty.” If she hadn’t then followed up his astonished “Twenty?” with “Mmm…just a thumb-sized thing, blue. And if she had it that long, who knows, maybe she’s still got it now.” In precisely that moment he was struck by the image of a blue flower on a woman’s buttocks, its petals opening outward. In his mind, the fact that his sister-in-law still had a Mongolian mark on her buttocks became inexplicably bound up with the image of men and women having sex, their naked bodies completely covered with painted flowers. The causality linking these two things was so clear, so obvious, as to be somehow beyond comprehension, and thus it became etched into his mind.

  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 and began to draw, finishing it off with a dot like a small blue petal in the middle of her buttocks, and he’d got an erection. It was almost the first time since his marriage, and definitely the first time since he’d said good-bye to his mid-thirties, that he’d felt such intense sexual desire, a desire which, moreover, was focused on a clear object. And so who was the faceless man with his arms around her neck, looking as if he were attempting to throttle her, who was thrusting himself into her? He knew that it was himself; that, in fact, it could be none other. Arriving at this conclusion, he grimaced.

  —

  He spent a long time searching for a solution, for a way to free himself from the hold this image had on him, but nothing else would do as a substitute. Another image as intense and enticing as this one simply didn’t exist. There was no other work he wanted to do. Every exhibition, film, performance, came to feel dull and flat, for no other reason than that it wasn’t this.

  He spent hours seemingly lost in a daydream, mulling over how to make the image become a reality. He would rent a studio from his painter friend and install lighting, get some body paints and a white sheet to cover the floor…he let his thoughts run on like this even though the most important thing, persuading his sister-in-law, still remained to be done. He agonized for a long time over whether he might be able to replace her with another woman, when the suspicion occurred to him, somewhat belatedly, that the film he was planning could all too easily be categorized as pornography. Never mind his sister-in-law, no woman would agree to such a thing. In that case, should he shell out a large sum of money to hire a professional actress? Even if, after making a hundred concessions, he eventually managed to get the thing filmed, would he really be able to exhibit it? He’d often anticipated that his work, which dealt with social issues, might put him in the firing line with some people, but never before had he imagined himself being branded as some peddler of cheap titillation. He’d always been completely unrestricted when it came to making his art, and so it hadn’t ever really occurred to him that this freedom might become a luxury.

  If it hadn’t been for the image he would never have had to go through all this anxiety, this discomfort and unease, this agonizing doubt and self-examination. He wouldn’t have had to suffer the fear of losing everything he’d achieved—not that that really amounted to all that much—even his family, in one fell swoop, and due to a choice that he himself had made. He was becoming divided against himself. Was he a normal human being? More than that, a moral human being? A strong human being, able to control his own impulses? In the end, he found himself unable to claim with any certainty that he knew the answers to these questions, though he’d been so sure before.

  He heard the click of keys in the lock, quickly covered the sketchbook and turned to face the door. Whoever it was, he didn’t want his drawings to catch his or her eye. This was something new and a little strange for him. He never usually held back when it came to showing his sketches or concepts to other people.

  “Hey!” It was J, his long hair tied back in a ponytail. “I didn’t think there was anyone in here.”

  He leaned back, keeping his movements deliberately slow, and laughed.

  “Fancy a cup of coffee?” J asked, fishing some coins out of his pocket.

  He shook his head. While J went to get a coffee from the vending machine, he looked around the studio, now no longer his own private space. He put his baseball cap back on, uncomfortable at the thought of his balding crown being on show. Like a cough that tickles the throat, he could feel a long-suppressed yell threatening to burst out from deep inside him. He swept hi
s things into his bag and fled the studio, hurrying toward the lift. In his reflection in the lift’s door, which gleamed like a mirror, it looked as though tears were streaming from his bloodshot eyes. However much he combed his memory, he couldn’t recall anything like this having happened to him before. Right at that moment, he wanted nothing more than to spit at those red, lined eyes. He wanted to pummel his cheeks until the blood showed through beneath his black beard, and smash his ugly lips, swollen with desire, with the sole of his shoe.

  —

  “You’re late,” his wife said, making an effort not to sound too put out. Their son turned back to the plastic forklift truck he’d been playing with. It was impossible to tell whether or not he was glad to see his father.

  Since his wife had gone back to working full-time at her cosmetics store, she was constantly exhausted, but she was the type to press on regardless, diligent and persevering. Practically the only thing she asked of him was to keep Sunday daytimes free. “I’d like to have a bit of a rest myself…and our son needs to spend time with his father too, doesn’t he?” He knew that this was the only time of the week she would allow herself a bit of a break. She was even grateful that he let her take on so much responsibility, running a business as well as a household, without so much as a word of complaint. But these days, every time he looked at her he saw her sister’s face overlaid on hers, and their domestic life couldn’t have been further from his thoughts.

  “Have you had dinner?”

  “Yeah, I grabbed something on the way.”

  “You have to eat properly, why do you always just grab something on the go?” Her tone was resigned, as though she’d long given her husband up as a lost cause. He examined her exhausted-looking face the way one might look at a complete stranger. Her eyes were deep and clear, framed by naturally double eyelids, and her face was a slender oval, with a smooth, feminine jawline. The success of the cosmetics store, which had expanded over the years from the two-and-a-half-p’yong space which she’d somehow managed to set up when she was still a young girl, must have been largely down to the impression of affability which these pleasant, open features gave. And yet, right from the first there’d been something about her that left him feeling vaguely dissatisfied. Her face, figure and thoughtful nature all combined to form the spitting image of the woman he’d spent so long trying to find; and so, unable to put his finger on just what it was that he felt she was lacking, he’d made up his mind to marry her. In fact, it was only when he was introduced to her sister that he realized what it was his new wife was missing.

