D-Day 996 (1): The Narrow Room We Share
“Bring me some underwear!”
The towel was already in the bathroom. Several pairs sat on the shelf, so I hadn’t given it any thought. Only after I’d finished showering did I realize I’d forgotten to grab any. These things happened often. Especially right after a night shift. When everything feels like a chore, you cut every corner you can.
“Underwear!”
I called louder. A rustling noise answered from the other room, followed by quick, shuffling footsteps. The door cracked open just enough for a hand to slip through. Gray panties dangled from the fingertips.
“Oh. Thanks.”
I took them. The hand vanished instantly. Footsteps retreated, and I heard the heavy thud of someone dropping onto the floor somewhere in the apartment.
I dried myself, stepped into the underwear, and left the bathroom. My hair was still damp when I emerged.
…
My older sister lay sprawled face-down on the floor like something half-melted into the linoleum. Only her elbows were raised, propping up her phone. While I worked, she probably stayed glued to the computer. The moment I came home, she switched to mobile. It made sense. My life ran on a night schedule now, and at some point hers had synchronized to it. No one wants to hammer away at a keyboard or blast videos while their roommate is trying to sleep. From the perspective of someone who doesn’t work, the guilt must be constant.
“…Ugh.”
I shook the water from my hair and sat at the small table. My sister had laid out a meal. Rice. Rolled omelet. Stir-fried fish cake. Kimchi. Soup. Nothing special, but edible. There was a quiet comfort in coming home to food already waiting. She had to contribute something. In exchange for not working, she handled nearly all the housework—cleaning, laundry, cooking, restocking necessities. In a way, it felt like having a full-time housewife. The sad part was that she wasn’t my wife. She was my older sister, a hikikomori who almost never left the apartment. And I was the pathetic younger brother stuck supporting her.
I shoveled rice into my mouth and opened YouTube, watching videos that would be forgotten by tomorrow. Late-afternoon shifts, home at sunrise, eating a midnight meal prepared by my sister while scrolling on my phone. She really did resemble Dobby the house-elf sometimes. Still, I tried to look on the bright side. It wasn’t the worst arrangement. Compared to refugees starving somewhere in Africa, a warm back and a full stomach counted as a decent life. Even if that life meant supporting my sister alone inside this cramped studio.
“I’m done.”
“Uh… yeah.”
The moment I set my spoon down, she rose with practiced slowness. Her movements were sluggish, but the order was automatic—someone who had repeated the same sequence for years. She stacked the bowls, covered the leftovers with plastic wrap, gathered the cups, and shuffled toward the sink. Her round body navigated the narrow space with surprising efficiency.
“…Water.”
“J-just a second.”
She changed direction mid-task and waddled to the refrigerator, then returned carrying a cup as if rolling her entire body forward.
“Here.”
“Thanks.”
She immediately went back to cleaning. She really did look like a bear. Not in a cute way—she was fat. Too fat for the polite word “plump” to fit. Living indoors all the time probably didn’t help, but the truth was she had always gained weight easily. Even as a child she was never thin. It had simply grown worse.
Clink. Clatter.
Dishes knocked together at the sink. I sipped my water and watched her back. My sister lacked confidence in almost everything, yet she handled housework with surprising competence. Her cooking was at least edible. She never let laundry pile up. The apartment stayed livable. The irony was that she couldn’t manage any kind of life outside these walls.
…
There was one more thing about her that always stood out. Brown hair. Blue eyes. Pale skin. An unmistakably Western appearance. It wasn’t dyed hair or colored contacts. She had been born that way. I looked like any ordinary Korean guy. She didn’t. If you passed her on the street, greeting her in English would feel completely natural. She wasn’t the glamorous blonde from movies or dramas. More like the nerdy side character in a teen American show—the friendless girl who stutters, always wears hoodies, and keeps to herself. If she stood quietly without speaking Korean, you’d believe she came from some potato farm in rural Europe.
Of course, in reality she barely left this room, let alone the country.
