# Chapter 19: The Comfort Station – Where Names Are Erased and Souls Take Flight
Hello everyone, it's me again! How are you all doing today? I'm so glad you're here with me, because this chapter… this chapter is a heavy one. I need you to take a deep breath before we walk into it together. Today, we continue our journey through "Honey in The Wound free digital audiobook," and Chapter 19 carries us into one of the darkest corners of this entire story. If the earlier chapters broke our hearts, this one shatters them to pieces on the cold, dirt floor of a place no girl should ever have to call home. But within that darkness, there are sparks of humanity that refuse to be extinguished—and that's exactly what makes this chapter so powerful. So, take my hand, and let's step into it together.
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The chapter opens in absolute blackness. Young-Ja comes to on the metal floor of a moving truck, her head throbbing from a blow that knocked her unconscious outside Fenghuang. She tries to push herself up, searching desperately for a door, a window, any sliver of escape—but there is nothing. Only narrow air slots near the ceiling, high above her reach. A wail tears from her hoarse throat, raw and animal-like, born of a suspicion she cannot bear to name in the dark.
A voice cuts through her panic. It belongs to a girl with a striking, unblemished beauty—the kind of face that would soon become a curse in this place. Her name is Bok-Hee. She gestures toward another girl nearby whose left eye is swollen shut, a brutal warning: *stay calm, or they will do the same to you.* Bok-Hee gently pushes Young-Ja down to rest and asks for her name. But Young-Ja has almost nothing left to say. Her thoughts are malformed, reeling, grieving for Meiyu, trying to piece together how she went from the blinding flames of the teahouse to imprisonment with strangers in this dark, lurching vehicle.
When the truck finally halts, cold air floods in as the door opens. A tan-uniformed soldier grimaces at the stench of urine and orders the girls out. They climb into a fenced yard before a wooden building, shivering in the cold and the fear. A large trough of water sits waiting with scattered buckets. The command comes: *strip down and bathe.* No one moves. When a girl protests in accented Japanese that it isn't decent to wash outside in the cold, a soldier slaps her across the face and raises his bayoneted gun. Gasps ripple through the line. The message is clear: *clean yourselves now, or we will do it for you.*
The girls undress in silent terror, clumsy but quick, and dump cold water over their heads. Young-Ja shudders as she scrubs the filth and smells of the journey from her body—no soap, and no one dares ask for any. Even in the fading dusk, she can see the pale bodies around her marked with bruises and red gashes. The beaten girl from the truck, now scrubbed of crusted blood, looks younger and smaller than before. The soldiers leer from behind their rifles, lighting cigarettes and laughing. Cold water strips the heat from the girls' tears, flowing into gray streams that sink into the soil between their pallid toes.
Once dressed in thin cotton gowns, the girls are led into a corridor lined with closed doors. Each waits her turn to enter the room at the end of the hall, silenced by the guns in the soldiers' arms. When Young-Ja's turn comes, she steps into a small room with a cot, a table, and a scale. A middle-aged man in glasses with a trim haircut sits writing notes in Japanese. Thinking him different—calmer, softer—she pleads that there's been a mistake, that she must return to Xinjing. He shushes her gently and instructs her to stand on the scale first. He's just here to check her health, he says, he won't hurt her.
But he lies. After noting her weight and asking her age—she whispers "nineteen"—he examines the bump on the back of her head with delicate hands, and for a moment, a sliver of hope flickers in Young-Ja's chest. Maybe this man can help her get home. Then he tells her to lie down on the cot. *I only need to check a few things. It won't hurt.* She lowers herself, staring up at the wooden ceiling, and he takes her pulse, jotting more notes. Then he asks when she last had a health inspection. Before she can finish answering, he thrusts his dry fingers between her legs. She gasps, eyes watering from the sudden pain. *Shh, just relax. This is routine.* His fingers move inside her while she tries to push away. He presses his free hand onto her abdomen to hold her down, warning that if she moves, he'll have to start the examination all over again. His fingers slide in and out; his breath quickens. Tears gather at the corners of Young-Ja's eyes and she lets out a meek cry, begging him to stop. He presses his hand over her mouth and continues until he is apparently satisfied she is not diseased. *You may get up and exit out the other door.*
Young-Ja stands, void of thought, and walks out as ordered. Another soldier leads her to her final stop of the night.
