In-hye’s chronic insomnia

In-hye’s chronic insomnia is a three-month crisis in which sleep comes only in brief snatches, while memories of Yeong-hye’s suffering and In-hye’s own part in the family’s history recur through the night. The insomnia is not presented in isolation: it follows the family’s failed attempts to control Yeong-hye, gathers around In-hye’s regret and self-questioning, and coexists with the daily care she continues to provide for Ji-woo. Its ending remains unresolved; the narrative instead shows how pain and responsibility persist together.

Onset and Nightly Routine

The account gives the duration precisely: for three months, In-hye has managed only scattered periods of sleep, never longer than an hour at a time. Yeong-hye’s voice, the image of a forest under black rain, and a vision of her own face with blood trickling from an eye break the night into fragments. The tree she watches outside the hospital offers no explanation or comfort; it remains silent as her sleeplessness continues.

When she gives up trying to sleep, it is usually around three in the morning. She washes her face, brushes her teeth, prepares side dishes, and cleans the house, but these tasks do not make the hours pass more quickly. The clock seems suspended. She sometimes enters her husband’s room to listen to records he left behind, repeats his gesture of spinning around with a hand on his back, or curls up fully clothed in the bathtub. There, she considers that he may simply have lacked the energy to undress and shower. The small, concave space feels unexpectedly cozier than the rest of the apartment, making the bathtub both a refuge and a place where grief is reconsidered.

Memory, Violence, and Guilt

In-hye’s sleeplessness gives repeated force to questions about when the family’s life began to fall apart. She traces Yeong-hye’s conspicuous change to about three years earlier, when she became vegetarian, lost substantial weight, and spoke so little that meaningful communication became difficult. At a family housewarming, their father struck Yeong-hye and forced meat on her; In-hye watched, rigid with shock, before Yeong-hye injured herself with a fruit knife. In-hye’s memory is not only of what happened to her sister but of her own inability to intervene.

Her questions widen into a chain of possible missed interventions: stopping their father, taking the knife away, preventing her husband from being the one to take Yeong-hye to hospital, or challenging his later treatment of her. She also revisits the harm her husband did to Yeong-hye and wonders whether she could have changed the course of events. She acknowledges that she could not have predicted what her casual mention of Yeong-hye’s Mongolian mark would prompt, yet still asks whether she should have recognized the direction things were taking. The thoughts do not produce a settled verdict about what she could have done; they show guilt repeatedly returning without resolving into certainty.

The remembered violence has a longer history. When the sisters were children, Yeong-hye said they should not go back after getting lost on a mountain. Only much later does In-hye understand the wish behind those words: Yeong-hye alone was beaten by their father. In-hye, the eldest daughter, had helped their exhausted mother by making broth for him, and he treated her with more care. She now sees her own hard-working, self-sacrificing role not as maturity but as a way of surviving. That belated recognition sharpens the insomnia’s central burden: the past returns with an understanding In-hye did not possess when she might have acted.

Brief Relief and Continuing Distress

Pain sometimes stops just after In-hye laughs. Ji-woo’s antics can bring on laughter that feels more manic than joyful, and his delight in making her laugh leads him to repeat or intensify his performance. In-hye feels guilty that he tries so hard to draw a little happiness from her, knowing that the laughter will pass. Its relief is real but temporary: after it ends, the night begins again.

When Ji-woo sleeps beside her, the hours become an expanse without the sight or sound of another living thing. In-hye curls up in the empty bathtub and closes her eyes; images of Yeong-hye in a dark, rain-filled forest return, followed by bright trees that seem to lift and surround her. Cities, towns, and roads appear only as fragments above a vast forest. The images echo Yeong-hye’s accounts and visions, but In-hye cannot decipher what the trees signify. Their recurrence makes her sleeplessness a shared imaginative terrain between the sisters, not a source of clear knowledge or escape.

Responsibility and Significance

In-hye wonders whether Yeong-hye passed through a similar period of distress before her present condition, and whether In-hye herself might have let go of the slender thread connecting her to everyday life. Her responsibility toward Ji-woo is one reason she has not relinquished that connection. This does not cure her insomnia: even beside her sleeping son, the night returns. Yet the contrast between his dependence and her isolation shows how care remains a daily obligation amid her crisis.

The insomnia also changes how In-hye understands survival. She reflects that people continue eating, drinking, washing, and sometimes laughing after terrible experiences; ordinary bodily routines persist alongside pain rather than proving that it has passed. Her nights gather together the family’s history of violence, the consequences of Yeong-hye’s crisis, and In-hye’s own unspoken distress. The narrative leaves that condition open rather than resolving it, ending this thread in recurring forest imagery and an unanswered question about what the trees are saying.