Who’s responsible for Yongho’s death?

Set in 1999, the film begins with the main character, Yong-ho, waiting to commit suicide on top of a train track. Facing the approaching train, he exclaims, “I want to go back again!” In a series of flashbacks, we get to see how he was like in the past and discover what has driven him to death. The first flashback takes place three days before his death. Here we immediately learn that he is a very miserable guy, living in a shack, who has lost everything. He got divorced, therefore has no family beside him. It is also shown that he has swindles away all his money and lost his job. This situation represents the Asian financial crisis in general during the late 1990s. However, in the next flashback that shows his life five years earlier, we soon realize that he was once a successful businessman. Even during this time, his life did not look great since his wife was having an affair with her driving instructor and he himself was also having an affair with his assistant. Along with the next flashback that shows his indifference to his pregnant wife, it becomes apparent that Yongho has never really cared or loved his wife, while thinking of his first love, Sunim. We later learn why he could not be with Sunim in the following flashbacks. It was because he could not get over the smell of the crimes he had committed. In 1987, the cops have tortured a lot of pro-democracy activists, mostly students. Before becoming a businessman, Youngho was a cop. As such, he, as a cop, crucially tortured a student. In these scenes, I could not tell if it was entirely his decision to be changed this way. He used to be an innocent student who was full of dreams for the future, but who ruined all of his dreams and made him become a heartless guy? While he was serving in the military, he accidently shoots an innocent girl who was not even part of the protest group. Starting from that moment, Yong-ho was broken to be more miserable. He has always wanted to move forward and indeed he did move on. However, the traumatic and painful events that happened to him were so embedded in his life that he could not just get over with it, like the smell of peppermint candy hardly disappears. Thus, Yong-ho symbolizes the dominant culture in Korean society, and I believe that his death was no one’s fault but the society’s.