# Chapter 28: The Tea, the Scar, and the Story That Would Not Stay Buried
Hello everyone, it’s me again! How are you all doing? Today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 28 of "Honey in The Wound free digital audiobook." This is one of those chapters that begins with small domestic chaos and then quietly opens into something enormous—history, memory, shame, tenderness, and the terrifying courage it takes to tell the truth. So settle in, because this chapter earns every emotion it asks from us.
The chapter opens with Shun in a familiar kind of fury. He calls the phone company, ready to battle over charges so absurd they feel like an insult. For a moment, he is righteous, indignant, certain he has been wronged. Then the truth lands: his daughter, Rinako, is the one who ran up the bill. The accusation dies in his throat, and embarrassment floods in. It is a small scene, almost comic, but it tells us so much. Shun wants control. He wants to be the wronged party, the reasonable man, the father who understands. Instead, he is caught out by his own child.
On impulse, he forbids Rinako from calling her grandmother without his supervision. It is a punishment born from shock, not strategy. And almost immediately, the restriction begins to soften. Rinako is changing. That is the strange thing. The silent, gloomy girl who once drifted through life without purpose now has brightness in her voice, determination in her step. Shun notices it, and he is mystified. These two taciturn women, each lost in her own world, have somehow cracked the hardened resin around each other’s shells. Rinako is shedding her quiet gloom. Shun should be glad—and he is—but he also wishes she would pour that energy into university admissions instead of into the stubborn reticence of an old woman.
That wish reveals the wound inside him. What would it take for Rinako to understand that life would not be handed to her? That she would have to strive, prove herself, fight—as he once had and still does? Perhaps because he ensured she lacked for nothing, she took so much for granted. Yet his daughter’s wishes have rarely been legible to him. Not when he cradled her as an infant, promising to give her everything he never had. Not now, as she plunges into the terrifying opacity of near-adulthood. Rinako is just as inscrutable to him as his mother had been. She, too, is so little like him.
And that leads to the ache Shun will not name. What is it about his daughter that makes his mother so solicitous, in ways she never was for him? He is too proud to call it envy, but he cannot pretend to be unbothered. Then another message arrives from the professor, asking after his mother. Shun is irritated. If his mother had not wanted to tell her own son about her life—if he was not owed knowledge of his own origin—what made this stranger think she would disclose anything of importance to her? He is done scratching at old scabs. So he buries himself deeper in work, and with whatever energy remains, he monitors Rinako’s exam prep. He will not let her bungle this pivotal moment.
But Rinako hovers over books every day, and her focus lies beyond exams. She has become possessed by the need to understand the contexts in which her grandmother would have encountered soldiers in her youth. She scours texts at home and in the public library for accounts of the Japanese in Korea and China. She wants something concrete: a record of real events that can pin down those elusive dream images, or help her grasp the professor’s search for Korean women who had worked abroad.
Everyone knows Japan annexed Korea in 1910 until the end of the Pacific War. Every nation understandably sought independence from foreign incursions, and many Koreans lost their lives resisting Japanese authority, though Rinako had always been taught that her country had also done some good. It had brought modernizing technology and education to an agrarian society, building infrastructure and industrial capacities from which Korea benefited even now. There was still friction between the two countries, of course, but Japan had paid a terrible price for war, more terrible perhaps than any single nation had ever suffered. However, beyond the passages devoted to the victims of American atomic bombs, her textbooks did not dwell much on the lives of civilians. They focused on battles, national policies, and the ideologies of men in power. The perspective of Koreans—and that of women in particular—rated no mention at all. The more Rinako combed through the same history she had learned for years in school, the more dismayed she became at how shallow her understanding had been all along.
Eventually, books and phone calls become insufficient. Rinako demands a return to Korea for the remainder of summer break.
“Absolutely not. Stop pestering your Obaa-san.”
“Harumoni wants me to visit her.”
“No. And certainly not until you pass the sentā shiken.”
“That’s not till January. No one studies in August. Everyone’s on holiday!”