The girls who had undergone their checkups before her lie huddled on mats scattered about the room. Some cry into their knees, others sit in silence. Young-Ja puts her back against the wall and slides down to the floor. She wants to scream but cannot find her voice. Shame and regret surge through her—why hadn't she kicked the man off? Why hadn't she shouted for help? The dull soreness between her legs is a testament to her weakness, and she buries her head into her knees, shaking her head, willing these sensations to leave her.
Then someone next to her begins to bawl loudly, gasping for breath between wails. When the soldier returns to deposit the next girl into the room, he walks over to the source of the racket and kicks her until she falls to her side. She yelps as his boot digs into the soft flesh of her stomach, knocking the breath from her body. *Shut up and go to sleep, all of you!* Everyone stills. He looks around, daring them to defy him, then slams the door.
Young-Ja crawls over to the fallen crier, who is now coughing up blood. Looking up through the slit of her puffed-up eye—a token of her earlier punishment for screaming in the truck—she gazes at Young-Ja. As Young-Ja sits her up and wipes the blood from her chin with her sleeve, she notices something achingly familiar in the girl's face. The high cheekbones. The oval face. The long black braid. In the girl's pained expression flickers a mild resemblance to Young-Sook—her older sister whom she had believed dead since a soldier abducted her ten years ago in Cheongju. Confronting the memory of Young-Sook in this stranger's tear-soaked eyes, Young-Ja's vision blurs with wet heat. She takes the girl into her arms and holds her, wondering if this was what those soldiers had done to her own child sister so many years ago. She tightens her hold at the thought, embracing her as she would the sibling she could not save.
*Where are we?* the young girl whispers in Korean. *What's going to happen to us?* Young-Ja doesn't know. But it's late, and sleep is the only mercy left. She strokes the girl's hair and whispers kind words until the sniffling slows into steady breaths. Young-Ja closes her eyes, trying to ignore the moans from the others. The girl curled in her arms radiates a trembling warmth that helps lull her to rest.
Some time later, Young-Ja wakes—darkness still blanketing the sky—and realizes she cannot hear or feel the girl's soft breaths anymore. Her bruised body lies stiff and cold. Young-Ja rolls away in panic, convulsing into dry heaves, coughing up what little liquid remains in her empty stomach. She collapses back onto the floor, void of thought. The coolness of the mat against her cheek remains the only sign she can feel anything at all, and she stays there, unmoving, as the light of sunrise filters through the window.
In the morning, the girls are taken by armed men to a long shanty structure in the fenced yard—a place that looks like a stable for farm animals, with a wooden panel wall split down the middle creating two long rows of stalls under the roof. In each stall lies a mat hidden behind a flimsy curtain. Sixteen mats in sixteen stalls. Fifteen girls are told to step into the space and lie down. One mat would be left empty that day.
