# Chapter 21: The Mark of the Maggot
Hello everyone, it's me again! How are you all doing? Today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 21 of "Honey in The Wound free digital audiobook". I have to warn you before we begin: this is one of the darkest chapters in the entire story. It is not dark because of battlefields or grand explosions, but because it shows how cruelty can become routine—how a system can turn human beings into inventory, and how one small act of conscience can cost everything.
The chapter opens with a scar. A bumpy, slightly discolored patch of skin that brings Young-Ja a strange, ghostly comfort—the kind of tactile memory only a mother could give. But in this cursed place, Young-Ja provides comfort to no one. Only phantoms claim her as a mother. And now there is life inside her, a life she never wanted, a life that pulsed stubbornly despite everything. That life was forced upon her, and she wishes to extinguish it.
The next morning, Young-Ja runs outside near the latrines and searches for poison weeds. She would rather smother the life inside her by her own hand than allow it to be smothered by the hands of her captors. She grabs a clump of jagged leaves and gnashes them into a bitter, gritty paste with her teeth. She swallows before the guards have a chance to grasp what she is doing. She barely manages to wipe the soil from her lips.
Then a man walks into the yard. He has a balding, gray hairline and wears a familiar smile. He has hung around the stable before, sometimes stopping to chat with the soldiers in line, but he never interacted with the girls directly. He always abstained from speaking to them or touching them. Now, with his hands clasped behind his back, he informs the girls that they will not receive any soldiers that day. General Akagawa is to stop by the comfort station for an inspection. They are to clean the building in preparation for his visit.
It had been under the general’s orders that this station was established as soldiers’ demand for comfort rose. It is imperative that they present their best front to the highest-ranking officer stationed in Manchukuō. The balding man tells the girls they will show their gratitude to the man who has given them their jobs, this opportunity to serve the empire. He warns them that they are well acquainted with what these guards will do if the place does not look impeccable by the afternoon.
He scans the grounds and examines the shuffle of girls before him. Several walk with scarred limps—mementos of failed escape attempts. Many otherwise sport unseemly bruises on their faces and necks, cigarette burns on their arms. The man’s smile falls as he considers the limited options, then points at Young-Ja near the latrines. She is not the comeliest of the bunch, but she at least has an unblemished face. He calls her Fujiko, the Japanese name imposed on her, and orders her to help the cook clean and prepare in the kitchen. She will serve the delegation when they arrive.
In all one thousand days she has been a prisoner, Young-Ja has never been inside the kitchen. The girls are not permitted inside the building anywhere except the infirmary and their sleeping cell. Occasionally they are forced into the rooms upstairs if a passing officer had selected them for more private consumption in the evenings. Like livestock, they are kept mostly outdoors. They receive soldiers outdoors. They wash the reeking undergarments of laboring men outdoors. They bathe and relieve themselves outdoors. Even in the cold of winter the girls are forced onto their backs in the outdoor stable, with meager fires burning at their frost-nipped feet.
The kitchen is a modest nook down the corridor from the infirmary: a small expansion in the limits of Young-Ja’s life in bondage. She tries to recall when she last prepared anything in a kitchen and looks at the scar on her left palm. Its gnarled, discolored line is a vestige of a resolve so bygone that Young-Ja can hardly recognize the hand as her own. Had she once truly believed that she could do something against all this, a force capable of devising the loathsome prison around her? As she passes the pots on an iron stove, she wonders if she will even be able to wield her old tools to any effect. She has been drained so empty of feeling that whatever food she touches will also likely taste empty, void of all flavor.
The guard hands Young-Ja off to the cook, a young Japanese man who leans against a crutch in lieu of a missing left leg. Despite the eye patch over his right eye, he manages an intense glare as he orders her to clean. When not tending to breakfast on the stove, the cook sits and watches Young-Ja scrub down the grimy pots lined with stale halos of an undetermined crust. He has already collected the kitchen knives and keeps them in a pouch hung around his shoulder. The guards have long since learned not to allow these girls anything sharp. But Young-Ja keeps her eyes downcast as she has been taught, betraying no signs of subversive intent. She quietly cleans the large pots and gives the cook little to monitor. When he grows bored of her, he limps over to the pot of millet gruel and declares it ready to be portioned out. Young-Ja complies as he turns to prepare the guards’ rice, pickled vegetables, and canned meat. She salivates at the smell—an involuntary reaction from a tongue that has not tasted meat in years.
Young-Ja sinks a spoon into her own bowl of millet gruel in silence. She peers at the cook between bites, wondering if he will admonish her for taking too long to finish her meal, or if he means to harm her in any way. There is no relaxing in the presence of men.
