Tag: romance

TV review: Gimbap and Onigiri

Gimbap and Onigiri poster

I’m a sucker for a romance based around food, and I love Korean and Japanese food, so Gimbap and Onigiri (TV Tokyo 2026) seemed like a good bet. A Korean woman studying in Tokyo strikes up a friendship – and then romance – with a Japanese man who cooks at a small diner. They bond over food, and the relationship helps them both move past stumbling blocks in their lives.

Rin (played by Kang Hye-won) is studying for a master’s in animation but at the start of her final year, she is falling behind her peers and struggling to find somewhere to live. Her mother is nagging her to move back to Korea and work as an art teacher but Rin dearly wants to stay in Japan. Though it’s unclear why as she seems lonely, with only one friend in Tokyo.

Taiga (Eiji Akaso) is clearly a good cook and is valued by his employer, though he’s had no formal training. His family are hard on him about what they see as an unskilled part-time job. But while working he’s happy and popular, if a little too shy to see how liked he is.

So they’re both insecure, and working unsociable hours that make it hard to have much of a life outside work/university. When Rin stumbles on the diner and they start talking, it seems like a perfect match.

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K-drama review: Just Between Lovers

Just Between Lovers poster

The drama Just Between Lovers (JTBC 2017–2018), also known as Rain or Shine, is at the more serious end of the K-dramas I have watched. I really enjoyed it despite not having expected something with this tone.

The story’s background is loosely based on the real-life disaster in 1995 when Sampoong Department Store in Seoul collapsed. In reality 502 people were killed and 937 injured. In the TV show, the collapse of the fictional S-Mall kills 48 people and the drama focuses on two of the survivors 10 years later.

Lee Kang-doo (played by Lee Jun-ho) and Ha Moon-soo (Won Jin-ah) both lost a family member when S-Mall collapsed and they are still dealing with grief as well as their own trauma. Kang-doo was badly injured in the disaster and still struggles with physical pain as well as nightmares about the time he spent trapped in the rubble. He works in temporary construction jobs. He acts tough but is sweet at his core.

Moon-soo has trained as an architect specializing in safety regulations. She has her life together but suffers from her mother’s alcoholism. And though she has lost much of her memory from the day S-Mall collapsed, it still haunts her. She’s practical and not easily phased.

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K-drama review: Hometown Cha Cha Cha

Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha posterHometown Cha Cha Cha (tvN 2021) is a sweet, gentle romcom told over 24 hours of television. Like all the better K-dramas it takes its time to establish characters and tell their story without overstaying its welcome. I thoroughly enjoyed this.

Yoon Hye-jin (Shin Min-a) is a dentist in Seoul. When she refuses to recommend unnecessary expensive treatments to her patients she is fired. In a thoroughly low place, she decides to spend a few hours in Gongjin, a seaside town her family used to visit when she was young.

A series of mishaps conspire to keep her in this small town for the day and night. And also to repeatedly put her in contact with Hong Du-sik (Kim Seon-ho, who was also in Start-Up). A jack-of-all-trades, he is affectionately called Chief Hong by the town’s residents. When a couple of residents casually mention that Gongjin doesn’t have a dentist, the seed of an idea is planted. It’s about time for Hye-jin to start her own practice, and it need only be for a year or so, until she can move back to Seoul.

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K-drama review: Start-Up

Start-up still image

I felt the need for a light-hearted K-drama and Netflix assured me Start-Up (tvN 2020) fit the bill. It’s certainly at the lighter end of TV fare but not the comedy I was hoping for. It’s basically a cheesy romance with a B storyline about tech start-ups.

As always, the centre of the story is a love triangle. This one is more convoluted than most, but actually did keep me guessing for a few episodes which guy would get the girl.

We meet Seo Dal-mi as a young teen. When her parents divorce they tell Dal-mi and her older sister In-jae to choose which parent they want to live with. The sisters choose differently and are separated. To cheer Dal-mi up, her Grandmother hatches a plan with her 18-year-old lodger, Han Ji-pyeong. He becomes a penfriend to Dal-mi but they don’t use his real name, they pick the name of a kid from a story in the newspaper: Nam Do-san. For a year they exchange letters and Dal-mi believes herself in love. Then Ji-pyeong leaves for university and the letters stop.

Cut to 15 years later. Dal-mi (played by Bae Suzy of Uncontrollably Fond and Anna), having chosen to stay with her perpetually in debt father, couldn’t afford university. She works a series of temp jobs and dreams of following in her now-deceased father’s footsteps and starting her own business.

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Book review: Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

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The novel Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield is beautiful, thoughtful, original, packed with ideas that generate discussion. And yet I found it a bit too ponderous to love it.

Miri’s wife Leah has “come back different” after a deep sea research mission that overran by months. Leah seems weakened and barely eats, sleeps or speaks. She sips on salt water and soaks for long hours in the bath. Her skin takes on a strange hue, almost translucent.

Miri spends her days worrying and trying to get hold of the research centre behind the mission to find out what happened but they are proving maddeningly elusive. She reflects on earlier days of her and Leah’s relationship and who Leah truly is, or was.

Chapters alternate between Miri’s present and Leah’s journal of the mission itself. They are a tiny crew of just three and disaster strikes early, but in an odd way that is left open to the reader’s interpretation. The craft’s communications, lights and engines fail so that it sinks to the ocean floor and cannot be manoeuvred or any message sent. But somehow it still has a working shower, oxygen and water recycling plus a store of long-life food that could last them months, despite the original mission only being a couple of weeks long.

