# Chapter 22: The Night the Knives Turned Homeward
Hello everyone, it’s me again! How are you all doing? Today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 22 of *Honey in The Wound free digital audiobook*. This is the chapter where a kitchen becomes a battlefield, where rice carries grief, and where the hunted become the hunters for one breathless night. Hold tight, because this one cuts deep.
The chapter opens in silence so heavy it feels like a living thing. Young-Ja stares up at the ceiling, unmoving, while the other girls squirm in their own private torment. That morning, they had welcomed the break from the endless queues of soldiers, grateful for a chance to clean and breathe. But they now understand a terrible truth: an audience with the general is simply another chamber in the same hell. The respite was never mercy. It was only a different kind of waiting.
Then the guards throw open the door and seize Young-Ja. Bok-Hee clings to her injured friend’s hand in protest, but she is kicked away. The other girls look away. They have learned that looking away is sometimes the only way to survive.
Young-Ja lets herself be hauled off, accepting whatever form her death will take. She no longer fears pain. She is almost ready for it. But there are no guns or swords in the kitchen where she is taken. There is only the cook.
He tells her that the general has provided this station’s staff with extra rations as a reward for their work. She will help him prepare the guards’ dinner and clean up after them. He points his knife at the stove. “Prepare the rice.”
She is not being marched to her death. She is being marched to more servitude.
The cook slides his knife down the length of an eel, gutting and deboning it with quick, practiced swipes. Young-Ja stares, half-wanting to wrest the blade from his hands and slit her own throat, to atone for what she has done. She does not hear his first order because she is already lost in the reverie of her own imagined death. He clears his throat and knocks the knife handle against the cutting board to command her attention.
Her ears ring. All the food on the counter appears rotted to her. Putrid heaps of decay she cannot fathom anyone wishing to consume. Nothing can move her toward the stove. Not the cook’s glare, not his pointed demand. When her stony gaze meets his, he huffs with irritation.
“If you don’t hurry,” he warns, “they’ll keep withholding meals from the others and blame you for it. Your resistance helps no one. Just do as you’re told.”
These words of caution had come too late to save Hanako. But they move Young-Ja to give in. She fills a pot with rice to wash away the impurities. Her fingers have not sifted through such precious grains in over a decade. Now she reunites with the sensation only to gratify her enslavers. Her fingers swirl around the rice water, submerging the grains in her spite, her torment, her wish for death. She is sick with a desperate hope that the guards will all choke on their food and know her anguish. She squeezes the clumps of rice until her knuckles turn white with grief, pouring her despair into the pot.
With the rice simmering on the fire, Young-Ja is made to sit near the cook as he cuts the eel into fillets and prepares the sauce. She forces her eyes to lose focus. She will not be a willing audience to her tormentors being rewarded. The sizzling of fat on fire, the sweet scent of grilling eel flesh—nothing can mask the taste of bile raked across Young-Ja’s tongue. She cannot say how much time passes as she sits imagining her final breath, but the cook eventually barks at her to deliver the completed dishes to the guards.
Young-Ja holds the heavy tray of food and limps to where four comfort station guards sit waiting, one door down the hallway from the kitchen. A red stain begins a slow spread across the fibers of her cotton gown. Blood saturates through the bandages Bok-Hee had placed on her wound and is now soiling the dress and dripping down her belly, legs, and feet. The rivulets of blood smear under her toes, leaving shiny splotches on the wooden floor in her wake.
The men pay little mind to her bleeding when she enters the room with their dinner. Their eyes are locked on their reward. It was not particularly hard work to keep sixteen frail, underfed girls subdued. But the general knew that small gifts for grunt workers could pay long-lasting dividends in loyalty and productivity that far exceeded their initial cost. Indeed, these men grab their meals from Young-Ja with the intent to speak highly of the general for years to come.
The first guard raises the whole eel fillet into his mouth and chews, something he has not been able to do in months. The rest take generous portions of fish and savor its sweet, rich flesh. This is a luxury reminiscent of home. As the guards pair the eel with hefty bites of the rice Young-Ja had prepared, one by one they fall into silence. Their eager molars gnash into the plump white rice grains, releasing despair onto their tongues. The four guards sit chewing her wretched desire for death and swallow it down with the fatty flesh of eel.
One guard drops his chopsticks and stares at his dinner, tugging at the collar of his uniform. He then reaches for the pistol in his holster and, without another word, fires a bullet into his temple. Young-Ja shrieks. She looks around frantically at the other men to react, but they do not flinch at the blood spray creeping down the wall. They have fallen too engrossed in the private storms of their own tense bodies.
Young-Ja jumps back when another guard begins to cough violently, sending masticated bits of eel and rice grains flying across the bowls of the other men. She watches in disbelief as he reaches for the dagger he had set on the table before dinner. He unsheathes its blade and drags it red across his choked throat to cough no more.
The remaining two guards knock over their bowls as they collapse, clutching at their bulging purple throats, curling into the sharp stabs in their stomachs. Young-Ja yelps as one guard grabs her ankle and tries to pull her down with him, but she kicks free from the weak grip. She watches, frozen, her captors reaching for their own knives to plunge into their stomachs. As the men twitch, she sees a glint of brass fall from the breast pocket of a guard curled on his side—the keys to the building. The keys to the girls’ sleeping cell.
The keys rattle against her shaking hand as she retraces her bloody steps in the hallway. When she opens the door, the girls inside gasp at the sweating Young-Ja covered in blood, heaving for breath.
