A Single Shard

Though Tree-ear’s boat journey is much faster than his walking journey, he still feels impatient with its duration, wanting to return to Ch’ulp’o. When he gets back, he decides to run straight to Min’s to tell Min about the commission before visiting Crane-man. At Min’s, he finds Ajima working in the garden. She smiles brilliantly when she sees he’s home safe. When Tree-ear asks where Min is, she says he’s at the draining site. Then she pauses significantly before asking whether Tree-ear has something to tell him. Tree-ear says he does, bows, and runs toward the draining site.

At the draining site, Tree-ear finds Min stirring clay and explains that Emissary Kim has assigned Min a commission. Min closes his eyes, breathes deeply, sits on a rock, and gestures for Tree-ear to sit beside him. Tree-ear is baffled by Min’s grimly serious expression. Min tells Tree-ear he’s sorry, but a few days previously, Crane-man was standing on the bridge when a cart came across and knocked him into a rotten section of railing. Crane-man fell through into icy water, and his heart stopped. Tree-ear feels as though he’s having an out-of-body experience. Meanwhile, Min reaches into his pouch, pulls out the ceramic monkey that Tree-ear made for Crane-man, and says that Crane-man’s corpse was holding it when they retrieved him from the river.

Ajima appears and tells Tree-ear he’ll stay at Min’s house that night. Tree-ear, still feeling outside his body, follows her. Min calls after him that the monkey was good work—but Tree-ear, dissociating, thinks he might have imagined hearing it. Ajima brings him to a small room in Min’s house, where Tree-ear falls asleep immediately.

The next day, Tree-ear goes to the river. He tries to skip a rock across it—and then begins furiously throwing rock after rock into the river. He wonders whether Crane-man would have died if he had stayed in Ch’ulp’o instead of taking Min’s work to Songdo. Yet then he remembers how much Crane-man appreciated the ceramic monkey and how proud he was of Tree-ear for braving the long journey. Memories of Crane-man rush at Tree-ear. Tree-ear whispers that he hopes Crane-man is walking “on two good legs.” Then he weeps.

When Tree-ear returns to Min’s, Min stands in the yard with the cart and ax. Tree-ear, assuming that Min will send him to chop wood, thinks that his trip to Songdo changed nothing. He laments the thought of spending a cold winter alone in the dugout without Crane-man. Then Min demands that Tree-ear go cut bigger logs—as wide as a person’s torso. Tree-ear is confused: such longs are too big to fit into the kiln unless you do more work to cut them down to size. Min snaps that he has a royal commission, it’s going to be a lot of work, and Tree-ear is going to need his own potter’s wheel if he’s going to help—so he'd better go chop the logs for the wheel. It isn’t until Tree-ear is walking away that he realizes Min plans to teach him to throw pots.

Tree-ear smiles joyously. Min hurries back into the house, while Ajima brings Tree-ear out a lunch bowl and instructs him to come home in time for dinner. When Tree-ear is visibly surprised at the word “home,” Ajima asks him to come live at Min’s and to take the name Hyung-pil. Tree-ear remembers that Ajima and Min’s son was Hyung-gu and that siblings’ names often share a syllable—Tree-ear wouldn’t have an orphan’s name anymore if he were Hyung-pil. Tree-ear, stunned, nods silently.

As Tree-ear walks away with the cart, his mind whirls with thoughts of Crane-man, his potter’s wheel, and his new home and name. Trying to settle himself, he imagines a prunus vase he might one day make, trying to picture what design he’ll use for the inlay work. He wonders how long it will be before he has learned to execute such a beautiful work. Then he resolves to take it one day at a time.

“The Thousand Cranes” vase, whose maker is not known to historians, is a 12th-century prunus vase whose inlay work depicts 46 cranes within medallions interspersed with clouds. It’s “among the most prized of Korea’s many cultural treasures.”