The cook meets Young-Ja’s probing eyes. He searches for any hints of pity or mockery of his body. Satisfied that what lingers in her gaze is fear, he ventures a few words.
“If you’re worried I’m going to hurt you, I don’t beat women,” he says. “Save your energy for cleaning. Those guards are the ones who will hurt you if this place isn’t spotless.”
Young-Ja knows he does not need to strike her to do harm, but she does not disagree with his assessment of the guards. She casts off this thought before getting up to rinse her bowl and scrub more grime from the kitchen floor. The cook rises to clear his dish when he drops his spoon. On instinct, Young-Ja turns to the clatter and reaches down to retrieve the fallen utensil.
“I can get it myself! I lost my leg, not my hands.”
Young-Ja retracts her hand at the rebuke. To think that this man worried about her pitying him. Laughter is a years-forgotten impulse, yet she suppresses its bitter tickle as she goes back on her knees to scrub the floor. She has learned in her years of watching men that only fragile egos jump to see assistance as pity. It would be best not to provoke.
The cook spends some time assessing the kitchen’s inventory but otherwise sits observing Young-Ja work. The guards had clearly thought that watching one girl clean the kitchen was not a worthy task for them. They had brought in the cook from his usual rotation in the nearby barracks to supervise in their stead. This seems to bother the cook, as if he needs reassurance that his station is not so far beneath the guards.
“You know, I was a soldier, too, once,” he muses. “Lost the leg and eye in Mongolia in a skirmish against the Russians a few years back.”
Young-Ja glances at him but keeps working in silence. Encouraged by the flash of attention, the cook continues his monologue.
“Going back to Japan like this was out of the question. At least the others don’t cringe at my appearance here. They understand the sacrifice I’ve made.”
Young-Ja wipes at the floor without looking up.
“I can make a living and do my duty with some semblance of dignity,” he says, eyes somewhere far. “But what would a whore know of dignity?”
Young-Ja grimaces but holds her tongue. Again, it is not worth reacting. The cook mumbles that a stupid Chōsen girl probably would not understand Japanese anyway and does not say much more as Young-Ja crawls about to clean.
In the afternoon, a guard comes into the kitchen with a box of tea that had been specially ordered for the general. He commands Young-Ja to undress and wash herself, tossing over a clean gown for her to wear. The general will be arriving soon and everyone has to look presentable. Young-Ja hesitates. She does not wish to be presented to the man to whom she and the other girls owe their shackles. Neither does she wish to bare herself alone in front of the guard and the cook. But as the guard glares on, hands on his rifle, she pulls her dirty dress over her head and begins washing up at the basin. With the eyes of the two men gliding down her body, no amount of water can help her feel clean.
Once she is dressed, the guard orders her to brew the tea and the cook to prepare the guards’ lunches. The cook throws him a dirty look for barking demands but hops over to the storage bins to take out the materials. Young-Ja sets about to boil the water and place the special tea leaves into the pot. It is a fine, woody pu’erh, long-aged, something that would have been reserved only for the most important clientele at Fenghuang. Young-Ja’s hands shake with angry mortification at the thought of serving anything to the architect of this place. But with the armed guard watching for any misconduct so closely she can smell his fetid breath, she can do nothing but hope that the drinker at least chokes on the distress she steeps into the tea. She is then forced to take the pot on a tray and march toward another room.
Inside sit the general, the comfort station’s doctor, and the balding man who had given the girls their instructions that morning. The men do not acknowledge Young-Ja while she enters and pours the tea. Instead, they discuss the number of soldiers served every day at the comfort station.
“Fifty to a hundred a day on average, over two hundred at our busiest,” the balding man reports. “With officers getting precedence, of course.”
Nausea grips Young-Ja’s throat but she holds steady in an elegant pour. The guard nudges her with his rifle to bow once the tea is served. Dizzy with wretchedness, she lowers her head and bares her neck to her captors, nearly losing her footing as the guard ushers her out to rejoin the other girls.
The doctor and the balding man raise their cups to their lips. General Akagawa ignores his, having avoided contact with most things since his arrival.
“We’ve made relatively high profits for very low operating costs, which we’ve funneled back into the military budget for the region as per your guidance,” says the balding business manager, taking a sip from his tea.
The doctor, also eager to preen, jumps in. “This station also has some of the lowest incidence of venereal disease in the region, largely thanks to your premium selections, General.”
General Akagawa is not so quick to bend to this flattery, inured to sycophants who flock to his power. As he listens, however, the two men before him are becoming increasingly taciturn in their answers, clutching their teacups like women trying to warm their hands in the cold.
