Mr. Cheong opens the novel not with love, not with passion, but with a kind of blunt, unapologetic practicality. He tells us, almost with pride, that he chose Yeong-hye precisely because there was nothing remarkable about her. She was not especially pretty, not especially interesting, not the kind of woman who would make demands or cause scenes or require him to become a better man. She was, in his estimation, completely average — and that was exactly what he wanted. This is our introduction to a marriage built not on desire but on the absence of inconvenience.

What Han Kang achieves in these first pages is a quietly devastating portrait of a certain kind of conventional life in contemporary Seoul. Mr. Cheong is not a villain in any operatic sense; he is something more mundane and therefore more recognizable. He is the product of a society that values order, conformity, and the smooth running of domestic machinery. He works a white-collar office job, he comes home expecting dinner, he expects the apartment to be clean and his wife to be unremarkable. Yeong-hye, before the dream that will change everything, fits this mold perfectly. She cooks. She keeps the house. She makes no complaints.

There is a chilling intimacy in the way Mr. Cheong narrates their life together. He lists Yeong-hye's qualities the way a person might list the features of a reliable appliance — she does not nag, she does not spend recklessly, she does not stir up drama. His satisfaction is real, but it is the satisfaction of a man who has arranged his life to be friction-free, not the contentment of someone who truly sees his partner. The reader understands, even if Mr. Cheong does not, that this arrangement has always required Yeong-hye to make herself invisible.

Han Kang uses this opening narration to do something deeply structural: she puts us inside the perspective of a man who fundamentally misunderstands the woman he married. Everything that follows in Part 1 will be filtered through his bafflement, his wounded ego, his inability to comprehend that a quiet person can harbor an interior world entirely invisible to those around her. We trust his account only as far as it goes — which, the novel implies, is not very far at all.