Yeong-hye and In-hye’s sisterhood

Yeong-hye and In-hye’s sisterhood is the novel’s sustained relation of attachment, estrangement, and care under pressure. In-hye does not begin as an uncomplicated ally: she joins the family in urging Yeong-hye to eat, then gradually becomes the person who visits, pays, advocates, and stays. As Yeong-hye’s refusal deepens into a medical crisis, the sisters’ bond persists without resolving the conflict between In-hye’s wish to preserve her sister’s life and Yeong-hye’s expressed rejection of the conditions under which that life is being maintained.

Identity and Family Context

In-hye is Yeong-hye’s older sister. The first account of her in the evidence comes through her brother-in-law’s perspective: when he telephones the family to report Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism, he sees In-hye as physically similar to his wife but more feminine, and describes his own reaction to her voice in explicitly sexual terms. This is a limited, male-filtered introduction, not an account of the sisters’ private relationship; it places In-hye in a family network where Yeong-hye’s change is reported and interpreted by others before the sisters’ bond comes into focus.

The family’s response to Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat makes the sisters’ differing positions visible. At a meal, their father rebukes Yeong-hye, and In-hye insists that a vegetarian diet requires a properly balanced meal plan, pointing to her sister’s emaciated appearance. Her concern is concrete—she fears the damage to Yeong-hye’s body—but it is also expressed as correction, in keeping with the family’s expectation that Yeong-hye should eat. The scene establishes an early pattern that will later become more painful: In-hye tries to protect her sister by urging compliance with ordinary rules of nourishment, while Yeong-hye’s refusal makes those rules feel like another form of pressure.

From Family Meal to Physical Coercion

The family meal turns that disagreement into an assault on Yeong-hye’s bodily autonomy. Their mother places dishes of beef, pork, chicken, and octopus in front of her. When Yeong-hye will not eat, the mother tries to feed her directly, bringing sweet-and-sour pork and then beef and oysters toward her closed mouth. In-hye reinforces the appeal by reminding Yeong-hye that she used to like oysters. When Yeong-hye twists away, their father orders the others to hold her; In-hye takes hold of his arm and asks why he is doing this. Her intervention matters, but it does not stop the violence: her brother seizes Yeong-hye, and their father approaches with pork in his fingers.

In-hye is therefore neither simply aligned with her family nor able, at this point, to free Yeong-hye from its authority. She has just urged her sister to eat and invoked a familiar childhood preference, yet she also challenges their father when the attempt to persuade becomes force. The difference between these actions is central to the relationship: concern can turn into pressure even when it is motivated by fear for Yeong-hye, and resisting overt violence does not immediately mean understanding the refusal behind it.

After the confrontation, Yeong-hye is hospitalized. In-hye arrives with their younger brother and his wife; their mother still insists on going to the hospital, while the brother refuses to let her near it. The visit reveals the rupture spreading through the family after their father hits Yeong-hye in front of her husband. In-hye acknowledges that their father has always been quick-tempered, but the scene’s aftermath also makes clear that the episode cannot be treated as an isolated misunderstanding: relatives argue over access and responsibility while Yeong-hye remains the person subjected to their decisions.

Care, Separation, and the Missing Sister

Later, Yeong-hye’s hospitalization makes the sisters’ connection more precarious. During an hour set aside for brief, unaccompanied walks, Yeong-hye goes missing from the hospital. Staff search the surrounding mountain and block a road near the route toward Maseok, uncertain whether she has gone down toward town or deeper into the woods. A nurse eventually finds her standing motionless, soaked in a secluded part of the forest, as if she were one of the wet trees.

The call reaches In-hye while she is caring for her six-year-old son, Ji-woo, who has been feverish for days and is undergoing a lung X-ray. The hospital has not contacted her by mobile before. The nurse explains that Yeong-hye is missing and asks whether she might have gone to her parents’ home; In-hye says that their parents live in the countryside and offers to contact them if necessary. She then returns to Ji-woo, takes him home in the rain, washes him, gives him rice porridge and medicine, and prepares for the possibility that he may need hospital admission. Her sister’s disappearance and her son’s immediate illness occupy the same evening, but not on equal terms: there is no room in her thoughts for Yeong-hye while she meets the urgent demands of childcare.

