# Chapter 27: When the Dead Speak Through Fever Dreams
Hello everyone, it's me again! How are you all doing? I hope you're cozy, because today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 27 of "Honey in The Wound free digital audiobook." And wow—let me be honest with you right from the start: this chapter is a gut punch wrapped in quiet tenderness. It's the kind of chapter that creeps up on you slowly, then leaves you staring at the wall long after you've finished reading. So grab a cup of tea, settle in, and let me guide you through every heartbreaking, beautiful moment of it.
We begin right where the last chapter left us: in the hospital, at the bedside of Halmuni, the aging grandmother who has spent decades buried under silence and secrets. She speaks in Jeju dialect first—words that sound like the earth itself, rough and worn—and then, surprisingly, shifts into fluent Japanese. And that fluency stuns Rinako, because her grandmother reveals something gut-wrenching: "You look just like my father. You have his eyes." That one line carries the weight of generations—an inheritance of grief passed down through a face Rinako never fully understood.
The old woman cups Rinako's cheek in her wrinkled hand, and we notice a long brown scar slashed across her palm—a mark that goes unexplained but speaks volumes. Her touch is cool against Rinako's flushed skin, and she instantly senses something wrong: "You feel warm. Are you unwell?" A nurse then interrupts to deliver news—two nights of observation, and the doctors are clearing Halmuni for discharge, with strict conditions. Kidney disease is beginning its slow, quiet invasion. Hypertension threatens to worsen without care. The family is being handed a ticking clock, whether they want it or not.
Now, let me pause here and highlight something that absolutely broke my heart. On the taxi ride home, no one speaks much. Halmuni clutches Rinako's hand, searching her granddaughter's face for something she lost long ago. And when Shun tries to help his mother down the stairs to her basement room at the church, she shoos his hands away: "I can do it myself." The independence is fierce, but the ache beneath it is enormous.
And the basement? Oh, readers. The basement room where Rinako is laid down to rest is *shamefully* unchanged from Shun's childhood. Same wardrobe. Same worn coat rack. Same mismatched cups. Same comforter his mother has used since he left for university nearly thirty years ago. There's a half-empty bundle of Shin Ramyun packets and a box of instant coffee sticks sitting beside an old antennaed TV. He has sent her money all this time—*all this time*—and yet it's painfully unclear whether she's spent a single won on herself. Shun physically cannot bear to look, so he flees to run errands, vowing to buy replacements for her threadbare things. He thinks, with the sharp clarity of a son drowning in guilt, that at least with new items there will be less visual evidence of his negligence.
But the true heart of this chapter—the part that will haunt you—unfolds in that dingy basement while Rinako sleeps off her fever. Young-Ja, the grandmother, watches over her granddaughter, pressing a cold towel to her forehead. She notices the resemblance to Geum-Jin—that *glimmer of yellow* she once saw in Rinako's eyes—and something in her breath catches. It feels strange to see traces of her strong father's features rendered so vulnerable, lying on a futon in feverish sleep. And here, in this intimate silence, Young-Ja admits something she'd never say aloud: she is *happy* to tend to this girl. It has been so long since she felt needed. Since she felt useful. Something she does not get from Joon—her own son, who avoids her now, whose face falls with shame whenever he steps into this room. He is ashamed of her. And that thought lights a fire of cold heat in Young-Ja's chest.
Then the uncanny begins. Rinako, still asleep, speaks. "Young-Ja-ya." A voice that isn't quite hers. Frost creeps into Young-Ja's chest. Because the next words come in *unaccented Korean*—from a voice that once insisted on speaking only Japanese. "Fujiko-san." A name Young-Ja hasn't heard in decades. A name belonging to the only one among them who insisted on those labels.
And then—oh, this is where the chapter becomes something else entirely—the voices come. *Multiple* voices. Overlapping. Angry. Grieving. Achingly alive. They are the ghosts of the comfort women—the girl soldiers of sorrow who died in that hell and are being buried a *second* time by history's silence. "Why do you ignore us?" "We know you hear us." "It's good the young one finally found you." "Much harder for you to ignore us now." "You should talk to that woman who calls. The educated one. She wants to help."
Young-Ja desperately tries to reason with them: "You should be at rest. This world can't hurt you anymore." But they fire back with bitter wit. "Listen to this, the restless telling us to rest." One voice, younger and fiercer, confesses she'd "curse them to hell and back" if the living could hear her. Another dreams of beef and naengmyeon. Another, a hot bath. Another, achingly: "Who will remember us when you're gone?" And the answer echoes back, devastating in its simplicity: "Who remembers now?"
And then—here's the twist that ties everything together—they reveal that Rinako *knows*. This child witnesses dreams. She has even seen dreams from *other* survivors. "What angry hearts project in the night. She'll understand. She'll listen." One ghost suggests Rinako can help them "bury those sons of bitches." Another, vicious and broken, fantasizes about cutting off a soldier's testicles, chopping him up to feed to pigs. And Rinako—still asleep, eyes closed—*cackles*. A chorus of overlapping laughter from a single girl's throat. Young-Ja shivers from head to toe. "How horrid. I don't want to think like that. Like them." But the ghosts push back: "How else do we get even?" "There's a little darkness in all of us." "But not like in those soldiers." And the sleeping girl *nods*, humming her agreement.
