The Neighbor's Quiet Despair
“Give me my underwear!”
The bathroom towel rack held several pairs. I hadn’t thought much of it at first, but once I finished drying off, I realized I hadn’t packed any fresh ones.
This kind of thing happened more often than I cared to admit. Especially right after work.
“Underwear!”
I called out a little louder, and I heard rustling from beyond the door. Footsteps soon approached. “H-here…”
The door cracked open just enough for a hand to slide in. At its tip was a pair of gray panties. “Ah, thanks.”
I took the underwear. The hand withdrew instantly. The footsteps retreated, and I heard a heavy thump of someone collapsing somewhere inside the room.
After wiping myself dry with the towel, I slipped into the panties and stepped out of the bathroom. “…”
As I shook my hair, I found my sister sprawled out on the floor. Her body was half-dissolved into the floor like something melted, her elbows propped up as she stared at the screen.
While I was at work she’d been glued to her computer. When I got home she switched to her phone. That was only natural. My life was geared toward night shifts, and hers had followed suit at some point. As long as her roommate slept, even blasting videos loud was fine because it didn’t annoy anyone. For someone who wasn’t working, it was just obvious. “…Sigh.”
I ran my hand through my wet hair and sat down at the table. The food my sister had prepared was waiting for me. Rice. Rolled omelet. Stir-fried fish cakes. Kimchi. Soup. Nothing fancy, but it was edible. Having someone else cook dinner when I came home was actually convenient. Well, at least I had to eat something. My sister took care of most of the housework since she didn’t work. Cleaning. Laundry. Meal prep. Shopping for essentials. If she had a full-time housewife wife, it probably felt like that. Too bad she was just my sister, a hikikomori who rarely left the house. And I was the poor brother who fed and clothed her. “Mmmph.”
I shoveled rice into my mouth and turned on YouTube. I’d watch videos that would be forgotten by tomorrow while I ate. I left for work in the late afternoon and got home around sunset. A chubby fairy-like sister setting out dinner, then immediately checking her phone. Still, I should count my blessings. At least I had a warm, full belly. Compared to the African refugees I sometimes thought about. Even if I was barely scraping by in this tiny one-room apartment, supporting my sister alone. “I’m done.” “Mhm.”
When I set down my spoon, my sister stood up on instinct. Her movements were slow, but her hands knew exactly what to do. She stacked the bowls, wrapped the leftovers in plastic, rinsed the cups, and headed toward the sink. Her round body squeezed through the narrow room. “Water, please.” “Just a sec.”
Instead of finishing, she hurried to the fridge and poured water into the cup she had brought. “Thanks.” My sister began cleaning again. She was a bear. Not literally, but she was chubby. Calling her plump was almost an understatement. Living in the house all day probably hadn’t helped. Not that she’d always been this way. She’d been curvy since childhood. Now it was worse. Clink. Clink. The sound of bowls hitting the sink came from the direction of the faucet. I sipped my water and watched her back. My sister lacked confidence in most things, but she was surprisingly competent with housework. She could cook, do laundry without missing a beat, and keep the house looking lived-in. Yet she couldn’t hold down a job. The irony was bitter. “…”
There was one more thing that stood out about my sister. Brown hair. Blue eyes. Fair skin. She looked like a complete foreigner. She hadn’t dyed her hair or worn colored contacts. She was born that way. I looked like a typical Korean guy, but she was the opposite. Walking down the street, you’d have no trouble greeting her in English. She was the perfect Western beauty from the movies, not quite a blonde idol, maybe more like the nerdy girl from a high-school mid-tier drama who was always in a hoodie and had no friends because she stuttered and talked too much. If she just stood there quietly, you’d think she was a farmer’s daughter from some rural European village. She might even pass for one. Not that she ever left this room. Strange. A face like that, those exact hair and eye colors, yet she acted like a typical hikikomori shut-in. So, my sister and I weren’t similar at all. If it were ten, we were ten. If it were one hundred, we were one hundred. Most people assumed we were just siblings, but we really were. Father was the same. Mother was the same. I just happened to take after Dad more, and she took