Hideo was a man of many secrets, one of them being that his biological father was Japanese and so he’d spent his childhood in Kyoto. We were walking down a quiet street one late afternoon when he told me this. From that day on, he would occasionally reveal more of these glimpses into his younger years, and later I was able to thread these piecemeal incidents from his early life into one cohesive story.  

Hideo was born on the outskirts of Kyoto in an ordinary residential area, a far cry from what Koreans might imagine when they think of Kyoto, the travel destination. Hideo himself couldn’t remember the place in any real detail. Even as he described the humid summers or the trees so enormous you couldn’t see the tops of them, he would add that it was hard to tell whether these were actually his own memories or simply details he’d imagined after seeing or hearing about the city somewhere else. All the memories he was sure of were bad ones. Like how his desk in elementary school was covered in dirty words for Koreans—zainichi, chosēnjin, chong—or how the boys always kicked his bag around like they were playing soccer, or how they would make fun of him by changing the lyrics to K-pop songs and singing them at him. Things like that. Once, the other kids beat him up so bad they broke his nose. That evening, his parents had a serious talk about moving to Nagoya for their son’s sake. Hideo’s father called him in, sat him down, and warned him that in Nagoya, they would have to hide the fact that Hideo’s mother was Korean. Surprised, Hideo turned to his mother where she sat at the dinner table. He wanted to confirm that she agreed with what his father was saying. As far as he knew, his mother had never once tried to hide her heritage. But in that moment, she lowered her gaze, looking neither her husband nor her son in the eye. 

Hideo’s father spoke again. “Either way we’re going to keep living here, so let’s do it that way.” 

That night, Hideo couldn’t get to sleep on account of the pain in his nose, the blood trickling down his throat, the thought of his mother’s placid face, and the very welcome fresh start awaiting him in Nagoya. But his parents remained on the fence about going, and through some convoluted process of reasoning that Hideo could not at all fathom, they decided to get a divorce. Hideo’s mother returned to her parents’ home in Gyeonggi-do, taking him with her. And from then on, Hideo completely buried the existence of his Japanese father and his former life in Japan. Until the day he confessed this secret to me, he hadn’t even told anyone that his first name had been Hideo.

The first time I saw Hideo was in a classroom in the drama school building. This was in March before the cherry blossoms bloomed, and eight students including me and Hideo were sitting at desks that had been arranged in a circle. That year, the drama school had launched a new project for incoming students where they grouped them together to create a one-act play no longer than fifteen minutes, also known as a “playlet.” These students would gather in teams before the semester began to prepare, and at the start of the school year in March, they would stage their plays in the drama school’s little theater—a one-of-a-kind welcome reception for the new students. The school newspaper had decided to interview one group of incoming students taking part in the project, and that year, the task fell to me as my first reporting assignment.

The interview was animated. When I asked a question, one of the interviewees would latch onto something I said and launch into a longwinded response, and then before that person had even finished their thought, someone else would cut in. The conversation often veered off topic. I kept the recording device on and listened as the students freely shared their opinions, chiming in once or twice to remind them of the question. I had just done that again when I realized that the guy sitting across from me had been silent the entire time. It was Hideo. Even when I’d asked everyone to tell me something about the play they were preparing to stage, he was the last to answer. He said that even though the play was centered around ordinary high school students, it wasn’t meant to be didactic, or a critique of the college entrance exam system or the Korean education system as a whole, and it wasn’t all that accurate to compare it to a novel like Demian, either. After saying his piece, Hideo fell silent, prompting me to ask again, So what is it about? He’d only mentioned things that were unrelated to the play and hadn’t shared his opinion on the work itself. Looking taken aback by my question, Hideo stared for a moment at the ceiling, choosing his words, but right then the student next to him, who was entering the playwriting department, said that still, there was some overlap between Demian and their play before naturally changing the topic. After that, Hideo silently watched the conversation unfold among the others like he was in the audience of a panel debate. During the more than two hours of the interview, all I scribbled down about Hideo was “shy, no self-conviction.”