“All the better to give yourself an advantage over them.”
“I’ll pay for the trip.” Rinako tosses the thin envelope of 10,000 yen notes from her mother onto the table.
Shun grimaces at the unexpectedly familiar cramped script of his ex-wife. Was that all she had left her daughter?
“Go to your room and study.” He pushes the envelope away. Rinako throws him a flinty look he cannot parse. She says nothing more and retreats into her room.
The next morning, when Shun grabs his briefcase to leave for work, he finds he cannot. The leather oxfords he kept lined up by the entrance have disappeared, as has every other pair of shoes he owns. Even the grimy plastic sandals he wore for late-night cigarette runs to the konbini are nowhere to be seen. Shun can only imagine where his daughter has hidden them, but he does not have time for such nonsense. He squeezes his feet into the largest shoes he can locate—his ex’s abandoned rubber gardening slippers—and walks to the local market, where he buys cheap sneakers before descending into the subway.
Rinako’s bedroom door is still closed when Shun returns home from work. He takes the new leather oxfords he purchased during his lunch break into his bedroom for safekeeping. As he undresses to ready himself for the bath, he discovers that all his suits have gone missing from his wardrobe, including the winter suits he had stored away in bags to ward off moths. He hurries out to Rinako’s room and pounds on her door, his unbuttoned dress shirt half-tucked into his pants.
“Return my things at once.”
“Let me go see Harumoni,” comes the voice behind the door.
“If you focused half the energy on your studies as you do on your Obaa-san, you’d already be a star pupil at Waseda.”
“If you focused half the energy on Harumoni as you do on your dumb work, you wouldn’t die alone with no family!”
Shun jiggles the doorknob, knowing it will not turn. He beats on the door again and declares he will break it down, deeply aware of just how unthreatening he sounds. He leans against the door with one last thud of his fist. Silence is his daughter’s only reply.
Shun is determined not to reward such obstinance. After changing into a T-shirt and shorts, he runs out to get the summer suit he had worn that day dry-cleaned overnight. His coworkers might not notice the repeat wear the following day if he at least swapped in a different shirt.
When Shun emerges from his bedroom the next morning, Rinako stands waiting by the living room window she has slid gaping wide. The shadows of passing birds dance across the sunlit floor of the apartment. Shun runs to close the window in panicked remembrance of the last cleaning bill, but his daughter blocks him, a glare boring into his sleep-dusted face.
“If you don’t let me go see Harumoni, I’ll scream into the neighborhood that you’re abandoning your family.”
Blood rushes to Shun’s head in a dizzy swell. He lowers his slim arms from the window and sinks into the newly replaced sofa behind him. He does not understand where he had gone so wrong. When had he lost all control?
“Fine. Go. But you might be disappointed by what your Obaa-san is willing to offer.”
Rinako descends from the airport bus to meet her grandmother and the smiling office assistant. She gifts pretty boxes of senbei crackers to the church staff for their hospitality, along with a modest sum from her mother’s envelope as a general offering. The office assistant declares she is welcome at any time and sees to it that Rinako is installed comfortably, though she is not so guileless as to bombard the visitor with undue attention. This frees Rinako to set about helping with anything she can. Her grandmother resists her attempts to take on church cleaning duties on the first day—“guests shouldn’t dirty their hands”—but yields to a more balanced distribution of responsibilities after Rinako rises early the next morning to mop around the pews while she sleeps.
There are no such objections, however, when Rinako buys groceries and cooks their meals. She quietly disposes of the empty instant ramen packets lying around the basement and makes a fresh pot of rice every morning, happy to chatter away as she serves unsalted grilled mackerel and lightly pickled radish—foods she had heard might be good for kidney health. After meals, Rinako seeks to unburden her grandmother with helpful little tasks in the margins: laundry, trash removal, general tidying, waving away her admonitions for working on vacation.
“I don’t consider spending time with my grandmother to be work,” she retorts.