When the hospital calls again around nine and says Yeong-hye has been found, In-hye’s thanks are sincere but subdued by fatigue. Only after the call does she register that the rain over her own day must also have fallen on the mountain. Her imagined view of Yeong-hye—alone in the black, rain-soaked woods in her pale hospital uniform—is explicitly not a scene she witnessed. The brief connection between their lives is instead made through weather, distance, and In-hye’s uncertain vision. This separation does not loosen her attachment; it marks how little direct access she has to what Yeong-hye experiences.

Caregiving and the Limits of Persuasion

After Yeong-hye’s condition worsens, In-hye becomes the family member who does not abandon her. Their parents stop visiting and sever contact with In-hye, who reminds them of how they treated Yeong-hye; their younger brother and his wife also withdraw. In-hye nevertheless takes on the hospital fees and the role of carer. She continues to keep her shop running and to care for Ji-woo, carrying the practical and emotional work that the rest of the family has left behind.

Her role is not only financial or logistical. In-hye questions Yeong-hye about being found in the dark woods, asks whether she was cold, and urges her to eat something other than meat. Yeong-hye, lying with an intravenous needle in the back of her hand, asks for water and then asks whether In-hye has spoken to the doctor. The exchange shows their continuing intimacy in small acts of communication, but also the limits of what In-hye can know: Yeong-hye’s sparse replies do not explain the forest or make her refusal comprehensible to her sister.

The medical staff also place In-hye in the position of intermediary between Yeong-hye’s refusal and treatment. A doctor explains that Yeong-hye is refusing food while suffering from schizophrenia, that the reason for the refusal remains unclear, and that the medications have not helped. He says the hospital cannot be sure of keeping her alive there and invokes the physician’s duty to preserve life. In-hye is thus asked to confront the consequences of a condition whose meaning remains uncertain even to the clinicians, while being expected to help secure treatment and carry the burden of care.

When Yeong-hye asks to be released, her plea makes the conflict explicit. She says that people keep telling her to eat, that she does not like eating, that she is forced, and that she dislikes the injections and wants to leave. In-hye answers with the evidence of Yeong-hye’s physical dependence: she can barely walk and is surviving with an IV. She offers to have her discharged if she promises to eat. At the condition, the light goes out of Yeong-hye’s eyes; she turns away and whispers that In-hye is just the same. The accusation is devastating because In-hye’s offer is meant as a way out, yet it makes release depend on the very compliance Yeong-hye says she cannot accept. Care and coercion have become difficult to separate.

Change and Narrative Significance

The sisters’ relationship is not repaired by In-hye’s endurance. It is instead made more complicated by the fact that she stays. She must act for a sister who cannot reliably eat, walk, or speak, while recognizing that her own requests may sound like the demands of the family and institution from which Yeong-hye wants escape. The story gives In-hye responsibility without giving her a clear solution: abandoning Yeong-hye would leave her alone, but preserving her through treatment does not automatically honor what she says she wants.

In-hye imagines that Yeong-hye’s soul might have passed into another dimension after shedding flesh like a snake. She recalls her sister standing on her hands and wonders whether Yeong-hye mistook the hospital floor for forest earth, whether roots might have grown from her hands and flowers from her body as sunlight and water passed through it. The vision links Yeong-hye’s bodily extremity to the novel’s recurring vegetal imagery, but its form matters as much as its content: these are In-hye’s questions, not confirmed transformations or an explanation supplied by Yeong-hye. Imagination offers a way to approach her sister’s inner life while preserving the distance between them.

At the end of the available account, Yeong-hye’s blood stains a doctor’s white gown. The doctor says she must be transferred to a main hospital in Seoul for a protein injection into a carotid artery to stop gastric bleeding; he warns that its effect will not last long and presents it as the only way to keep her alive. In-hye takes the admission letter, leaves the nurses’ room, and collapses in a bathroom cubicle, vomiting milky tea and yellow stomach acid. Her body registers the cost of the care she continues to provide, but she still carries the letter onward. The sisters’ bond ends this sequence not with reconciliation or release, but with In-hye moving toward another urgent intervention, caught between the obligation to keep Yeong-hye alive and the knowledge that every available form of help may also impose itself upon her.