Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way,” I read as I flipped to the first page of Han Kang’s “The Vegetarian.”

The novel, which I had picked up while cleaning our cluttered living room coffee table, was strewn among the many books that fed my mother’s voracious reading habits. Enthralled by the first line, I slowly sat down on the couch behind me where I was unable to move until I had finished the book.

Unremarkable as she was to her husband, protagonist Yeong-hye upturns her monotonous life as an ordinary sister and wife with one seemingly trivial decision: vegetarianism. This decision begins to raise eyebrows when she refuses to cook meat for her husband or eat it during social gatherings. In the meat-heavy dietary culture of South Korea, Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism is remarkable.