The Vegetarian recap

After nightmares filled with blood and violence, Yeong-hye abruptly stops eating meat. Her husband and family regard the decision as defiance, and a forced family meal ends with her cutting her wrist. Her marriage collapses. Later, her video-artist brother-in-law becomes obsessed with her remaining Mongolian mark and films her body painted with flowers. Their artistic collaboration becomes sexual; discovery destroys his household and contributes to Yeong-hye's confinement in a psychiatric hospital. Her older sister In-hye, now caring for her son alone, is the only relative who continues to visit. Yeong-hye increasingly believes she is becoming a tree and refuses all food, seeking to live on light and water. Hospital staff restrain and force-feed her as she nears death. In-hye secures a transfer to Seoul and travels beside her in the ambulance, confronting both her sister's peril and the coercive family life that helped produce it. The novel ends without confirming whether Yeong-hye survives.

Mr. Cheong presents his wife Yeong-hye as an ordinary, compliant partner who has never disrupted his conventional life. That changes after he finds her in the kitchen disposing of the household's meat. She explains only that she has had a dream, while fragmentary images of blood, animal bodies, and violence show the terror she cannot communicate to him. She stops eating animal products, loses weight, sleeps poorly, and resists sex when her husband's body smells of meat. Mr. Cheong is chiefly embarrassed by the effect on work dinners and married routine. He asks her family to intervene. At a gathering, her mother offers numerous meat dishes and her father demands obedience. When Yeong-hye still refuses, her father hits her and tries to force a piece of meat into her mouth. She spits it out, takes a knife, and cuts her wrist. The family rushes her to hospital. The crisis makes clear that what began as a private dietary refusal has become a struggle over bodily autonomy, while neither her husband nor her parents seriously engages with the fear driving her.

After Yeong-hye's marriage fails, her brother-in-law, a video artist married to In-hye, learns that Yeong-hye still has a bluish Mongolian mark on her body. The detail becomes the center of an erotic artistic obsession. He imagines bodies covered with flowers and asks Yeong-hye to model. She agrees calmly and allows an artist to paint elaborate blossoms across her naked body. A male dancer is painted as well, but he refuses to continue when the artist asks for explicitly sexual contact. Rather than abandon the image, the brother-in-law has flowers painted on himself and returns to Yeong-hye. She responds to the floral covering and they have sex while his cameras record them. Yeong-hye associates the painted bodies with relief from the violent dreams that have haunted her, while he uses art to rationalize his desire and betrayal. In-hye discovers what has happened and calls emergency services. Her husband considers escape or self-destruction as officials arrive, and Yeong-hye is taken into psychiatric care. The project leaves In-hye's marriage shattered and turns Yeong-hye once again into the object of other people's decisions.

In-hye is now raising Ji-woo, running her shop, and visiting Yeong-hye without meaningful help from the rest of the family. She reviews the collapse around her and recognizes how thoroughly she has built her own identity on endurance and responsibility. Yeong-hye's condition has progressed beyond vegetarianism. In the psychiatric hospital she says that she is becoming a tree, practices inverted poses, seeks sunlight, and insists that plants need no food. After she escapes into the rain-soaked forest, she is found among the trees and moved to a more secure ward. Her continued fasting brings her close to death. Doctors restrain and force-feed her, but she fights the tube and vomits blood, leaving In-hye horrified by both her sister's danger and the violence used to preserve her. A transfer to a better-equipped Seoul hospital is arranged, and In-hye accompanies her in the ambulance. Yeong-hye remains absorbed by the wooded landscape outside. Watching the trees herself, In-hye does not claim to understand or cure her sister; she remains present, angry and questioning, as Yeong-hye's fate is left unresolved.

Yeong-hye's refusal to eat has become an attempt to abandon human life altogether. Believing she is turning into a tree, she rejects food and insists that sunlight and water are sufficient. The psychiatric hospital restrains and force-feeds her as her body approaches collapse, but the intervention causes further trauma and bleeding. In-hye, the only relative still visiting, sees both the immediate danger and the violence of making Yeong-hye conform. A transfer to a larger Seoul hospital is arranged, and she accompanies her sister in the ambulance. Their father, Mr. Cheong, and In-hye's husband have all disappeared from Yeong-hye's care, while In-hye remains responsible for her son and for the family crisis. As the ambulance passes wooded hills, Yeong-hye watches the trees and In-hye looks at them with an intense, questioning anger. Yeong-hye's survival and recovery are left unresolved; the firm closing fact is In-hye's refusal to look away or offer an easy explanation for what has happened.