“And what of the soldiers, are they in high spirits?” the general asks.
The manager averts his eyes. “They seem... fine,” he replies, squirming in his seat, knuckles white against the teacup.
The general narrows his eyes and turns to the doctor. “And the health of the stock here? Low incidence of disease is good, but how are their general constitutions?”
The doctor, too, lowers his gaze and his voice, staring into his cup. “Some sort of summer cold is going around... rest assured I’ll try to keep the girls here from becoming vectors of disease.” The doctor hesitates before adding, “In fact, I may not be feeling too well myself, and if you’ll excuse me, I wouldn’t wish to get you ill, General.” He stands up and bows.
The manager also stands up to bow, muttering some sort of half apology about feeling a bit dizzy.
The general ends the meeting early. He would rather inspect the goods directly than deplete his patience with soft-bellied managers.
General Akagawa understands what men need to succeed in battle. He issued the directive for more comfort stations not only for troop morale but also as an important component of military strategy. If the state did not provide their soldiers with women to bed, they would turn to rape in the battlefield and occupied lands, spreading anti-Japanese sentiment among the Chinese they sought to rule. The general also wishes to minimize relations between Japanese men and Chinese women, for the tongue of a besotted man knows no discipline. Military secrets could not be leaked if soldiers only lay with women under complete control of the Imperial Army. And as with any other important supply, quality assurance is necessary. It is by design that these comfort stations are often filled with Chōsen girls, whose conservative, agrarian society conveniently prized female purity. The girls they shipped in from the peninsula were more likely to be virgins and could limit the spread of venereal disease among soldiers.
With these considerations in mind, General Akagawa had expedited the creation of ten more stations in Jilin in the last three years. This outpost he is visiting now is one of the smaller operations, with fewer than twenty girls. Although it is shabby, it is at least efficiently run, with fewer deaths or expulsions than some of the larger comfort stations. His inspection would not last long and he could soon leave for dinner in more sophisticated company elsewhere.
General Akagawa sends his aides outside to prepare the girls in advance. When he walks out into the yard, they are lined up in a row as he had specified. If this is what his men need to give them the strength to take on China, so be it. He would gladly provide.
The girls at this comfort station do seem rougher than he had seen elsewhere. They are underfed and bony, their skin baked from laboring in the sun. Dullness lurks in their eyes. The general would have to order an increase in the girls’ rations if they wanted to keep their stock viable for the long term. The site medical officer had claimed these girls had low rates of disease, but there are plenty of rashes across the bare limbs in front of him. He would have to have a word with the doctor, for he does not wish to have his troops fall prey to blight when China is proving to be tricky to overcome.
The general pauses to examine a girl whose skin is beginning to grow syphilitic spots. She shakes under his gaze.
“Step forward,” he orders.
The girl shuffles out to where he points. The general takes a turn to examine her from behind.
“Lie down.”
The girl continues to shake, tears streaking down her cheeks as her breathing turns into erratic pants.
“Don’t make me wait.”
As the girl lowers her body to the ground as directed, the general unsheathes the curved steel blade of his shin guntō. A wretched sob erupts from the girl’s throat as he drags the sword’s point from her chest to her knees, cutting open her dress. Contemplation settles into his brow as he examines her exposed body. His gaze does not linger long before he pushes the sharp metal of his blade into her skin, carving lines in the flesh under her breasts to connect the spots of her syphilitic rash. The girl screams and tries to squirm away. The general stomps on her shoulder and pushes down his weight to keep her pinned. With a few more slashes, the characters for “vermin” bleed on the broken skin of her stomach. The girl cries out as the others stand trembling.
The general takes a step back to examine his work. He then plunges the shin guntō into her chest and watches her bleed out until she moves no more.
“Disposing of your defective stock,” the general declares, addressing the guards as he withdraws his blade. He turns to the remaining girls, tense in their waxen stares. “But it seems my strokes are not fine enough yet. My writing requires more practice.”
His eyes graze over the yard until they settle on a particular girl. Even the general catches himself admitting that her face could be elegant if not for the long scar that stretches from her eye down to her chin. He grasps the hair at this new target’s scalp and pulls her to him. She screams in protest as he throws her on the dirt and presses his boot heel into her shoulder.
“Stop it.”
General Akagawa looks up.
“Who said that?” He scans the girls. No one is shaking anymore.
“Don’t be shy. You have something to say. I’m giving you permission to speak.”
No one steps forward.
“No one? Fine.”