It was strange. To have that face, that hair color, those eyes, and still behave like a basement-dwelling hikikomori. Because of it, my sister and I looked nothing alike. Ten out of ten people. A hundred out of a hundred. Almost no one assumed we were blood-related. Yet we were. Same father. Same mother. I simply took after our father. She was our mother’s spitting image. The genes had simply concentrated on one side.
A hikikomori older sister. A younger brother living with her. From any normal perspective, it was a bizarre pairing. Unusual families usually come with unusual stories. Ours was no exception. And those circumstances were exactly why we ended up sharing this tiny studio apartment.
*
To explain how we started living together, I have to talk about our father. More precisely, about the circumstances of my sister’s birth. That single fact ruined a large part of her life.
Our father was Korean. The kind who had gone through an international marriage. These days such families aren’t rare, but back then they were uncommon—especially in the remote countryside where he lived. He had farmed there since childhood, born in that soil, raised in it, and expected to die in it. He had barely traveled beyond the county lines, let alone lived in a city.
A country bumpkin. That was the nicest description. His appearance matched the label. You could see it in my own face and in the old photographs. In them he was rail-thin, his skin burned almost black by the sun, his face carrying the perpetual shadow of exhaustion that farmers wear like a second skin. You would have believed he was Vietnamese. At that time, young people were leaving for the cities in droves. He stayed behind, tending the family fields and burying his youth in that backwater village. There were almost no women his age nearby. Even if there had been, none would have chosen him—a middle-aged farmer with unremarkable looks and no prospects.
Only when he neared forty did the fear of dying alone seem to hit him. He spent a considerable sum on an international marriage. I never learned the exact details—which agency, how much money, who made the introduction. But I can guess it was the usual transaction. Money for a bride.
Fortunately it wasn’t a scam. He actually brought a woman home. That woman became my mother. Since I was born, the proof is obvious. She was Ukrainian. People say that country produces many beauties. She wasn’t stunning, but she was attractive enough. And young—nearly twenty years younger than our father. Looking back, the mismatch feels grotesque. A rural man pushing forty and a foreign woman barely out of her teens. Nevertheless, they married and had children. My sister came first. I followed a few years later.
I barely remember our father. He lived with our mother for only about five years before illness took him. As for our mother, I can scarcely recall her face. She disappeared when I was six. “Disappeared” is the polite word. In truth she ran away with another man, fleeing in the middle of the night. No adult explained the details to a child, but the atmosphere in the house told its own story.
That was when my sister’s real suffering began.
Our father had been an only son. He never left the house where he was born and had lived with his mother—our grandmother—the entire time. Marriage changed nothing. Our mother moved in, and we were born and raised under that roof. From infancy, grandmother raised us.
The problem was that she harbored a vicious preference for boys.
Male superiority. She never said the words outright, but her actions left no doubt. I was always first. I was male. I also resembled our father. Though my skin was somewhat paler, my features and overall impression marked me clearly as a Korean boy. To grandmother, I was a grandson worth keeping. My sister, on the other hand, was ambiguous. The daughter of a foreign woman. She looked exactly like her. The very woman grandmother had hated. Therefore grandmother hated the child who mirrored her. Even though she was her own granddaughter.
She never starved her or beat her hard enough to require hospitalization. It wasn’t that kind of abuse. She simply withheld attention. She called my sister only when she needed something done. Clean this. Set the table. Watch your brother. Hang the laundry. From a young age my sister handled most of the housework. While I played outside, she swept the yard. While I pretended to do homework, she prepared side dishes beside grandmother. To grandmother, my sister was less a granddaughter than a young servant.
Outside the house was no better. In a remote village, a chubby girl with brown hair and blue eyes stood out like a beacon. The whispers were inevitable. Adults stared openly. Children were crueler. Foreigner’s daughter. Pig. Weird-eye girl. I heard some of it myself. I can guess the rest.
A target for mockery outside. A servant inside. It would have been strange if someone in that position turned out normal. My sister’s personality—lacking confidence, constantly reading the room, stuttering, always shrinking as if she had done something wrong, wearing that perpetual gloomy expression—was the natural result.
