I have to admit.
It took me a while to finish the book.
I was greatly disturbed.
The first arc where Yeong Hye made a decision to become a vegetarian - I would say closer to being a vegan.
And even this choice was dismissed by her husband, her husband's colleagues (especially the boss's wife) and later her family, which included her older sister, In-Hye, her brother in law, her parents. She had a younger brother who presumably was also in like mind with her father, that being a vegetarian was against human nature. All humans need meat!
I suspect that YH made this decision as it is within her control, she had suffered physical abuse from her father, no one really shielded her and even her sister IH came to think about the what-ifs. What if JH had been protected from their father, what if she (IH) had stepped in when YH introduced her husband to be to the family (and she felt he was not right for her)
I can't even bear to discuss the second arc, when it focused on the obsession that IH's husband, YH's own brother in law, had over YH. I do not feel anything sexual, even though it was sexually explicit - but it felt like YH was a puppet to her brother in law's whims. Maybe puppet is not the right word, because I did sense that YH did not see herself as a person anymore, so her body actually meant nothing to her.
YH's intense desire to become a tree (in the final arc) - suggested to me that she wanted to return to nature, where you are unbothered by the trials and tribulations of life and just to merely live.
Was she really trying to kill herself by slowly dying in the end? Who knows? However, the final sentences had some sense of trepidation that IH was also struggling with what had happened to her family and may also fall into this abyss - the need to discover oneself and to live life on ones' own terms.
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