Jungkook

Jungkook is one of the novel’s most volatile and searching figures: a Korean student whose body carries both the evidence of childhood violence and the discipline of underground boxing. He can enter the Ares Garden ring seeking the exhilaration of pain, drink until anger threatens to become a public fight, and still remain beside a traumatized woman without knowing how to help except by waiting. His decisive arc is not a simple conversion from brutality to goodness. It is a struggle to recognize how violence has shaped him, how he repeats it, and how love, friendship, therapy, and work might give that force another direction.

Identity and Background

Jungkook’s history is marked by domestic violence. As a child, he and his older brother Ye-jun hear increasingly loud cries from downstairs while Ye-jun holds the eight-year-old Jungkook back, preventing him from rushing into the kitchen to intervene. Jungkook is furious and distressed, wipes away tears of rage, and struggles free when his brother’s grip loosens. The scene establishes a boy whose instinct is simultaneously protective and dangerous: he wants to stop the violence, but he has not yet learned any method other than physically entering it.

Sunmi later recalls that Jungkook once appeared quiet and restrained, until he came home with a badly injured face. He claimed that he had fought at school and that Namjoon had rescued him before matters became worse, and Sunmi believed him until Jungkook ran away at sixteen. His father did not search for him, while Sunmi welcomed him into her home without hesitation. Jungkook was neither turbulent nor disrespectful there; instead, he showed enduring gratitude toward the woman who took him under her protection. Sunmi’s concern nevertheless deepened as she observed his behavior outside her home and heard Namjoon describe the dangers surrounding him.

The contrast between Jungkook’s quiet gratitude and his public menace becomes visible in his tattoos. He explains that the demonic Japanese samurai on his right biceps represents a part of himself that has existed since childhood, while the mandala extends the image from his elbow. A geisha wearing a Kitsune mask signifies the mischievous side of his personality; a chrysanthemum carries associations with death, funerals, determination, and durability; and an oni on his hand embodies his personal demons, complete with a tantō, smoke, and thorns. The word "Hate" across his knuckles is a reference to his father. His skin therefore functions as a map of divided identity: endurance and destruction, playfulness and menace, remembrance and defiance.

Life and Plot Trajectory

Jungkook’s principal outlet is the Ares Garden, an establishment disguised as a bar and protected by Chen’s carefully maintained relationship with corrupt police officers. On a fight night, Jungkook packs his sports bag, drives to the venue, and enters a system in which illegal matches coexist with ordinary drinking and official silence. The setting offers him belonging, reputation, and a controlled vocabulary for emotions that otherwise threaten to overwhelm him.

Before a match, he changes into black mesh shorts, sports shoes, and black Venum boxing wraps. The preparation is methodical, almost ritualistic, and gives his anger a physical form. He tells himself that the fights allow him to release pressure; in the ring, he feels alive, while the crowd’s admiration feeds his pride and ego. The image of the tattooed fighter with infernal eyes attracts both fear and fascination, turning his inner darkness into a marketable persona.

That release becomes frightening when he returns to the ring while carrying unresolved rage. Shelby and Namjoon watch him fight after following Spencer into the transformed venue. Jungkook strikes his opponent repeatedly and shows no sign of exhaustion even as the other fighter nears unconsciousness. His furious expression makes clear that he wants not merely to win but to finish the encounter, regardless of whether the opponent ends up in hospital. For Shelby, the spectacle reveals the danger behind his claims of control; for Jungkook, the ring has become dangerously close to an instrument of self-punishment and displaced revenge.

Jungkook’s conflict is not limited to the ring. At a bar, after consuming his sixth glass of whisky, he downs a seventh and places the glass heavily on the wooden counter. The bartender recognizes the warning signs in his emotional state and approaches cautiously, fearing that the young man may start a fight. Alcohol lowers the distance between Jungkook’s pain and his aggression, making visible how quickly his chosen methods of relief can become forms of incapacity.

His return to the Ares Garden is followed by remorse rather than triumph. Jungkook explains that the promise he made with Shelby to learn how to love together had led him to hope that he could drive away the demons occupying his thoughts since childhood. Yet, when he learned about the fights at Ares Garden, he entered a trance-like state in which vice felt stronger than intention. The ring felt genuinely good until he saw Shelby’s eyes, reddened by dried tears; then he regretted what he had done. The admission does not erase the harm, but it marks a crucial change from rationalizing violence to identifying the moment in which compulsion overtook choice.

Relationships and Conflict

Jungkook’s relationship with Shelby is built through repeated collisions between his need for closeness and his fear of what his own intensity can do. When Shelby is distressed, he approaches her, crouches down, and places his right hand on her knees. The touch becomes meaningful because she is seeking comfort, but the novel repeatedly treats physical contact as something that must be negotiated rather than assumed. In another crisis, Shelby recoils when Cassiopée places hands on her shoulders; Jungkook’s later care is significant precisely because it is attentive to vulnerability rather than automatically forceful.

