God's Song

He lost two things in exactly 3 years. Money and health.

All he was left with was a bank balance that had been reduced to a measly $1000 from what was once over $10 million and a warning from his doctor that, because he had spent his days watching the HTS program while chain smoking, he would die if he did not quit smoking and start exercising now.

Though Yoon Kwang Hun was not a successful gambler, he was not stupid. He had admitted his defeat and left the table.

After he sold his house worth millions to settle his loans, he had about $1 million left. For someone who survived such a great loss, it wasn’t a bad result. He needed to be careful with his second challenge. He couldn’t waste his remaining $1 million.

At first, he thought of making a cafe in Hongdae or Sinchon. Music, coffee, and wine were Yoon Kwang Hun’s only hobbies and he had wanted to spend the rest of his life surrounded by them.

However, the music that Yoon Kwang Hun liked had long become classics that wouldn’t be popular in Hongdae and Sinchon. This became a reason to give up his tiny store with colossal rent.

Yoon Kwang Hun lost all of his nerve and had to admit that he was an old middle-aged man and needed to be more and more careful with the money he had left. The last place that he contracted was a refined live cafe.

Infested with middle-aged customers and the occasional irrelevant pop singers with one or two hits under their belts, the target customer was the person who wanted to listen to music while giving a farce of elegance with wine.

The practice did well enough for 6 months to make a comfortable living. Once the business slowed down, he was making the bare minimum to live off of. About a year passed like this and, as the contractors kept frequenting his cafe, Yoon Kwang Hun had to change its concept to another live cafe.

As another year passed, he found out that he had been swindled by the contractors. Though the menu prices were increased 5-fold on the days that singers performed, profits didn’t increase. Eventually, his live cafe just became another cafe in Misari where he had to keep listening to the pop music of the 70s and 80s instead of the music that he liked.