The Korean meal is not divided into starter-main-dessert but unfolds around bap (plain steamed rice), the silent foundation of every table. Everything gravitates around it: a guk (soup-broth), and a constellation of banchan (small shared side dishes placed together) — seasoned vegetables (namul), ferments (kimchi, jang). You don't eat in order: you move from one bowl to another, a mouthful of rice, a fermented leaf, a sip of broth. Sweetness, bitterness, and sugar often arrive separately, in a cup of tea or a rice cake on special days.

At the heart of this cuisine live the jang — fermented soybean pastes (doenjang, ganjang) — and vegetables left to mature in salt and time. Fermentation here is a memory: it transforms, preserves, brings out flavor. In Han Kang, whose work questions the body, violence, and what survives, this simple, low-meat cuisine — rice, namul, tofu, ferments — resonates with an attention to the living and fragility.