ボクたちはみんな大人になれなかった
by Moegara
Book Club Date:November 2023
📖 Book Summary
*We Couldn't Become Adults* (Japanese: 《ボクたちはみんな大人になれなかった》) is by the Japanese writer Moegara. It was first serialised online, published in book form in 2017, and released in Traditional Chinese in September 2019. The trigger is modern and cruel: on a crowded train, the forty-something narrator sends a Facebook friend request to someone he once deeply loved, then memory rewinds all the way back to 1990s Shibuya and the tail end of youth. It is not a fiery coming-of-age story, nor is it chicken-soup inspirational — it is a "City Pop-style" narrative: the melody is catchy, the lighting is lovely, but every line conceals regret. The work was later adapted into the Netflix film *We Couldn't Become Adults* (2021), using the same structure of "one friend request pulls a person back into the past."
✍️ Reading Notes
The sharpest thing about this book is that it does not frame "growing up" as levelling up but as **a receding tide of feeling**. You start missing certain early joys — not because they were objectively better, but because back then "everything was still new": the first sweetness, the first song, the first instant of being understood by someone, all felt like life's summit. Once you actually reach a certain age, gummy bears taste like wax, and if you could revisit those scenes you once swore you would cherish more, the return trip might taste only of blandness. The book says it honestly: **memory is beautiful not because it was perfect, but because it no longer needs to be accountable.** "We couldn't become adults" is not cutesy whining about wanting to stay young forever. It is more like an admission: most of us have someone we cannot forget. Late at night, scrolling past their updates, a nameless pang of regret strikes — not because you want to get back together, but because you suddenly remember that you once lived so intensely, and the person who lived that way has vanished. So the "friend request" in the novel looks like a reckless impulse but is actually a kind of self-rescue: not chasing the other person back, but confirming that you once existed, once loved, once treated someone as your future. What the book really wants to reset may be this default: we assume maturity means "no longer caring," but the book seems to say that maturity might be **learning to say goodbye properly** and learning to make peace with who you used to be. You may no longer be the person whose head was full of fantasies, but you can at least say to that person: I know you were doing your best at the time. And then shrink "happiness" back to something very small: do you have someone who, when you say "I just saw something great," is genuinely happy for you?
💬 Discussion Points
- 1Does your current sense of "happiness" look more like an achievement checklist, or like "having someone who lights up when you share something"? If you have neither, which age of yourself would you most want to hug first?
- 2If one day you spotted that someone you cannot forget on social media, would you press "Add Friend"? Is what you want a reunion, or just a chance to finish a sentence you left unsaid?
- 3Do you think "becoming an adult" is more about gaining something or losing something? Which capacity to feel would you least want to lose?