# Chapter 32: The Taste of Sorrow and the Sweetness of Memory
Hello everyone, it's me again! How are you all doing today? I hope you're ready for another emotional journey because today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 32 of "Honey in The Wound free digital audiobook." This chapter is a deeply moving one, filled with the bittersweet complexity of family bonds, the weight of memory, and the quiet power of retribution. So grab a cup of tea, settle in, and let me guide you through this remarkable chapter.
We open in a space of intimate vulnerability. Rinako sits with the words of her grandmother echoing in her mind—"I miss you"—a phrase so simple yet so profound that it pierces through the barriers of language and distance. The old woman had written in Korean, her native tongue, but Rinako could not string the rest together into coherent sentences. There is something achingly beautiful about this moment: the granddaughter who wishes she could read her grandmother's note unaided, who longs to speak to her in the language of her blood, but must wait for her father to translate when he returns later that night. It is a small tragedy, the kind that accumulates over generations of displacement, of living between worlds and never fully belonging to either.
But there is hope glimmering through the cracks. Things had been improving between Rinako and her father at home. He was starting to come around to her work with the professor, especially after Rina—and here I must pause, for this detail is significant—Rina had hinted that it was the older woman who had convinced Rinako to enroll in university after all. This revelation shifts something in the father's understanding of his daughter's path. And yet, Rinako does not admit to him that her previous threats to defer her education had largely been empty, hurled as they were in desperation, the only bit of leverage she had to make him comprehend the stakes of her work. His obsession with convention had dictated her life for so long that it felt strange—almost foreign—to push with such force against the grain of his comfort.
The professor, we learn, genuinely supports Rinako's entry into higher learning. This is no mere academic endorsement; it is mentorship in its truest form. While she continues to give Rinako the names of men to track down and meet—a detail that chills me, knowing what Rinako does with those names—she also encourages her to think about the opportunities education could offer. "I think university life will suit you," the professor says, and Rinako responds with a humility that speaks to her character: "I hope so. Though I've probably learned more from you and my grandmother than I ever have in school."
The professor's laughter is warm, and her wisdom cuts deep: "Your education is what you make of it. If you go into it thinking it'll be useless, it will be. But if you go in with the intent to learn and to unlearn, to be critical of the world around you, you'll start to pick up on how institutions work. See how beliefs are made and taught."
This is the heart of the chapter's philosophical underpinning—the recognition that education is not merely about absorbing information but about understanding systems of power, about learning to see the invisible structures that shape our lives. Since meeting the professor, Rinako has watched so many in power continue to deny the past, to belittle these elderly women as a nuisance. The weight of this observation is crushing, and it fuels something dark and determined within her.
And here we must confront the reality of Rinako's actions. She has been arrested three more times since that first protest in Seoul: twice for trespassing in offices in Tokyo, once for elbowing a police officer in the stomach when he tried to take away her protest sign. Each time, her father paid the penalty fees and scolded her into the late hours of the night, desperate for her to balance her devotion to her cause with the education he swore would spare her struggles later in life. But he does not seem to understand that the list of men to target grows longer each day. Every minute that slips by diminishes the urgency of the past. There is a ticking clock here, a sense that justice delayed is justice denied, and Rinako feels this pressure in her bones.
Fury has thus grown to be a constant in Rinako's life. This is not the hot, explosive anger of momentary rage—this is something deeper, more abiding, the kind of fury that rouses her from sleep each morning, that reminds her of the long arc of brutality eclipsing the light in her grandmother's life, that forces her to recall just how much of her own life she had been made to live in ignorance. This anger propels her into the world, fueling her search for repentance from men who believed such an act beneath them. The imagery here is stunning: "Like a diver stabbing into the ink of the night sea, determined to prise a lost pearl from its depths." While rage took from Rinako her peace, it left her the satisfaction of clarity. She has no doubt that fighting for her grandmother was the right path. She hungers to do more. Have more impact. Sharpen her fangs.
And yet, despite his annoyance, her father at least seems resigned not to limit Rinako's access to her grandmother. In fact, he had taken to calling his mother nearly every day as well, urging her to consider moving to Tokyo so that he could look after her in her aging health. He insisted that she could be with her family and receive more advanced medical care in a Japanese hospital. She refused. Rinako did not take her father's consternation at this rejection seriously. Even now, his job search in Tokyo took precedence, regardless of the amends he claimed to want to make to his mother.
This is a devastating observation about the father—he means well, but Rinako senses that he does not quite have the intuition to speak to his mother about anything beyond arranging for her material comfort. He was trying, in his own way, and his mother, in hers. It would take time for both to shed certain instincts that had calcified in all those years apart. For them all to learn how to exist as a family. This is the quiet tragedy of the chapter—the recognition that healing is not instantaneous, that the wounds of separation do not close simply because you wish them to.
