When Han Kang’s surreal, violent novel “The Vegetarian” was published in South Korea nearly a decade ago, literary critics found it baffling. The story stars an unhinged heroine who believes she’s turning into a tree, and features some of the strangest erotic passages in literature. (In one unforgettable scene, Ms. Han renders clichéd sexual metaphors about flowering plants and protruding pistils quite literally.)  The mesmerizing mix of sex and violence was not what fans and reviewers expected from Ms. Han, a celebrated and award-winning poet and novelist.  “It was received as very extreme and bizarre,” Ms. Han said in English during a recent telephone interview from her home in Seoul. “Definitely, readers were surprised.”  Even more surprising was the rapturous reception that followed. “The Vegetarian” became a cult international best seller. Publication rights have sold in nearly 20 countries. It was adapted into a Korean film that played at Sundance in 2010.  Still, Ms. Han, who has been publishing fiction and poetry for more than two decades, remained almost entirely unknown to English-speakers.  That is starting to change, thanks largely to Deborah Smith, a 28-year-old British translator who read a Korean edition of “The Vegetarian” four years ago, when she was studying for her Ph.D. at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. She was transfixed by the unusual story and vivid, chiseled prose, and attempted to translate it herself, but wasn’t fluent enough yet to capture Ms. Han’s style. A year later, she tried again, and sent a short sample translation to a British publisher, who decided to publish the novel based on the first 10 pages.  “It was very visual and painterly,” Ms. Smith said. “The reason that I wanted to translate her in the first place is that I think she is the best writer they have.”  It remains to be seen whether “The Vegetarian,” which is being released in the United States this week by Hogarth, will resonate with American readers. But it is causing a stir in literary circles. The book has drawn a string of ecstatic early reviews, including those in Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Kirkus, which called it “gracefully written and deeply disturbing.” Independent booksellers are rallying around it. Literary novelists like Lauren Groff, Helen Oyeyemi and Eimear McBride have heaped praise on Ms. Han’s hypnotic prose.  “Enthusiasm spread like a virus in the way that you always hope will happen,” Molly Stern, the publisher of Hogarth, said. “We’ll see if that virus spreads into the reading public.”  The story centers on Yeong-hye, a melancholy housewife who is haunted by violent dreams that drive her to stop eating meat. Her abusive husband views her vegetarianism as an act of rebellion, while her brother-in-law becomes obsessed with her increasingly emaciated figure and her bluish birthmark, and lures her into performing in his sexually explicit video art. Like a cursed madwoman in classical myth, Yeong-hye seems both eerily prophetic and increasingly unhinged when she begins starving herself, hoping to transform into a tree.  Ms. McBride, the author of “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing,” said she was struck by “the alignment of extraordinarily lyrical prose with incredibly brutal content.”  “The tension between the two creates a very singular effect within the reader; a sense of complete immersion and utter disorientation all at once,” Ms. McBride wrote in an email. “The technical achievement is astonishing and all the more so because she never allows you even a glimpse at the seams.”  If Ms. Han gains a broad American readership, she will be one of the first South Korean authors to do so. While American publishers have become more willing to take risks on works in translation, particularly since the commercial success of international authors like Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Haruki Murakami, literary imports from South Korea remain scarce. Just a few prominent contemporary South Korean novelists have been published in the United States, including Young-ha Kim and Kyung-sook Shin.  Some scholars, editors and translators say it is a shame that South Korea’s vibrant and diverse literary culture has been largely overlooked by Western publishers, even as other Korean cultural exports like K-pop have spread across the globe. “There are so few works of Korean literature in translation, especially contemporary stuff,” said Ed Park, a Korean-American novelist and executive editor at Penguin Press.  More books are starting to trickle in. Three years ago, the independent publisher Dalkey Archive Press started its “Library of Korean Literature” series, a translation program financed in part by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Dalkey has published 19 translations so far, including contemporary novels and 20th-century classics, and will release six works of Korean fiction this year.  Last year, AmazonCrossing published the Korean author Bae Suah’s acclaimed novella “Nowhere to Be Found.” Hogarth has acquired a second novel from Ms. Han, “Human Acts,” which takes place in 1980 in Gwangju, South Korea, where a boy searches for his friend’s body after a violently suppressed student uprising. The novel won Korea’s Manhae Literary Prize last year, and Ms. Smith’s English translation came out last month in Britain, where it was well received.  Ms. Han was born in 1970 in Gwangju. Her father, Han Seung-won, a novelist, struggled to make a living from his writing, and her family moved frequently when she was young. “It was too much for a little child, but I was all right because I was surrounded by books,” she said.  When she was 9 her family moved to Seoul, just four months before the Gwangju uprising in 1980, when government troops attacked pro-democracy protesters, firing on the crowds and killing hundreds. Though she didn’t witness it directly, the crackdown profoundly shaped her views of humanity’s capacity for violence, but also for compassion and redemption. Her fascination with those contradictory impulses drives much of her fiction, and gave her the idea for “The Vegetarian.”  “I was thinking about the spectrum of human behavior, from sublimity to horror, and wondered, is it really possible for humans to live a perfectly innocent life in this violent world, and what would happen if someone tried to achieve that?” she said.  She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University, and published her first poems in 1993. Her first novel, “Black Year,” a mystery about a missing woman, was released in 1998. Around that time, she had the idea for a short story about a woman who becomes a plant, and who is lovingly tended by her husband. The concept was inspired partly by a line from the Korean poet Yi Sang, who wrote, “I believe that humans should be plants.”  She always intended to return to the plant woman, but wrote two other novels before returning to that theme around 2004.  Ms. Han spent three years working on “The Vegetarian,” which she wrote as three separate novellas. She has published three other novels since, but said she is still attached to her heroine and the story, which ends on an ambiguous note.  “I didn’t want to describe Yeong-hye’s death,’’ she said. “I wanted to keep her alive.”  A version of this article appears in print on February 3, 2016, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Violent and Erotic Novel, Rooted in the Surreal. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Han Kang, highly regarded in her homeland, has broken through to English-speaking readers with a book that’s a decade old.