At the end of his essay "Letter to a Japanese Friend," Derrida inquires, "How to translate a ``poem``? a ``poem``?..," thus letting the silent caesura speak for the indomitable logic of differance always already at work within any given speech. The obverse of the same logic would of course dictate, as Derrida furthermore notes, that "another word (the same word and an other) can be found in [a foreign language like] Japanese to say the same thing (the same and an other), to speak of deconstruction" as the latter word will have been originally enunciated in French. The present inquiry follows the philosopher`s cue and, by tasking the Korean word shillae-literallly denoting a certain rupture (shil) of intersubjective custom or ritual (lae)-to stand in for the decoristructive clearing opened up by the French term ``pardon,`` attempts a critical reading of J. M. Coetzee`s 2007 novel Diary of a Bad Year. How does this supplanted idea of rupture, for instance, allow us to reconsider the set of horizontal lines separating the three independent narratives (respectively, the political essays by Senor C, his diary-like entries and finally another diary-like narrative by Anya, Senor C`s nymphlike love-interest) comprising the text? Although the question would at first seem to revolve around the familiar conceptual boundaries demarcating the personal and the political, masculine and feminine, writerly and readerly, etc., our interpolation gives us a chance to reflect on the still dominant role of lae (or ii in Chinese), whose haunting presence/as-absence continue to precondition our daily lives in the Far East not simply despite or against the century-long inertia of Westernization but more importantly.