We Do Not Part

The novel opens with Kyungha, an unnamed narrator-writer, recounting a recurring dream that began in 2014, two months after she published a book about a massacre in a city she calls G—. In the dream she stands on a snowy plain studded with thousands of black, lopped tree trunks resembling huddled human figures while the sea rushes in to wash bones from the earth. For four years she has lived in the dream's wake, enduring forced and chosen partings, near-starvation, migraines, and nightmares from her research. By summer of the present year she has retreated to an apartment outside Seoul, drafted an unaddressed will, and finally torn it up, recognizing she must climb to higher ground and keep living. Years earlier she had proposed to her photographer-filmmaker friend Inseon a collaborative project: planting ninety-nine ink-blackened logs and filming them awaiting snow.

In late December, Kyungha is summoned by an urgent text from Inseon to a Seoul hospital. Inseon has severed two fingertips with an electric saw; to save the reattached nerves a carer must jab needles into the wounds every three minutes around the clock for three weeks. Inseon reveals she was injured while secretly carving life-sized human figures for the project Kyungha had tried to cancel. Brushing aside Kyungha's guilt, Inseon asks an impossible favor: fly to Jeju before nightfall to save her surviving budgie, Ama, who will die of dehydration within a day.

Kyungha goes straight from the hospital to the airport without packing. She lands in a violent blizzard, takes buses to a coastal town, and waits beside a deaf elderly woman who reminds her of Inseon's mother. Memories surface throughout the journey: Inseon's youthful flight from her gentle, nightmare-haunted mother; the mother's revelation, after Inseon nearly died in a Seoul fall, that as a girl she had wiped frozen snow from the faces of massacred relatives at her village school; Inseon's documentaries on Vietnamese massacre survivors and a Manchurian independence fighter; and the lullaby Inseon sang to her two budgies, Ama and Ami.

Disembarking in the uplands, Kyungha takes a wrong fork and falls into a snow-covered streambed—the historic line dividing a village burned in 1948. Her phone lost, freezing toward fatal sleep, she is roused by a phantom tapping on her fingertips like Ama's beak. The storm breaks, moonlight reveals the path, and she reaches Inseon's workshop, its iron door still gaping open from the day Inseon was carried out bleeding.

Inside the house, Kyungha finds Ama dead in her cage. Weeping, she wraps the bird in a handkerchief and buries her beneath a palm tree in the yard. The workshop holds over a hundred ink-daubed logs. Recalling Inseon's last documentary, in which Inseon interviewed herself about hiding with her father in island caves during the 1948 massacres, Kyungha collapses with fever and convinces herself she has come to this house to die.

She wakes to find Ama impossibly alive on her perch—eating, drinking, warm in her hand. In the workshop she encounters Inseon herself, uninjured and calm, seemingly unaware of how she arrived. Over broadleaf bamboo tea they finally name their project “We Do Not Part,” debating whether the words mean a refusal of farewell or a parting indefinitely deferred. Kyungha realizes they have not touched. Inseon reveals that her other budgie, Ami, died months ago and lies buried beneath the same palm tree.

By candlelight in the powerless house, a vivid bird-shadow flies across the wall though no bird is visible: Ami's spirit, Inseon explains, sometimes visits. A faint voice murmurs “no, no,” mimicking a habit Inseon developed to retract dangerous wishes. Kyungha senses she and Inseon share the same buried wish to die. Inseon traces her sense of haunting presences to a decade earlier, when she read of remains being excavated beneath Jeju Airport's runway.

Inseon then opens her family's history. A newspaper photograph of a curled-up victim wearing small rubber shoes had drawn her toward an unmade film. Her father, at nineteen in 1948, had hidden in caves while soldiers burned his village, executed his grandfather under the hackberry tree, and trucked his family to a beach where they were shot, including his infant sister Eunyoung. Inseon shows Kyungha archived testimonies of an elderly Jeju witness who watched the beach killings through a window and was later visited by a stranger searching for a lost baby.

Inseon corrects details of the testimonies: her father's hand tremors came not from emotion but from torture aftereffects; he kept a heated stone pressed to his angina-stricken chest. She insists their abandoned project must be revived. When Kyungha confesses she has no one left, Inseon answers, “You have me.” Inseon then recounts her mother Jeongsim's family massacre at Hanjinae—parents shot in a barley field, an eight-year-old sister found dying in their burned yard, fed blood from Jeongsim's bitten finger during curfew.

Inseon retrieves her late mother's hidden archive: a censored 1950 letter from her uncle Kang Jeonghun, imprisoned in Daegu; clippings, photographs, and a prisoner list showing his July 1950 transfer and secret handover to army and police. He almost certainly perished in the Gyeongsan cobalt mine, one of an estimated 200,000-300,000 victims of the nationwide Bodo League killings. Jeongsim spent decades attending memorial rites, joining the bereaved families' association, and entering the partially exhumed mine, but never recovered his bones.

A rumor reached Jeongsim that one baby-faced young man had survived the massacre, fleeing in clean clothes—splitting her grief between her brother as corpse and as vanished man. This haunting drove her to seek out Inseon's father, a fellow Daegu prisoner saved only because overcrowding had transferred him to Busan before the killings. From their meeting in a small tea room came their marriage, and ultimately Inseon herself, the inheritor of all this silence, who has now broken it for her friend.