Summary

Pages 68 – 85. The artist’s conversation with Yeong-hye is unsatisfactory, because she is mostly silent. Narration reveals that Yeong-hye spent several months in a psychiatric hospital, then afterwards she came to live with the artist and In-hye. At that point, Yeong-hye had seemed perfectly fine, if a bit quiet. The conversation ends with Yeong-hye finally speaking, in “the quiet tone of a person who … had passed into a border area between states of being (71).

Narration then describes how the artist’s contemplations of Yeong-hye have all blended with images of the Mongolian Mark, and refers to the artist’s sense that the blood that soaked his shirt in the aftermath of her suicide attempt was some kind of premonition of his fate. Meanwhile, he goes to Yeong-hye’s apartment, taking a bag of fruit. He rings the doorbell, and when there is...