Chaebol Princess
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 4
She woke up because the cat was sitting on her chest evaluating her.
It was a substantial cat, grey and self-possessed, with the expression of a senior court official who has seen everything and been impressed by none of it. It sat with its paws folded beneath its body in a posture that reminded her of the third minister of rites, who had also been grey and judgmental and had also had the unsettling habit of appearing silently in places where he was not expected.
She looked at the cat.
The cat looked at her.
“You may stay,” she said.
The cat stayed.
She lay on Sora’s couch in the thin morning light coming through curtains printed with small yellow ducks and took a careful inventory of herself. Body — uninjured, stiff from the couch which was shorter than she was by a meaningful margin, otherwise functional. Mind — present, alert, clear in the way of someone who has decided that surviving today is sufficient ambition for today. Heart — she set that aside. The heart would have its accounting in due time.
The apartment was small and layered with the accumulated personality of someone who lived entirely in the present tense. Clothing draped over every chair. A tower of small colorful books beside the television. Seventeen products of various descriptions arranged on the low table by the window — she had counted them last night before sleeping. On the wall beside the door a collection of small papers with handwritten notes stuck one atop the other in a column, and photographs wedged into the frame of a large mirror, people smiling in groups, a beach, a restaurant table crowded with dishes.
A life. Casually and completely displayed.
She had never seen anyone’s life displayed like this. In Joseon every object in her chambers had been placed deliberately, communicated something, existed as text to be read by observers. Nothing had been simply left somewhere because that was where it landed.
She found it extraordinary.
From behind the door at the end of the short hallway came sounds of kitchen activity, the hiss of something heating, the particular note of a spoon against a ceramic bowl, and Sora’s voice singing something that bore only a structural relationship to the original melody.
The cat stood, stretched with magnificent indifference, and walked off her chest.
She sat up.
Sora had made eggs and rice and a soup that smelled of anchovy and radish and set it all on the low table in the main room with the particular energy of someone who apologizes for things before they need apologizing for. “It’s just doenjang jjigae from a packet, I know how to make it properly but I didn’t have the ingredients, and the eggs are a little overcooked because Tangerine distracted me—”
“Tangerine,” Eun Bae said.
“The cat. Because of his personality.” Sora sat cross-legged on the floor across the table. “He’s very — he has opinions.”
Eun Bae looked at the cat, who had arranged himself in the corner with his back to both of them. “He reminds me of the third minister of rites,” she said.
Sora opened her mouth. Closed it. Decided to let that pass.
Eun Bae ate. The soup was exactly what the previous night’s ramen had been — nothing she had ever tasted before, made of components she couldn’t fully identify, completely and immediately satisfying in a way that owed nothing to refinement and everything to being warm and present and real. She ate with focus. Sora watched her with the helpless concern of someone constitutionally unable not to care about people eating properly.
“You were hungry,” Sora said.
“Yesterday I ate nothing from before dawn until your noodles at midnight. The day had a full schedule.”
“Right.” Sora picked up her own spoon. Set it down. Picked up her phone instead with the expression of someone who has been waiting since last night to say something. “Can I show you something?”
“Yes.”
Sora turned the phone screen toward her.
Eun Bae looked at it. A small rectangle of moving image — herself, on the drama set, receiving the decree. She watched herself sit. She watched the pause. She watched her own face deliver the lines.
She looked different from the outside. That was the first thought. Smaller and more still than she felt from within herself. The camera — she had gathered what cameras were from Sora’s patient explanations the previous night — had found something in the pause that she hadn’t known she was doing. A quality of weight. Of someone for whom this moment, this decree, this court, was not performance but memory.
She watched the turn to the chief lady. The added line.
“Twelve seconds,” Sora said. “That’s all they posted. Just those twelve seconds.”
“And?”
Sora took a breath. “There’s a number at the bottom of the screen. Do you see it?”
“I see it.”
“That number is how many people have watched this clip.” Sora paused. “All of them. In one night.”
Eun Bae looked at the number.
She had a general understanding, assembled from last night’s conversation, of what the internet was. A system connecting people across distances through their devices. A public square of infinite size in which information moved at speeds that had no historical equivalent. She understood it the way she understood the cars — functionally, structurally, without the bone-deep instinct that came from growing up inside it.
She looked at the number.
“All of these people,” she said carefully, “watched me.”
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