Last March (Yeong-hye’s disappearance)

Last March (Yeong-hye’s disappearance) is the episode in which Yeong-hye vanishes into the rainy woods near Mount Ch’ukseong and is later found there, an event that sharply worsens her condition and leaves In-hye unable to retreat into the routines that have sustained her. Recalled from the hospital, the disappearance remains partly unexplained: Yeong-hye says she went into the woods because she heard something calling, and that she had been waiting there.

Background and Retrospective Framing

In-hye looks back on the previous March as a turning point in the sisters’ lives. She remembers that Yeong-hye disappeared, was found in the forest on a rainy night, and then experienced a sudden worsening of her symptoms. The repeated conditional phrasing of In-hye’s recollection—her wish that Yeong-hye had not disappeared, had not been found in the woods, and had not deteriorated—registers the event as a break in a life she had previously believed could be managed through persistence.

The episode is not narrated as a continuous account of Yeong-hye entering the forest. Instead, the novel returns to it through In-hye’s later visits and questions at the hospital. The gap between the disappearance itself and its partial explanation matters: the reader encounters the event through its consequences, while its meaning remains inaccessible except for Yeong-hye’s brief, altered account.

The Hospital Visit Before the Disappearance

When In-hye visited Yeong-hye a few days before the disappearance, her sister refused to come to the visiting room. The head nurse reported that Yeong-hye had not wanted to leave the ward for several days, even during the hour when patients were allowed to walk without an escort. At In-hye’s request, a nurse accompanied her to see Yeong-hye inside.

There, In-hye found her sister doing a handstand at the far end of the western corridor, her face flushed and her long hair hanging downward. The nurse said Yeong-hye had been holding the position for half an hour and had started two days earlier. Attempts to return her to the ward had not stopped her; once inside, she began again. The nurse suggested that a small nudge would make her fall, treating the handstand as a problem to be interrupted. In-hye’s memory of that visit makes the later disappearance feel less like an isolated act than the culmination of a growing withdrawal from the ordinary movements expected of a patient.

Disappearance and Its Immediate Consequences

The woods become the place where Yeong-hye is found on a rainy night. In-hye later looks from the hospital window toward Mount Ch’ukseong’s forest and thinks that the spot where her sister was discovered must lie somewhere on its slope. The view brings the absent event into the present hospital room: the mountain remains visible, while the route Yeong-hye took and what happened there are not described in full.

The disappearance changes In-hye’s sense of what she can endure. She had been capable, since childhood, of making her way through duties as daughter, older sister, wife, mother, and shop owner. Yet she imagines that she might have conquered even time through the sheer momentum of continuing, if Yeong-hye had not vanished, been found in the forest, and worsened. The crisis thus exposes the limit of In-hye’s habitual endurance: care can keep her sister from being abandoned, but it cannot restore the life that preceded the woods.

Yeong-hye’s Account and the Continuing Crisis

In a later hospital conversation, Yeong-hye lies in bed with a drip needle inserted into the back of her hand. In-hye asks why she went into the dark woods, whether she was cold, and what she would have done if she had caught a serious illness. Yeong-hye is haggard, her uncombed hair matted; she first asks for water, then asks whether In-hye has spoken with the doctor.

Looking toward the forest, In-hye recalls Yeong-hye’s explanation: she had gone because she heard something calling her, but no longer heard it, and had simply stood there waiting. When In-hye asks what she was waiting for, Yeong-hye’s feverish gaze and unexpectedly strong grip on her sister’s hand offer no further clarification. The account gives the disappearance an inward prompt without resolving it into a clear intention or destination.

The episode also sits within a worsening refusal to eat. During the hospital crisis, staff report that Yeong-hye has stopped coming to the lobby for meals and will not eat even when food is brought to the ward; after four days she is dehydrated. In-hye asks why she will not eat anything at all, distinguishing the refusal of other food from the earlier rejection of meat. The disappearance therefore belongs to a wider rupture in which familiar forms of care and bodily survival no longer reach Yeong-hye as they once did.

Significance

Last March is both a date In-hye uses to divide her life and an uncertainty the narrative refuses to close. Its force comes from the contrast between her sister’s practical efforts to keep life running and Yeong-hye’s movement toward the forest, away from the ward and its schedules. The remembered handstand, the rainy search, the hospital drip, and the distant slope of Mount Ch’ukseong connect successive moments without explaining them away. What remains is an event whose consequences are unmistakable, while the call that led Yeong-hye there—and what she was waiting for—remains beyond In-hye’s understanding.