My name is Kim Soo-jin. Some of you have known me for years. What I’m about to tell you… it happened last winter, after we had to move to Tsuruhashi. The landlord had raised the rent—again. We didn’t really have a choice.
The flat we found is in one of those run-down danchi where the walls flake away. You know, buildings with creaking stairwells and a mildew smell in the corridors. Two tiny rooms, stained tatami… the kind of place where you hear your neighbor peeing at night. Well, you make do with what you can.
Three days after we moved in, my son Min-ho started—how should I put it—waking up every night at exactly the same time: 3 : 15 a.m. He would sit bolt upright, point at the wall—the one we share with the building next door—and shout words I couldn’t understand. They sounded like neither Korean nor Japanese. Then he’d fall asleep again as if nothing had happened.
In the morning he remembered nothing. We went to the neighborhood clinic, the one that still takes the national insurance card when you’re behind on payments. The doctor talked about night terrors and prescribed medicine we could barely afford. It didn’t help.
That’s when I started coming to the meetings more often. They cleared my head, gave me something else to think about. But even during the games I couldn’t fully concentrate.
One day at Ichioka Market I was helping my grandmother sell her kimchi. Between customers she looked at me with those eyes that see everything and asked why I looked so tired. I told her about Min-ho.
She just nodded. “Ah, it’s that wall,” she said, as if she knew exactly. She handed me a small bag of salt. Not cooking salt—salt she keeps for… for things like this.
My husband laughed when I told him. He works at the factory; he doesn’t believe in that stuff. But when you haven’t slept for a month, you try anything.
That night I did what my grandmother said. When Min-ho started screaming, I threw the salt against the wall. There was a kind of… strange sound, a very faint hiss. Min-ho lay back down immediately.
The next morning sirens woke me. The building next door. An old woman who had lived alone for years had been found dead in her bathroom. The caretaker—the guy who always wanders around in a beer-stained undershirt—was telling everyone her face was burned.
Later I learned she was our neighbor.
I’ve never been the type to believe in that crap. My family’s been Christian for a long time, even if we don’t really go to church any more. But I still pushed the wardrobe up against that wall. And every week I sprinkle a little salt behind it. Just in case.
Min-ho sleeps peacefully now.