Prologue: A Dream Come True
Everyone has a dream or two.
Not a career ambition so much as an impossible, unrealistic wish—the kind you know you will never actually fulfill.
I had one of those myself.
Other people might find it strange, but I often caught myself thinking I wished I had been born a girl. It wasn't that I wanted to transition, and it wasn't that I was confused about my gender identity. It was simply this thought that would not leave me alone: if I had been born a woman instead of a man, wouldn't I have lived even a slightly better life?
To explain why I carried that dream, I need to talk, however briefly, about the life I have lived. It isn't the kind of story you tell lightly. But all of it is in the past now.
My mother was a single mom. In other words, a woman who had a child without ever getting married.
The man who was my biological father does not seem to have been a particularly good person. You hardly need an explanation—the fact that my mother did not choose to have me is enough. She told me that by the time she realized I was in her belly, it was already too late to end the pregnancy.
Which is to say: I was the child she never wanted.
Naturally, my relationship with her was never very good. I was the son of the man who had done that terrible thing to her. Every time she looked at me, she would give a self-deprecating little laugh and say that he was the one she saw.
Then one day, Mom said to me,
"I've met a man I like. I'm going to marry him."
I don't really remember how I reacted. What matters is that she truly loved that man, and that she married him, just as she had said she would.
There was just one small problem.
"From now on, she's your little sister, so be good to her. Got it?"
Just like that, I had a little sister five years younger than me. Her name was Lee Se-ah.
Fortunately, she was kind and sweet. She reached out first to a shy kid like me and greeted me with an open, easy warmth.
"Hi. I'm Lee Se-ah. What's your name, Oppa?"
My stepfather, for his part, treated me almost too well. It was awkward at first, but honestly, I didn't mind. Even if we were a little different from other families, I think the four of us lived a happy everyday life.
Those brief memories are the happiest of my entire life.
Of course, it wasn't as if there were no problems at all.
"I wish I'd had a daughter of my own."
"Don't say that, honey. They're both equally precious children. And Se-ah is as good as your daughter already."
"...I know. Of course I know. But every time I look at him, I keep..."
"It's all right. Just forget it."
Hearing those voices leak from the master bedroom in the middle of the night was, honestly, a little hard. Deep down, I had already realized that was how Mom felt.
People say a stepmother dotes on her own child and resents the one who isn't hers. With Mom, it was the opposite. She favored Se-ah so openly that anyone could see it. My stepfather tried his hardest to love us equally, but even that wasn't enough to fill the emptiness I felt.
That's right.
That was when I started, quietly, to dream.
If I had been born a daughter, would Mom have been able to love me? If I hadn't been the son with the face of the man she hated.
And after that, I may well have begun to feel inferiority and jealousy toward Se-ah. She felt like someone from a completely different world—a perfect being who excelled at school, had a good heart, was beautiful, and was loved by everyone.
And me?
An introvert who didn't fit in even in his own class. A loser who shut himself in his room and watched anime.
"Oppa! Want to go see a movie tomorrow?"
The ones who truly loved and cherished me were, ironically, my stepfather and Se-ah. Which only made me more ashamed, more wretched. I was the ugly older brother who envied his kind little sister for being loved.
The only choice I had was to pull away.
The moment I graduated high school I enlisted, and two years later, after I was discharged, I left home and started living on my own. I hadn't gone to college, so all I did was part-time jobs and manual labor. That was when my stepfather, genuinely worried, said to me,
"How about studying for the college entrance exam? I'd like you to go to university, learn something you really want, and be happy. Don't worry about the money. Of course, the choice is yours."
I couldn't turn down that warm offer. While I prepared for the exam, I thought hard about what I wanted to study. I wasn't a particularly good student, and there wasn't anything I especially wanted to learn.
So I decided to study Japanese. The reason, of course, was that anime and Japanese culture were my only hobby.
That is an exact summary of my life up through yesterday. A twenty-three-year-old man, late to the game, studying for the college entrance exam and living alone.
But starting today, a great many things are going to change.
When I woke up—
Suddenly, my dream had come true.
In a rather strange way.