The visit, of course, is not all chores. The pair take to hiking the nearby Namsan Mountain every morning before the August heat peaks in the afternoon. Rinako likes to amble forward and admire the Seoul skyline through the sun-drenched trees, the crunch of her steps on fallen twigs engulfed by screaming cicadas. She eventually runs back to link her arm into her grandmother’s as sparrows trill in the canopy. Her grandmother is less reticent when asked about the different types of plants that comprise the undergrowth, and so Rinako questions her about the wild herbs they crouch down to examine, plucking a few sprigs for later use. When their sweat-soaked blouses cling to their backs, they return to the basement room to sit by a small rotating fan and eat slices of cold makuwari in front of the TV.
“We call it chamoe here,” Young-Ja explains, watching her granddaughter scoop out the slimy seeds from the yellow melon. The laugh track from the variety show crackles through the old TV speakers.
“Cha-mu-eh.” Rinako sounds out the word, adding an extra syllable.
“Korean pronunciation is hard,” she says, biting into a fruit slice.
“Chamoe. It’ll come to you.”
Young-Ja, too, pops a slice of fruit into her mouth. Its sweet cold floods her teeth as she watches the flickering TV.
Within a few days, the two fall into these domestic rhythms as if life had never been any other way, quietly avoiding the reason for Rinako’s visit lest they break this spell.
“Why did you come?” Young-Ja whispers into the cup of barley tea she has just drawn, eyeing her sleeping guest who has been subdued into a late-afternoon nap by the weight of August humidity. Everything about her Japanese granddaughter exudes new. New skin. New sounds. New life. The basement room has never felt more cramped, her worn things never more drab in the presence of such indisputable newness. How the vibrancy of Rinako had come to appear at her door earlier that week, she still does not understand, but Young-Ja feels she should not chase it away with too many questions. Although she has nothing to offer, she permits herself to lean into this new voice, nodding along to the cadence of the language she had avoided for decades. But something has dislodged within her since she met the ferrous glint of her granddaughter’s eyes in the hospital. It shifted in her joints when she moved. It rattled about the loose change of her thoughts when at rest.
Young-Ja sets her teacup by the futon before resting her hand on Rinako’s forehead. Apart from the constellation of faint acne at the temple, the girl’s face bears no marks of stress, no signs that troublesome fever would continue to haunt her. She stands nervous vigil each time her granddaughter yields to sleep. Watching. Listening. Neither those voices nor dreams have returned, and Rinako—true to her word—has not pressed. But the girl’s unspoken anticipation lingers, expanding to fill any silence, probing the empty space between them. A part of Young-Ja wishes to take back the promise she made Rinako in that heady moment weeks ago—she does not know if she can summon the words those ghosts had urged. And was it not unconscionable to expose an innocent child to such sordid things? To taint the success of her son, the peace of her granddaughter, for the world to judge? But something still tugs at her to oblige the girl who had not flinched at what she had seen. Each time Young-Ja thinks she has mustered the resolve, however, her thoughts crumble into powder as glimpses of her father emerge from the contours in Rinako’s face, in the way her eyes crinkle into cheeky smiles, in the expectant nostril flare of a question. The old woman finds herself unable to grasp the frayed threads of her explanations, shy around the vestiges of a face she had lost so long ago.
“Thirsty.” Rinako stirs, trying to lift eyelids swollen with sleep. Young-Ja rises to fill a glass with water but freezes when her granddaughter instead rolls over to grab the half-drunk teacup by her head.
“Don’t—”
Young-Ja moves to snatch away the barley tea she has made. Rinako is faster; the girl downs the remaining liquid in a single swig. She pauses to examine the bottom of the cup before meeting the look of a cornered animal in her grandmother’s eyes.
“This is tea?” Rinako’s voice is soft, lacking its usual verve.
“Barley tea,” Young-Ja says slowly, waiting for the girl to flinch. Retch.
“You made it?”
She bobs her head.
“Can you make some more? It tastes familiar.”
Young-Ja takes back the cup, disbelief at her fingertips. “Don’t they drink barley tea in Japan too?” she asks, for a lack of anything better to say.
