*SPOILERS AHEAD. IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THIS BOOK OR ARE PLANNING TO READ IT, PLEASE DO NOT PROCEED.*
I bought this book last week. I finished this book yesterday. I don’t even know what to process or where to start.
This book was wrapped up in so much sadness and reality that it was hard to put down, I was and still am very uncomfortable with how transparent the characters and the story line reenacted actual results of abuse, abandonment, the reality of relationships between emotionally dysfunctional people, and so many more topics.
When I got into this book, which is an extension of BTS’s The Most Beautiful Moment in Life alternative universe series (there’s also two albums with the same name), I knew it would be heavy. I saw the music videos to I Need U and Run which, at the time, I didn’t understand at all. But upon reading the book, a lot of plot holes and missing backstory were plugged in and made sense, like why Yoongi and Jungkook were fighting in his workspace (pg. 93-94) and why Hoseok passed out while walking down the road (pg. 100). But finishing the book, I now feel more distraught and more confused than I did before I started reading. Not because the story line seemed to go in and out of reality and imagination, but because I wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that this story did not have a good ending. None of the characters ended on good notes, and despite the good moments they all seemed to share together, they still eventually ended up separating and parting ways, because they all in some aspect were not ready or willing to let go of their broken, abused pasts.
The story circles around the lives of seven young boys who grow up into adults throughout the book: Seokjin, Taehyung, Namjoon, Jungkook, Jimin, Hoseok and Yoongi. Seokjin whom seems to me to be the main character of the story, knows everything about his friends, stalks them, and sees into the future? I don’t fully understand him. He is troubled by the lie from his father that he always needs to be a “good kid”. Because of this, he seems to hold himself responsible for bringing his friends together and “saving” them from painful fates. In a way, he is like the others; his father seems to be very professionally wealthy and thinks Seokjin should follow in his footsteps. Taehyung is being abused by his father after his mother left when he and his sister were children. He is troubled daily by thoughts of killing his father, as he is physically abused by him as well as his sister. He hangs out with Namjoon a lot, whom works at a gas station and he lives with the guilt of a lot of things, including the death of a friend on a scooter he scuffed up before giving the keys to his friend. Jungkook is a young student who deals with suicidal tendencies and his father leaving him and his mother. He self-harms as well, and almost dies when he’s hit by a car toward the end of the book (pg. 142). He looks up to Yoongi, who suffers with suicidal thoughts and self-hate after his mother killed herself in a house fire when he was a child. He carries a lighter and a melted piano keyboard with him at all times, is constantly drunk and doesn’t talk much. Hoseok was abandoned as a child by his mother in an amusement park. He still searches for her and often times runs after hallucinations of her. Hoseok is the backbone of the group; he pretends to be more stronger and more resilient than the rest. He reaches out first to them and initiates conversations. He bonds well with Jimin, who is a dancer like Hoseok, who struggles with mental illness caused by his parents throwing him in a mental asylum due to suffering seizures. The book follows the seven boys as they go through various stages of life carrying the excruciating emotional and mental pain inflicted on them from childhood into early adulthood—with each other.
The one character I am very interested in is Seokjin; he seems to be the overseer over each and every boy. He finds time to watch them and pay attention to their habits and patterns. How does he find time to stalk them from afar and also when they aren’t aware? I have a theory that Seokjin may be hallucinating all of them, because there is one part of the story, towards the middle (pg. 78-79) where Seokjin speaks to Namjoon after not seeing him for while at the gas station. However, Namjoon’s story is different, saying that he noticed Seokjin watching him from his car and that he never came close to him or spoke. I talked to my army friend about this as well and I was suggested to read the Webtoon (which I will do and probably add to this post my thoughts.)
