“No. She woke up a little while ago, so we moved her back to the ward. They told you they’re putting the nasal drip in at two, right?”

She follows the nurse into the third-floor lobby. On fine days there are elderly patients sitting on the long bench by the window and soaking up the sun, others engrossed in a game of table tennis, cheery music filtering in from the nurses’ room. But today all of that liveliness seems to have been smothered by the incessant rain. Perhaps because the majority of the patients are in their wards, there isn’t much going on in the lobby. The table tennis bats lie unused on the table.

She looks down along the ward’s western corridor, where, right at the end, the afternoon sunlight shines through the large window more brightly than in any other spot on sunny days. When In-hye came to see Yeong-hye last March, just a few days before the latter disappeared into the rainy woods, Yeong-hye refused to come to the visiting room. When In-hye contacted the head nurse from reception, the nurse said that, oddly enough, Yeong-hye hadn’t wanted to leave the ward for several days now. Even during the hour when an unaccompanied walk was permitted, a time that all the patients always looked forward to, she’d kept to the ward. When In-hye asked if she could just go and look at her sister’s face, given that she’d come all this way, the nurse came down to reception to accompany her.

When she came upon the unexpected sight of a female patient doing a handstand at the far end of the western corridor, it never even crossed her mind that it might be Yeong-hye. Only when the nurse, with whom she’d just spoken on the telephone, guided her in that direction had she been able to recognize Yeong-hye’s long, thick hair. Her sister was upside down and balancing on her hands, her face flushed almost puce.

“She’s been at it for thirty minutes already,” the nurse said, seeming impatient. “It started two days ago. It’s not that she isn’t aware of her surroundings, or that she doesn’t speak…she’s different from the other catatonic patients. Up until yesterday we’d been having to force her back into the ward; but no matter what we did she just started up with the handstands again as soon as she was in the ward, so…so we can’t even force her to stop.” Before he went back to the nurses’ room, the nurse said, “She’ll fall over if you give her a little nudge. Give it a try if you can’t get her to talk to you. We would have had to push her over to get her back in the ward, anyway.”

Left alone with Yeong-hye, In-hye squatted down and tried to look her sister in the eye. Anyone’s face will look different when they’re upside down. Yeong-hye’s face certainly looked odd, with what little flesh she had on her cheeks pushed down toward her eyes. Those eyes were glittering and sharp as Yeong-hye stared into space. She seemed unaware of her sister’s presence.