# Chapter 20: The Mulberry Tree and the Hungry Ghosts
Hello everyone, it's me again! How are you all doing? Today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 20 of "Honey in The Wound free digital audiobook." This is not an easy chapter. It is one of the darkest, most haunting turns in the story—a chapter where the living and the dead refuse to release one another, and where motherhood becomes both a wound and a haunting. So take a breath, stay close, and let's walk through it together.
Mariko moves like a broken prism, refracting the light as she moves. Lost in her recollections, she consumes so many rocks that her belly swells and invites suspicions that she is with child. But this does not stop the soldiers from using her as they have come to use her. One morning, while crouching over the laundry, Mariko howls in pain and falls over, holding her distended, wriggling stomach. Young-Ja rushes to help her up, but the guards drag Mariko to the infirmary to have the child removed.
Then a man's shout erupts from the operation room. The guards rush in to inspect the cause. The doctor lies unconscious on the ground next to a smooth boulder smeared in blood. Mariko is sprawled on the examination cot with her belly sliced open, a beatific smile on her glassy-eyed face. The doctor's assistant stands lamely in the center of the room, stuttering that the boulder flew from her open belly and hit the doctor in the head when he reached inside to extract the baby. The guards ignore the assistant's protests and drag him off to be detained and tried. Assaulting a medical officer of the Imperial Army is a serious offense.
Young-Ja and the others are ordered to clean the infirmary and bury Mariko's body. As their shovels break the earth, each girl wonders whether and when she will encounter the same fate. Without needing to exchange a single word, they choose to lay her to rest under the mulberry tree. While Mariko's buried flesh nourishes her beloved tree, her mat is filled by "Setsuko," a poor girl from Pyongyang who had followed a soldier's promise to give her new shoes. Setsuko, too, notices that she can see the branches of the mulberry tree from her mat. She does not know that it will soon be her turn to dig a grave for a girl under the mulberry tree and watch her mat be filled by another.
Hanako was one of the first girls at the comfort station to lose a child and survive—most had perished or been sent away for being unable to perform their duties. She carried her child for half a year, working just the same as all the rest. When the hunger within her stopped one morning, she did not raise an alarm. There had been no pain, no struggle. For weeks Hanako said nothing, believing herself well though her belly had stopped growing. She could no longer be deceived by her own bluff when an abrupt sharpness in her gut made her drop her bowl of evening gruel. Clutching Young-Ja's hand and leaning against the other girls around her, she wailed and pushed an inert, purple lump out from between her legs. The guards forced the girls to clean up and dispose of the lump in the yard.
After that night, strange, garbled noises no one else seemed to hear followed in Hanako's wake. Each day the noises came more into focus, their slow but persistent echo boring into her ears. One night, lying awake amid the gentle breaths of slumber in their prison, Hanako confronted what she had been dreading.
"Ma. Ma." A strained gurgling came from outside the boarded window.
Hanako had never heard this voice before but had no doubts about to whom it belonged. She knew then she had finally lost her mind to this torment and released a loud, high-pitched scream. Bok-Hee and Young-Ja, lying on either side of her, sought to calm the girl, trying to determine what new pain had triggered the wail. Ignoring the others, Hanako sustained her unbroken scream. Guards ran into the room and jerked the possessed girl from Young-Ja's arms. They struck her across her face so hard it dislocated her jaw.
The next girl to hear strange noises had not forgotten what happened to Hanako. She strove to ignore the sound, hoping not to feed its volume with her reaction. On the mat, in the laundry, in her sleeping cell, the noise slithered around her, trying to coax a response. The night she gave in and acknowledged the voice as her daughter-son—the blood that had leached out from her one morning in the stable—the ghosts of the comfort station's spawn unleashed their wails. They wailed into the sky, they wailed into the ground. They wailed unseen from every corner their mothers turned.
"Hold me!" "I'm cold..." "Hungry!"
Each girl-mother knew which voice belonged to her.
Some put their hands over their ears, rejecting these sounds as kin. Nothing they were forced to carry would they ever accept as their own. Whatever blood they shared, whatever tissue was wrenched from their bodies, these girls would not give them life, what little left they had to give. They would see it all buried deep in the dirt beneath the comfort station so the world could never discover what dirty fates had befallen them.
And yet, some could not help but reach out to soothe the cries as they imagined their own mothers would. But they swiped at only air in the inky dark.
The creatures first emerged as mere sounds, though as loud and close as if cradled in arms. Within days they began to leave traces of presence only their girl-mothers could perceive. Thin trails of blood streaked on the walls. Infant handprints peppered across stable mats. Bloody stains on hands and legs that would not wash away.
During the day, ghosts could be heard pattering about the stable roof above their mothers, casting shadows that undulated across the lines of soldiers in the yard. The girls scolded their howling creations, telling them to close their eyes, to go away. They may be phantoms of their lunacy, but they were not to witness such vile acts.
"Don't look! Don't look!"
The soldiers were blind to the shadows of their young and believed these imperatives were addressed to them. Most ignored any sound that came from the Chōsen-pi. Some retaliated, forcing their girls to look them in the eye as they emptied into their bodies. No matter the scene, the ghosts wailed for their mothers' attention, dripping blood from the roof's edge onto the ground outside the stable.