When I ran into Hideo again, it was in a dim basement classroom in the film school on the last day of August, the start of the fall semester. As soon as the professor entered the room, he told a student sitting near the wall to cut the lights and started up the beam projector. Hideo slid into the classroom through the back door just as the projector powered on, filling the room with a faint blue glow. He approached the seat next to me and set down his giant backpack. There weren’t many empty seats, so it wasn’t like he was trying to sit next to me. Still, I recognized him right away, and he recognized me, too. About ten minutes after class began, Hideo opened an unruled notebook on his desk and wrote, I know this is late, but your article was good. From then on, we started writing notes to each other about all sorts of things. After filling an entire page with thoughts about the interview earlier that year in spring, the school newspaper article, and the playlet Hideo had acted in, I found that I had run out of things to say.

Don’t forget about me when you become a superstar someday.

I wrote it as a joke, a way to wrap up the conversation.

You think I can become an actor?

I do.

Thank you very much. Haha.

You don’t seem like an acting student.

Is that a good thing?

Of course. Is it not? Haha.

I actually chuckled as I wrote that, thinking of the guys in the acting department who were always singing and running lines in the hallways. I’d never once thought they seemed cool. A little while later, Hideo wrote a reply.

In that case, thank you.

In the next class and the class after that, the professor kept the room dark the entire time as he played us classic films. He would occasionally chime in with explanations, but only a few students really listened to what he said, and the professor himself didn’t seem to care one way or the other. Hideo and I stole glances at the movies onscreen, all the while continuing to write notes. Our respective school lives were a recurring topic of discussion. Unlike the guy who had sat close-mouthed throughout that entire interview, Hideo wrote line after line about what was going on with him. He shared that he was having a hard time understanding the acting classes that required him to be overly physical, and that he wasn’t used to expressing things with his body. For my part, I wrote about how my playwriting was coming along and how I was struggling on the school newspaper staff. I wrote about the plays I liked, the plays that other students in my department liked but that didn’t resonate with me, young foreign playwrights I had just discovered, and the column I was writing about all this for the newspaper. In one of our Saturday make-up classes, I was going into painstaking detail about my ex-boyfriend Yeongdo. Hideo read along as I wrote, adding the occasional “omg” or “T_T,” and once he’d read the entire thing, he flipped ahead several pages in the notebook.

Now for a brand-new chapter.

After writing that, Hideo swept a finger over the rest of the blank page. Because of the audio from the film that was playing, I knew there was no way I had actually heard his finger brush against the paper, but somehow I remember clearly hearing the sound.

The same way that Hideo’s actual name was no longer Hideo, Yeongdo also wasn’t my ex’s real name. It was a nickname, one he’d been given to mock the way he always stressed that he was a “yeonghwa hakdo,” a devoted student of film, every time he spoke in class. I hadn’t liked the nickname, so I never called him that to his face. It was only after we broke up that whenever he came to mind, his nickname naturally popped up along with him.

Yeongdo was the only student from another department in that class. The class in question, a basic major course on writing plays and sketches, wasn’t typically open to students outside the playwriting department. But after pleading with the professor in front of everyone on the first day of the semester, Yeongdo received permission to enroll. From then on, he took on the role of the class mood-maker. He would make everybody laugh by tossing out the perfect joke at the perfect time, and when no one else dared to voice an opinion, he always stepped up and offered his. Even when the weaknesses in his writing were pointed out to him in detail, Yeongdo never became discouraged, and during the breaks he would go up to the students who had most pointedly attacked his assignments or ideas to casually strike up a conversation. It was like he’d gotten some special kind of vaccine as a child that made him immune to hate or mistreatment from others. Of course, as far as I knew, he didn’t warrant a ton of hate in the first place. At some point, Yeongdo had joined the fold of playwriting students who went out for beers together after class. According to our classmates, he had such a high tolerance that he could down alcohol by the bucket and never get drunk, and he always seemed to be the life of the party.

