We Do Not Part

Kyung-ha, a troubled author who no longer has a job nor a family to look after, has sequestered herself in an apartment in Seoul, South Korea. Her current life of seclusion sees her sitting at her desk while regularly drawing up a will/suicide note only to rip it up and rarely leave her residence. The story unfolds with a description of a surreal recurring dream she’s had, the elements of which foreshadow/symbolize different aspects of her past, present and future in the later chapters. The dream features a scene of heavy snowfall in a forest field, with thousands of black tree logs placed along the bottom of a mountain ridge. Kyung-ha suspects these snowflake-covered tree logs and the burial mounds behind them are all tombstones for the dead and that this is a graveyard. As she turns around, she suddenly finds herself facing a beach in open ocean waters. As the waves keep crashing in, she feels a strong conviction to protect the bones buried near the top of the ridge and keep them from getting swept away before the tide comes in further. She then suddenly awakens, realizing it was all a dream. The first time she dreamt this was around two months after she released a book about a massacre that took place in a city. She’d always thought this dream was just about that city and its history. But in the past year she started to wonder whether it meant more.

Then one day in December, Kyung-ha receives a text message from an old-time friend named In-seon, a former documentary film student who later got into wood-making. They grew apart when In-seon moved to a remote village in South Korea’s Jeju Island where In-seon’s mother lived before she died years after she moved there. In-seon’s text asks Kyung-ha to come to a hospital in Seoul, where she was flown after a severe accident at the wood workshop at her home back in Jeju Island, which saw two of her fingers get cut off by a wood grinder. She was sent to the hospital in Seoul due to the complex treatment/surgery required. In-seon asks Kyung-ha to fly to Jeju to save her pet bird, for which only two days’ worth of food had been left behind, so In-seon urges Kyung-ha must immediately go to Jeju to save the bird.

Kyung-ha gets on a plane to Jeju and arrives amid heavy snowfall on the island. On her journey to find In-seon’s village, Kyung-ha recalls when In-seon told her about the time she ran away from home when she was 18 and how her mother’s entire family was killed when her mother was 13 by police who massacred everyone in the village. In-seon’s mother remembers seeing a thin layer of snow frozen on the faces of the dead bodies. Since then, In-seon’s mother associated the image of snow remaining on a person’s face with death. As the relentless snowfall continues, Kyung-ha eventually arrives at a bus stop where she can catch a bus to the village nearest to In-seon’s place. At the stop, there is an old lady who looks to be at least 80 years old, standing amid the snowstorm. She reminds Kyung-ha of In-seon’s late mother, whom she met during her previous visit to Jeju, while the mother had dementia. When they were introduced, Kyung-ha remembers In-seon’s mother saying “Enjoy your stay” in a polite but hollow tone. The bus eventually arrives and as it drives onward, Kyung-ha notices thousands of trees covered and shaken by the continous snowfall, reminding her of the tree logs from her recurring dream.