“That’s not what I meant.” Rinako blinks. “I just... like it. Makes me think about being here with you.”
Young-Ja writes off Rinako’s tolerance of her tea to the incoherence of half-sleep. Her steps lighten toward the kettle, however, as she obliges the request for more. A request she cannot remember having last fulfilled.
Rinako’s father calls every other night to scrutinize her progress in exam prep. He does not inquire after the time she spends with his mother, nor does she bring it up. But when he insists she recite basic math formulae out loud for him to check, she throws her head back and tugs at her left cheek.
“Ugh, I know this stuff already. You don’t have to quiz me.”
“Never hurts to practice. You’re lucky to have a parent who cares so much about your education.”
Rinako rolls her eyes. “Since when do you have time to revisit old math textbooks? Shouldn’t you be going to sleep?”
A pause. “I’m not home yet.”
“It’s after ten.”
“So it is.”
Rinako nestles the receiver on her shoulder while twirling the phone cord in her fingers. Her father is in a snare of his own making—he does this to himself, for no one else but himself. Nonetheless, she feels a twinge of pity at the smallness in his voice. She grasps for words to break the tension, eyes scanning the office until recognizing the yellow note on a board near the phone.
“Otō-san.”
“Hm?”
“Did you ever talk with that professor who wanted to meet with Harumoni?” Rinako takes the yellow note into her hand, examining the woman’s neat, blocky writing.
“No, and don’t go bothering your Obaa-san with that nonsense. Just... look after her and keep up with your reading.”
“You keep saying I’m bothering her. I’m not.”
“Well, let’s keep it that way. Do as she says.”
Rinako sighs. “Do you want to talk with her?”
Another pause. “No, it’s all right. It’s late. We’ll talk again soon.”
With the yellow note stuck between her fingers, Rinako flops down the receiver to silence the dial tone.
The negotiated two weeks in Korea are drawing to an end. She has loved indulging in the small discoveries of companionship for the first time in her life. Her heart has grown full on recognizing which lines in her grandmother’s face can be coaxed into a smile, on knowing how hot she takes her tea, on noticing that she favors her left foot when climbing down the stairs. Even the menial household tasks Rinako loathed doing back in Tokyo prompt enjoyment in Seoul, bringing her the satisfaction that comes only from helping someone so unassuming. As if a person’s lack of material demands made her more deserving of them. But after so many hours of largely one-sided chatter, Rinako is no closer to catching another glimpse beyond the wall of her grandmother’s reserve. How the old woman walked through the world, where she had hidden the soft inner fruit of her person, Rinako cannot say. She is awash in the loneliness of waiting before a locked door. Listening for stirring on the other side, wondering if anyone would heed her knocking.
Rinako leaves the office and descends into the basement room where her grandmother is hunched over laying out the futon and light summer blankets on the ground. She rushes to help, but her grandmother has already smoothed out the bedding and gestures at her to settle in.
“Harumoni? How did you get that scar on your hand?” Rinako ventures casually as they both sit on the covers.
Young-Ja withdraws her left hand and holds it to her chest. “This? It’s nothing.”
Rinako’s lips fall into a frown, but her gaze stays lifted. After a beat threatens to slip into another impasse, Young-Ja clears her throat and tries again.
“It happened so long ago, it’s hard to remember the details.”
“Here?” Rinako leans forward.
“No, not here.”
That now-familiar swell of expectation creeps into the girl’s brow. Young-Ja inhales slowly and lets herself continue, subduing the instinct to turn away from that urgent look.
“It happened in a kitchen when I was around your age. I was trying to help someone.”
“And were you able to help them?”
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
A pause. “It must’ve hurt a lot.”
Young-Ja shrugs. She stares down at the covers, hands still clutched to her chest. “It’s all healed now. It’s just... not nice to look at.”
“You’re brave.”
Young-Ja whips her head up toward her granddaughter, taken aback. She cannot accept this word. Such a word does not belong in a room where she spent her days hiding from so many things. But Rinako speaks again, pushing past the knotted silence.
