A place to remember
A quiet place to hold someone you've lost. Not a prediction — just Bokki, sitting with you.
A quiet place to hold someone you've lost. Not a prediction — just Bokki, sitting with you.
A gentle keepsake for someone you've lost: their zodiac animal and Five-Element year, read in the past tense, plus a comfort line shaped by your relationship to them.
We use only their birth year — the Four Pillars year pillar, no time or place — because this isn't a chart reading of them, it's a memory held gently. The comfort line changes by relationship (parent, spouse, child, sibling, grandparent), because grief doesn't take the same shape for each.
We never claim contact with anyone who has passed and make no claim about an afterlife — this is remembrance, not prediction. If a name is given, its sound-element reading is a keepsake, never a verdict.
No — Bokki never claims contact with anyone who has passed and makes no claim about an afterlife. This is a keepsake for remembrance, held gently, not a spiritual communication.
Because this isn't a chart reading of them — it uses only the year's zodiac animal and Five Element as a simple keepsake, read in the past tense, rather than analyzing their life in the present.
Three boxes, and every one of them is optional. You can leave all three empty, press the button, and the page will still sit with you — there is nothing here you have to be able to remember first. What the boxes do is small on purpose. A birth year, if you know it, becomes one thing and one thing only: the sign they were born under, read off a wheel of twelve. It is not a saju chart. There is no month here, no day, no hour, and nothing on this page is worked out from one. A year between 1900 and 2100 is accepted, and that is the whole of what it is used for.
| Sign | Element | Birth years |
|---|---|---|
| 子 Rat | Water | 1924, 1936, 1948, 1960, 1972, 1984, 1996, 2008 |
| 丑 Ox | Earth | 1925, 1937, 1949, 1961, 1973, 1985, 1997, 2009 |
| 寅 Tiger | Wood | 1926, 1938, 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, 1998, 2010 |
| 卯 Rabbit | Wood | 1927, 1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987, 1999, 2011 |
| 辰 Dragon | Earth | 1928, 1940, 1952, 1964, 1976, 1988, 2000, 2012 |
| 巳 Snake | Fire | 1929, 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001, 2013 |
| 午 Horse | Fire | 1930, 1942, 1954, 1966, 1978, 1990, 2002, 2014 |
| 未 Goat | Earth | 1931, 1943, 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991, 2003, 2015 |
| 申 Monkey | Metal | 1920, 1932, 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992, 2004, 2016 |
| 酉 Rooster | Metal | 1921, 1933, 1945, 1957, 1969, 1981, 1993, 2005, 2017 |
| 戌 Dog | Earth | 1922, 1934, 1946, 1958, 1970, 1982, 1994, 2006, 2018 |
| 亥 Pig | Water | 1923, 1935, 1947, 1959, 1971, 1983, 1995, 2007, 2019 |
Each sign carries an element, and the keepsake line on the card is written from that element rather than from the animal. The twelve do not divide evenly among the five: Earth carries four of the signs while each of the others carries two. So two people can share an element without sharing a sign — and a sign never belongs to more than one element, which is why the same year always gives the same line.
The sign here is read from the calendar year, and that is an approximation we would rather name than hide. The traditional year does not turn on the first of January. It turns at 입춘, the beginning of spring, which falls in early February. Across the hundred years from 1950 to 2049, the calendar year and the traditional year point at different signs on 3,499 of 36,525 days — 9.6% of them, between 34 and 36 days in every single one of those hundred years, with not one year exempt. So if they were born in the first weeks of a year, the sign shown here may belong to the year before it. This page asks only for a year, and a year is all it can honestly use.
One line on the card is not worked out at all. The words of comfort are the same for everyone who opens this page — whatever year is typed, whoever was lost, however long ago. That is deliberate. Grief is not a quantity, and handing you the same steady sentence is more honest than pretending a birth year told us anything about what you are carrying.
Saying who you lost changes how we speak, never what is read. There are six to choose from and choosing none is a complete answer. Of the six, exactly one — a child — has a keepsake sentence written separately for it, because words shaped for an elder do not belong to a child and handing them over would be careless. The sign and its element come out the same either way.
The name box is read only when it holds Hangul. 발음오행, the old reading of a name by the sounds that open its syllables, needs those initial consonants, and a name written in Latin letters does not have them. When the page cannot read a name it prints no line about the name at all — it does not fall back to the gentlest of the three readings, and it does not guess. Silence is the honest answer there. A keepsake built on a reading we could not actually take would be worth less than none.
What is missing here matters more than what is present. This page does not ask when they died, or how. It does not tell you where they are now, and it will not carry a message in either direction — no one here speaks for them. It reads nothing about what is coming, for them or for you — nothing on the card is a forecast. What it holds is what was, and what is still here because of it, because remembering is the whole of what this page is for.