Young-Ja sits on her mat awaiting further instructions when a soldier approaches, climbs on top of her, and pins her arms down. Her shrieks are lost in a chorus of splitting howls as the other girls confront their own horrors. She flails and hits him, and he strikes her across the face without compunction. He presses his knee into her stomach until she loses her breath. When he feels her go limp, he wriggles out of his pants, pushes up her dress, and shoves himself inside her. Hot pain shoots up her spine. Young-Ja screams. She had never prayed to the heavens before that moment, but she prays for it to end. She prays for lightning to strike her dead. She prays for the earth to open beneath her and swallow her up. It isn't long before the soldier shudders and pushes hot, vile breath in her ear. He slumps his weight onto her, his limp body slick with her blood. *My lucky day,* he says, wiping the blood off on her dress. *Since you're clean, I won't have to regret not wearing a condom.*
She can hear distant screams from the others even as her eardrums burst with horrible ringing. Her voice catches in her constricted throat as she falls into panicked spasms, gasping for breath. She doesn't register when the soldier leaves and the next comes in. This one, too, climbs on top and holds down her wrists. He empties his seed into her mechanically. A third one comes, and Young-Ja feels she has gone blind, unable to see what is happening as reality. She floats in and out of consciousness, her head bumping into the central wall of the stable in a steady beat as soldiers thrust into her slack body. She doesn't know how many soldiers she receives that day, but she recalls the last one of the night. He spits on her once he finishes. *Chōsen pi,* he calls her. *Joseon cunt.*
Young-Ja's vision blurs in and out of focus as a scratching sound comes from somewhere beyond her stall. The girl in the space next to her carves a notch into the wall with her jagged fingernail, adding to the numerous coarse lines already grooved into the wooden paneling. When the guards come by and tell the girls to get up, the one next to Young-Ja speaks up: *I tallied the number of men I saw today. How much will I be paid for them?* The guards laugh. *Paid? I think plenty of deposits have been made to the Bank of Chōsen today.*
The armed guards bark at the girls to follow them to the trough of lukewarm water outside—the same one they used the night before. They are told to clean themselves so they don't bring their diseases to the soldiers the next day. As Young-Ja washes her groin, she notices the angry red patches appearing on her arms, her hips, her legs. New bruises in the shapes of fingerprints darken the other girls, some with blood on their faces and lips. Their flesh has already been mottled blue from the voyage into this ruinous place. Now they have been beaten red by the brutish hands that keep them there. No part of their bodies would be left unsullied by their captors.
Bowls of millet gruel and fermented soy paste are laid out in the room where the girls slept. Young-Ja stares at the small bowl with no urge to reach for it. Fog settles in her mind and all sensation is lost to its haze. Hunger and thirst cannot exist if her body does not. Pain cannot exist if her body does not. Shame cannot exist if her body does not.
When she comes to, her bowl is empty—someone else has eaten what she was too slow to touch. She sits frozen, unfeeling. She does not flinch when one of the others smashes a bowl against the wall and presses the broken ceramic shard to her own neck, holding it tight until a bead of blood pools at the divot in her skin. She is punished for her hesitation to move, however, for the guards drag her out before she can glide the sharp edge across her skin. Only wooden bowls are used thereafter, and a guard is posted to stand watch during meals.
The girls pray to the heavens to let them breathe their final breath in their sleep. Most gods are deaf to these pleas. The girls open their eyes to the same living nightmare the next morning, their organs rotting with bile and agony. But as they rise from their mats, they look with fear and envy at one blue-lipped girl whose god did seem to take pity on her cries. The comfort station doctor cannot surmise the cause of death; he finds nothing but abrasions and bruising that he believes insufficient to kill. Her cause of death is recorded as unknown, and she is lost to nourish the soil of a foreign land where none knew her name.
Another soldier rolls off Young-Ja as she lies flat, lip busted into a trickle of blood. He had slapped her when she turned her head away from his demand to face him. But he had gotten satisfaction and departed without another thought. Young-Ja braces herself for the next soldier, but no one else crawls into her stall. Yelling erupts in the yard. She sits up to see what trouble unfolds.
Two soldiers are fighting over a girl—the beautiful Bok-Hee, with her unblemished skin. A sneering officer steps into the fray, wearing a red-and-gold gochō collar tab with a single star. He pulls apart the fighting men and scolds them for losing their discipline. When they try to defend themselves, he fires his pistol into the sky. He glares at the men, then examines the girl between them before lunging to punch her in the stomach. When Bok-Hee folds over with the wind knocked out of her lungs, he kicks her in the face so hard that a few teeth fly out of her mouth as she falls. He squats down and pulls her dirt-covered head up by her hair, unsheathes a large knife, and runs its blade slowly down her left cheek from her eye to her chin, cleaving the fatty flesh and releasing a stream of blood like red teardrops from a single eye. The yard is silent except for Bok-Hee's cries for mercy. The officer throws her to the ground and stands up.