“I mean, I can’t imagine getting hurt like that to help someone. You must’ve been really brave to do it.”
Tension leaks from Young-Ja’s shoulders. She lowers her hands onto the bedding and lets those declarations settle.
“No, I just... wanted to help. That’s all. I think you understand what that’s like.”
The acknowledgment lures a smile from Rinako as she slips under the covers. The pair lie still, waiting for the other to say more, each nervous to spoil the soft new ground they have tread. But the hour has grown late. They let that silence preserve the tenderness they hold for each other to be uncovered in the light of a new day.
After Rinako has fallen asleep at Young-Ja’s back, girl arm slung around her thickened old waist, she searches herself for the truth in her granddaughter’s words, wondering what else she might be ready to tell her.
Young-Ja wakes to the heat of Rinako’s face burrowed into her shoulder blades. She turns her body and strokes her granddaughter’s hair—lightly sweat-damp in the August morning. A new fluidity courses in her movements when she peels away from the sleeping girl, the usual aches in her joints somehow quieter than usual. She strides over to put water in the kettle and prepare tea for the pair to drink.
As Young-Ja busies herself, Rinako stirs in the covers. She stretches out her arms and rolls onto her back with a raspy “good morning.” The kettle whistles steam and Young-Ja turns off the gas range.
Rinako sits up, hair askew. “I wonder if it’ll rain today,” she says, turning on the TV and flipping through the channels for the weather forecast.
“Maybe,” Young-Ja says absentmindedly, waiting for the water to cool slightly from its boiling point. The snippets of each channel bleed from tinny advertisement music to laugh tracks to serious male narration.
“—yor of Seoul announced tod—”
“—grab and don’t let you go, those Japan—”
“—latest model only availa—”
“—of rain. It’ll be 32 degrees with swelt—”
“Go back.” Cold shot through Young-Ja. Had she heard that right?
“Huh?”
“Go back to that other channel.” Young-Ja turned away from her tea and scrambled over to the futon near the TV.
Rinako flips to the previous channel, a peppy advertisement for the latest Goldstar refrigerator.
“Go back one more.”
Rinako obeyed. Young-Ja’s every sense snagged on the resulting broadcast. She saw and heard nothing else except the old woman weeping on the screen, speaking of how soldiers had taken her forcibly, not letting her go no matter how hard she struggled. How no one in Korea or Japan acknowledged what people like her had been subject to.
Young-Ja is stunned. She does not know how many others like her there are, but she cannot fathom what would possess a woman to expose this shame so openly. Did this woman have no family who might be hurt by this knowledge, who might shun her as polluted? Was she not afraid of public judgment, the millions of eyes on stains she would not be able to scrub clean? Who was this lone, impossible beacon, shining light on the dirty fate Young-Ja had long sought to conceal?
“Who is that? Someone you know?” Rinako leans in and squints. “Wait. Is that... the professor? The one who wants to talk to you?”
Young-Ja had been too focused on the elderly speaker to notice the other men and women on the program writing on their notepads as they listened. Among them was an elegantly dressed, bespectacled old woman seated in quiet attention.
“What are they saying?”
Although Young-Ja knows that Rinako’s ears are closed to Korean, she is mortified to have this damning testimony occupy the same space as her grandchild. Dread knifes through her veins. She dares not face her kin, as meeting Rinako’s eyes in that moment would expose her every thought before she could dress them in the right light. She had endured this shame for so long, borne her losses in silence for decades, afraid it would ruin her, ruin her son.
The TV continues its din even as its images blur through the tears pooling at Young-Ja’s lashes. But when those tears spill into a steady path down her cheeks, something within her bursts: a continuous roar from the void she had carried since she was a young girl of nine, one fatal, sunny morning in the mountains of Cheongju. She does not know how long she wailed, a vessel for grief that blotted out all vision and deafened her to any voices.
When Young-Ja regains awareness of her body kneeling on the ground of that basement room, her hands are clasped in Rinako’s. The TV screen is a powerless black, only the gentle cadence of their breathing stirs the air.