The me who describes all this wasn’t much different back then. I was a child. Being young doesn’t excuse everything, but it is the truth. Grandmother doted on me. The household atmosphere tilted in my favor. So I accepted it as natural. I teased my sister for being stupid. I ignored her. When she stuttered I mimicked her. When she cried I found it annoying. I ordered her around. At the time I didn’t even realize I was doing anything wrong. I thought it was simply how things worked.
As I grew older I stopped. Not because I suddenly developed a conscience, but because I finally understood my own place in the world. At home I might have been the precious prince, but outside I was nothing special. There were plenty of boys who were taller, better-looking, smarter, more athletic, and more likable. I belonged to the opposite category. Small. Mediocre. Invisible. For a while I took that frustration out on my sister. Eventually even that became tiresome. Puberty, eighth-grade syndrome, whatever you want to call it—I simply turned cynical.
That was how we grew up. Not particularly close. Not complete strangers. Just family sharing the same house. That was all.
By the time I graduated high school, my sister had already finished school and left home. More accurately, she worked at a factory and sent money back. She was living exactly as people expected her to. I wasn’t any different. Even though I had been pampered, the family wasn’t wealthy. Besides, I had no talent for studying. I never planned to attend university. From high school onward I assumed I would simply work. The moment I graduated I entered the military.
The military broke me in countless ways. Not through physical beatings—the modern army doesn’t operate like that. But absurdity can destroy a person without fists. You smile when you don’t want to. You adjust when it’s unfair. You endure what you hate. You accept nonsense as truth. By the time I was discharged, I hated people even more than before. The desire to be alone had become overwhelming.
Leaving home was simple. I rented a studio, took a part-time job at a convenience store, and began living at a deliberate distance from others. A few months later came the news of grandmother’s death. She collapsed suddenly, lost consciousness, and never woke up. Since our father had us late in life, she was already very old. It wasn’t a shocking end.
The funeral was quiet. We had almost no relatives. Most of the people grandmother knew had either died or were too old to travel. We cremated her without ceremony. Afterward we sold the house. I had no intention of living there. It was too remote—no jobs, no hospital, no market, no people. Taxes and maintenance were beyond me. We sold it cheaply. At least there were no debts.
More months passed. I drifted along, working nights at the convenience store. Then the call came from my sister.
We had seen each other at grandmother’s funeral for the first time in years, but we barely spoke. We stood awkwardly, then parted awkwardly. So when she contacted me, I had no idea what she wanted.
Her request was unexpected. Could we live together?
I refused immediately. My place was a studio. Even though she was my biological sister, the thought of sharing space with anyone repulsed me. Being alone was comfortable.
Then she told me why.
She was being bullied at work. It wasn’t the first time. The previous job had been the same. And the one before that. Verbal abuse, harassment, excessive workloads. After a while she became afraid of people. She had already quit some time ago and stayed inside. Her savings were nearly gone. She would soon be unable to pay rent.
The story was horrifying in its predictability. I told her to get another job. To me it seemed obvious. I understood her fear, but understanding wasn’t the same as accepting her as a dependent. Sadly, she had already passed the point where reasonable arguments worked. Over the phone she half-cried and stuttered so badly I couldn’t interrupt her.
I don’t need to describe the rest. The result is visible right now.
What could I do? No matter how pathetic she was, she was still my sister. When I remembered how I had treated her as a child and what her childhood had been like, I couldn’t simply abandon her. Of course I set conditions. Get better and leave. When you can hold a job, become independent. I can’t support you forever.
She nodded. At the time she seemed to believe she could manage it. So did I.
“…Sigh.”
It has already been several months. My sister spends her days rolled up in a blanket in a dark corner, staring at her phone like it’s the only real thing left. These days I can’t help thinking it’s hopeless. The only saving grace is that the habits drilled into her from childhood remain. She still cooks, cleans, and does laundry properly. If she didn’t… if she truly contributed nothing… I might have thrown her out regardless of blood or gender.
…
Anyway. That is how I ended up living with my older sister. These days I often find myself seriously contemplating how my life reached this point.