Seoul is the novel’s central urban setting, joining the ordinary routines of marriage and work to the crises that expose how little control its characters have over one another’s lives. It is where Yeong-hye and her husband make a home, where In-hye has established herself independently, and where the family’s attempts to manage Yeong-hye’s refusal of food and treatment unfold. Its familiar interiors and institutions provide no simple shelter from coercion or distress.

Domestic Life and Marriage

The novel first presents Seoul through Mr. Cheong’s retrospective account of choosing a wife. He describes his own preference for the middle course—at school, in choosing a college, and in settling for a modest salaried job—and says that Yeong-hye’s unremarkable appearance and accommodating manner suited the orderly life he wanted. His account makes the city’s domestic setting an extension of his self-image: marriage is valued less as mutual intimacy than as a way to avoid disruption.

That arrangement grows unstable as Yeong-hye changes. In the couple’s corridor apartment, Mr. Cheong returns early from work on an exceptionally humid evening and finds her peeling potatoes bare to the waist. She explains that she is hot; he notices how much weight she has lost. The scene’s ordinary details—the front door, the television cabinet, the potatoes—make the domestic space a place where her changing body is visible but not necessarily understood. Mr. Cheong’s first response is to worry that a passerby might look inside, revealing his concern with exposure and social appearance alongside his unease about her condition.

Work, Independence, and the City

Seoul is also the setting of In-hye’s self-made life. She left home at nineteen and built a life there entirely under her own power. In memory, she connects her affection for her exhausted future husband to a possible recognition of herself in him: she had wanted to use her strength to give him rest, but comes to wonder whether she was responding to her own image instead. The city thus signifies independence without guaranteeing emotional security; the life In-hye has made is hers, yet her marriage remains marked by her husband’s withdrawal into his work and art.

The novel’s accounts of the city are filtered through sharply limited perspectives. In the first part, Mr. Cheong’s narration repeatedly measures people and circumstances by their usefulness to his stability. In-hye’s later perspective, by contrast, recalls the effort of leaving home and making a life in Seoul, while attending to the uncertainty and unmet needs within her marriage. The city is not a neutral panorama so much as a lived space rendered differently by those who possess different degrees of agency and interpretive authority.

Family Crisis and Medical Care

Seoul becomes a destination for family intervention when Yeong-hye is hospitalized. A relative brings black-goat broth, prepared before coming up to the city, and asks that it be passed off as herbal medicine because Yeong-hye has grown frail after months without meat and has lost blood. The plan places familiar ideas of nourishment and maternal care in conflict with Yeong-hye’s refusal: the food is presented as help, but its ingredients are to be concealed from her.

At the hospital, the city’s clinical routines meet the limits of coercive treatment. Staff report that Yeong-hye has stopped coming to the lobby at mealtimes and will not eat even when a tray is brought to the ward. After four days without food, she is dehydrated; attempts to insert a drip provoke violence, and staff doubt that she has taken her medication. In-hye visits her sister and asks about her time in the dark woods, the cold, and her refusal to eat anything at all. Yeong-hye asks for water and then asks whether In-hye has spoken with the doctor. Care here is necessary, but it is entangled with surveillance, force, and a struggle over who may decide what her body needs.

Narrative and Significance

The novel does not treat Seoul as a unified, fully observed setting. It emerges through remembered encounters, domestic observation, and In-hye’s recollections, each shaped by the person whose attention organizes the scene. That restricted presentation matters: Yeong-hye is often seen and discussed by others, while the city’s apartments and hospital wards make her body available to scrutiny and intervention without making her inner experience equally accessible.

Across these settings, Seoul holds together contrasting forms of life: Mr. Cheong’s preference for an undisturbed routine, In-hye’s hard-won independence, and the family’s effort to keep Yeong-hye alive while confronting her refusal. The city’s significance lies less in a single landmark than in this repeated collision between ordinary social arrangements and bodily autonomy. A home, a meal, and a hospital visit become sites where care, control, and the limits of understanding are difficult to separate.