*There, not such a beautiful prize after all, so stop your bickering,* he commands. *You are proud soldiers of the Empire of Japan. You will not behave like animals over a Chōsen pi. Don't disturb me again unless you wish to be treated like animals.*
He spits on the ground and grabs another girl he has chosen for the afternoon. They disappear into the main building—officers are entertained in the comforts of a private room indoors, not in the overrun stable. The soldier who had been waiting in line picks up the crying, disfigured girl and drags her to the stall next to Young-Ja's.
When night falls and the last of the soldiers leave, Young-Ja lifts the curtain that hangs over Bok-Hee's stall. *Are you there?* Bok-Hee sits up on her mat, face swollen and bruised at the lip, a thin bandage saturated red wrapped around the left side of her face. Young-Ja crawls beside her and shares some of her water, stroking the girl's back. Bok-Hee is slow to swallow the liquid. *My mother told me that beauty could be a curse,* she says, running her fingers against her wet bandage. *I wonder if this was what she meant.*
*Ok-Ju, come here and eat—* says Bok-Hee. *Don't,* Ok-Ju replies in Japanese. *Do not speak her name. Do not speak that language. That girl is not here. These things are being done to Hanako now.* Unable to pronounce or remember the girls' native names, the soldiers force a new Japanese name on each. Young-Ja is called Fujiko. Bok-Hee is Sachiko. There is a Hanako. A Mariko. A Yukiko. A "ko"—child—for every soldier's tastes. The guards forbid the girls from speaking their native tongues around them, not wanting to give them the opportunity to conspire openly in their secret language. It is not enough for soldiers to take their bodies—names and tongues, too, are necessary consolation prizes. With each girl gutted, pretty shells are left for the men to fill with what they wish to see.
During the day, soldiers line up outside the stable, yelling at men who take longer than their allotted half hour. *Hayaku, hayaku, hayaku!* They compare these Chōsen pi to ones they had used at other comfort stations, trading notes on which had the prettiest girls, the most submissive stock. The girls learn not to fight back too much, for soldiers are quick to wield their fists and knives to force compliance. Some keep screaming until the sound is choked out of their throats. Others give up entirely, lying limp as struggle only worsens the pain.
When the girls are not receiving soldiers, they launder uniforms and keep the comfort station clean. They are also made to darn socks and mend clothing, but after Yukiko uses a needle to stab at an artery in her neck, the girls are forbidden to sew. During the first week in their cramped prison, very few girls speak, most drifting about in a fugue state. But as the days pass without change, as the weeks accumulate into months, they cling to one another for whatever can pass for comfort. Older prisoners like Young-Ja teach the others how to tend to minor wounds and help those who have just arrived from Joseon with their Japanese. All swap ways to dissociate when receiving soldiers, resigned to the unyielding march of time.
The girls are fed twice a day, morning and evening, with just enough food to keep their hearts beating. To ward off syphilis and other diseases, they are forced to receive periodic sarubarusu injections filled with arsenic. The military likes to ensure that the dirty Chōsen pi will not disable their valiant troops with disease. If the doctor is feeling generous that day, the girls get medical attention beyond the cursory weekly checkup in the infirmary. Some girls have grown so swollen between their legs it hurts to walk. Others are brought in to drain the pustules on their labia. Those who merely bleed from abrasions are told to stop complaining, for the doctor is busy taking care of real ailments that could threaten the health of the soldiers.