Still, there were a few students in that class who weren’t fans. They thought he was trying too hard to win their attention and pretending to be friendly with everyone. As for me, I was somewhere in the middle. It was thanks to Yeongdo that the mood in that tense workshop had lightened up, but at the same time, I didn’t one hundred percent love how he acted. More than anything, when I read his work, I could feel my chest tightening, like I was suffocating. Every week, we submitted sketches around two thousand characters in length to discuss as a class, but Yeongdo always submitted the same type of story, taking a page out of his own playbook every time. His pieces were invariably about a young man who meets a beautiful woman and falls in love, but fails to win her heart in the end. As I saw it, the male leads were stand-ins for Yeongdo himself, and the other characters were just props that either served to hurt or comfort him. The one time he broke away from his usual approach was around the end of the semester. After not bringing in a single revision up until that point, Yeongdo revised three or four of his pieces to submit all at once; for the first time, he received positive feedback from everyone in the class. I complimented his work as well, but then Yeongdo surprised me by saying something absurd about how all the changes he’d made were thanks to my feedback.

“What Sujin said last time was a really huge help,” he said. He looked around at everyone to gauge the mood before playfully adding, “I think my round of applause should go to her instead.”

It was our class custom to applaud the people who’d submitted pieces for the workshop after we had given our critiques. Being congratulated for something I didn’t even write felt a bit odd, but at the same time, it made me happy. Looking back, I should have put a stop to it then and there, but I don’t even think I could have. At the time, it seemed so positive. I thought that, thanks to me, a guy who’d never once imagined the world beyond himself had changed. In reality, all Yeongdo had done was revise a few short pieces. That day after class, he invited me out to a cocktail bar near campus, and I went. Later on, we ended up calling that our first date.

The first time Hideo and I went out somewhere outside the film school building was after our last class before the Chuseok holiday. Our professor ended class an hour and a half earlier than usual that day for personal reasons, so we wrapped up a little past three in the afternoon. As I grabbed my bag and headed out of the classroom, it occurred to me that it was the perfect moment to casually suggest hanging out. I was planning to check out the exhibition the fine arts students were holding on the first floor of the library building, and I asked Hideo if he wanted to come. He said it sounded good to him. We walked down the sunlit halls of the film school building and crossed into the library, where we admired several installations. After that, we naturally made our way to a pho restaurant near the campus’s back gate. That was where we ran into Yeongdo. As I waited for my food to come out, a bunch of guys appeared outside the shop, and one of them was him. Just as I was wondering whether the guy in the hoodie really was him, he turned toward me and, if only briefly, we made clear eye contact. Honestly, I’d imagined and hoped for that exact situation—for Yeongdo to see me with another guy—so many times. But now that it was really happening, I was more than a little overwhelmed, and what happened next went far off-script from what I’d envisioned. Hideo waved at one of the other guys in the crowd around Yeongdo, and a moment later, the guy he’d greeted came inside. Up close, I recognized his face as one I’d seen a few times before. He must have been one of the underclassmen Yeongdo had introduced me to ages ago.

“You two on a date?” the guy asked Hideo.

If Hideo had spared me a glance at that moment, and if that glance had contained even a hint of a question, I would have somehow sent him positive signals with my eyes. Of course, a deeper part of me hoped that Hideo wouldn’t even have to ask, that he’d answer yes without hesitating. But he didn’t. He didn’t even look at me as he replied, “A date? As if. We’re just eating.”

The guy nodded, then chatted with Hideo for a little longer before leaving. Later, I would think back on that moment countless times. The embarrassment and confusion I felt when Hideo firmly denied that we were on a date stayed with me long afterwards. Meanwhile, I started endlessly imagining things like what that guy might have reported back to Yeongdo, and how Yeongdo might have reacted to hearing it. Soon after, I started remembering our first date, much to my surprise. Something similar had happened that day at the cocktail bar. The bartender asked me if the guy sitting next to me was my boyfriend.

