I couldn’t smell from the day I was born.
I just grew up thinking that was normal — it never really bothered me.
If something gets taken away from you, sure, that’s sad and unfair, but if you never had it to begin with, you don’t even know what you’re missing, so you just live with it.
Especially when it’s not like I was missing arms or legs, or couldn’t see — it was just smell.
Still, my parents took me to the hospital from early on, hoping the sensor might somehow recover, or that clearing out the sinusitis might open the passage and let me start smelling things.
From their side, it must have been heartbreaking.
When I was around 12, the hospital said: let’s do the surgery when you turn 19.
Do it too young, they said, and the bone could deform — better to wait until you’re fully grown.
I turned 19.
I’m sitting in a hospital room talking with the doctor.
Since you’re young, he says, let’s skip general anesthesia and just do local — you can tough it out.
How bad could the pain really be, he says, it’s only about 20 minutes.
Fine, I say.
Surgery day.
I walk into the operating room wide awake.
Doctor 1, Doctor 2, Nurse 1, Nurse 2, Nurse 3.
Doctor 1 comes over with a syringe and injects anesthetic somewhere inside my mouth and nose, and then all these instruments come into view — who wouldn’t be scared?
But I’m Amuro.
Nineteen years old, in my prime, Amuro.
When the first instrument goes into my nose and gently touches somewhere on the inner wall, I think: oh, so this is what it feels like, not so bad.
That confidence doesn’t last 30 seconds.
The scraping, the cutting — it stops being just sound and starts coming through as sensation.
Wait, is this thing even numb?
The feeling is that vivid, and the pain is beyond words.
Somewhere deep in my pride, me and my nervous system’s survival instinct start fighting it out for real.
Tell them to stop?
Are you insane?
You’re a man.
The surgery drags on for about two hours, and all I can think about is slitting Doctor 2’s throat.
Everything I’d heard in the pre-op briefing is now vivid enough that even I — not just the doctor — can follow along in real time.
There’s a vertical partition inside the nasal cavity of the skull, and mine had been bent out of shape from years of trapped pus; the plan was to drain the pus, cut into the partition and the muscle beside it, stitch it back up, and let the muscle contract as it healed to pull the partition straight again.
And yeah — I can tell exactly what’s happening.
Now they’re cutting the partition.
Now Doctor 2 slips and cuts into the wrong muscle next to it.
You bastard….
You bastard…
You bastard…
All I can do is clench my fists and repeat that, over and over.
I stayed in the hospital for five days after the surgery, and when I came back ten days later,
“you bastard”
slipped out of me again.
The doctor asks: so, can you smell now?
Yes?
No.
Life is funny like that — around the time I was supposed to head off to the military, I heard that if you couldn’t smell, you might not have to go.
But no hospital could actually prove that you couldn’t smell.
It was a loophole in an unreliable system that depended entirely on your own say-so.
Made sense, in a way — if every man in Korea could just say
“I can’t smell,”
nobody would ever have to serve.
Can’t smell, don’t have to go — but there’s no one who can prove it.
The end!
When I turned 21, there was a general hospital called Samsung Medical Center, founded by Samsung, and one of the ENT department heads there had earned his doctorate — and become quite famous — for developing an objective way to prove someone couldn’t smell.
The day I went in for my appointment, they had this whole elaborate setup ready for me.
For four hours I tasted sample after sample — salty water, slightly less salty, even less salty, sweet water, slightly less sweet, even less sweet — thousands of little cups, checking boxes on a sheet after each one.
The doctor said he’d invented the pattern himself, and that after tens of thousands of trials he’d statistically mapped out the typical response patterns of normal people, liars, and people who genuinely couldn’t smell — it couldn’t be fooled, he said.
And so, on January 7th, 1998, I was officially certified as a person who couldn’t smell — and officially exempt from the military.
My life plan was quietly rewriting itself into: a guy who doesn’t have to serve.
Then in 1997, presidential candidate Lee Hoi-chang’s son got caught up in a draft-dodging scandal that blew up into a huge national issue, and starting January 1st, 1998, the military service law was revised — anyone who could function normally in daily life would now be drafted, smell or no smell.
My draft notice arrived at the house.
My appeal was denied.