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Book review: The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

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Forty rules of love book coverI am not a big fan of the novel-within-a-novel device. Invariably I find the secondary narrative either too dull or too abstract to keep my attention, and my interest is only held by the primary story. I found it a little odd, then, that the opposite happened with The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak.

Ella Rubinstein is a very average, middle-class white American housewife. Now that her three children are almost fully grown she’s got her first job in two decades, reading manuscripts for a literary agency. Her first manuscript is Sweet Blasphemy by A Z Zahara, a historical novel about the real-life 13th century poet and scholar Rumi and the time he spent with Sufi dervish Shams of Tabriz.

The story’s setting and characters are completely alien to Ella but she finds herself getting completely sucked in. To the extent that her relationships to her children and husband change entirely and she begins a secret e-mail correspondence with Zahara that quickly becomes flirty and romantic.

I can relate (to a point) as I also found myself fully absorbed by novel-within-a-novel Sweet Blasphemy. I’ve read a little of Rumi’s poetry and I’m very interested in new historical settings. I didn’t really know anything about 13th century Iran or Sufism. But most of all I was fascinated by Shams.

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Book review: Neon Roses by Rachel Dawson

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This is why independent bookshops are awesome. I probably would never have heard of Neon Roses by Rachel Dawson if my local bookshop Bookhaus hadn’t held an author event about this debut novel. Though I was unable to attend because I was unwell at the time (my lupus has flared up a little in the last month), the description in the Bookhaus email about the event sounded so good that a few days later I cycled over and bought myself a signed copy.

The story opens in a small coalmining town in South Wales in 1984. It’s the peak of the miner’s strike and Eluned is working all the hours she can to support her family, as her father’s strike wages have trickled to almost nothing, while also turning up to the picket lines and volunteering at fundraising events at the miners hall. It’s a lot, and her sister Mabli’s no help – swanning off with her Thatcher-supporting policeman boyfriend.

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K-drama review: Suspicious Partner

Suspicious Partner
Ji Chang-wook and Nam Ji-hyun play lawyers in Suspicious Partner.

Yup, K-drama did it again – they managed to combine a genuinely tense murder mystery with a sweet, silly romance and come up with a result that’s entertaining. Suspicious Partner (SBS 2017) is about two lawyers who fall in love – and at the end of the first episode, one of them is arrested for murder.

Noh Ji-uk (Ji Chang-wook) is a prosecutor and Eun Bong-hi (Nam Ji-hyun) is a lawyer who briefly works for him during her training. There is a clear spark between them but they are both smarting from having been cheated on by long-term partners and are wary of new love. Then Bong-hi’s ex-boyfriend is found dead in her apartment and his father – who happens to be the chief prosecutor – presses Ji-uk hard to charge Bong-hi with murder. It’s an inauspicious start for a romance.

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K-drama review: My ID is Gangnam Beauty

My ID is Gangnam Beauty 

I’m aware that South Korea has a high take-up of plastic surgery, particularly of women’s faces, but I hadn’t really questioned how that is regarded and talked about among Korean people. A K-drama might not be the most accurate way to find out, but romcom My ID is Gangnam Beauty (JTBC 2018) certainly gave me an insight.

Kang Mi-rae (Im Soo-hyang) gets plastic surgery between high school and university, after years of being bullied because of her looks. At first, the only person who knows (besides her mother) is her one close friend from school Oh Hyun-jung (Min Do-hee, from Reply 1994) who is bubbly and cheerful and tries to get Mi-rae to join in with the fun of university life. And at first it seems to be going great. Mi-rae immediately has boys chatting her up, girls befriending her and crowds clapping her dancing at Freshers Week.

However, it becomes clear that most people can tell Mi-rae had surgery and some of them judge her harshly for it, calling her a “Gangnam plastic monster”. She’s also being exposed for the first time to stalkery men and women who snipe behind her back. Mi-rae seems super naive at times, but she didn’t experience these things at school – the nastiness there was pretty open, as we see in flashbacks.

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Bout of Books 33 reading round-up

In all the excitement of the new year and my birthday, I almost didn’t realise there was a Bout of Books readathon last week. Thankfully, I spotted some Tweets on Tuesday morning and decided to join in, albeit a day late. It seemed like odd timing to me initially, but on reflection it was the perfect way to start the year.

Bout of Books is a week-long readathon held three times a year. It was started in 2011 by Amanda Shofner, who still co-hosts, and has a wide community, from those who consider themselves bookstagrammers, booktubers or book bloggers, to people who just like to chat about books on Twitter and other social media. It really feels like you’re part of an event when you’re seeing lots of updates on the #BoutOfBooks hashtag and having live conversations with fellow book lovers.

As well as encouraging us to carve out time to read every day, Bout of Books is distinguished by half-hour reading sprints three times a day. As it’s US-based and I was working full time Tuesday to Friday, these didn’t fall at super helpful times for me in the UK but I did like that there was a sprint every day at 11 p.m. GMT, encouraging me to switch off the TV (if it had been on) and read for my last half hour before bed. It slotted perfectly into my routine, and I think I slept unusually well last week so I’ve tried to maintain the habit even after the readathon ended.

2022 has so far been mostly wet and grey, and going back to work after all the excitement of Christmas is always a little sad, so it would have been very tempting to just stare at the TV every night last week. I am so glad that instead I curled up with a book (and usually the dog). I tore through books from the TBR and I felt a bit more positive about myself. Plus reading itself is a good time, which you wouldn’t think I’d need reminding of, but that TV is such an easy temptation.

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