after Mom. Purely a matter of genes. The hikikomori sister. The brother living with her. From the outside world’s perspective, it was an odd pairing. Well, what can you do. Strange households usually came with strange stories, and ours was no different. That was exactly why we were sharing this cramped one-room apartment. * To understand how we ended up living together, I have to talk about Dad first. Or rather, about the process that gave my sister life. That event wrecked her entire existence. Our father was Korean. An international marriage. Back then it was rare, even more so in the countryside where he lived. Dad had farmed his whole life. Born and raised there, he was growing old in the same village. He had almost never left the region and certainly never lived in a city. A country bumpkin. The kindest way to put it. He didn’t look particularly handsome either. I could see it in my own reflection, and old photos confirmed it. The Dad in those pictures was gaunt, his skin dark and rough from the sun, his face shadowed with the tired look of a lifelong farmer. He could have passed for Southeast Asian. In that era, young people were leaving for the cities in droves. Dad stayed. He clung to the family farm and buried his youth in the countryside. There were almost no girls his age nearby. Even if there had been, none of them would have come near a man who farmed in a backwater town, was getting older, and looked average. Coldly speaking, it was unlikely he attracted any women. So when he turned forty, the fear of being alone must have finally hit. Dad spent a lot of money on an international marriage. I don’t know the details. Who introduced her, how much it cost, or which agency arranged it. I never asked. Like most men in his position, he probably used money. Thankfully, it wasn’t a scam. Dad actually brought a woman home, and that woman was my mother. Since I was born, that was proof enough. Mom was Ukrainian. The country was known for beautiful women, and Mom wasn’t exactly ugly. She wasn’t a supermodel, but she was pretty enough. She was young too. Only about twenty years older than Dad. Looking back now, it makes sense. A forty-year-old rural farmer and a twenty-year-old foreign woman. Either way, they got married and had a child. My sister was born first. I came a few years later. But I barely knew Dad. Sadly, he died after only about five years of marriage, sick and gone. The same went for Mom. I barely remembered her face. I was six when she disappeared. It was abandonment, plain and simple. I heard she ran off with another man. No one explained it to me as a child, but the atmosphere was enough. That was when my sister’s suffering really began. Dad was an only child. He never left his birthplace and lived with his own mother, our grandmother, the whole time. Marriage didn’t change anything. Mom moved in, and we were born and raised there. In short, we were raised by our grandmother from the cradle. The problem was that she hated men. She preferred sons to daughters. Not openly, but the favoritism was clear. I always came first. I was a boy, after all. Plus I looked like Dad. My skin was a bit lighter, but my face and mannerisms were unmistakably Korean boy. From her perspective, I was the only worthwhile grandson. My sister was the opposite. A foreign daughter’s child. Her looks were the spitting image of the woman Dad had married. The woman Grandma hated. Grandma disliked Mom and, by extension, hated my sister even though she was her own granddaughter. She didn’t starve or beat her until she ended up in the hospital. She just ignored her. She only called my sister when she needed something done. Clean the floor. Set the table. Watch your brother. Hang the laundry. Once she was old enough, my sister took over the housework. While I played outside, she swept the yard. While I did my homework in my room, she prepared side dishes beside Grandma. To Grandma, my sister was less a granddaughter and more a young housemaid. But the outside world wasn’t any better. In the countryside, a chubby girl with brown hair and blue eyes stuck out like a sore thumb. People whispered. Adults stared openly. Kids were even more blatant. Foreigner’s daughter. Pig. Strange eyes. That was probably what they said. I heard it myself and figured it out later. At school I was the target. At home I was like a servant. Either way, it was hard for someone like her to stay sane. My sister’s personality made sense. No confidence. Always checking if she was bothering anyone. Stuttered speech. Shoulders hunched like she was always apologizing. A permanent gloomy expression. That was exactly how she