  Everything about her sister pleased him—her single-lidded eyes; the way she spoke, so blunt as to be almost uncouth, and without his wife’s faintly nasal inflection; her drab clothes; her androgynously protruding cheekbones. She might well be called ugly in comparison with his wife, but to him she radiated energy, like a tree that grows in the wilderness, denuded and solitary. All the same, he felt no different toward her than he had before they’d met. “Huh, now she’s my type; even though they’re sisters, and they’re quite similar in many ways, there’s some subtle difference between them”—this thought flitted briefly through his mind, and was gone.

  “Shall I make you something to eat or not?” His wife’s question was almost a demand.

  “I told you, I’ve already eaten.”

  Exhausted from all the emotions roiling inside him, he opened the bathroom door. As soon as he turned the light on, his wife’s voice drilled into his ears once more.

  “On top of everything else, I’m worried about Yeong-hye; I didn’t hear from you all day, and Ji-woo has a cold so I had to stay with him all the time…” Her sigh was followed by a shout directed at their son. “What are you doing? I told you to come and take your medicine!” Knowing that the boy would dawdle, his wife slowly poured the powdered medicine onto a spoon and mixed it with a strawberry-colored syrup. He emerged from the bathroom and closed the door behind him.

  “What about your sister?” he asked his wife. “What’s happened now?”

  “She finally got served with the divorce papers, of course! It’s not that I don’t understand Mr. Cheong’s position, but all the same, he could have shown a bit more sympathy. To just throw away a marriage like that…”

  “I…,” he stammered. “Shall I call around and see her?”

  His wife suddenly became animated. “Would you? We haven’t had her around in such a long time, and if you were to go and see her, even if it’s a bit awkward…but you know, it’s not as though she doesn’t understand the difficulty. She knows that’s just how things turned out.” He studied his wife, a picture of responsible compassion as she carefully approached their son with the medicine. She’s a good woman, he thought. The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive.

  “I’ll give her a call tomorrow.”

  “Do you need the number?”

  “No, I’ve got it.”

  Feeling as though his chest might be about to burst, he went back inside the bathroom and closed the door. He turned on the shower and listened to the water drumming down into the bathtub as he took off his clothes. He was aware that he hadn’t had sex with his wife for close on two months. But he also knew that his penis’s sudden rigidity was nothing to do with her.

  He’d pictured to himself his sister-in-law’s rented studio apartment, the one she’d shared with his wife back when they were young, pictured her curled up there on the bed, then switched to remembering how it had felt to carry her on his back, her body pressed up against his and staining his clothes with her blood, the feel of her chest and buttocks, imagined himself pulling down her trousers just enough to reveal the blue brand of the Mongolian mark.

  He stood there and masturbated. A moan escaped from between his lips, not quite laughter and not quite a sob. The shock of the too-cold water.

  —

  It had been the beginning of summer two years ago when his sister-in-law had cut her wrist open in his house. They’d moved there only recently, wanting the extra floor space, and his wife’s family had all come around for lunch. He’d heard about his sister-in-law apparently turning vegetarian, something that hadn’t sat at all well with this family of meat lovers, the father in particular. She’d been so pitifully thin, it wasn’t as though he couldn’t understand them giving her a strict dressing-down. But that her father, the Vietnam War hero, had actually struck his rebellious daughter in the face and physically forced a lump of meat into her mouth, that was something else. However much he thought back on it, he couldn’t convince himself that it had actually happened—it was more like a scene from some bizarre play.

  More vivid and frightening than any other was the memory of the scream that had erupted from his sister-in-law when the lump of meat approached her lips. After spitting it out, she’d snatched up the fruit knife and glared fiercely at each of her family in turn, her terrified eyes rolling like those of a cornered animal.

  Once the blood was gushing out of her wrist he’d torn a strip from one of their quilts, bound it around her wrist and picked her up, her body so light she could almost have been a ghost. As he ran down to the car park, he’d been surprised by the speed and decisiveness of his own actions, something he’d never before realized he was capable of.

  As he watched her unconscious form receive emergency medical treatment, he’d heard a sound like something snapping inside his own body. The feeling he’d had at that moment was one that, even now, he found himself unable to explain with any degree of accuracy. A person had attacked her own body right in front of his eyes, tried to hack at it like it was a piece of meat; her blood had soaked his white shirt, mingling with his sweat and gradually drying to a dark brown stain.

  He remembered hoping she would survive, but at the same time doubting just what that “survival” would mean. The moment she’d tried to take her own life had been a turning point. Now there was nothing anyone could do to help her. Every single one of them—her parents who had force-fed her meat, her husband and s
iblings who had stood by and let it happen—were distant strangers, if not actual enemies. If she woke up again, that situation wouldn’t have changed. Just because this suicide attempt had been spur-of-the-moment didn’t mean she wouldn’t try it again. And if she did, no doubt she’d be more careful in how she went about it, and that meant there mightn’t be anyone to stop her as there had been this time. All of a sudden he became aware of the conclusion his thoughts had led him to: that it would be better if she didn’t wake up, that if she did the situation would actually be ambiguous, ghastly, that perhaps he ought to throw her out of the window while her eyes were still closed.

  Once she was out of danger, he’d used the money her husband had given him to go to a shop and buy a new shirt to change into. Instead of throwing away his soiled shirt, which stank of blood, he’d bundled it up into a ball and taken it with him in the taxi home. During the journey, his most recent video work had come to mind, and he’d been surprised to find himself recalling it as something that had caused him unbearable pain. The work was based around images related to things he loathed and thought of as lies, edited together into an impressionistic montage with music and graphic subtitles: ads, clips from the news and television dramas, politicians’ faces, ruined bridges and department stores, vagrants, and the tears of children who suffered from incurable diseases.