Part 1 Spring Meets Spring
Part 2 Spring sought spring
Part 3 The injured spring cried for a long time
Part 4 Spring has brought spring

Epilogue: Spring is Revenge

Author's Note

A diary I started writing in a collapsed place,
Recording the past and finally welcoming the new season

One day, 'I', who is in my fifties, finds out that her husband 'Seok-gu' has been stalking a female colleague with whom she was active in political parties. She is irreparably hurt when Seok-gu tells her that he is not ashamed because his actions were sincere.
After that, he started to settle down and live apart, and he became estranged from his daughter, Haejun, who had been especially close to Seokgu, and he lived like a wreck until he finally received psychiatric counseling, where the doctor told him that 'writing a diary' would be helpful.
While half-believing the doctor's words that "writing a diary is an act of looking at one's life from a distance" (page 15), 'I' was searching for 'diary writing' on the Internet and discovered a 'diary writing class' run by a writing room.
And I'm instantly captivated by the phrase promoting that classroom.


“Write your life.
“Only when we write can we meet, and only when we meet can we finally part ways.” (Page 16)

As if I had been holding onto memories I wanted to break up with, I was suddenly drawn to this sentence and enrolled in the ‘Diary Writing Class.’
However, since “I couldn’t write a single line if I started with ‘I’” (page 32), he tells a story he had never told anyone before in his diary for the first time, using a speaker named ‘Si-ot’.
The story of Si-ot, a ten-year-old girl going through severe growing pains on the periphery of a dark and chaotic era in 1980.


The diary, which spans parts 1 through 4 of the novel, describes the pain sharply engraved in Si-ot's young body and mind in powerful and dense sentences.
The humiliation and shame she had to endure as a girl, the days when she insisted on wearing only short hair, a T-shirt, and pants so she wouldn't be "seen as someone with a vagina" (p. 70), that spring when she pretended to be a "clear-skinned boy" (p. 61) to get what she desperately wanted and bore the weight of the secret alone, and when everything was revealed and she "felt like she was being driven to the edge of the world" (p. 211).
This wasn't all that Siot had to endure.
At that time, Si-ot was “getting used to the feeling of the word ‘poor.’” (page 79) Her father disappeared after incurring a large debt, and the empty space left by her father was filled by her grandmother’s increasingly desperate chanting and her mother’s sighs.


There were humiliations I had to endure because I was poor and dreams I had to give up.
The ten-year-old Si-ot was anxious, not knowing whether she wanted to be a 'girl' or a 'boy' and what she should become, and was even trying to act calm in the face of the sudden poverty that had befallen her. She was tired, sad, and lonely.
I go through the emotions of that time, which I have never properly faced before, one by one, and although I go back and forth between anxiety and frustration every day, I do not stop writing in my diary.
I cling to writing as if I can only meet a different tomorrow by fully reliving that time.
As I follow the sentences that delicately reflect on the heart that I had not been able to cherish, I find myself wanting to quietly bring out the long-standing wounds that I had ignored and now look at them under the bright light.


Meanwhile, 'I' also writes in my diary the stories of people I had completely forgotten about.
My friend next door, Annie, always dressed up like a princess, making Si-ot toss and turn with admiration and jealousy.
After her father disappeared, the 'Swallow Tea House Man' who broke into her house demanding the return of "the heartbreaking money my mother had saved by selling tea leaves" (page 81) was suspicious and rude, but he was an adult who knew how to gently comfort his young daughter-in-law.
'Yunsoo' was a precious friend who taught me how to share sadness and fear, and Yunsoo's older sister 'Yunsim', who was always suffering from poverty and fatigue, would smile brightly when she saw Si-ot, her eyes turning into rainbows.
'I' meets them again in the diary, and vaguely realizes that the diary he is writing is "not his own story" (page 340), but a story he is writing together with those who once left a deep mark on Si-ot and passed by.


And we come to understand that they too were barely getting through that time, a time of savagery, hatred, and discrimination that made the city terribly miserable and chaotic.
But despite such understanding and continued writing, it seems that 'I', rather than breaking away from memories, am clinging to them more and more, and rebuilding the shattered reality feels increasingly distant.
Moreover, he is now shocked to hear news of one of them who has now grown distant.
The novel tenaciously follows the arduous process of writing and recovery, keeping you captivated until the very last page.


Even so, you want to keep writing, moving forward, and living.
The world of Lee Joo-hye, whom you must meet right now

My efforts to record with meticulous detail the memories that have not faded even after forty years are probably an expression of my will to overcome the difficult present and move forward.
One of the driving forces that allows that will to continue, however precariously, is the other students who attend the diary writing class with me.
They come together with their own stories and become the first readers of each other's diaries.
“A diary to be read by others” (page 41) is bound to be different from a diary written and read alone, and thanks to those who read my writing together and add stories, ‘I’ can look into my memories more intently and write until the moment when Si-ot welcomes a new spring.
The rough and honest conversations and the kind of friendship shared among the fellow writers will be another attraction of this novel.


Lee Ju-hye is a writer who “never forgets that even in hardship, there is a time for self-respect and wisdom” (Shin Dong-yup Literary Award judges’ comment), and “The Season is Short and Memories Are Forever” is a story that saves the difficult present by retrieving the moments when she tried to “walk forward step by step, making constant choices at every moment” (p. 324) in the midst of yesterday’s despair and pain.
In the novel, 'I' suffers as I write about the pain of my childhood that has not yet been resolved, but writing a diary is not just about throwing myself into pain again.
Like the question, “Am I alive now? Have I survived?” (page 76), it is rather a process of gradually strengthening one’s inner strength by renewing one’s sense of oneself as vividly alive here and now despite the trials of the past.
In the diary, I recall the countless choices I made as a child to navigate the reality before me, and I contemplate which direction I should take from where I stand now.
Is it a steep cliff, or is it a threshold that “leaves us with another story” (p. 224)?
Let's watch this recovery narrative, told with a careful and truthful voice, until the very end.
Before you know it, you will witness “Lee Joo-hye’s amazing sincerity” (Ha Seong-ran, recommendation) that will warm the reader’s life.


Author's Note

The night did not reveal its true nature, but showed me a face that was both infinitely unfamiliar and yet familiar.
That face was Lee Joo-hye, then Min Ae-ni, then Jeong Yun-sim, then Choi Su-ho, and then Jeong Yun-su.
And it was always a poem.
Since I serialized this novel in a quarterly magazine last year, it has been Si-ot who has silently endured my cruelty and harshness.
The train door opened and a young couple got off.
The sissy also disappeared from my sight.
As the doors closed and the train departed, the shiot reappeared on the window glass.
Suddenly, I realized that I hadn't even given Siot a name.
When the train stops at the next station, the siot will disappear for a moment again.
I suddenly became anxious.
I wanted to apologize to Shiot.
I wanted to talk to you before.
No, I wanted to call your name before that.
I wanted to ask you how you were doing.


Fall 2023
Lee Joo-hye