Mount Ch’ukseong is a wooded landscape at the edge of the sisters’ ordinary lives, connected to childhood memory, Yeong-hye’s later disappearance, and the final journey carrying her away from the mountain. Its forest is not merely a setting: as the sisters encounter or remember it, the trees gather meanings of escape, transformation, danger, and unanswered appeal.

Setting and Recollection

In-hye looks toward the mountain’s forest from the hospital, where the sky is beginning to lighten. The summer colors return to the slope, and she locates in that landscape the place where Yeong-hye was found after disappearing. The view makes the mountain present even within the ward: it connects the sister beside her to the unknown place Yeong-hye had entered and from which she had been brought back.

The recollection reaches further into their shared past. When the sisters were children, they became lost on a mountain. Nine-year-old Yeong-hye said they should not go back, while In-hye, unable to understand her, urged them to find the path before dark. They eventually descended on the opposite side from where they had started, hitching a ride on a power tiller back to town. In-hye had felt relieved; Yeong-hye watched the evening-lit poplars without speaking. The memory later becomes legible to In-hye as an early expression of her sister’s wish to escape rather than return.

Yeong-hye’s Disappearance

After Yeong-hye is found on the mountainside, she tells In-hye that she went because she heard something calling her. By the time she speaks from the ward, she no longer hears it and says she had been standing there, waiting. Her account then turns toward an imagined bodily transformation: the rain had melted what covered her, and she had been about to go down into the earth so she could turn herself upside down again. The mountain is where this effort to leave human existence takes place, though In-hye can only hear about it afterward and cannot fully enter her sister’s experience.

The forest’s appearance sustains that uncertainty. In-hye remembers trees gathered like green flames in the early-morning half-light, but she does not know what they were saying. Her visions do not offer reassurance: the trees seem cold, alive, and unwelcoming, and she cannot find one that will take her life. The mountain’s vegetation therefore refuses to function as a simple refuge. It draws the imagination away from human life while remaining strange and even frightening to the person who confronts it.

The Ambulance and the Forest

At the end, the ambulance carries Yeong-hye away from Mount Ch’ukseong. Beyond its windshield, summer woods shine with rain in the waning afternoon light. As they round the last bend and leave the mountain, In-hye sees a black bird flying toward dark clouds, then loses sight of it in the bright sunlight. The departure makes the mountain both a place left behind and a landscape that continues to command her attention.

In-hye stares at the roadside trees, whose green fire seems to ripple like the flanks of a large animal. Her gaze is insistent, at once expectant and protesting, but the forest gives no answer. The closing image holds together the sisters’ divergent situations: Yeong-hye is being transported away after her crisis, while In-hye remains conscious of dreams and of the possibility of surrendering to them, yet insists that waking must also come. Mount Ch’ukseong thus concentrates the book’s unresolved tension between escape and return, and between the human demand for explanation and a natural world that remains silent.