Now, let’s talk about some themes I noticed. All of the characters seem to share the common thought of wanting to reach out to each other, second-guessing their thought, then not reaching out. Their deep and understandable pain all permit them from exploring new avenues of life. This is seen in Yoongi’s abrupt pause to his music production with his partner, Hoseok leaving back to Songju after being asked to join a dance tour company (his dream, by the way), and Taehyung failing to visit Jungkook in his hospital room after he told him he would out of fear for confronting Namjoon. This is a perfect example of what emotionally injured people do when they try to connect to others emotionally. Their self-doubt and self-pity control their train of thought and they often destroy relationships. I appreciated this honest interpretation of what being emotionally scarred means.
Another theme I noticed was toward he end of the book, in the chapter titled After Returning From the Sea, a woman was introduced with each character, except Seokjin, in a sense, as a way to rescue the characters from their ongoing painful pasts and self-pity. This woman is used to remind a boy of another boy, (like Yoongi listening to the woman playing the guitar which reminded him of Jungkook, or Taehyung doing graffiti with the woman at the bus stop he and Namjoon used to wait at the bus for), makes them laugh, feel less tense, or reminds them of a deep insecurity. This is seen when Jimin accidentally injures his dance partner during dance practice and immediately feels like he is the same clumsy eight-year-old at the mental asylum and hasn’t grown (pg. 164.) These women, in my opinion, are placed here not for romantic relief, but to bring out another element the reader needs to know about the character. In Seokjin’s case, he was intentional about creating a “relationship” (I use quotation marks because it was only a relationship to her…it was all a lie to hold up for him.) with the woman he saw. He stole her diary, made sure to do all the things she wanted in a boyfriend (she had a checklist written down inside of it) (kinda gives me Joe Goldberg vibes not gonna lie) in a month’s time. All this stemmed from Seokjin’s deep guilt over lying on his friends in high school and the fight he had with Taehyung and Namjoon while they were all together at the sea (found on page 136-139.) His motivation for pursuing this woman came more out of guilt and sorrow he felt over exposing his friends back then. Looks like the woman was used to keep him connected to past memories of his friends.
I understand. I get it. Not every book you read will have a happy ending, and this book sure didn’t. Seokjin’s girlfriend dies in front of him. And that epilogue…let’s not get into it. I read Woman Hollering Creek and other stories by Sandra Cisneros around two years ago and it was one of the most saddest books I’ve ever read, but has a very transparent, real message about life being a Chicano. Shortly afterwards, I read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Another sad book with a great message on being black and seeing beauty defined in whiteness. But this book…I fail to completely accept its message. (Maybe because I am a new army and have only gotten into about 35% of BTS and haven’t completed the Webtoon.) I received the message that past pain hinders the future, and I also understand that parents putting children’s own professional reputations over their children’s well-being is highly damaging. But I had this same problem with the two previous books I mentioned. They didn’t end with that happy ending and I didn’t delve deeper into why. Perhaps because I didn’t want to know why.
I recently watched this video on suicide in Korea and I instantly had an idea to compare. But I had to stop right there, because although the countries of this story are different, these characters represented real people with real stories. I can name people who have committed suicide, who have had parents who committed suicide, who have felt pressured to always be “perfect”, who have had their dad clobber them and their siblings every night in a drunken rage, who have lied in relationships to avoid losing the person, who have suffered severely because of a divorce. These are real situations that come up everywhere, not just Korea. And I think maybe we need more books like this that will give us the hard truth in growing up and becoming an adult in a world where life is anything but easy.
In this book, these seven boys were all each other had. They formed a community, as broken as they were, where they were not judged, criticized, expected to rise to any standards, and they could just exist and not conform. Despite its eventual stagnation (because all seven of them used everything they could to start it but had no idea to maintain it), I saw a spark of fight in each boy I was introduced to in this book, although they may believe they didn’t. So, in my opinion, despite how sad and uncomfortable these 230 pages made me, I liked the representation in the book and am looking forward to part 2.
Also, let’s ignore that epilogue. Lord, have mercy.
Here is information about the two albums here and here.
Picture of book taken by author. Please do not repost.
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Shanedra Writes Too Much 