Summary
In-hye takes a bus to the Ch'ukseong Psychiatric Hospital to visit her sister. As the bus passes Maseok, In-hye sees the woods out the window and wonders if this is where her sister was found when she escaped the hospital a few months prior. In-hye continues reflecting on the past as she waits to meet with Yeong-hye's doctor. In-hye tries to pinpoint when exactly everything began to fall apart. She feels that she should have intervened at some point and tried harder to stop things from unfolding the way they did.
The doctor informs In-hye that the medical staff have been unsuccessful in treating Yeong-hye. Their plan is to try feeding her intravenously and if that doesn't work, transfer her to one of the critical wards at the general hospital.
A nurse informs In-hye that Yeong-hye has been trying to pull her IV needle out, so they had to tranquilize her. On a previous visit, In-hye found her sister practicing handstands much to the annoyance of the nurses. Yeong-hye informed In-hye that she doesn't need to eat anymore. She just needs water. On this visit, In-hye finds that her sister resembles a prepubescent child due to her prolonged starvation. In-hye tries to tempt her sister to eat fruit to no avail. In-hye remembers her sister asking if it was such a bad thing to die, and thinks about how Yeong-hye absorbed the suffering from their father's beatings.
In-hye remembers going to the gynecologist two years prior and having a polyp removed. This period of time was a reminder that "her life had never belonged to her."
Analysis
Part 3 begins in the third-person point of view, following In-hye as she visits her sister at the psychiatric hospital. Everyone on the bus examines In-hye with a mixture of "suspicion, caution, repugnance, and curiosity" when they find out her destination. She claims to be used to this, showing the way that mental health issues are socially stigmatized.
The uncanny enters the narrative again in Part 3 when Yeong-hye speaks in In-hye's dream and then later says the exact same words in reality. Fatigued from taking care of her sick son all week, In-hye slips into an exhausted dream state. Between sleeping and waking, she hears Yeong-hye explain that she does handstands because she wants to become a tree. Yeong-hye says, "leaves are growing out of my body, roots are sprouting out of my hands...they delve down into the earth...I spread my legs because I wanted flowers to bloom from my crotch; I spread them wide..." At the hospital, Yeong-hye repeats this statement in nearly the same way, showing how accurate In-hye's premonition was.
Nature becomes the nexus between the two sisters, translating Yeong-hye's experiences so that her older sister can understand and empathize. At the beginning of Part 3, In-hye realizes that "the rain she had seen all day must have been pouring down on the mountain where Yeong-hye has been found too." In-hye calls this "an indiscriminate connection, their existences briefly aligned." Albeit in less extreme ways than her sister, In-hye begins to open herself to communicating with and through nature. When she sees an old zelkova tree at the hospital, she watches "the sunlight scintillate its leaves, seemingly communicating something to her." She sees her sister's face superimposed on the tree, reinforcing their connection.
Upon reflection, In-hye realizes that she had been trying to help herself and address her own exhaustion when she married her husband. At first, she had just wanted to use her own strength to ease his burdens, but his inscrutability created an insurmountable distance between them. They separated after his transgression with Yeong-hye. This left Ji-woo without a father figure, but the boy had always asked the same question ("is there a dad in our family?") repeatedly, even before the separation.
With her husband gone and her sister admitted to a psychiatric hospital, In-hye begins to understand each of them better. Perhaps this is because she is losing her own grip on reality as a result of compounding stress and exhaustion. For example, she climbs into the bathtub where she used to find her husband asleep with his clothes still on, and finds that the tub is "cozier than anywhere else in the entire apartment." However, In-hye does not think she will ever cross the line and transgress certain social boundaries the way her sister and husband did. This feeling is particularly strong in relation to Yeong-hye. In-hye talks about not being able to forgive Yeong-hye "for soaring alone over a boundary [In-hye] herself could never bring herself to cross."
