The book by Han Kang can often be seen in the windows of bookshops these days. the reason: she has won the nobel prize for literature and this is one of her best works. it has a very beautiful cover, for my taste. colourful, bright, lively and full of details: exotic. exactly what the west expects from the east. but is this novel really exotic?
what is it about? is it about the restrictive social and family norms in korea that make it impossible for a housewife to be a vegetarian? I can imagine that many readers in Western countries might think so, but for me the book is not about cultural restrictions or even about being vegetarian. For me, the book is about control. Control over one's own body. The lengths to which people go to exert that control over their bodies, or to reclaim it. The husband with abondance, the father with violence, the brother-in-law with sex/art, the sister with caretaking and Yoeng-hye herself with whatever she can, but never violence: not wearing a bra, not eating meat, not wearing leather, not eating at all. 
"I can only trust my breasts now. I like my breasts, nothing can kill them. Hand, foot, tongue, look, all weapons from which nothing is safe".
And she never wanted to cover them up, even though her husband found it very provocative. 
The book may remind many of Kafka's Metamorphosis. Yoeng-hye could be the female version of Gregor Samsa. But it reminds me more of The Blind Owl by the Iranian writer Sadegh Hedayat. The man who paints an ethereal figure of an ethereal woman he sees dying in his own bed. 
It is worth noting that both Kafka and Hedayat were vegetarians.
The recurring motif is always violence, which is always related to physical substance: Eating, sex, caring, dying.

A dying bird hidden in a clenched fist, an IV bag half full of blood, flowers painted on a naked body, the incessant stench of sizzling flesh, the strong tendency to become a tree.

"Why, is it so bad to die?" Yeong-hye asks at the end of one section. The next section simply echoes this: "Why, is it such a bad thing to die?"

Because that is the ultimate means to gain control over your body, to die!

As a woman, no matter where you live, your body is a public arena. Some may be more fortunate and take some parts of it back for themselves, but you are never free to control it completely. The public always decides what women do with their bodies. How they cover it, how big they are allowed to be, how natural, how daring. This control even goes so deep that the public decides how to deal with their intimate organs, whether to shave them, whether to use them, whether and how to enjoy them, whether to carry their fetus, how to carry the fetus, how to give birth, whether not to breastfeed, whether to look like they have given birth, whether to grow old?
Women literally have too little control over their bodies, and if they try to take it back, the whole system feels insecure, so everyone would try to convince the woman to stop for her own good! for the sake of the family, for the sake of the husband, for the sake of the husband's boss even.

Han Kang is a very clever writer, and clever writers need clever readers, and there is not a single useless sentence in the whole novel. The whole book is a glorious network of symbols, subplots, situations and personalities that serve the idea in the best possible way. This is a book you would have to read twice to fully enjoy.