Drip. "Kaa-san." Drip. "Mama." Drip. "Hold me."
If ignored, they screeched so loudly that sleep could not come. If acknowledged, they left the whisper of a tug on the girls' dresses, little red handprints blooming across frayed hems. Some asked their girl-mothers why they swallowed toxic weeds to prevent their growth. Some warned that this was their final chance to rear children, that their wombs were now contaminated by blight and poison. That they could never again be mothers with bodies so worn and spoiled.
Young-Ja's began as a spasm. It gnawed at her stomach as she trudged toward her place in the stable, exiting from her in a blood flow she had not seen for two moons. The queue of soldiers trampled the drops into the dirt beneath their boots while a weak-kneed Young-Ja was carried to her mat. At night it rose from the ground to find the carrier of its womb. It was vocal, oozing as blood down her scalp and into the conch of her ear to whisper in Japanese sing-song.
"Hungry, Kaa-san. Feed me."
Young-Ja grew increasingly numb to these cries. She was no mother. This hell took life, it did not give it. And so she would nestle closer to the other girls, to Bok-Hee and Hanako, sinking into their still-warm breaths and living heartbeats to escape death's call.
For Bok-Hee, there were two. The scar on her face twinged with pain every time the voices emerged, trickling blood down her cheek and crying out for a pink scar just like their beautiful mother. Although she could not see them, they begged her to slice their ugly faces until they matched hers. These dreadful pleas echoed in Bok-Hee's every waking moment until she learned she could subdue their cries by hiding the scar from view. She took to sleeping on her maimed face, exposing only her beautiful right cheek to the night. If the pitiable ghosts could not see it, they would not envy it.
Madness seized the girls. They burned with loathing for themselves and the monsters who created these wretched beings. They went mad with love and shame for their malformed flesh and heard their cries as proof someone in the world still needed them. While the echoes of ghostly cries corroded their senses, they found refuge in knowing that these forlorn apparitions were not true children. True children who could suffer the abuses they shouldered. The girl-mothers would receive it all in their stead, for it was the mother's duty to keep her children from harm.
Unknown, Manchuko, Empire of Japan, 1943
A tiger visits Young-Ja's slumber in the third year of her bondage. It climbs down from the sky on a large rope and lands before her. The beast approaches with a soft growl, but Young-Ja senses no hostility. It considers her for a moment through the yellow of its eyes before nudging her stomach with its broad head. Young-Ja woke submerged in the dread that she had beheld a taemong—a conception dream. She could still summon her mother's descriptions of the taemong she had for her children.
"I saw all three of you coming to me," said Jung-Soon, a gentle smile pulling at her cheeks. "Young-Sook came to me as a persimmon. I was so hungry in my dream. I saw a tree in the distance and ran to it, but its branches were bare. I squinted my eyes and looked up: there was one perfect persimmon at the top of the tree. So I climbed all the way up to pick it from the branch. When I bit into it, I knew right away it was the most delicious fruit I had ever tasted.
"Young-Ho came to me as a bear cub. I had been walking in the mountains for a long time and sat down to rest. This small, furry bear cub crawled up to me and nestled in my lap. He was so warm and cozy, he fell asleep right there. I played with his fluffy ears and felt so happy and protected.
"Young-Ja was tricky. I thought she would be a boy. I saw a big tiger approaching me, so I got scared and ran. It caught up to me and tackled me to the ground. I thought that I would perish, but it dropped a mugunghwa blossom in my hands and left. The flower stayed with me and grew in my palms."
Young-Ja recalled looking up at her mother as she told her these stories. She had difficulty picturing the exact contours of her mother's face, but she knew that she liked to run her fingers over the raised web of flesh on Jung-Soon's burn scar. And now, in the third year of her captivity, the tiger had come to her. Was it a promise, a warning, or another ghost demanding to be born?
## Reader's Impressions & Star Rating
This chapter is devastating in the way only the best kind of dark storytelling can be. It does not simply describe horror; it makes you feel the slow erosion of the mind when love, shame, pain, and motherhood are twisted into instruments of torture. The ghost children are terrifying, but what haunts me most is the tenderness the girls still try to offer—reaching into the dark to soothe cries that only they can hear. The mulberry tree becomes a silent witness, a grave, and a cycle that refuses to end. The shift into Young-Ja's taemong is beautifully unsettling, linking her captivity to her mother's old dreams of birth and protection. It left me breathless.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.9 / 5 Stars
## Next Chapter Prediction
The tiger dream feels like a turning point. Young-Ja may be pregnant again, or the tiger may be a spirit choosing her for something beyond ordinary motherhood. I predict the next chapter will explore whether Young-Ja can hide a new pregnancy, how the other girls will react, and whether the ghost children will become more aggressive or more sorrowful as they sense a living child nearby. The memory of Jung-Soon's taemong suggests that Young-Ja's fate is tied to the mugunghwa blossom—something beautiful growing in the middle of violence. But in this world, beauty often becomes another wound. I expect a dangerous choice, a possible act of defiance, and perhaps the first sign that one of the girls will try to protect an unborn life instead of surrendering it to the comfort station.
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