Boy, Iro
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plant lover
Wonderbox
Dog's Night
grass
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Author's Note

“Whose fault is it?”
The unknown traps that lie before us as adults

The title of the work, "Boyhood is easy to grow old" seems to be taken from the first part of the poem "Boyhood is easy to grow old, but learning is difficult" included in Zhu Xi's collected works, which is commonly known to mean "Boyhood is easy to grow old, but learning is difficult."
When focusing on the changes that occur when a boy becomes an adult, it is truly significant that "Boyhood Changes" is placed at the front of the collection.
What does an older boy, or an adult in a novel, look like?
What does it mean to become an adult?
Does being an adult mean knowing yourself better than anyone else, and therefore being able to remain calm in any situation?
At this very point, Pyeon Hye-young poses a weighty question to her readers.
I wonder if I can handle all the unexpected things that happen in life.
The father, who was so affectionate, loses that affection while caring for his sick grandfather ("The Next Guest"), he works hard but gets seriously injured helplessly ("Wonder Box"), and he uses the right amount of herbicide but for some reason the yard becomes a mess ("Grass").
Faced with the unimaginable, we become paralyzed, sometimes even paralyzed, and eventually become fixated on a single question.
Whose fault is it? Whose fault is it that I am suffering like this?


I lost my place to return to.
It wasn't lost just now.
I lost it in a car accident.
Or even before that.
It was hard to fathom how long I had been running towards this, not knowing that I would eventually lose it all.
―The “plant lover” section

In Soyoung's view, Su-man couldn't have thought more harshly.
For example, why did he end up going to the apartment where Kim lives?
Suman was so focused on the damage he suffered from other people's mistakes or irresponsible actions that he forgot his own mistake of not looking closely at the transaction.
It could be that he was deliberately pretending not to care.
Because when you get caught up in blaming someone, it's clearly someone else's fault.
―「Wonderbox」 section

Once you start asking, you can't stop.
Because we must find the person responsible for this misfortune.
We ask more questions about who is to blame, but at the end, there is only one answer waiting for us.
It was perhaps the answer I most wanted to avoid: that I was at the beginning of all this misfortune.
I don't know when it started, but life pulls us by one leg, dragging us into a trap that was already prepared, as if it knew we would fall into it.
Can we bear that uncomfortable truth in the midst of suffering that is difficult to blame anyone but ourselves?


“Some faces only reveal themselves in the dark.”
About our crumbling relationships and their fragile foundations.

Those who suffer from unknown causes are surrounded by those who 'watch' their struggles.
Next to Su-man, who asks whose fault it is, are So-young ("Wonder Box") who asks back, "Then whose fault is it that I have to take care of the child all day?"; Ji-min ("A Dog's Night") who doesn't understand why she has to defend the faults of her brother-in-law, whom she's not even close with; and So-jin ("Boyhood Changes") who witnessed Yu-jun's house falling apart from up close.
And these 'watchers' also take a step closer to the truth of life.

Instead, I thought about what we had lost.
I wondered how I could get it back, and if I couldn't find it, how I would live without it.
I also thought that I hadn't lived long enough to know my husband well.
Now, you have to accept that your husband is a person who acts differently depending on the person and the topic.
The same goes for myself.
I've been living for nearly 50 years, but I never thought I'd become a person who would feel angry at a temporary teacher who just brushed me off.
―The "Grass" section

It comes from the realization that I, as well as you, didn't know much about our relationship, something I thought I knew enough about.
When an unbearable bomb explodes in our lives, which were mostly stable and peaceful days, even though there were occasional big and small incidents, many things that had been holding us together crumble at once.
It doesn't matter if someone's daily life is lost because of me.
“What we lost”, there is only me who is absorbed in it.
The chilling power of this book comes perhaps not simply from the narrative's mystery, but from the truth of life itself: the fear that our lives and relationships can be turned upside down in an instant, and that we ourselves don't know how to live again in the face of that fear.

Let's go back to "Boyhood Changes".
At an age when it is difficult to even understand the chaos of the environment surrounding them, Yujun and Sojin suddenly become adults.
Life awaits them, hiding cruel secrets or setting up evil traps.