# Chapter 24: A Mother’s Silence, a Son’s Distance, and the Strange Gift of Rinako
Hello everyone, it’s me again! How are you all doing? Today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 24 of "Honey in The Wound free digital audiobook". This is one of those chapters that creeps up quietly, then leaves a bruise on your heart. It moves from a market corner to a church pew, from a phone call across oceans to the buried shame of a mother, and finally into the life of a little girl in Tokyo who seems to know too much and belong nowhere. So take a breath, settle in, and let’s walk through it together.
## The Market Turns Its Back
Young-Ja’s rice cakes had become a small, fragile lifeline. But it did not take long for the complaints to reach the other market vendors. The unhappy customers became a parade, and a parade of unhappy customers is never good for business. The vendors banded together and asked Young-Ja to leave. There was no room for her there anymore.
So she left. She carried her rice cakes to different busy street corners, places where people would not find her again and fault her goods. Once she sold a batch, she would return to the church at the foot of Namsan and begin her afternoon cleaning chores. The church had sheltered her for decades when no one else would. It had given her a room, meals, a modest place to keep her body and her silence. It asked only the gentlest gratitude toward its god. Young-Ja did not think she could give them her belief, but she would never shirk her duties. She would earn her keep and pay her modest rent with scrubbing, sweeping, and the quiet labor of a woman who had learned not to ask for more than she deserved.
Then one of the church volunteers walked by as Young-Ja carried her broom and said, “Joon-Uhmuhni, you have a call from your son.”
Joon rarely called. Young-Ja did not even know how to dial his number. Even if she did, she would not call, not wanting to tie up the church’s telephone line or ask any more of them than she already had over the years. But she was always glad to hear from her son. A new energy jolted through her as she shuffled toward the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Okaa-san,” said Joon.
“I’m not your Okaa-san, I’m your Uhmuhni,” Young-Ja said in Korean, the bite in her voice sharper than she intended. The call was a special occasion, but she could not abide by his choice to address her in that other tongue. “Joon-ah, are you well?” she pushed ahead in Korean.
“Please, it’s Shun now,” Joon said, continuing in Japanese. “I’m calling to confirm that I’ve sent you some money. Check with the bank and make sure it’s come through.”
Young-Ja whispered her thanks. Despite her gratitude that Joon had thought to send funds without prompt, her heart dropped, weighed down by the distance and time in which she had become a burden to her child. She shook her head free of the gloom and asked after his baby.
“I don’t really have time to talk—I’m busy at the office. International calls are expensive too.”
“Ah, all right. Well, I’m sure the bank has the money—”
“Take care of your health, Okaa-san.”
Joon hung up.
Young-Ja had last spoken with him in the summer. Joon had informed her then that she was a grandmother, though the child had been born several months prior, in the spring. Young-Ja could still recall the cold strain in her chest as she processed the news. She had not known that Joon and his wife had been expecting. She was briefly curious to know what the baby girl looked like and if she might ever get to see her, though perhaps she did not deserve to. No granddaughter would be proud of a poor, aging grandmother who spent her days making rice cakes that people called rotten and cleaning toilets in an old church.
## Pews, Memory, and the Weight of the Past
Young-Ja walked out to the wooden pews and sat to rest her feet. She glanced at the large wooden crucifix at the head of the remodeled nave, the one that had hung there since before she and Joon first arrived in Seoul with Paul and Agnes. The young pastor of the church had let the doctor siblings set up a clinic to treat the poor in their congregation. In exchange for a basement room and meals, Young-Ja took up odd cleaning jobs and taught Korean to passing foreign missionaries.
Sitting in the pews now, she recalled a growing Joon running through the aisles with stray children while yet another war erupted around her. As with most of her past, she tried not to think about covering in the church basement, leaving only to acquire rations for the others sheltering in place. The early days of the civil war echoed with Joon’s cries of hunger—her son would not eat whatever passed through Young-Ja’s distressed hands and instead turned to Paul and Agnes for sustenance. She began to avoid handling food altogether to keep from sullying the church’s limited supply.
When the fighting threatened the edges of the city, Young-Ja and Joon followed the doctor siblings down to Busan with millions of others fleeing for their lives. Paul and Agnes continued their work as medical missionaries among the throngs of the wounded and afraid on the southern coast. But their god put an end to Paul’s service with sudden illness before he put an end to the war. After the ceasefire, Agnes alone returned with Young-Ja and Joon to rebuild their demolished home church in Seoul. There the doctor continued tending to the poor who struggled to regain footing in the country’s wreckage, but she eventually retreated to Scotland to stave off homesickness.
