Human Acts

Jeong-dae narrates this chapter after his death. His body has been carted off by soldiers in a military truck and stacked near the bottom of a heap of bodies in an empty lot. His corpse is badly crushed and damaged by this mistreatment.

Although Jeong-dae didn’t encounter any souls like himself in the military truck, after the soldiers dump their bodies, he navigates to the top of the pile, and there, he feels something brush against him: “…that breath-soft slip of incorporeal something, that faceless shadow, lacking even language, now, to give it a body” (57). Jeong-dae cannot communicate with this other soul, and eventually, it drifts off. This happens repeatedly throughout the night as he brushes up against other souls. As the first light of dawn begins to show, Jeong-dae suddenly thinks of Dong-ho and how he was with him right up until the moment he died.

Putrefaction and rot begin to set into the bodies, and they are further defiled by insects and parasites. Jeong-dae wants to look for Dong-ho but finds himself stuck to his rotting body. However, as he sits trapped, Jeong-dae realizes that Dong-ho isn’t among the dead—leading him to discover that if he focuses his attention on a particular individual, he can sense whether they are alive or dead. He focuses on his sister, Jeong-mi, and realizes with agony that she has also died.

Jeong-dae begins to lose his sense of self. He no longer feels that he is 15 years old or belongs to any age. But as he loses himself, he begins to focus more and more on the questions that keep him occupied: “Who killed me, who killed my sister, and why?” (60). Part of him still yearns for his sister, but he doesn’t even know if he would recognize her as a soul and is still stuck to his corpse.

Two soldiers show up and carry another batch of bodies to the empty lot, stacking them in a heap next to the stack Jeong-dae is in. The souls cluster around these new arrivals. One of them is a corpse who is relatively clean, having had his wounds tended before his death. Jeong-dae feels envious of the care shown to this corpse, and despises his own crushed, rotting body.

No longer able to sleep or dream, Jeong-dae wishes he could escape into his memories and thinks back to the day when he took a blackboard eraser as a joke for Jeong-mi. He thinks of how that night, he heard his sister laugh out loud as he pretended to sleep. He clings to this memory and then tries to remember more things, such as the sensation of riding a bike, the reflective water in the rice fields, the feeling of burning his tongue on a hot potato, even the yearning he’d had to someday love a woman. But ultimately, Jeong-dae returns to fixating on the moment of his death and the soldiers who caused it.

Jeong-dae loses track of time, noting only the arrival and departure of the military truck bringing more corpses to add to the pile. Some of them have clearly come from hospitals, some have been beaten beyond all recognition, and some have had their heads dipped in paint, their faces erased. Even though they cannot communicate, Jeong-dae gets a sense that some of them have suffered worse atrocities than others. He wonders if, given enough time, the souls would eventually learn to better understand one another—but he never gets the opportunity to find out. One day, heavy rainfall pours on the bodies. Later that night, the military truck arrives, and the soldiers unload new bodies with more carelessness than usual. They cover all the bodies with petrol and light them on fire. As the bodies begin to burn, the force holding the souls to this location is severed, and they begin to soar upward in the clouds of smoke. Jeong-dae knows the fire will soon release him from this location, but doesn’t know where he will go. He still doesn’t know where his sister is, and doesn’t know who murdered him. But in a moment of clarity, he decides to find Dong-ho.

But then, there is a mighty thunderclap noise, and as Jeong-dae feels souls leaving their bodies, he knows that Dong-ho has died in this moment. He wants to go to Dong-ho and help ease his transition, but finds himself unable to move.