The psychiatric hospital where Yeong-hye is hospitalized

The psychiatric hospital where Yeong-hye is hospitalized is both a place of care and a place of confinement: In-hye comes there to visit her younger sister, while staff work to manage Yeong-hye’s refusal of food and worsening condition. The hospital’s corridors and wards frame a shift from visits that briefly seem to preserve an ordinary sisterly closeness to an emergency in which medical intervention, patient resistance, and In-hye’s responsibility collide.

Setting and Access

On a rainy day, In-hye gets off a bus alone at a hill road and walks toward the small hospital, passing through a roughly fifty-meter tunnel. Flaxleaf fleabane has pushed through the asphalt along the way. The approach is quiet and remote, a contrast to the urgency that brings her there: she has come to see Yeong-hye, who has been missing since the previous March and was later found in the woods.

The hospital is organized around controlled movement. At the first annex, patients press against a glass door while a nurse comes with a key, closes the door behind him, and locks it. Inside, staff accompany visitors and patients between reception, corridors, wards, and visiting areas. These boundaries are not incidental to the setting: they shape what In-hye can see, how she reaches her sister, and the difference between a visit and access on Yeong-hye’s terms.

The hospital’s ordinary rhythms are visible in the third-floor lobby. On fine days, elderly patients sit by the window in the sun, others play table tennis, and music comes from the nurses’ room. During the prolonged rain, patients remain in their wards and the bats lie unused. The contrast makes the hospital feel less like a neutral backdrop than a daily environment whose routines can be interrupted by weather, illness, and restrictions on movement.

Visits and the Sisters’ Relationship

Before the crisis became acute, In-hye visited once a month, bringing fruit, rice cakes, or fried tofu stuffed with vinegared rice. In the visiting room, Yeong-hye would silently go through the motions of eating. When In-hye tucked her hair behind her ears, Yeong-hye sometimes looked up and smiled. Those modest exchanges could reassure In-hye that her sister might be able to live indefinitely in a setting where she was not required to speak if she did not want to or eat meat if it repelled her.

That hope reflects the history In-hye carries into the hospital. Yeong-hye is four years younger, and In-hye remembers feeling protective of her from childhood, when their father’s violence fell especially on Yeong-hye. In-hye’s visits therefore hold more than the immediate work of checking on a patient: they are also attempts to sustain a relationship in which she has long felt responsible for her sister’s safety. Her later doubts about what she could have prevented follow her from the family’s home into the hospital.

The hospital setting also places the sisters’ closeness beside institutional care. Hee-joo, a patient receiving treatment for alcoholism and hypomania, had been assigned to help look after Yeong-hye when she became difficult to manage and refused food. She tells In-hye that Yeong-hye may die. The exchange makes clear that care in the ward is not performed by doctors and nurses alone; patients with better control of their faculties also take on supportive roles, for a little pocket money, even as the limits of that arrangement become painfully apparent.

Worsening Condition and Medical Response

Three months after Yeong-hye was found in the forest, the doctor told In-hye that her sister had stopped coming to the lobby for meals and would not eat even when a tray was brought to the ward. Staff had avoided serving food containing meat because seeing it disturbed her, but now she was refusing food altogether. She was becoming dehydrated, and attempts to give her medication or insert a drip were complicated by her resistance. The doctor also doubted whether she had been taking her medication: when a nurse checked her mouth, the tablets were still there.

The hospital’s response escalates as Yeong-hye’s condition worsens. In-hye learns that Yeong-hye’s condition has not improved, and the doctor says they will try feeding her intravenously; if that does not help, they will need to transfer her to a critical ward at the general hospital. Later, staff explain that repeated attempts to place a nasal tube have failed because Yeong-hye closes her throat. The IV has become increasingly difficult as veins in her hands, feet, and elbows are damaged. The remaining option they describe—access through an artery near the shoulder—would require a dangerous operation at the general hospital.

On an earlier visit, Yeong-hye lies in the ward with a drip needle in the back of her hand. In-hye asks what she was doing in the dark woods, whether she had been cold, and why she would not eat anything, even food without meat. Yeong-hye asks for water and then asks whether In-hye has spoken to the doctor. The brief exchange shows how little the hospital’s clinical explanations can settle between them: In-hye presses for an account of the disappearance and the refusal to eat, while Yeong-hye’s immediate request is for water and her attention turns to the doctor’s conversation with her sister.

The Ward’s Limits and Crisis

The hospital’s rules and the limits of staff control become especially visible in the account of Yeong-hye standing on her hands at the far end of the western corridor. During In-hye’s visit the previous March, Yeong-hye had refused to leave the ward for several days, even during the hour when patients were permitted an unaccompanied walk. When In-hye asked to see her, a nurse escorted her. At the corridor’s end, Yeong-hye was upside down, balancing on her hands; the nurse said she had been doing so for thirty minutes and had begun two days earlier. Staff had tried to return her to the ward, but she resumed the handstands. The nurse tells In-hye that a small nudge would make her fall, an offhand suggestion that exposes the strain between managing a patient and respecting her agency.

Later, staff report that Yeong-hye has become so unwell that feeding her through a tube is the last available measure in the hospital. The procedure turns into a struggle: carers and a nurse’s aide hold her down, and she cries out for them to leave her alone. In-hye is asked to step outside. When the attempt results in bleeding, she re-enters the room and demands that the tube be removed. The scene makes the hospital’s central conflict concrete: an intervention intended to preserve Yeong-hye’s life is being carried out against her resistance, while her sister can no longer remain a detached visitor.

Afterward, the doctor tells In-hye that Yeong-hye must be transferred to the main hospital in Seoul for treatment of gastric bleeding and a protein injection through a carotid artery. The effect, he says, will not last long, but it is the only way to keep her alive. In-hye takes the admission letter and leaves the nurses’ room, only to collapse in a bathroom cubicle and vomit. The hospital has not resolved the crisis; it has reached the point at which its resources are insufficient and transfer is necessary.

Narrative Significance

The hospital’s corridors, locked doors, visiting room, and treatment spaces give physical form to the tension between care and control. In-hye’s memories of quiet visits—food laid out, a small smile, her sister’s hair tucked behind her ears—stand against ward routines in which meals, medication, movement, and feeding become matters of staff intervention. The same institution that allows In-hye to imagine a tolerable life for Yeong-hye also makes the limits of that hope impossible to ignore.

The setting further concentrates the novel’s concern with how Yeong-hye’s experiences are interpreted by others. In-hye arrives with memories of family violence and questions about her own failures, while hospital staff describe symptoms, restrictions, and medical options. Yeong-hye is repeatedly encountered through observation and report, yet her resistance in the ward makes her presence unmistakable. By ending this hospital episode with transfer rather than recovery, the narrative leaves care unresolved: the attempt to preserve life continues, but neither the institution nor In-hye can make the underlying conflict disappear.