The general draws his pistol with his free hand, points it at a girl in line near him and shoots her between her eyes. Her corpse crumples to the ground as shrieks burst out in the yard, the loudest from the girl pinned under his boot. The hot scent of urine rises from streams pooling in a froth by squirming bare feet.
“Now that I think about it, it couldn’t have been her,” the general says. “The voice came from farther down the line.”
He points his pistol at another girl who screams and cowers behind her hands.
“Stop.” A girl steps forward. “It was me.”
General Akagawa strolls up to the source of this impudence and recognizes the spindly girl who had served him tea. He thrusts the barrel of his pistol under her chin. Her black gaze meets him up the length of the gun he has pointed at her jaw. He orders her to lie down on the ground.
“You’ve given me an idea for my next character. But mind your tongue this time. If your voice breaks my focus, I will not be so gentle with you or the others.”
The general cuts open her dress and drags his sword down her narrow belly. Blood leaks down her sides in tiny streams as she lies unmoving, no sound escaping from her mouth. Eleven smooth strokes of red: uji. Maggot.
“The stroke work here is a bit better,” says the general to no one in particular. He turns to face the others. “Never forget that you breathe only because I allow it. Never forget that your sole duty is to prepare our soldiers for battle. Those who forget,” he says, pointing the blade at the girl on the ground, “will be branded for what they are.”
He removes a cloth from his pocket and wipes the blade of his shin guntō before sliding it back into its scabbard. He throws the stained cloth on the ground and leaves the station with his aides.
Later, in Manchukuō, Empire of Japan, 1943, Bok-Hee presses a linen to the angry gashes on Young-Ja’s belly. She keeps her tears from falling on the cuts so as not to worsen the sting, willing the drops down the path of her long, pink scar and neck where they can be swallowed by the skin of her chest. She tears the hem of her dress into long strips to bandage up the maimed torso lying before her.
“It should’ve been me,” Bok-Hee murmurs.
Despair soaks into the marrow of Young-Ja’s bones. It works its grip into her lungs and catches in her throat, stealing her breath as she had stolen Hanako’s. She does not understand exactly what had possessed her when Bok-Hee was pushed under the general’s foot. The words burst out of her from a visceral, unknowable place. Her hesitation after the initial disruption, however, had as good as shot that bullet into Hanako’s face. Young-Ja’s mind curls into a spiraling chorus of self-reproach until all voices converge into a single refrain: that she should have died in Hanako’s stead.
While Young-Ja lies crushed by the weight of her thoughts, the others, too, sit in the dazed aftermath of their brush with the general. They had been locked up early in their sleeping cell without dinner. The skipped meal does not register as much of a loss. Appetites shrivel when their vision is stained with blood. Few can bring themselves to look at the paralyzed Young-Ja. Many are relieved it had been her speaking up and not them, her mutilation and not theirs. Others are shamed knowing they could never have done the same. Some even think her a fool.
“It should’ve been me.” The soft undertone of Bok-Hee’s mantra is the only sound in the room. “Not you. Me.”
Reader’s Impressions & Star Rating
This chapter is devastating. It does not rely on surprise or spectacle; it relies on the slow, suffocating machinery of dehumanization. General Akagawa is terrifying not because he rages, but because he calculates. He speaks of girls as stock, disease as quality control, murder as disposal, and branding as discipline. The horror is in the banality of the paperwork and the tea service that surrounds the slaughter. Young-Ja’s small, instinctive “Stop it” is one of the bravest moments in the book so far, and yet the chapter refuses to let that bravery feel heroic in any simple way. It becomes a source of guilt, survival, and unbearable consequence. Bok-Hee’s whispered “It should’ve been me” cuts deeper than any sword stroke. This is a chapter that will stay with me.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.9 / 5 Stars
Next Chapter Prediction
I predict the next chapter will deal with the immediate aftermath of Young-Ja’s branding: infection, fever, and the fragile care Bok-Hee can offer in secret. The poison weeds Young-Ja swallowed may or may not have ended her pregnancy, and that unresolved fate will likely return with painful consequences. General Akagawa’s parting threat about his “next character” suggests he will not forget Young-Ja, and the station may be forced to hide her or offer her up again. I also suspect the cook’s silent observations and Bok-Hee’s fierce guilt will push one of them toward a dangerous act of mercy—or resistance. The chapter may end with Young-Ja choosing, for the first time since Hanako’s death, whether she wants to survive at all.
To listen free the next reviews chatpers, please access website novelsaudio.com and search keyword: Honey in The Wound free digital audiobook or click the link in the description of this video or if you want to listen or read full the Honey in The Wound free digital audiobook please access website novelsaudio.com