Armed guards are ever-present. At any one girl's disobedience, the men shout and strike, threatening to maim all those present until they can work no more. Some girls wonder if that is really a threat and not an improvement in their lot. But the risk of indiscriminate group punishments keeps casual acts of individual defiance at bay, for no one wishes to be responsible for inflicting further pain on their fellow prisoners. Many attempt to take their own lives over the course of the year. Those who fail to perish try to run away without success. Each time, all girls are punished for even a single one's insolence by whip or withheld meals. Those who are inevitably recaptured are also stabbed in both calves, forcing them on their backs and submitting to their duties as their legs healed. Not all legs healed.
There is little other natural life at the comfort station. It is as if birds and insects know not to linger. Young-Ja breaks each time an errant sparrow lands on the fence opposite the stable. *Have you come to mock me?* she asks hoarsely before the bird flies away in a blur. Envying its freedom is too painful to bear, and she desperately hopes that it will not sing to anyone of her disgrace in this accursed place. Young-Ja tries to quash whatever reminiscence of Xinjing those brown wings stir. If there is something in her left to die, it shrivels at the thought of presenting her broken face to Feng-nüs hi. To Tayiji. To Baek Yong-Woo. To have them know what she has done for countless days and nights, whom she has been made to serve. What she has become. To any departing sparrow, Young-Ja cries, *Don't show yourself here again!*—for thoughts of loves past serve only as torture. In this madness, she eventually finds solace in having lost her family, for they would never have to live knowing her shame.
At daybreak, when the girls are released into the yard for their chores, Young-Ja has taken to looking at the well and wondering how easy it would be to throw herself inside and drown. When no one is looking, she could tie a large rock to her waist and jump, disappearing before the guards noticed she was gone. She approaches the edge of the well and peers down at the murky water. Young-Ja sees in her expressionless reflection the swollen, bruised eye she received from a soldier two days ago. Impulse compels her to reach out and join that girl in the water. To reunite with her family. With Meiyu. As she thinks about climbing over the stone edge, her reflection distorts. Teardrops have fallen below, rippling the placid black surface.
*Fujiko-san.* Young-Ja jerks back. Hanako approaches, clutching her arms across her chest. *Sachiko-san needs your help with the laundry.* Hanako maintains a flat tone as she speaks in Japanese, despite a wincing avoidance of Young-Ja's eyes. *I know it's not your turn today, but she wanted me to ask you.* It doesn't take long for Young-Ja to note that Hanako's right wrist has swollen out to a lumpy protrusion mottled blue. Neither girl feels the need to remark on the cause of the injury or acknowledge that Hanako is usually paired with Sachiko—Bok-Hee—for their laundry shifts.
*Yes,* says Young-Ja, wiping away the remaining moisture at the corners of her eyes. *I can help with the laundry. But let's go to the infirmary first—* *The doctor's not in today. He wasn't yesterday either.* *Hm. Wait here.*
Young-Ja hurries to the lone mulberry tree in the yard. Hoping the guards aren't paying attention, she tears off the slim ends of a few branches to the length of her forearm and strips them of leaves and twigs. Within moments, she has sunk her canines into the hem of her dress, torn off a few strips of cloth, and bound the branches tight. She lays the makeshift splint against Hanako's wrist and wraps the last few cloth strips around the girl's arm. Hanako draws sharp breaths but otherwise complies without a word.
As the girls walk toward the laundry, hand in hand, Young-Ja knows she cannot allow herself to return to the murky reflection in the well. Not so long as girl hands grasp hers, squeezing her for whatever warmth she can provide. And for all the hands she can no longer hold, she will squeeze back to say, *Don't worry, I'm still here.*
The chapter closes with a shift in perspective—to a girl renamed Mariko, somewhere in Manchuko, Empire of Japan, 1942. Anytime she is allowed outside, Mariko searches for rocks and swallows them when she thinks no one is looking. The rocks keep her low to the ground, her soft organs heavy with the clatter of stone. *Clack. Clack. Clack.* The girls can always hear her approaching. Young-Ja takes pity on the rock-swallower and offers to share her meager dinner, thinking this proclivity an attempt to stave off the hunger pangs clawing at the stomach of every girl. Mariko refuses each time, preferring to slide a dusty stone over her little pink tongue.
