Yeong-hye, an unremarkable Korean housewife, abruptly refuses to eat meat after a series of bloody dreams. Her husband, her family, and Korean society respond with escalating coercion — her father force-feeds her at a family dinner, her husband rapes her, and she is committed to a psychiatric hospital. Meanwhile, her brother-in-law, a video artist, becomes erotically obsessed with a Mongolian mark on her body and manipulates her into a sexual-artistic project. Her sister In-hye, the novel's final narrator, watches Yeong-hye's progressive refusal of all food as she attempts to become a plant — rooting herself to the earth, refusing water, starving toward either transcendence or death. The novel ends without resolution: Yeong-hye is taken by ambulance to another hospital, and In-hye sees trees flaming with new leaves.

The Vegetarian unfolds in three sections, each narrated by a different person in Yeong-hye's orbit — her husband Mr. Cheong, her brother-in-law the video artist, and her sister In-hye. Yeong-hye herself never narrates. Her interiority is represented only through brief, italicized dream sequences, an...