Yeongdo, who had been listening to our conversation, cut in without hesitation to say, “I’m working on it.”

The bartender told Yeongdo that he was cheering him on and slid a free cocktail with a slice of dried orange on top toward me. Thinking back on it, Yeongdo was the type of person who knew when and where to take initiative, and he never let a chance to do so slip past him.

When that underclassmen friend of Yeongdo’s left, Hideo deftly made his way around the bend in the cramped shop and returned with water and pickled radish. We picked up in person where our written conversations in his notebook had left off, but what had just happened stuck with me. It was only when Hideo mentioned the name of a play I had written that I snapped back to my senses.

“Nuna, I heard you’re looking for actors?” he said, observing me for a moment. “I want to audition.”

The title of the play Hideo was referring to was Slap Game. It was the sixth play I had written at the drama school, and had started as an assignment in one of my major classes in the fall of my second year. It was the best thing I had written up to that point. I had to put on a staged reading at the end of the semester, the evaluation of which would also serve as an evaluation of the past two years of school. Jiyoon, my director, was in the same boat as me. We would meet at a café near campus to discuss preparations for the show, but usually we just chatted about nothing much and parted ways without coming up with any specific plans. Jiyoon had her hands full trying to figure out how we would pull off the scenes where one character slapped or was slapped by another, and I kept tweaking and tinkering with the script, determined to change even the most minor nuances. The biggest problem, though, was that one of the lead roles still remained uncast. We had uploaded ‘actors wanted’ posts to the Everytime app and the school website, but before my lunch with Hideo, we hadn’t had any luck finding the right fit.

That day, Jiyoon and I set up a simple audition for Hideo. I showed up first, drew open the heavy purple curtains, and opened the window. I still remember the autumn air that rushed in and the view that was so vivid outside.

Hideo entered the classroom looking slightly nervous. He wore gray slacks worn smooth at the knees, a white shirt under a knitted vest that had started to pill in places, and Vans sneakers caked in dried mud—similar to how I imagined the problem student in the play would dress. Hideo took a seat on a chair set up in the middle of the classroom and started reading from the script. Soon after, Jiyoon, who was sitting beside me, began lightly rapping on my thigh, and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was: We were going to stage the reading with Hideo.

Slap Game started and ended at the meeting of a school violence committee at a high school. There were four characters in total: two teachers who were also committee members, the model student who had called the meeting, and the problem student who had been reported to the committee for school violence. The model student claimed that he was being slapped in the face every day by the problem student, an accusation the problem student didn’t deny. But the problem student claimed that all this had been done at the model student’s request. According to the problem student, the model student—an aspiring writer—had asked the problem student to help him out, believing that only those who had undergone painful experiences in life could write good stories. So the problem student had shared his stories of being abused by his father, and in exchange for these stories, the model student agreed to let the problem student slap him every evening. Hideo immersed himself in his character and read the lines detailing his abuse. After finishing his story, he turned to the imaginary model student who would have been sitting next to him.

“Today’s story was worth six and a half, don’t you think?”

Hideo nodded as if receiving confirmation, then picked up a flat basketball that had been sitting under his seat and started slapping it with his open hand. As his right hand struck the ball, his left hand, which was holding the ball up, was knocked back a bit, and Hideo wobbled in his chair. That was where the passage he was meant to read for the audition ended. The scene closed with Hideo striking the ball exactly six and a half times, as if he were doing a peculiar dance.

After Hideo left the classroom, Jiyoon said excitedly, “He really has a talent for setting off your emotions.”

Shortly after, I called Hideo and told him he’d passed the audition. He asked if I might be free to join him for dinner in a bit.

“I’d love to, but the film devotee needs to see me for something.” Then I quickly added, “Could you wait for about an hour?”