Once Agnes departed, Young-Ja had no one left who could speak of her life in China or the scars on her stomach. No witness to her ever having left Joseon, no witness to her return. She was surprised to find herself missing the foreign doctor in her absence, though it was easier to bury the darkest parts of her with no one around to care for anything but their own postwar woes.
Without Paul and Agnes to keep him busy with structured tasks around the church, Joon started to grow curious about his origin. For the first several years of his life, Joon had not broached the topic of his father. Young-Ja wondered if his interest had never emerged because war had left so many of his peers fatherless. Children that age did not often talk to one another of what they lacked. But when Joon asked the first dreaded question, Young-Ja wielded her reticence as a shield, hoping to outlast his curiosity with equivocation. This she did to protect him as much as to protect herself.
“Umma, where is my appa?”
“Your father passed away in the war.”
“Oh. Here?”
“No.”
“Where?”
“China.”
“Did he fight in the war?”
“Mmm.”
“What about your parents? Where are they?”
“Joon-ah, Umma is tired. Let’s go to sleep.”
Questions poured from Joon for months, spilling into lingering pools around Young-Ja as she cleaned, as she cooked, as she relieved herself. Each time Joon pressed her, eager to know more of himself, of his inscrutable mother, she answered in monosyllabic disinterest until he learned to stop asking about his family. When Joon had uncovered every possible dead end in his interrogations, recognizing it sapped what little energy could be coaxed from his mother, he pivoted to asking how Young-Ja had met Paul and Agnes. Why he had been born in China.
“Paul and Agnes said I was born in China.”
“Mmm.”
“Umma, what were you doing in China?”
“Working.”
“What kind of work?”
“Joon-ah, Umma is tired. Please wash the dishes now.”
Young-Ja cocooned herself in her secrecy, weaving a barrier that kept her son unmarred by her truth. He did not need to know how and why he did not have the gift of kin. He did not need to know he harbored the face of a monster whose name she would never learn. His entry into the world was no fault of his own. He was owed a clean start. And while she would never be able to give him the childhood she could not believe she had once had, he would live unhindered by her soiled fate.
Engrossed in her efforts to subdue, Young-Ja did not see how Joon’s hungry eyes dimmed each time their conversations tapered, how his small child frame shrank when he relented to her unspoken wishes. Her silence was teaching her son to seek the comfort of answers elsewhere, to drift away from her with a distance she mistook for protection. As Joon began school, he redirected his unsated curiosity to teachers who welcomed his inquisitive nature. In their praise he discovered a certain aptitude for language—both in Korean and in Japanese—falling into his texts with boundless hunger for the histories of his world he could not get at home. In the early days, he would become so enthralled with his schoolwork he would forget having given up on asking his mother questions.
“Umma, did you learn Japanese in school?”
“Mmm.”
“How long did it take you to learn?”
“Mmm.”
“Can you help me with this homework?”
“Joon-ah, Umma is tired. You should ask your teacher.”
Joon had watched his mother recoil in the basement over time, evading the church staff and neighborhood ladies who would ask after her. For years he prayed for his mother to change, to shed the heaviness lodged in her eyes and tongue. When these prayers went unanswered, he sometimes wished he could switch mothers entirely, to those of his school friends. Ones who could spare him a kind word or give him coins to buy candies after class. An acceptable mother that the neighborhood had not started whispering unkind things about.
“See that? She ignored me.”
“Don’t mind her, she’s like that.”
“I heard she was in China during the occupation. And well, women who went overseas then…”
“Uhmuhna… and her son doesn’t have a father. You know what that means.”
“That poor child. So skinny too.”
A thousand pins prickled at Joon’s neck when neighbors did not lower their voices as he ran errands with his mother. But what disturbed him most was not that she appeared unbothered by such comments. It was that she did not seem to hear them at all, her pupils cloudy as she appraised the meager produce selection at the market.
Joon feared the unknowable darkness tailing his mother and endeavored to ward himself against it. He lingered in the light of school after hours, keeping himself fed on the praise of teachers happy to instruct a bright student. Under their attentive tutelage, he achieved top marks: a stepping-stone to his teachers’ affection far from the pitying eyes in his neighborhood.
Seeing Joon’s potential, his mentors set his sights on an ambitious education. While Korea was split and left to build up from the ruins of war, the star of Japan was rising on the global stage. Its economy was in boom and there were jobs to be had. It was not a difficult choice for Joon to hone his Japanese and seek his fortune abroad, for his curiosity had not been able to take root in the brokenness of his home country. Joon’s efforts gained him a scholarship at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he excelled in the study of business and economics.
