A teacher offers a class a less awkward way to introduce themselves. Each student must make five statements, one of them false. Everyone else has to guess which one.
There is room for a joke, a ridiculous preference, a small performance of personality. But a student waiting to speak still has a decision to make. Which pieces of a life can safely be handed to a roomful of people who do not yet know what to do with them?
Kim Ae-ran's 2024 Korean novel takes its title, 이중 하나는 거짓말, from this game. This guide uses One of These Is a Lie as an English identifying title, not the title of a confirmed English-language edition. Its central figures are three classmates in their second year of high school: Ji-u, So-ri, and Chae-un. Their lives begin to intersect, though they are not an inseparable trio. Much of the story takes place around a winter vacation lasting roughly two months.
The attractive question here is not simply who has deceived whom. It is how an impression formed in a classroom might become a reason to send a message, consider a request, or keep looking at someone after the conversation ends.
A truth that sounds safely impossible
The game provides an unusual permission. A false statement is required, so a listener cannot assume that everything being said is true. That uncertainty can offer cover to a person with something difficult to tell.
In the Korean passages supplied on YES24, So-ri feels an urge to speak about a secret she has carried alone. She imagines telling the kind of truth that sounds so implausible everyone could laugh it away. Something might be expressed without immediately becoming a demand for explanation.
It is an uncomfortable, recognizable wish. Speaking lightly can make a serious experience feel neglected. Speaking with its full weight can leave an ordinary social occasion unable to contain it. So-ri is drawn to a way of being heard that might preserve some room to retreat.
A classroom gives this difficulty a useful scale. The person standing up has a face, a name, perhaps an irritating habit or an interesting voice. Even if the reader knows something painful about that person's home, the classmates are meeting someone who must also get through an ordinary school day. The setting leaves space for curiosity before sympathy hardens into a description.
The game can finish successfully without anyone being understood particularly well. Its rules concern the five statements, not everything that has been left outside them. This is a promising starting point for a novel about young people: being able to identify a falsehood does not mean being qualified to explain the person who told it.
Someone has to look after the lizard
Ji-u's mother has died. He lives with her partner, Seon-ho, and keeps a lizard named Yongsik. When he plans to go away for holiday work, he asks So-ri to look after the animal.
For a stranger, arranging pet care might sound like a minor practical task. For Ji-u, there is a life he cannot simply set aside while he earns money. Something familiar has to continue in his absence. Before leaving, he must find someone to entrust with it.
So-ri already has a reason to remember him. Hearing him read his work in a writing class made him more than another recognizable face. The published extract describes an attention that has not yet acquired a grand name: she remembers a smile and wants to see it again. Interest can precede an account of what that interest means.
The request gives that uncertain feeling something to do. Neither person needs to deliver a complete history of suffering before contact becomes possible. A message arrives with a manageable question inside it: could you help with this particular thing?
There is considerable tenderness in that scale, but also a demand. Looking after an animal is not the same as feeling kindly toward its owner. Care introduces something that must be attended to even when one's own mood has changed. It connects people through a continuing responsibility rather than a single moment of mutual recognition.
Seon-ho's presence opens a related question. He is not Ji-u's biological father. After the mother's death, the boy's understanding of his place in the household cannot be settled by a family label. The relationship has to continue through what these two people do, and through what each believes the other wants.
This is where the premise becomes more inviting than a list of losses. We want to know whom Ji-u still lives beside, what he has to arrange before going away, and whose name comes to mind when he needs help. Those details give a bereaved child a present tense.
What the hands can manage
One of the earliest published passages places a soft art eraser in Ji-u's hand. He likes its size, its yielding texture, and the fact that it is inexpensive. When he feels low, he rolls it in his fingers. The sensation gives him a modest feeling that an ordinary, bearable future may still be possible.
The object is a good measure of the opening's appeal. Nothing spectacular has occurred. The future has not been repaired. There is simply something he can hold and alter, a little resistance that responds to the movement of his hand.
Drawing begins at that level before it becomes a story about artistic expression. Ji-u can add a mark, remove one, or find a shape for something he cannot easily say. A reader need not wait for evidence of extraordinary talent to be interested in those actions.
So-ri's hands have a different difficulty. She avoids holding other people's hands, and a pen or pencil helps her maintain that distance. Drawing can therefore make contact possible while also keeping contact at bay. The apparent contradiction belongs to the person, not to a lesson that needs to be resolved.
Ji-u's comics will also find a reader in Chae-un. An image made to accommodate one person's experience can reach someone with different memories and anxieties. The same panel may become heavier when seen from another position.
That offers a pleasure particular to fiction: we can be interested in the making and in the looking without assuming they will produce identical accounts. A picture may establish a connection before the people involved can speak about it directly.
Chae-un has his own history of commitment, including football training he has left behind. The reasons belong to the novel. For an introduction, it is enough to notice that these teenagers have practiced things, developed preferences, and invested effort. Their difficult homes do not exhaust what there is to know about them.
In Kim Yong-chul's interview for Segye Ilbo, Kim says she did not want talent to become the route to salvation. That intention usefully changes what we wait for. A competition, a breakthrough, or public recognition need not arrive to certify that a young person's life is worth continuing.
The eraser already suggests a smaller possibility. Making something can help a person stay with an experience without making that experience harmless.
A winter, not a completed account of growing up
This is Kim's second novel, published thirteen years after My Brilliant Life. The short span of its main action holds the pressure of lives that began well before the holiday. Moving among three perspectives allows the present to gather different histories.
There is suspense in that arrangement, but the opening invites more than a search for missing facts. We can also attend to how someone approaches what is difficult to say. Learning a secret and learning how to listen are not necessarily the same achievement.
The publisher's materials describe a thread of the fantastic alongside the everyday circumstances. It is worth knowing about that mixture without turning the introduction into an explanation of abilities or rules. The concrete things remain useful points of entry: a classroom, a drawing implement, an animal entrusted to somebody else.
These public passages support an expectation of close, intimate attention. They cannot settle how evenly every character develops across the whole book or how convincingly its later connections work. A reader looking primarily for a tightly engineered puzzle may want a different kind of momentum. Here the early interest lies in the changing significance of apparently small encounters.
Kim's interview also looks back on the burden she once placed on a young character to understand adults. She describes coming to feel that the child's own life was difficult enough. Read beside the practical arrangements of this premise, that reflection matters: warmth need not require children to become more accommodating to those who hurt or disappoint them.
We can begin without asking whether these classmates will emerge stronger. It may be more interesting to watch what they keep caring about, whom they decide to contact, and how another person's response changes the next thing they do.
Five statements take only a few minutes. The longer question starts afterward: will someone who heard you today still want to know a little more tomorrow?