Yeongdo was standing in the dorm lobby looking at his phone. A familiar sight. He had on that field jacket he often wore in the fall, the one that came down to his knees and looked hot and cumbersome to me. Late the night before, he had texted me saying he wanted to pick up a book he’d loaned me. Apparently, he’d recently started working on a new screenplay he really needed it for. I decided to take the opportunity to sort through all his stuff that was still in my possession and stayed up all night doing so. To avoid getting into an argument if any of his things got damaged in the process, I lined the bottom of a box with scrap paper and placed everything Yeongdo had saddled me with over the course of our relationship—several film magazines and books, records that served as mere decorations since I couldn’t even listen to them in the dorm—inside. I’d felt a giddy sense of satisfaction as I imagined handing the box over to him, but unlike what I’d anticipated, Yeongdo took it with an indifferent expression.

Without even looking inside to see if the book he’d mentioned was in there, he said, “Oh, by the way, that guy you were with that other time—I heard he was Japanese but got naturalized as a Korean?”

“Naturalized? No way,” I said. At the time, I didn’t have the faintest clue that Hideo was Hideo.

Yeongdo shifted the box a bit and said with confidence, “I guess you didn’t know. But everyone in the drama school does. They heard it from the staff member who handles all the enrollment paperwork.”

I soon realized that Yeongdo had contacted me just to tell me this, and that he was positive that what he was saying was true. Just then, I thought back to quiet Hideo among all his chatty fellow students and wondered if maybe what I’d just heard might explain something about the atmosphere that day. A moment later, Yeongdo rummaged through the box and took out a book, which he handed to me. It was an essay collection with a photo of the author, a film director I especially loved, on the cover. Shortly after, as I was walking to the restaurant with Hideo, I learned that this director had publicly come out in support of #MeToo whistle-blowers. We talked about the #MeToo movement that had started up in various sectors of the film and theater worlds, but I didn’t bring up what Yeongdo had told me. Instead, I praised Hideo on his acting, meaning every word I said. Hideo seemed to know intuitively which lines called for genuine anger and which ones required him to hide his true feelings as he sneered at the model student and teachers.

Looking excited, as if he still hadn’t come down from the high of his performance earlier, Hideo murmured, “I loved the script from the moment I read it. So I really wanted to do it. Because I’ve always . . . felt so wronged.”

“Wronged?”

Once again mulling over what Yeongdo had told me, the words I’d been keeping in my pocket and fiddling with all evening, I waited for what Hideo would say next.

“Ever since I lived in Japan as a child. Back then, I would get beaten up by the Japanese kids. They even broke my nose.”

“They beat you so badly they broke your nose?” I stared at Hideo in surprise.

He glanced away, avoiding my eyes as if embarrassed, which gave me a better look at the sleek bridge of the nose he said had once been broken. I could now see that it was crooked, bent slightly to the left. A little later—as we continued walking after finding that the restaurant we had been heading to was closed—Hideo confessed that it wasn’t just that he’d lived in Japan when he was younger, but that he was Japanese himself, the son of a Japanese man who was still living in Kyoto. Hideo said it was his first time talking about his childhood, but as if he felt that he had to see it through to the end, he launched into a fairly long story without pausing to rest. As he spoke, night fell and the streetlamps came on, casting a ruddy glow on the roads. We walked in the direction of Hankuk University along the Line 1 tracks walled in by a sound barrier.

“So that’s why I really wanted to play that role,” Hideo said. “Because I wanted to . . . hit people too, for once.”

He fell silent. He seemed to think his desire to hit people was both the conclusion to his story and an important clue as to why he’d auditioned for the problem student role in Slap Game. But I was at a bit of a loss, those words being so unlike my vague sense of Hideo up to that point. Of course, it wasn’t that I couldn’t understand him at all. He’d just told me his story of being bullied in his Japanese elementary school and having to hide his identity while attending school in Korea. But at the time, his resentment seemed so distant to me and even struck me as sort of alluring. I was looking down at my map app trying to find a good restaurant, still a little dazed, when Hideo suddenly burst out laughing, saying, Look at this. The palm of his hand was red and swollen from slapping the basketball not long before.