Mariko spends most of her day lying in her stall of the outdoor stable. From over the shoulder of whichever soldier she is receiving, she can see the lone mulberry tree that grows in the yard through the crack of the curtain. With no other trees to be seen, its stark branches always catch the eye. At first, she resisted and screamed like all the others. This provoked beatings from the soldiers, which she learned could be abated by lying still. So she taught herself to focus on the branches of the mulberry tree when her back is on the mat, to forget she has a body to move at all.
Mariko notices that when her defiled body is weighed down, its pains cannot follow her soul to rest in the mulberry tree. The more rocks she devours, the longer her soul can evacuate from her body when soldiers barge in from the queue at the foot of her mat. In the mulberry tree, she does not have to think about the soldiers. She can cry, laugh, seethe, desire. Exist without shame. She can think about her grandparents' Mokpo seaside home where she played with her sisters. She can think about the clams she collected to eat, feeling the burst of their briny flesh on her tongue. She can recall the warmth of the sun drying the ocean water in her hair, leaving salt crystals to—
And here the chapter ends, mid-sentence, mid-memory, mid-breath. A cruel cut that leaves us suspended in Mariko's fragile escape, knowing that the salt crystals she remembers will never quite carry her all the way home.
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## Reader's Impressions & Star Rating
I have to be honest with you all—this is the hardest chapter I've had to walk through in this entire book so far. And yet, I think it may also be the most important. What the author accomplishes here is something devastatingly brave: she refuses to look away. She refuses to soften the truth of what these girls endured. There is no cinematic gloss over the horror of the comfort stations, no convenient narrative mercy. And yet, in the midst of it all, she gives us glimpses of something unbreakable.
The image of Young-Ja standing at the well, staring at her own battered reflection and contemplating the release of drowning—and then being pulled back by the simple plea of another girl who needs her help—that is the entire thesis of this novel in one scene. Survival doesn't always look heroic. Sometimes it looks like making a splint from a mulberry branch and torn dress strips for a girl whose wrist has been broken. Sometimes it looks like holding a dying girl who resembles the sister you lost. Sometimes it looks like refusing to speak your own name because the only way to survive is to become someone else entirely.
The detail I cannot get out of my mind is the names. How the soldiers strip away Young-Ja, Bok-Hee, and the others and replace them with Fujiko, Sachiko, Hanako, Mariko. It's not enough to own their bodies—they must also erase who they are. And yet, Young-Ja's final thought—*I'm still here*—is a rebellion. It is a refusal to be fully erased, even when everything has been taken from her.
The prose is spare precisely when it needs to be. The moments of greatest violence are rendered in short, blunt sentences that hit like fists. And then, suddenly, there is poetry: *her soft organs heavy with the clatter of stone*, *salt crystals in her hair*. This juxtaposition is what makes the chapter feel like a bruise—tender and brutal at once.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.9 / 5 Stars
I'm holding back that final tenth of a star only because the chapter's ending cuts off so abruptly that I felt almost cheated—though I suspect that's exactly the point. We are meant to feel suspended alongside Mariko, never quite allowed to reach the comfort of home.
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## Next Chapter Prediction
Based on the cliffhanger and the emotional trajectories laid out, I predict Chapter 20 will continue with Mariko's perspective, perhaps revealing the full memory of her Mokpo seaside home and the family she left behind. We may also see the first hints of a larger arc—perhaps whispers of liberation, escape attempts, or even the distant rumble of war shifting. Young-Ja's protective role over the newer arrivals will almost certainly deepen, and I suspect we'll see the emergence of a quiet, unbreakable network of sisterhood among the girls—a small rebellion of shared warmth in a place designed to destroy it. There may also be a glimpse of the doctor's true nature beyond the examination room, or perhaps the introduction of a soldier with a conscience—a rare crack in the machinery of cruelty. But knowing this story, any hope offered will likely come with a cost. Stay braced, dear readers—this journey is far from over.
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