Some books linger with us because of their narrative style, others because of their shock value. Choi Jin-young’s cult classic Hunger does both. When it was first published in 2010, it bombed. Since then, this bite-sized novella has become a word-of-mouth sensation in South Korea, selling more than 400,000 copies and staying at number one for more than 30 weeks.
Choi is one of South Korea’s most celebrated writers, winner of the Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature, the Manhae Literary Prize for works of social conscience and the prestigious Yi Sang Literary Award. Hunger is her global breakthrough. Now available in a crisp English translation by Korean-English literary translator Soje, it takes its place next to Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite as one of Korea’s most unsettling cultural exports.
A heartbreaking study of grief and intimacy, Hunger asks what it means to be consumed by love — not just obsessed but consumed in the most literal sense. Dam finds her boyfriend, Gu, dead on the street, murdered by loan sharks. Instead of surrendering him to the police or a morgue, she carries him home, cleans his body and begins to eat him. This isn’t a moment of madness but the fulfilment of a pact. Long before, Dam and Gu promised one another that if either died, the survivor would eat the other so they could stay together forever.
Gu and Dam fell for each other as children, first holding hands in the schoolyard, an act that earned them ridicule from classmates and punishment from adults, who sexualised their innocence. Their bond deepened through small acts of rebellion, like stealing sugar or shaking coins from Dam’s aunt’s clothes to buy ice cream. But soon the thrill gave way to shame and the crushing realities of family trauma and poverty.
In South Korea’s cut-throat system, where parents pour fortunes into cram schools, tutors and cosmetic surgery to give their children a fighting chance, Dam and Gu are doomed from birth; success is reserved for those with money and connections. As Dam puts it, “I hadn’t even got started, and failure was already guaranteed. Life had won.” All they have is each other.
It is this sense of inevitability that gives Hunger its bite. Like Parasite, Choi portrays a society so merciless that the poor are left to feed off scraps or, in Dam’s case, something far darker. Cannibalism here is less horror than metaphor, a way of showing survival in a system that devours its own.
Faced with the loss of her lover, she says to Gu: “I will eat you and live for an extraordinarily long time. I will outlive those who treated us as less than human. Even as they grow old, fall ill, die — until they are long forgotten and their bodies disintegrate into nothingness — I will live. I will carry your remains with me to the very end of time.”
Told through alternating perspectives, we follow Dam and Gu from childhood friends to teenage lovers, through separation and reunion, until poverty, violence and circumstance close in. Their bond is messy, sometimes tender, sometimes cruel, but always intense. By the time Dam lifts the knife, it feels almost inevitable, the only way she can honour her love in a world that keeps taking everything else away.
What makes Hunger so unsettling is the way it blurs boundaries between love and obsession, memory and hallucination, nourishment and violation. One moment you’re reading about the warmth of first love, the next the crunch of human flesh. It reads like a fever dream of tenderness and terror, where sentiment and savagery sit side by side.
Choi’s prose is pared down and economical, leaving the reader’s imagination to do much of the disturbing work. Soje’s translation keeps the clipped, direct rhythm of the original, making the violence feel intimate and the love more fragile.
Beneath the macabre love story lies a sharp critique of society. Dam and Gu are not simply star-crossed lovers, they are young people crushed by debt, indifference and systemic cruelty. In that light, Dam’s act is one of resistance. If society treats human beings as disposable, then she will insist on keeping Gu inside her, literally, defiantly. Love here is not only personal but political.
Comparisons with Parasite — a dark social satire about a poor South Korean family who infiltrate a wealthy household — are inevitable. Choi sketches a world where the poor are driven to extremes just to cling to their humanity. In a society obsessed with appearances, Dam consumes what is real, refusing to let Gu be forgotten or commodified or erased.
Cannibalism, in Choi’s hands, is about union, the desire to merge so completely with another that even death cannot divide you. What does it mean to love someone so deeply that you cannot let them go, even when you must? And what happens when the metaphor becomes flesh?
If you’re squeamish, proceed with caution. If you’re curious, prepare to be devoured.
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