“The bumps it left on my skin are still there,” Hideo said, carefully holding out his hand as if inviting me to touch it. I brushed his palm with my index finger. Just as he’d said, the tiny bumps on the basketball had left impressions in his flesh.

Some days after Hideo was cast in Slap Game, we had our first table read with the entire crew. The director, the writer, and our four actors sat in a circle in a first-floor practice room in the drama school building. Before we started the read-through, Jiyoon explained that she planned to install a string curtain for the actual show at the end of the semester.

“Like the ones they hang at the entrance to a Chinese restaurant,” she said. “We’ll set it up between the model student and the problem student. When your hands or shoulders brush against the curtain, the bamboo or glass beads knocking against each other will give off the effect of a slap landing.”

Soon after, the actor playing Teacher 1 started reading from the stage directions at the beginning. The stage directions shifted into lines, which shifted into dialogue. After the teachers finished explaining the slap game that the model student and the problem student had been carrying out, Hideo appeared as the problem student.

“This all happened at the model student’s request,” he said. “We made a deal. I would bare my pain to him, and he would bare his cheek to me.”

The model student shot back, “But that deal was rooted in trust and honesty. The problem student broke our promise. He said he would slap me in exchange for telling me about the abuse he suffered every day at his father’s hands. But it turns out his dad’s been dead for five years.”

“My dad may not be around now, but I’m telling the truth when I say he abused me. His death doesn’t erase what he did. I hit the model student only as hard as I needed to match the pain I suffered. I converted my pain into the exact amount of force that went into each slap. And in the process, a huge amount of pain was lifted off my shoulders. Imagine if I’d done to that weakling what was done to me . . .”

Hideo muttered his lines, scowling at the model student sitting opposite him. And in that moment it dawned on me, as clear as anything—I had fallen for Hideo. As I watched him sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor of the practice room wearing a plaid shirt that was a little big on him, I calmly accepted this truth.

And even then, I understood that Hideo didn’t feel the same way. He liked me, but not the way I wanted. The odds were slim to none that his feelings would ever change. But after our twice-weekly table reads with the whole crew, Hideo would ask me to join him for walks like it was our routine. During those walks, he told me stories he had never told anyone else. About how hard he had practiced his Korean pronunciation after moving here in elementary school, the lies he invented to explain away his Japanese father, and how exhausted it all left him. After going on a few of these walks, I couldn’t help starting to feel a sense of hope. Looking back on it now, these conversations were so clearly glimpses into some private, inner part of him. He told me about the different issues he’d run into while attending school in Korea, too. He heard about Japan in history or Korean class throughout the years, and he remembered every loathing, spiteful word that had been said. But he never quite knew how to feel about any of it. Even as he said that the kids who had insulted his Korean mother and bullied him didn’t seem all that different from the high school students who called the Japanese language teacher at school a jjokbari, he wasn’t sure if he could label both instances as the same kind of racism.

“Of course it was racism. What else could you call it?” I replied, though I also had my doubts. Koreans loathing the Japanese, calling them slurs like jjokbari or seomsungi or what have you, was undoubtedly racism, but Koreans disliking Japan and Japanese people—it seemed a bit more complicated to think of this as racism, too. Hideo also seemed aware of that.

“Korea and Japan have a history.”

He always ended his stories on that note, and then we would change the topic to talk about theater or college life. If I could turn back time and return to that moment, I would probably say something different. Korea and Japan had a history, one that hadn’t been resolved at all. But even so, that guilt wasn’t Hideo’s burden to bear, and the fact that his high school Japanese teacher had to hear the word jjokbari said to his face—that was a case of racism and xenophobia. But of course, by now, Hideo no longer needed such reassurances.