“The guards, they’re… they’re gone.”
Bok-Hee runs to hold Young-Ja and keep her from collapsing. A few others rise and look out into the hallway. Seeing no one, they spill out into the dark, not allowing doubt to cloud their bid for escape. Many remain still, trying to grasp the situation.
“Follow them, go see,” says Young-Ja.
When the throng of girls arrives in the room where the guards lay, Bok-Hee grabs a discarded knife and stabs one of their corpses in the chest.
“Here, you dropped your knife.” Bok-Hee sticks her angry blade into his soft flesh anew, clenching its handle with both hands to pour as much of her strength as she can into the plunge.
The others follow suit, their small fists thudding fury into the lifeless bodies that had once held dominion over them.
Dozens of feet stampede bloody footprints down the corridor as the girls hasten to leave the guards behind. They pour out of the station and into the yard, grabbing chairs and tables from inside the building to stack so they can climb over the fence into the dark of night. Once they touch down on that long-unfelt soil of the other side, they fling themselves in different directions. Patrolling soldiers see flashes of white streaking past the barracks and turn to the source of the apparitions. By the time the soldiers enter the building, their stock of captive girls is long gone, leaving behind the butchered remains of four guards and a cook who seemed to have disemboweled himself with a boning knife, alone in the kitchen.
Bok-Hee helps Young-Ja over the fence and lands like a cat beside her. She grabs her hand and together they bolt into the darkness. With thick clouds burying the moon from view, they cannot see far. They know only to run, to flee from any source of light. Where there is no light, there will be no men. They trip and fall countless times, tumbling over rocks and other protrusions in the ground they cannot see in the starless night. Other girls tumble around them, muting their cries of pain as much as they can for fear of being discovered. Each time she stumbles, Young-Ja picks herself up and reaches for Bok-Hee’s hand. They continue to run, hoping for as much distance as possible.
But there comes a fall in the dark when Young-Ja is not able to feel the searching grasp of her friend’s hand. There comes a stretch of field when all she can hear is her own breath, her own tread, and nothing, no one else. She slows to a walk but lurches ever forward, hoping that the others will not stop in their pursuit of liberation.
As sunlight diffuses over the horizon, Young-Ja approaches a river’s edge. She had lost sight of the others hours ago in the unforgiving black of night. She cannot say where she is, but yet again she finds herself there alone.
No parents, no siblings. No Yong-Woo, no Tayiji. No Meiyu. No Bok-Hee. Her last remaining friend, the only person who cared that she bled, who helped her scale that fence out of their prison, who reached for her hand in the dark.
She is alone. With nothing but the unwanted grain of life within her.
Young-Ja crawls into the river and submerges her body, willing the current to take her. She drinks in the water and lets it fill her lungs, for she is done breathing in this godforsaken life.
Then the story shifts to Jilin, China, 1945.
Xiuying was never blessed with children of her own, though she was no stranger to care. Both her parents had fallen prey to disease of the liver—as an only child, she had no choice but to devote her life to nursing their health. While her friends wed and left their riverside village for better prospects in the city, Xiuying stayed behind to tend to her parents, scrounging for whatever work she could find as a washerwoman, a farmhand, a seamstress. A true paragon of filial piety. But for the poor, filial piety was more necessity than vaunted choice. They could not afford the luxury of care provided by hands they had not created.
Life only got harder as Japan invaded China. Food prices rose. Medicine supply fell. The weight of her daily labors bent Xiuying’s spine into a gnarled hump. She did not know how much longer she could tolerate her ailing back for such meager income, but she was fortunate to have bartered for medical services from the doctors hiding in her village.
A few years back, two large Westerners with light hair and ruddy skin arrived in Xiuying’s village. They spoke in distorted, cloggy words that frightened people into keeping their distance. One of the village children, too young to have cultivated a fear of the unknown, approached them and realized they were repeating the word *yīshēng*—doctor—with the most inane pronunciation the villagers had ever heard. The discovery triggered a wave of laughter that dissolved any initial fear or bafflement. The lone child who could decipher the visitors’ thick-tongued speech further explained that they were from a country called Sūgélán, and had come to help the sick in the countryside of China. Baoluo and Agenisi. Brother and sister. Both doctors. The villagers wondered how good these doctors could be when they themselves were covered in red splotches, but the chapter closes on that uneasy question hanging in the air.
Reader’s Impressions & Star Rating: As a reader, this chapter left me breathless and shaken. The way Young-Ja’s inner despair becomes something the guards literally consume is haunting, almost supernatural, and deeply tragic. The escape is triumphant for a moment, but the chapter refuses to give us simple relief. Young-Ja’s loneliness at the river is devastating, and the sudden shift to Xiuying and the foreign doctors opens a new door just as another seems to close. The writing is brutal, lyrical, and unforgettable. I am giving this chapter ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.9 / 5 Stars.
Next Chapter Prediction: I predict the next chapter will reveal whether Young-Ja survives the river—perhaps she is pulled out by someone connected to Xiuying, or she wakes alone and must crawl back from the edge of death. Meanwhile, Xiuying’s encounter with Baoluo and Agenisi will deepen, and the red splotches on the doctors may hint at a mystery, a disease, or a hidden past. I also suspect Bok-Hee survived the escape and will search for Young-Ja, because their bond feels too powerful to end in the dark.
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