This is when we get the deepest cut of the chapter. One ghost whispers, "Our souls died in that prison. But that wasn't enough. They're killing us again by burying our memories, burying their sins. They wish on us a second death." Another accuses Young-Ja: "You always looked after us younger girls. Why can't you look after us now?" And Young-Ja, tears welling through her closed granddaughter's eyelashes, answers: "That girl died long ago. I'm just an old woman." But one ghost has no grave at all—"My bones are at the bottom of a lake with all the fish shit and garbage. No one knows I'm there." Another simply pleads: "Help us. Please." Young-Ja swats at the air above Rinako's nose and says what every survivor of unimaginable trauma eventually says: "I can't. Now, leave. My granddaughter is burning up and she can't handle all of you swarming around her. She's just a child." And the ghosts answer, quietly, devastatingly: "We were just children too."
The kettle screams. Young-Ja turns off the gas, looks back down, and Rinako's eyes are leaking tears. When the kettle falls silent, Rinako opens her eyes—brimming with understanding—and says, "Harumoni." But her tongue can't help splitting the Korean word, slipping on its vowels, mimicking the accent of someone who learned it secondhand. In that plaintive accent Young-Ja senses that her granddaughter heard *everything*. Felt *everything*. Rinako sits up, her fever gone, and embraces her grandmother. Two solitary bodies, offering and receiving a warmth neither is accustomed to.
We then shift scenes. Shun and Rinako are heading to the airport when the office assistant catches them. She confesses that an academic—a professor from a Seoul university—has been persistently calling about Halmuni. The professor is working to gather testimonies from people forced to work abroad under Japanese rule. She gave Rinako a piece of yellow paper. "History is often what we as a society deem worth remembering," the professor said, looking straight at Rinako. "And your family is worth remembering."
Then we get a stunning, almost cinematic dream sequence—a young woman standing before the stable of the comfort station, surrounded by fellow captives in white hanbok, some pale and young, others sunbaked and creased with survival. The women converge on her, clamoring, pleading: "Please don't let them bury us." But she shakes her head and backs away. She has spent a lifetime forgetting. "They've already buried me," she says. "There is nothing I can do." The mass of white erupts in a wail and scatters as soldiers storm the yard, bashing in heads with rifle butts, dragging girls by their hair, tearing at the jeogori of the elderly. The soldiers trample the collective into the earth, grinding their ghostly bones to dust, amid the pleas to remember. "Please. Please. What can I do?"
The chapter closes back in 1991. Rinako pesters her father to translate everything on the car ride to the airport, but he evades. On the plane, she renews her demands so loudly that other passengers turn their heads. He hisses at her to be quiet and gives a brief, whispered summary—just enough to placate her. She insists: "We should absolutely talk to the professor." He replies, "It's not our place." She fires back: "Aren't you curious to know what your mother was doing in China? How she got there? If she speaks Chinese like she speaks Japanese?" He tells her it's none of their business. She declares, "She's your mother. We're family." And he says the line that lands like a blade: "You don't understand what your Obaa-san is like." Then he closes his eyes and leans back for the rest of the flight.
But here's the twist that ends the chapter. Rinako, back in Tokyo, calls her grandmother *every evening* before her father comes home from work. She fills those slow, lonely hours with stories—her childhood memories—hoping her grandmother will reciprocate with tales of her own. But the old woman doesn't. She keeps her verbal meandering from where she wishes to go most, muzzling her curiosity about the professor and the scenes in her dreams to respect her grandmother's wishes. And just when you think this quiet ritual might continue forever—bam. The final line hits: *These daily conversations came to a halt when her father saw the astronomical phone bill for July.*
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## Reader's Impressions & Star Rating
Okay. Deep breath. This chapter is a masterclass in restraint and devastation. What Ami Polonsky and the narrative team have crafted here isn't just a story about family reunions—it's a meditation on *inherited trauma*, on the way silence becomes a family heirloom, passed down from one generation to the next like a terrible secret nobody wants to open. The ghostly chorus of the comfort women is, without exaggeration, some of the most haunting prose I've read this year. The way each spirit has a distinct voice—their anger, their humor, their longing for beef and hot baths and someone to just *remember*—makes them feel painfully, achingly real. And Young-Ja's refusal to help, her insistence that "that girl died long ago," isn't villainy. It's survival. It's the terrible arithmetic of a woman who has spent every resource she has trying to stay alive in a world that would rather she vanished.
Rinako is the beating heart of this book, and here she proves it. She's not just the conduit for ghosts—she's the bridge between generations, the granddaughter who refuses to let silence win, even when her own father shuts her out. The final line about the phone bill is a masterstroke of dark comedy and tragedy: a mundane detail that threatens to sever the very lifeline Rinako has been building.
I laughed. I cried. I put the book down and stared at nothing for five minutes. This is the chapter that will make readers understand why "Honey in The Wound" deserves every bit of its buzz.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ **Rating: 5.0 / 5 Stars** — One of the most powerful chapters in the entire novel. A perfect fusion of historical horror and intimate family drama.
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## Next Chapter Prediction
The astronomical phone bill is a loaded gun on the table. I predict that Chapter 28 will open with Shun confronting Rinako about the calls—likely with a rage born from shame, fear, and the unspoken guilt of having abandoned his mother for decades. He may forbid her from calling Halmuni altogether, or worse, cut off the apartment's international calling. But Rinako, having *seen* the ghosts and *felt* her grandmother's silent grief firsthand, will not back down easily. I also anticipate the professor returning in a more direct way—perhaps she reaches out to Rinako independently, recognizing the young woman's unique connection to the survivor community. And with Halmuni's health deteriorating, the question of whether to testify before it's too late will become urgent. We may also see Joon's perspective—his shame, his avoidance, the dissolution of the family he never really built. Something tells me this phone bill won't just be a domestic dispute. It'll be the spark that forces every buried truth to the surface.
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