A beaded curtain was installed onstage the day of our rehearsal. A few days earlier, Jiyoon and I had gone around Namdaemun Market buying beads of all colors and shapes, and we stayed up for two nights straight threading and unthreading all the beads in our backpacks into countless permutations. The completed curtain was set up between the problem student and the model student to give the audience a sudden flash effect from the reflection of the light when the problem student reached out to hit the model student. Jiyoon wanted the audience to be exposed to the scattering light—in her words, the light’s violence.

Hideo and the model student sat in the center of the stage wearing identical school uniforms, and Teacher 1 and Teacher 2 sat on either side of them. During the rehearsal, Jiyoon adjusted the location of the curtain and lights several times. As she and an upperclassman in the stage design department who had agreed to help us out for the day subtly shifted the beaded curtain and lights and tried turning them off and on, I sat in the middle of the audience seats and told them when the rippling beads reflected the most blinding light.

“It’s bright, but it just looks pretty from here!”    

“It only sparkles for a second in that spot!”

“It’s really bright now!”

When at last a brilliant flash of light illuminated the dark theater, making me instinctively squint as shards of that light embedded themselves on the insides of my eyelids, I made a big OK gesture above my head to say they had found the perfect spot. And inside that dazzling light, I saw Hideo, but not the same Hideo I knew—it was another version of him, the one he’d once told me about.

Hideo had told me about his alternate self one evening not long before the show—instead of taking one of our long walks, we were sitting side by side on the low wooden benches in front of the drama school building and chatting for a bit. I didn’t know it then, but in that moment, Hideo and I were the closest we had ever been, physically and mentally. As he watched the light fade from the sky, he murmured, I think we’ll be able to see the morning star, taking out his phone and snapping a photo. A moment later, he brought up how in his last year of high school he’d suddenly changed his mind about his career plans and started commuting about an hour from Anyang, Gyeonggi-do, to Gangnam to attend an acting academy.

“There was one time I fell asleep on the bus home and completely missed my stop,” he said. “When I woke up, it was pitch black outside, and I didn’t know where I was. It suddenly occurred to me. What would I be doing if my mom and dad hadn’t gotten divorced and we had all moved to Nagoya together?”

Nagoya. The place where Hideo and his parents had vowed to become fully Japanese. I stared at him, not knowing how to respond.

“Nuna, what do you think would have happened if I lived in Nagoya?” he asked.

“If you lived in Nagoya . . . Wouldn’t things be similar to how they are now? You’d have had secrets to keep there, too.”

Hideo nodded. “You’re probably right. But I kept wondering. What I’d be like if both my parents were both fully Japanese. Or fully Korean. What do you think?”

“In that case, you wouldn’t be the Hideo you are now,” I said. “You’d be a different person.” I thought of a movie I had seen not too long ago. “You know, there’s that Michelle Yeoh film. Just like all her selves in the movie, wouldn’t your other selves be different in some ways to this version of you and similar in others?”

Hideo said he’d seen the movie too, then started searching for film stills on his phone. He fixed his eyes on one image of Michelle Yeoh in the movie, wearing a gorgeous dress and standing in the spotlight.

“You know, Nuna, I want to become someone like this,” Hideo said. Which I took to mean that he wanted to be a version of himself that wasn’t so wounded, that hadn’t been bullied or made to carry all these secrets growing up. And almost intuitively, I thought again about Yeongdo.

“Those kinds of people, though . . . don’t you think they could turn out to be terrible deep down?” I said. Then I told him a story about Yeongdo.

This was during a time when there had been a lot of weird debate surrounding feminist movies, I said. Around the time I had just started dating Yeongdo, he’d mentioned not liking this short film that had won an award at a film festival, claiming that the male director had made a “feminist flick” to curry favor with the critics.

“So only women directors can make feminist films? That can’t be right,” I said.

And Yeongdo, clearly taken aback, snapped, “Women directors make those kinds of films because they’re stuck in a victim mentality.”