Young-Ja did not express her disappointment when she learned that Joon would leave for Tokyo, and later, that he would remain. After dropping his Korean name for a Japanese one, he was one of a few international students in his class to secure a position in a respectable company. The day he called to announce his intentions to marry a Japanese woman, Young-Ja crumpled into a nearby chair. She knew she could not stop him. It was neither her place nor her right to tell him how to live his life. To tell him the truth—to weigh him down with what she was—would be to tar his impossible success. In what she understood as an act of love, Young-Ja let him walk the paths he had chosen for himself. And while he enjoyed his hard-won prosperity, she would live out the remainder of her days quietly, causing him no additional worry or burden as a good parent should.
## Part III: Matsumoto Rinako
Tokyo, Japan. Matsumoto Rinako was an unusual child. Although she was born in Tokyo, her father was Korean. Before he met her mother, he had changed his name to Matsumoto to facilitate assimilation into Japanese society. Despite his efforts to mask his origin, he sometimes misplaced the high and low pitch accents of his syllables when he spoke. Such slips revealed that Japanese was not his mother tongue, making it apparent that Rinako was of mixed blood. While Rinako felt that she could be nothing but Japanese, her classmates’ parents would quietly tell their children to play with anyone else but her.
Her heritage, however, was not the only thing that made Rinako unusual among her peers. She also seemed to know things that were not her business to know. She knew her classmates’ siblings’ names. She knew where they had gone on vacation. She knew what their pet cats liked to eat at home. Although her classmates had never once conversed with her, she knew which ones feared thunder, which ones feared sharks, which ones feared the night. Even as six-year-olds, her classmates sensed that this was not right and kept their distance from the strange girl.
Once, during playtime, Rinako captured a spider in the fleshy cup of her hands. Wishing to make friends, she sought to teach her classmate not to fear the harmless creature. The boy leapt back with a scream at the twitch of hairy legs in Rinako’s palms. He tripped and fell, crashing his soft child skull on the corner of a table. The resulting gush of blood plunged the whole classroom into teary screams.
“Monster!” the children yelled, pointing at the stunned girl whose spider had long fled from her grasp.
And with that word, the chapter closes like a door slamming shut. Young-Ja’s silence has traveled across generations. Joon—now Shun—has built a new life under a new name. And Rinako, his daughter, stands in a Tokyo classroom carrying a strangeness she did not choose, already being called a monster for trying to be kind.
## Reader’s Impressions & Star Rating
This chapter absolutely wrecked me in the best way. It is so quiet on the surface, yet everything underneath is screaming. Young-Ja’s love for Joon is not soft or warm; it is a love made of locked doors, sealed lips, and the desperate belief that silence can be a form of protection. But we see the cost. Joon does not feel protected. He feels shut out. He learns to seek praise, language, distance, and finally a whole new identity in Japan. The phone call between them is devastating because it is not cruel. It is polite. It is expensive. It is busy. It is a son sending money and hanging up before his mother can ask about her granddaughter.
And then, just when my heart is already raw, the story opens Part III and introduces Matsumoto Rinako. The moment I realized her father was likely Joon—Shun—I felt the whole novel tilt. Young-Ja has a granddaughter. A granddaughter who is mixed-blood, isolated, and gifted in a way that frightens other children. Rinako knows things she should not know, just as Young-Ja carries secrets no one should have to carry. The spider scene is almost unbearable because Rinako is trying to connect, trying to be brave and generous, and the world answers her with blood and the word “monster.” That final cry echoes all the way back to Young-Ja’s own shame and Joon’s lonely childhood. This chapter is masterfully constructed, emotionally bruising, and impossible to forget.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.9 / 5 Stars
## Next Chapter Prediction
I predict the next chapter will dive deeper into Rinako’s childhood and her family life in Tokyo. We are almost certainly going to see more of her father—Joon, now Shun—and the Japanese wife Young-Ja never met. Rinako’s strange intuition may become both a curse and a clue, leading her toward truths about her father’s Korean past and the grandmother she does not know exists. The “monster” label from her classmates may follow her, shaping her into someone guarded, observant, and perhaps a little dangerous to the secrets adults keep. I also suspect the story will eventually force a collision between Young-Ja’s buried history and Rinako’s inherited strangeness. The next chapter may show Rinako retreating further into herself, or it may reveal the first crack in Joon’s carefully rebuilt Japanese life. Either way, the emotional storm is only beginning.
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