Now we come to the chapter's central symbol: the yakgwa. Rinako examines the rows of honeyed cookies in the opened package. She remembers trying some with her grandmother in a local market the last time she visited Seoul. The old woman held her hand tight and walked her through the colorful stalls, explaining what each vendor sold with a sort of pride in their work. Rinako would not forget the brightness of her grandmother's face when introducing the tastes of her childhood's few happy memories. This memory is a gift, a moment of pure connection between grandmother and granddaughter, unmediated by language barriers or cultural displacement.
She bent down to give the yakgwa a closer inspection and could see that the sweets before her had not been purchased from the market. They bore the imperfections of her grandmother's hand, small inconsistencies pockmarking the cookies that Rinako treasured as a labor of her grandmother's love. This detail—that the grandmother made these cookies herself, that they are imperfect because they are handmade—is everything. It transforms the yakgwa from a mere confection into an artifact of devotion, a physical manifestation of love that crosses the miles between Seoul and Tokyo.
The yakgwa's oily, sweet scent hit her before she took a large bite and began to chew. An unexpected bitterness washed over her tongue. Rinako nearly spit out the half-chewed mouthful as she was possessed with thoughts of the people who wished her grandmother ill. She gritted her teeth in the next involuntary chew, the accusations of attention-seeking slander hurled about in the enraging echoes of her memory. Her eyes prickled with the heat of new tears as she tore through these thoughts.
Before she could take possession of herself, Rinako found her hand reaching out for her cup and flinging it at the kitchen wall. An explosion of water and glass sprayed down its surface, falling into crevices between the counter and gas range. This moment of violent release is shocking but deeply understandable. The anger, the grief, the frustration—all of it has to go somewhere, and the cup becomes the vessel for emotions too large to contain within her body.
She stared at the jagged points of wet, broken glass. The notes of bitterness faded in her mouth as she clenched her jaw, releasing a deep, flavorful grief from the yakgwa. Tears soaked Rinako's cheeks as she was consumed with thoughts of those who had not come forward, those who had already perished, those for whom now was too late. The honeyed sadness bore through her as she struggled to swallow the yakgwa's remains. With the ghost of her first bite on her lips, she fell into a sob and crushed the half-eaten cookie in her hand.
This passage is almost unbearable in its intimacy. The yakgwa becomes a vehicle for memory, for grief, for the complexity of loving someone who has suffered. The sweetness and bitterness are inseparable—just as the grandmother's love and the grandmother's pain are inseparable. The honey in the wound, if you will.
Rinako gasped for breath as traces of yakgwa lingered as a sweetness on her tongue. This soft aftertaste imparted a gratitude that she had known her grandmother well enough to receive these gifts, that she had seen her as she wanted to be seen. And while she sniffled alone in her apartment, she took another bite of the debilitating yakgwa, each mouthful cycling her through waves of complex flavors she felt ill-equipped to name and confront.
This is the work of grieving—to keep eating the thing that hurts you because it also nourishes you, because it connects you to the person you have lost or fear losing, because to stop eating would be to stop remembering.
After Rinako finished devouring the mashed-up cookie from her sticky palms, she swept up the glass shards from the kitchen floor. Her father would be home soon, and she did not wish to cut his unsuspecting feet with the remnants of an outburst meant for someone else. This small act of care is important—her anger is not directed at her father, not truly, and she does not want to harm him even accidentally. The violence of her grief is contained within herself, and she will not let it spill over onto those who do not deserve it.
Rinako wondered if her father might like to sample his mother's confections. Would he be able to appreciate its swirl of flavors? If he would not eat them, she would share them with anyone who could also carry this burden. Should there be no one else, she would gladly finish off the lot. She would devour all the yakgwa her grandmother had sent and savor each glazed, bitter bite to the end. She would taste her sorrows, she would mourn her losses. She would see her and have her seen, her life alight on her tongue.
This is a vow—a promise to herself to carry the weight of her grandmother's legacy, to taste the fullness of her joy and pain, to refuse the easy forgetting that the world would prefer.
And then the chapter shifts, abruptly and chillingly, to a completely different scene. At seven o'clock, an attendant carries tea and the day's Yomiuri Shimbun to the main study where General Akagawa begins his mornings. The shift in perspective is jarring, almost cinematic, as we move from Rinako's intimate grief to this portrait of Japanese aristocratic routine.
The attendant balances the lacquer tray on a forearm and taps at the door with her free hand to announce her presence. She bows and enters a pristine room lined with books blanketed by the morning sun. A white-haired man is slumped over his desk. The woman—a long-practiced stoic—does not betray her surprise at witnessing her employer's sleeping form for the first time in her two decades of service. She sets the tray down and calls out a morning greeting in a soft voice. He does not respond.