He didn’t think anyone could have a genuine interest in feminism or could explain their own lives through that framework. The whole time we dated, I tried to convince him that it was possible, but Yeongdo wouldn’t budge. This sort of thing happened countless times with him. The more than six months that our relationship lasted was filled with these kinds of conversations.

Hideo agreed that Yeongdo seemed terrible based on what I’d said, but he couldn’t understand why I was drawing a connection between them or what made me think Hideo’s other self might turn out like Yeongdo. Because Hideo’s other self would just be him, minus the woundedness, the bullying, the secrets. Even I had trouble explaining why I had linked the two of them in my mind.

Our conversation died down for a moment before Hideo looked up at the sky again and murmured, “We’ll definitely be able to see some stars tonight.”

And a few minutes later, the stars actually began to appear.

The day of the show, Hideo shone brighter than anyone. Brighter than the other actors in our production, of course, but also brighter than any of the actors who took the stage for the other end-of-semester shows. It was shocking to remember that he was barely twenty years old, finishing only his second semester. After his performance in Slap Game, Hideo got called upon to star in many more drama school productions, and he became the most in-demand student in the acting department. He starred in a film student’s thesis project, and that movie went on to receive a lot of attention on the Korean film festival circuit, leading to Hideo’s successful silver screen debut. Even after the show Hideo and I kept in touch, and we even had a few long phone calls. But we weren’t able to meet up in person. And slowly, we started reaching out to each other less often. The next time I saw him was after his leave of absence ended and he returned to school, and I was frequenting the library while writing my thesis project after postponing my graduation. About a month into the semester, Hideo called me. By then, we hadn’t seen each other in over a year, and I stared at his name for a long time when it popped up on my cell phone screen.

“Nuna. How’ve you been?”

When I finally swiped to answer the call, Hideo’s voice leapt out at me. He mentioned the name of that restaurant we never got around to eating at and asked if I remembered. Of course I did. I treasured nearly every memory I had with him.

“Do you wanna go there?” he asked.

Shortly after, we met outside the library to head over together. Just as we used to, we walked, and I asked him how he’d been, realizing bitterly that my feelings for him hadn’t changed. Hideo told me about the recent auditions he’d been on and bragged about how he got recognized more often nowadays. Then he mentioned that he’d done an interview with the school newspaper the day before and asked if I was still on the staff there.

“I quit a while ago,” I said. “What did you talk about in the interview?”

“A little of this, a little of that,” Hideo replied. “We talked about Slap Game. Oh, and I told the interviewer about my childhood. The things that happened when I was living in Japan.”

I looked at him, a bit surprised. He nodded casually. A moment later, I realized that Hideo’s secret was no longer a secret. He explained that most of his colleagues and the people he worked with at the drama school now knew that at one time he had been Japanese.

“You’ve really mellowed out,” I said, and Hideo burst out laughing.

“Now that I think about, it seems kind of silly to obsess over something like that,” he said. “I really thought it was some huge secret back then.”

“So does that mean you don’t have any secrets now?”

He laughed again and shook his head.

“No, it just means I’ve gained a lot of new secrets.”

It seemed like he wanted to tell me some of these new secrets, but I didn’t ask. After that day, I never saw Hideo again.

After graduation, I worked as a reporter at a performing arts magazine for about half a year, and after that I moved to a children’s books publisher and started working as an editor. Jiyoon was working at a small production studio. At one point, we had been busy revising Slap Game to be staged as a proper play, but we weren’t successful in the end. Out of everyone who participated in our production of Slap Game, Hideo was the only one still actively working in a field related to his major. Not long before, he’d been cast in a significant supporting role in a promising rookie director’s film. Now, Hideo talked about his childhood in every interview. His repertoire was always more or less the same. He’d confess that he’d grown up in Japan when he was younger and endured severe bullying, which led him to move to Korea, then stress how much he treasured his school days here. He shared his love for his mother, who hadn’t given up her Korean identity even while living in Japan. And every time I read his story now, I find myself calling someone who is no longer Hideo by his old name, Hideo, anyway.