She lifts her watery gaze to her granddaughter’s eyes. In their steady, concerned luster, Young-Ja finds not the shame and revulsion she had feared but the overwhelming, undeniable warmth of compassion. There, the echoes of a face she had once loved look back to tell her it was all right.
“You know, you remind me a lot of my father. He’d teach me about wild plants and tell me stories at night before we’d fall asleep.”
Young-Ja continues to offer pieces of her heart, beginning with hazy but warm memories of her crooked-nosed father, her lively mother, her beloved siblings. Rinako sits witness to it all. She weeps when the tiger roars over the bones of her lost kin. She laughs along to tales of girlish mischief at a Manchurian teahouse and chokes at its fiery end. She falls silent before the account of captivity in a Japanese military outpost. For days and nights neither woman moves. One speaks, flush with the terrifying elation of being known. The other listens, moored by the weight of granted trust. Together they relive a life once forgotten and give in to the sorrow that binds them in love.
Once the time has come for Rinako to leave, she feels she no longer knows the girl whose life she is to resume in Tokyo. Those stagnant days yearning for someone to talk to, burying herself in textbooks that now raised more questions than they answered—it all seems like scenes from a distant past, the anemic desires of a stranger. Now, in the present, every atom in her body pulses, oriented toward her connection to her grandmother. Toward these revelations that make her doubt so much of what she had assumed about herself, her family, her country.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to stay? Because I will.”
Her grandmother smiles. “We’ll see each other again soon.”
“But we’re just getting started. I want to be here for you.”
“The best thing you can do for me is to live your own life. You’re young. You don’t know how much solace it brings me to know you can live in the ways you choose. Now, go. There will be time for another trip later.”
Rinako leashes the instinct to argue and embraces her grandmother. “I think I understand why that professor wanted to talk to you.”
“Hmm.”
Young-Ja ponders these words as Rinako waves from the departing airport bus. She stands in place for a while even after city traffic swallows the vehicle into its curtain of smog. Walking back alone toward the church and descending the basement stairs, she is struck with just how vast an emptiness her granddaughter’s absence has carved into her small room.
When Young-Ja sits to rest her swelling ankles, her hands brush against two small pieces of paper that have been left for her to find. One is a lightly crumpled yellow note with the professor’s phone number. The other is a short message in Rinako’s hand.
We can’t be the only ones to know your story.
Young-Ja considers the note, studying the slants in her granddaughter’s script and the numbers on the yellow paper. When Rinako calls to say she has arrived at home safely, she makes no mention of what she has left behind. She instead inquires after what Young-Ja has eaten that day, if she has gotten enough sleep, what time she has scheduled her next checkup with the doctor. In the girl’s voice, Young-Ja detects nothing but warmth, a genuine concern for her well-being unmuddled by obligation. Her granddaughter will not pressure her. It will be Young-Ja’s choice, and Rinako will accept it with all the tenderness in her heart.
Only a few days pass before Young-Ja phones the number on the yellow paper and asks to speak with the professor.
“Song Young-Ja-nim. I was hoping to hear from you.” The voice on the other end is gentle, yet confident.
Young-Ja stalls. How does a conversation like this begin?
“We’re around the same age, I think,” the other woman volunteers into the silence. “Pardon my asking, but you were born in the early 1920s, no?”
“Yes,” Young-Ja manages.
“I can’t help but think that it could’ve just as well been me in your place at that time. I’d hope, if that were the case, that someone would believe me. That someone would fight for me.”
Young-Ja grips the phone cord with her scarred hand. It takes her a moment to gather her words. “And what is it you want to do, exactly?”
“I’m here to listen,” says the professor. “And to make sure that others do too.”
