Description Sometimes, I am grateful for the tears that come to save us in unexpected moments… Pure tears do not mean tears that contain nothing. Only when they hold every kind of heat and coolness, the brightest light and the darkest shadow, does true light shimmer within them. Just as mixing many colors of paint creates black, but mixing many colors of light creates transparent light. One spring, over a decade ago, I saw an unusual children's play in Daehak-ro. It was a one-man show created and performed by a middle-aged Danish man, titled 'Shall I Show You Tears?' Though the memory has faded with time, one image remains vivid: he appeared on stage holding a black box and took out large, transparent teardrops to show the audience. Through all the years since, that image—the glimmering of tears inside a box—has occasionally resurfaced clearly, cleansing my heart, and I am grateful for it. (...) Sometimes, I am grateful for the tears that come to save us in unexpected moments. _ From the 'Author's Note' Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the story begins—on a day not so very long ago. In that day, there is a special child. A child who cries silent tears at the sight of pale green leaves glistening in the early spring sunlight, at a dragonfly caught in a spider's web, at the quiet sound of a flute drifting over the hill at bedtime, at the long, faint, trembling shadow of a mother worn out from a day's work. A child whose clear tears fall the moment a soft, moist breeze brushes the forehead just before rain, or when the wrinkled hand of an old neighbor woman gently strokes a cheek. One day, a man in black comes to visit this special child, whose tears not even the parents can understand. "...So it's you, the child with special tears." And he opens a black box to show the child the tears within. "This orange-tinted tear is one shed in great anger. This gray tear is a false tear. This pale lavender tear is one shed in regret for a wrongdoing. This dark red tear is one shed for someone missed but unseen. This pink tear is one shed in overflowing joy. This light brown tear is..." The man says he has come searching for 'pure tears' and wants to see the child's tears—but the child cannot show him any. Not until the sun sinks below the horizon, the clouds turn red, deep blue-black ink spreads across the sky, and sugar-like stars rise in clusters. "It's no use. I'll come again. Take care." The child decides to follow the man, who must go to an old man waiting to buy tears from him. This old man, who says he has never shed a single tear in his life—not even when his father died, not even when his wife left him—spends his entire fortune to buy all the teardrops the man has, and uses them all up on the spot. Will the old man ever be able to cry again? And what is the 'shadow tear' revealed behind the old man's now-empty tear ducts? The most beautiful story of tears in the world, shed for every reason in the world All tears are transparent, but this short fairy tale, born from the idea that if tears were crystallized, each would take on a different color, shows that anyone who has ever cried from genuine emotion can easily recognize how many different stories of 'tears' are held within. And that countless thousands of different-colored tears each hold their own different story. In that moment when, watching the sunset without realizing it, or suddenly hearing an old pop song melody drifting from somewhere, or even while laughing mindlessly at a weekend drama, your eyes suddenly well up and turn red.