Photo/Illutration Protesters gather in front of the National Assembly in Seoul on Dec. 4 to demand that South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol step down. (Yonhap via AP)

In May 1980, a South Korean woman, who lost her adolescent son in Gwangju, is overcome with grief in the cemetery where his coffin had been brought.

She pulls a handful of grass from the ground, swallows it, doubles over and vomits, grabs another handful, and chews again.

“How pale and drawn your face was,” she wails. “You were shot, and you bled so much.”

The above is a scene from a South Korean novel (translated into English under the title “Human Acts”) by Han Kang, a Gwangju native who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.

Published in 2014, it was inspired by the democracy uprising in Gwangju on May 18, 1980. Under martial law, the military attacked pro-democracy citizens, killing and injuring many.

In the novel, the boy Kang Dong-ho becomes guilt-ridden over his failure to save a friend he had gone to a protest demonstration with. As a form of atonement, he starts working at a mortuary where unidentified bodies are kept.

Aiding other young workers preparing the corpses for burial, Dong-ho decides never to run from danger again, fully aware of the military’s imminent arrival that would spell his own death.

Han’s terse writing style drives the story’s cruelty home, making it painful to continue reading.

Her narrative also offers glimpses of life under martial law. A nighttime curfew is in effect, citizens failing to produce ID at military checkpoints are hauled away, and publications are severely censored and blacked out.

It has been 37 years since South Korea declared itself a democracy. For that very reason, I doubted my ears when President Yoon Suk-yeol abruptly imposed emergency martial law on Dec. 3.

I was just as stunned when he called it off six hours later.

Among the people who gathered before the National Assembly building, many must have had flashes of memory of the carnage during the Gwangju uprising.

Still, those people came together in protest and in doing so averted violence. I was deeply impressed by the power of democracy, but also felt alarmed by the flippancy of the president’s words and actions.

—The Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 5

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.

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