Then the chapter lifts us into something almost dreamlike. A man tends to the garden outside his home as his son scatters seeds for the chickens in the yard. A woman nearby hums softly and braids her daughter’s long black hair tight. Sunlight glimmers through the canopy’s dancing leaves and casts a glow on the sleepy house. An old woman cuts into the clearing from a mountain path she finds strangely familiar. Her knees ache. Her wilted flesh struggles in the ascent, but she walks with help, clutching the hand of a young woman. The girl’s short bob brushes against her shoulders from another land, another time. The family in the yard stands, turning to the two women emerging from the tree line. They wave and call out. But the visitors’ legs yield to sudden heaviness. They cannot approach the faces in the yard whose features are distant blurs. The old woman calls back names she has not uttered aloud in years. The family’s feet root into the earth and neither can they approach her, forever affixed to that sun-drenched yard, washed out in the blinding light. Somewhere beyond the mountain clearing a tiger roars. The echoes rumble down through the roots of trees, the roots of the family in the clearing, shaking their legs free from the soil. Timid steps approach timid steps until those feet, once nations apart, arrive reunited at home.
Then the chapter shifts to Tokyo, Japan, 1991. People often remark on the irony of Andō Makoto’s name. Andō, “peaceful east.” Makoto, “truth.” As a columnist for one of the largest newspapers in the country, he is called many things amid typical accusations of pandering or biased lies. But Makoto is endowed with a temerity that makes him convinced of his own integrity, allowing him to brush off any complaints with the facile laugh of a tall, handsome man.
“Andō-san, I just came from your desk. There’s a visitor to see you,” says one of his coworkers as she walks by.
“Oh? Is it that city hall staffer—”
“No, it’s your niece. She seems nice,” she says as she hurries around the corner.
Makoto pauses. He does not have a niece. As he waits for the elevator to take him back to his floor, he runs into more reporters mid-discussion.
“You hear the latest thing those old nationalists said about that comfort woman? It’s one thing to say it’s exaggeration, but to say such rude things about a defenseless granny...”
“Typical Jimintō. But you know the Koreans did that deliberately. Find an old lady to tell some sob story to garner sympathy. People eat it up.”
“They can eat it up all they want, but it’s hearsay until they find sufficient documentation.”
“Even with proof, what can they do about it now? It’s not like this is brand-new information, and everyone from that time is so old.”
On August 14 that year, the morning before Korea celebrated its National Liberation Day, a sixty-seven-year-old woman named Kim Hak-Soon testified about her imprisonment as a “comfort woman” sex slave for the Japanese.
This chapter closes with history pressing its trembling finger directly against the present. What was whispered, buried, and denied now has a name, a voice, and a witness. And Young-Ja’s story is no longer only hers.
### Reader's Impressions & Star Rating
This chapter is devastating in the quietest possible way. It does not rely on melodrama; it relies on tea, shoes, phone cords, hidden suits, and the unbearable tenderness of two women finally seeing each other. The shift from Shun’s petty humiliations to Rinako’s stubborn love, and then to Young-Ja’s long-buried grief, is masterfully done. The scar on Young-Ja’s hand becomes a whole history. The barley tea becomes memory. The TV broadcast becomes a door that cannot be closed again.
I felt Shun’s smallness, Rinako’s fierce loyalty, and Young-Ja’s terror of being known. The chapter left me aching for all of them—even for Shun, who is trapped in his own resentment and cannot yet understand the mother he never truly knew. The dreamlike family reunion at the end is hauntingly beautiful, and the final historical anchor of Kim Hak-Soon’s testimony gives the story a weight that feels both intimate and world-changing.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.9 / 5 Stars
### Next Chapter Prediction
The next chapter will likely follow the aftermath of Young-Ja’s decision to speak with the professor. Now that she has taken the first step, the past will become public—or at least dangerously close to public. I predict Shun will discover what Rinako left behind and what his mother is considering, and his reaction will be explosive. Rinako may return to Korea sooner than expected, or she may begin researching Kim Hak-Soon’s testimony from Tokyo. The professor will likely try to document Young-Ja’s account, while Young-Ja struggles with fear of exposure, family shame, and the strange relief of being believed. And Andō Makoto, the columnist with the ironic name, may become a crucial ally—or a threat—as the truth moves from a basement room into the national spotlight.
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