It was both awkward and nice that he kept talking about his family and childhood background. It was funny to see him get drunk on his own emotions and go into a serious actor-y mood when he talked about his family. While I was uncomfortable having to share my own family history as a kind of tit for tat, it was still nice to learn more about his life. I wanted to listen to him all night, for many nights on end. I wanted to fit together his fragmented pieces and complete the puzzle of him in my mind. The life that was unknown to me, the habits I wasn’t aware of, even his breath—I wanted to reconfigure them all and make them my own.

Unaware of my obsessive thoughts, he slept blissfully until my leg started cramping, then his eyes jerked open as if someone had called out his name.

“You know you’ve been drooling, right?” I said as he got up.

Making the most adorably sheepish face, he wiped his mouth with his hand. He slowly got up and switched on the perfectly sculptured floor lamp (obviously another gift from his mother). The soft lighting fell on his back, and I could finally see the full shape of his tattoo. The pointed thing that reached the end of his finger was not a tail but a root. What ran up his arm and leg and stretched around his chest and back was a large tree. One that grew out of and covered a tiny planet, like in The Little Prince.

—Is that a baobab, like the one in The Little Prince?

—No. It’s the Tree of Life.

—What’s that?

—Nothing too meaningful. It contains the principle of the universe that I once studied.

He went on and on about how the universe was like a giant tree, some idea that combined sacred-tree myths from East and West, of invisible seasons and blah blah blah about death and rebirth, but all I could see from the tattoo was an attempt to cover up traces of an embarrassingly delinquent past with a more appropriately cool picture (not that the picture itself was either appropriate or cool). I could see through the thick branches and leaves some faint ghosts and red roses, lotus flowers, and dragons, which looked more like incomplete Irezumi tattoos.

—Didn’t you just draw a tree over an Irezumi tattoo?

—Wow, you must have the second sight. How could you tell?

—Because . . . I have eyes . . .

A “hyung I know” (he had a hyung he knew in every social stratum, it seemed) who had come over from Japan when he was in high school had done the Irezumi tattoo for him. But this hyung was sent to prison before he could finish it, and the incomplete tattoo had only recently been drawn over.

—But do kids these days know about Irezumi? It was a fad in my day.