In-hye’s three-month insomnia period

In-hye’s three-month insomnia period marks a crisis that is largely invisible to those around her, even as it changes how she understands Yeong-hye’s suffering. Its significance lies in the questions it brings to the surface: whether her sister’s withdrawal from everyday life followed a path In-hye herself might have taken, and whether care and responsibility have been what kept her from letting go.

The Crisis and Its Hidden Weight

The insomnia belongs to the later period of In-hye’s life, when she is caring for Yeong-hye in the psychiatric ward. The strain is not readily visible to others, but In-hye experiences pain and sleeplessness as an ongoing grip. The narration does not present her condition as an isolated symptom; it places her private disarray beside her sister’s grave illness and the demands of being a mother.

Her reflections give the crisis a particular measure: she remembers months in which life sometimes felt like total chaos. For In-hye, the responsibility she feels toward Ji-woo has helped keep her connected to ordinary life. She wonders whether, without him, she too might have released that hold. The comparison does not make the sisters’ circumstances identical; it makes In-hye newly aware of how fragile her own attachment to daily existence has felt.

Reconsidering Yeong-hye’s Past

At Yeong-hye’s bedside, In-hye thinks back to the family’s housewarming, when their father forced meat on Yeong-hye after she had become vegetarian. In-hye remembers being present and unable to stop the escalation, and her later reflections return repeatedly to what she might have done differently. That remembered violence gives her insomnia’s inward questions a history: her distress is entangled with the fear that she failed to protect her sister.

The period also brings In-hye to reconsider a childhood memory. When Yeong-hye was nine, the sisters became lost on a mountain, and Yeong-hye said they should not go back. In-hye had then insisted they find the path. Looking back, she understands the remark against the unequal violence in their home: Yeong-hye was the one who bore their father’s beatings, while In-hye, as the eldest daughter, helped their exhausted mother and learned to survive by being dutiful. She now sees that self-sacrificing role not simply as maturity but as a survival strategy—and recognizes that it did not save Yeong-hye from what she endured.

At the Ward: Care and Recognition

In-hye’s questioning continues in the ward, where Yeong-hye is refusing food and has become physically weakened. In-hye tries to care for her with quince tea, moistening her lips when she does not respond. Faced with her sister’s insistence that she can live on sunlight, In-hye wonders whether Yeong-hye’s refusal is directed toward death rather than a transformation into a tree. The thought is a suspicion, not a certainty, and it makes the act of caregiving more difficult: keeping Yeong-hye alive is not the same as understanding what she wants.

This bedside encounter connects the sisters’ crises without collapsing them into one. In-hye recognizes the possibility that Yeong-hye passed through a state resembling her own inner chaos, only earlier and more quickly, before letting fall what the narration calls the slender thread connecting a person to everyday life. Her own thread remains tied, in part, to Ji-woo and the responsibility she feels toward him. That recognition makes her insomnia a source of painful identification as well as a reminder of difference.

Narrative Significance

The account of In-hye’s crisis develops through retrospective recognition rather than a detached explanation. Memories of childhood, the family’s violence, and the ward return as In-hye tries to understand what happened to Yeong-hye and what she herself could have prevented. The gap between her younger self, who urged her sister to find the way home, and her present self, who can imagine why Yeong-hye wanted not to return, gives the period its emotional force.

The insomnia also shifts the focus from Yeong-hye alone to the sister who has been trying to care for her. In-hye’s distress remains largely unknown to others, yet it exposes how much survival can depend on fragile attachments and ordinary obligations. It does not resolve the sisters’ different paths; it makes In-hye see more clearly how close her own sense of order may have come to breaking.