The Tree of Life on his back seemed to wither that winter, and the Irezumi ghost underneath seemed to fade even more. I think it was because he was gaining weight. He had quit his usual thrice-weekly workout and taken on two more theory books to edit freelance. The wrinkles on his forehead deepened, and the smallest things set him off—the usual signs of someone going through a rough patch in life. Not that I was doing any better. I’d contracted chronic nasal inflammation, received text messages beginning with “We regret to inform you . . .” from the forty-eight companies I’d applied to, was sleeping only three to four hours at a time on the caretaker’s bed at the hospital, and sat with my laptop on my knees punching out a story about a life that was and wasn’t mine at the same time. There was no end in sight to any of this. No one would look at me in my state of constant exhaustion and take me for a twenty-something. Our daylight dates that had once been as exciting as spy missions were now gray and boring, and we had somehow reached a point in our relationship where everything about each other was just a part of the tedium of daily life.

We were watching a movie in his room while drinking soju and eating sweet-and-sour pork that we’d ordered in. On the flat-screen TV he’d bought there was an Eastern Bloc spy fighting for his life. I was bored with the slow-moving plot, but he watched in rapt concentration. At some point, I must’ve dozed off. The movie was over by the time I opened my eyes again. He was lying on the sofa, asleep. It had been a long time since I’d seen him splayed out like that, defenseless.

With nothing else to do, I sat down at his desk and turned on the computer. I killed some time looking things up on the Internet, searching his name and mine. I opened his bookmarks folder. There were all sorts of links to articles and blogs in there, seemingly stored at random. One article, from a pro–North Korean website, with the word “homosexuality” in the title caught my eye. Bored, I clicked on it.

Southern Korean society is facing increasingly complicated problems as time goes on. The foreign-worker problem, international marriage, prevalence of English language in employment and education, homosexuality and transgenderism, increase in studying abroad and immigrants, extreme individualism, too much religion, increased dependence on foreign capital, and the invasion of Western culture are problems we couldn’t have imagined only a few years ago. (“The Path of the Nation,” March 2007 issue)