Unlike most people, Hayoung looks blankly at the sunrise over the East Sea and imagines a fresh wound dripping blood. She clutches the corpse of a complete stranger and bursts into hysterical tears, only to laugh and stand up when she learns that the person died by suicide after taking poison. Hearing people around her mutter that she must be crazy, she leaves to drink soju alone. Such descriptions reveal almost nothing of Hayoung's true feelings. Readers can only dimly sense a woman swinging between outbursts and numbness.
Hayoung's trauma runs deep. Ever since the death of Sejun, a young man she secretly loved, she seems to have lived with persistent trauma and to have distorted her own memories. Sejun was a friend of her older brother and sometimes visited their rural home. One day they met alone on a country path and spent time by a nearby stream. When Hayoung asked whether he could swim, Sejun leapt gracefully into the water—and never breathed again. Some time later, Hayoung found herself surrounded by people, attempting to resuscitate him. She did not even know what artificial respiration was, but she tried anyway, perhaps hoping it might still work. Afterward, she suffered violence at the hands of Sejun's family, lost her father, and eventually married and formed a family of her own.
As a result, Hayoung experiences distortions of memory and reality, though she herself does not recognize them. The text does not explicitly say so, but she seems to suffer from dementia. One indication is the final scene, when a telephone call she makes home fails to connect and her manner of speaking suddenly changes. There is even an academic paper discussing a narrator with dementia in The Unbearable Secret. I concluded that Hayoung's dementia arose from the trauma surrounding Sejun. His death must have been an unbearable shock, and the cries of his grieving family that their bloodline had ended could hardly have been easy to forget. Rather than confronting the pain and recovering from it, she chose not to face it. In my interpretation, this eventually developed into dementia. Trauma also distorts her perception of reality. Exactly one year after Sejun's death, she witnesses another accident, this time involving a car, and comes to believe that she possesses some power to harm others. Although this cannot be true, the fracture within her is so severe that her judgment and self-perception are overwhelmed.
Hayoung thus enters a deeply unstable state. Just as someone balancing precariously can fall at the slightest movement, her mind is thrown into hysteria by the smallest stimulus. When an elderly stranger uses an expression about a family line coming to an end, Hayoung remembers Sejun, begins trembling violently, and flees. Her violent interpretation of the sunrise, her hysterical grief over a stranger's body, and her sudden ability to laugh and walk away can all be read as effects of trauma. She lives continually on the edge of hysteria.
Ultimately, trauma can be so powerful that it reshapes a person's past and clouds their judgment of reality. It confines the person to seeing the world and themselves through a particular frame. In Hayoung's case, I interpret the effects as so severe that, without adequate treatment or care, they culminate in the lasting distortion of memory that is dementia. Perhaps, for Hayoung, the “unbearable secret” was not Sejun's death itself, but the cold reality that she would have to confront her pain. She chose not to face that secret in order to protect herself. Might her distorted memories, then, have been not simply a tragedy but, paradoxically, her only refuge?