She allows herself to approach closer and notices that he has soiled himself. She gasps and runs out for help before she can see the glazed brown cookie lying half-eaten on the desk.
The horror of this scene is profound. The old man who ordered atrocities, who treated women as comfort stations, who built his career on the suffering of others—this man has died alone at his desk, with a cookie from one of his victims in his hand. The attendant, who has served him for twenty years, does not see the cookie. She does not know what it signifies. She only sees her employer, dead at his desk, and she runs for help.
As the medics arrive, the household staff hurry about in cool efficiency. The general had been in acceptable health, but his passing is not a shock given his years. He is fortunate to have lived a full life. There is nonetheless much to do to prepare the manor after the general's family is notified. In this commotion, no one thinks of the young woman who had delivered a flower arrangement from some unfamiliar sender the day before.
The line "He is fortunate to have lived a full life" is devastating in its irony. The general lived a full life built on the suffering of others, and now he is dead, and everyone around him attributes his death to natural causes, to old age, to the simple fact that he had lived many years. No one connects the cookie to the corpse. No one suspects the young woman who delivered flowers the day before.
By the time the body is moved to the morgue and the study cleared of any mess, the young woman is long gone. No one may remember her, but that does not matter. She has seen to it that he tasted their sorrows. She has seen to it that he did not forget, that his final breath was taken in the remembered torments of his own creation, no honey in the wound to soothe what lay festering in that darkness.
This is the moment the chapter has been building toward, and it is executed with chilling precision. Rinako—for surely it is she who delivered the flowers, she who left the yakgwa—has taken her revenge. Not through violence, not through the courts, but through memory. She has poisoned him with the past, with the sweetness and bitterness of the pain he inflicted. And it has worked.
Now she walks on, the bitterness of the past lingering on her tongue. Her path ahead is yet unknown, but she vows not to forget, to see to it that others do not forget. As long as she keeps walking, death will not follow them a second time. No, death would not be permitted to return here and claim the knowledge they paid for with their bones. From death she takes the power to end: she lives and tells. She tells and lives.
This final passage is a manifesto, a declaration of purpose. Rinako is not just seeking revenge—she is seeking justice, seeking to ensure that the stories of the comfort women are not erased, not forgotten, not allowed to die with the men who perpetrated the crimes. She lives and tells. She tells and lives. The repetition is incantatory, prayer-like, a mantra for survival and resistance.
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## Reader's Impressions & Star Rating
As a passionate reader, this chapter left me breathless and deeply unsettled—in the best possible way. The juxtaposition between Rinako's intimate grief session over the yakgwa and the abrupt shift to General Akagawa's death is masterfully executed. The author trusts the reader to connect the dots, to understand that the flower delivery from an "unfamiliar sender" was no coincidence, that the half-eaten yakgwa on the general's desk was no mere sweet. This is storytelling at its most sophisticated.
The chapter's emotional range is extraordinary—from tender nostalgia to explosive rage to cold, calculating revenge. Rinako is not a simple heroine; she is complex, damaged, furious, and determined. Her father is not a villain but a flawed man trying his best in ways that fall short. The yakgwa itself becomes a character, a symbol of love and poison, sweetness and bitterness, memory and reckoning.
The final section, with its clinical description of the general's death and the household's efficient response, is a masterclass in understatement. The horror is in what is not said, in what no one notices, in the gap between what we know as readers and what the characters understand.
**⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.9 / 5 Stars**
This chapter is nearly perfect—a stunning achievement in narrative tension, character development, and thematic complexity. I reserve that final tenth of a star only because I am desperate to know what happens next.
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## Next Chapter Prediction
Based on the cliffhangers and character motivations we have witnessed, I predict that the next chapter will explore the fallout from General Akagawa's death and its consequences for Rinako. Will anyone connect the dots between the flower delivery and the death? Will Rinako's father discover what his daughter has done? The gulf between her righteous fury and her father's desperate need for respectability seems impossible to bridge, and I suspect this tension will come to a head.
I also predict we will see more of the professor, who is clearly more involved in Rinako's mission than she initially appears. She has been providing names—does she know what Rinako does with them? And what of Rinako's grandmother in Seoul? The father's persistent calls urging her to move to Tokyo suggest that her health may be declining, and I fear we are building toward a devastating loss that will test Rinako's resolve and deepen her commitment to her cause.
Furthermore, the line "No one may remember her, but that does not matter" suggests that Rinako's methods are becoming more refined, more invisible. I would not be surprised if the next chapter shows her planning her next target, perhaps with even greater precision and even less trace. The list of men grows longer each day, and Rinako is sharpening her fangs.
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