Jiyoung’s wife works through elementary-school math workbooks

Jiyoung’s wife works through elementary-school math workbooks in the final portion of the novel, where the psychiatrist discovers that his own unnamed wife has been completing volume after volume. The books first appear to him as a possible sign of their son’s interest in mathematics; he gradually recognizes that they belong to his wife. Her explanation—that the work is enjoyable because it is one thing she can control—turns a seemingly small household habit into a measure of how narrow her choices have become. The episode also makes visible the career and care responsibilities that shape the lives of women in the novel, including Kim Jiyoung.

The late-night discovery

On the last day of the year, the psychiatrist comes home late from a gathering with high-school friends and finds his wife still at the kitchen table, working on a math book. More than half its pages are filled with colorful illustrations and pictures. He assumes she is doing their son’s vacation homework, but she explains that elementary schools no longer assign such workbooks over the holidays. She is doing them for herself.

One problem asks the reader to identify a Seoul public bus number from a chart, a map, and a timetable. The psychiatrist does not find the exercise absorbing, but his wife presents it with enthusiasm. The detail gives the books an ordinary, practical subject: they are not advanced exercises or a return to her former professional work, but children’s puzzles built from familiar systems. Their modest scale is part of the contrast. The woman working through them has a record of exceptional achievement, yet has taken up a task her husband initially dismisses as children’s work.

That weekend, he finds more volumes in the recycling. His wife has completed them, and he realizes that he had repeatedly thrown the books away while assuming their son was the one using them. The misunderstanding exposes how little attention he has paid to her private activity: the books were present in the household, but he had assigned them to the child without asking who was doing the work.

A former prodigy and a chosen pastime

The psychiatrist recalls his wife’s mathematical ability: she won competitions and Olympiads throughout her schooling, earned perfect scores on all twelve midterm and final mathematics exams across three years of high school, and missed only one question in the mathematics section of the college entrance examination. Against this history, her use of elementary-level workbooks seems inexplicable to him. He asks why someone of her ability would spend time on material meant for children; she answers simply that it is fun.

Her response refuses the hierarchy her husband assumes between impressive achievement and a modest pastime. The workbooks do not need to prepare her for an exam, prove her talent, or lead to a career in order to matter to her. Their clear problems and bounded tasks offer a kind of satisfaction that her current circumstances do not. When he presses the point that the material is beneath her level, she explains that it is enjoyable because it is the one thing she can control these days. That statement recasts the hobby: what looks to him like an eccentric choice is, to her, an activity with a boundary she can set and an outcome she can work through herself.

Care work and a suspended career

The books sit within a life increasingly structured by childcare. Earlier, Kim Jiyoung had feared that parenthood would make it impossible to sustain both her career and the care of a child. She and her husband considered returning to work immediately, taking a year of maternity leave, or not returning; their options included sending their daughter to his parents in Busan or hiring a live-in nanny. His parents’ age and his mother’s recent back surgery ruled out the first arrangement, while the cost and intimacy of sharing a home with a nanny made the second difficult. They concluded that one parent would have to stay home, and that parent was Jiyoung, in part because her husband’s job was more stable and better paid and because wives were more commonly expected to leave work for childcare.

The novel later gives the psychiatrist’s wife a related interruption. When their son’s teacher recommends a stay-at-home mother, she suspends her medical career. Her days fill with preparing breakfast, waking and washing the boy, feeding and dressing him, taking him to school and collecting him, arranging art and piano lessons, and sleeping in his room. She had arranged a position for a possible return to work through a senior colleague, but cancels it when she sees no improvement in her son. The workbooks are pursued within this demanding routine, not in place of it.

The earlier account of Jiyoung’s daughter, Jung Jiwon, beginning daycare at a little over twelve months old further complicates the idea that childcare creates leisure. Jiyoung has roughly three hours between drop-off and pick-up, but spends most of that time on laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food and snacks. The novel also cites a comparison of daily free time: a stay-at-home mother with a child under two has four hours and ten minutes, while a mother whose child attends daycare has four hours and twenty-five minutes. The fifteen-minute difference underscores how little respite a change in childcare arrangements necessarily provides. Domestic work remains after the child is elsewhere.

The husband’s recognition and the episode’s significance

The psychiatrist’s first reaction is irritation: he wishes his wife would do something more interesting, something suited to her talent and preferences rather than an activity he interprets as a substitute for having nothing else to do. Yet his own account shows why the distinction matters. He has not understood what the books mean to her until she explains their appeal, and even then he remains uncertain how to value a pastime that does not match his image of what she should pursue.

He extends that wish to Kim Jiyoung as well, hoping that she might do something she is good at, likes, and genuinely wants to do. The comparison links two women whose lives have been narrowed by care and career interruption, without making their circumstances identical. For the psychiatrist’s wife, the workbooks are not a solution to those constraints or a return to her former mathematical distinction. They are a manageable activity that she can claim as her own. The husband’s discovery therefore shifts the episode from a domestic curiosity to an instance of belated recognition: the books were visible all along, but the person completing them—and the significance of her choice—had been overlooked.