became today. Even I, who said these things, hadn’t been much different back then. I was young too. Being young wasn’t an excuse, but I was still a kid. Grandma loved me, and the household tilted in my favor, so I naturally took it for granted. I teased my sister for being dumb. Ignored her when she stuttered. Got annoyed when she cried. Made her do errands. I never thought I was doing anything wrong. I figured it was okay. As I grew older I learned better, but it wasn’t out of maturity. I just woke up to what I was. At home I was like a precious prince, but outside I was nothing. There were plenty of better kids out there. Tall, handsome, good at studying, good at sports, with great personalities. I was on the opposite end. Small. Middling. Unremarkable. At one point I got so fed up I took it out on my sister. But over time even that got annoying. Puberty, middle-school syndrome, whatever. I turned into a cynical adult on my own. So we grew up together. Not really close, but not total strangers either. Just two siblings sharing the same house. That was it. By the time I graduated high school, my sister had already left home. She was working in a factory and sending money back. Living like a proper sister. I was no different. Even if I had been pampered, our family wasn’t wealthy. I never had a good head for studies. I didn’t plan on going to college. After high school I just figured I’d get a job. Right after graduation I joined the army. I was shattered countless times in the military. Not beaten to hell, but the system was absurd enough to break a person without fists. Forced smiles. Forced bows. Pretending not to hate it. Accepting nonsense as truth. By the time I got out, I hated humanity even more. I had never liked it, but now I loathed it. The idea of being alone had become stronger. The reason I left home was simple. I rented a tiny studio, worked part-time at a convenience store, and started living somewhat detached from people. A few months later came the news of Grandma’s passing. She collapsed one day and never woke up. Dad had fathered us at nearly forty, so Grandma was already quite old. She could have died of old age any time. The funeral was quiet. There were almost no relatives. Most of Grandma’s friends were gone or too old. Few people came, so we just held a simple cremation. After that we sold the house. I had no intention of living there. It was too rural. No jobs, distant hospital, far supermarket, empty neighborhood. Tax issues and no one to manage it. We sold it quickly with the little money we had. Luckily there were no debts. Several months passed. I kept scraping by at the convenience store. And then. The call from my sister came. We’d seen each other at the funeral a few years earlier, but it had been awkward on both sides. So I didn’t know what she wanted at first. The words she spoke surprised me. “Can’t we live together?” Live together. It was absurd. Of course I refused. Our place was a one-room apartment, and even with a sister I didn’t want to share with anyone. Being alone was better. But when I heard the reason, I felt like laughing. She said she was being ostracized at work. This wasn’t the first time. Previous companies had done it too. Verbal abuse, harassment, impossible workloads. After that people got scared of her. She had quit and stayed home for months. Money was running out, she might not even pay rent soon. It was ridiculous. Listening made me dizzy. Then what? I said. For me it was obvious. I understood, but it didn’t give her a reason to stay. Sadly, that obvious advice no longer worked on her. Over the phone she was half-sobbing and stuttering, and I couldn’t stop her. I don’t need the painful details of what happened. The result was what you see now. What could I do. Even if she was pathetic, my sister was still my sister. Plus, thinking about the things I’d done to her as a kid and her childhood, I couldn’t just pretend I didn’t know. Of course I was unwilling, so I made conditions. Leave when you feel better. Start living independently once you can work. I couldn’t support her forever. That’s what I said. My sister nodded. At the time she probably believed she could. I did too. “Sigh.” It’s been months now. Rolling the blanket tight, my sister stares blankly at her phone in a dark corner of the room. Recently I’ve only thought she’s given up. But because she’s done housework since she was little, she still cooks, cleans, and does laundry. If she didn’t, I might have kicked her out long ago. “…” So, that was how my sister and I ended up living together. Honestly. My life. Lately I’ve been thinking about how we got to this point.