Jungkook also remains capable of tenderness in ordinary intimacy. While Shelby reads in bed, he studies every detail of her face, takes the book gently from her hands, places it on the bedside table, and draws her against him without speaking. His affection is expressed through close observation and a controlled gesture, a sharp contrast with the indiscriminate force of the ring. After Shelby cleans his injured face in silence, kneeling between his legs while avoiding his gaze, care becomes a shared practice rather than a declaration alone.

The relationship is eventually named publicly and defended against sexualized dismissal. When Shelby is reduced to someone he merely sleeps with, Jungkook rejects the description and identifies her as his girlfriend. He later tells her, "Je t'aime," and, at another decisive moment, says, "Je t'aime Shelby Anderson." These declarations matter because Jungkook’s history has taught him to associate masculinity with suppression and violence; naming love asks him to make himself legible through vulnerability instead.

His family relationships remain more fractured. The memory of Ye-jun restraining him during the childhood violence reveals an older brother trying to protect him, even while Jungkook experiences the restraint as another obstacle to action. His father, Dong-hyun, is not an abstract source of trauma: Jungkook recognizes him in the present with immediate anger and moves toward the familiar figure. The encounter shows how quickly the past returns through the body, before reflection can intervene.

Sunmi represents a different model of attachment and responsibility. She first shelters Jungkook after his flight from home and continues to worry about the darkness surrounding him. Later, Jungkook enters her psychologist’s office and sits in the chair while she takes up her notebook, surprised that he has requested an appointment. Seeking the meeting is itself an important action: rather than relying only on fists, alcohol, or avoidance, he turns toward professional help and allows another person to examine what he has concealed.

Change, Work, and Ending

Jungkook’s transformation is reinforced by the people around him, especially Shelby, Namjoon, Sunmi, and the wider circle that wants Shelby to recover. One person explains that Shelby has become more open and less cold, and attributes much of that change to the group, especially Jungkook. The observation reverses his usual position as the dangerous influence: he is also capable of creating conditions in which another person feels safer enough to re-enter ordinary social life. His care is therefore not only protective; it has consequences for Shelby’s behavior and sense of connection.

The novel does not present recovery as the disappearance of anger. Jungkook continues to feel the pull of Ares Garden because the fights provide immediate relief, public recognition, and a bodily sense of being alive. His progress lies in recognizing that these rewards are inseparable from exploitation and relapse. He can acknowledge that the vice was stronger than his promise in the moment, then recognize Shelby’s pain as a moral interruption. The movement is from automatic discharge to reflective responsibility.

His later working life offers a material alternative to the underground fighter identity. After moving into tattoo work, he describes an easy installation because Noah had already reserved space for him in the shop. He meets his colleagues, works on a flash book for clients, and begins to build a professional identity from skill, design, and sustained labor rather than from the crowd’s appetite for violence. The shift does not cancel the tattoos’ darker meanings; instead, it places the marked body within a practice that creates rather than destroys.

Jungkook’s graduation also supplies a visible counterimage to his earlier life. He adjusts his tie, looks at his reflection, and sighs before leaving the room to face Shelby, who helps him put on his gown and mortarboard. The scene joins self-presentation with mutual support: he is no longer defined solely by the black shorts, wrapped hands, and arena persona. He can stand before others as a student completing an academic passage while remaining emotionally connected to the person who has witnessed his most frightening contradictions.

Narrative Role and Thematic Significance

Jungkook embodies the novel’s central argument that trauma can explain violent behavior without excusing it. His childhood places him near violence before he possesses the power to stop it; adulthood gives him physical strength, a public arena, and access to alcohol, but not immediate emotional language. The result is a character who repeatedly converts fear and grief into bodily action, then must face the consequences of that conversion.

His body is the novel’s most direct psychological text. Bruises, tattoos, boxing wraps, pierced nipples, clenched hands, and the physical distance between him and Shelby all communicate states that speech cannot stabilize. Even the pain of piercing is described as intensely pleasurable, suggesting why controlled physical sensation can compete with slower forms of healing. Yet his body also becomes a site of revision: it can be restrained, treated, held, trained, dressed for graduation, and employed in tattoo work.

Jungkook is therefore a round character rather than a single emblem of menace. He is frightening in the ring, vulnerable before his father, grateful to Sunmi, loyal to Namjoon, attentive to Shelby, capable of drunken danger, and capable of asking for therapy. The same intensity produces both harm and devotion. His ending is not a claim that the demons have vanished, but an image of a man learning to keep them from dictating every gesture, relationship, and future choice.