Category: Reviews

K-drama review: Because This is My First Life

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Because This is My First Life still
Lee Min-ki and Jung So-min co-star.

Finally, the first K-drama in a while that I have thoroughly enjoyed without any caveats. Because This is My First Life (TvN, 2017) is unashamedly romantic but also modern and, dare I say it, feminist?

Nam Se-hee (Lee Min-ki) is an app designer who is struggling to pay the mortgage on his home. Yoon Ji-ho (Jung So-min) is an assistant TV writer who can’t afford to rent a place on her own in Seoul (she had been sharing with her brother but when he gets married their parents decide Ji-ho must move out). So it’s initially an ideal situation for Ji-ho to rent Se-hee’s spare room. They’re both in their 30s, reserved, love football and like to keep a clean home.

It becomes apparent that other people are uncomfortable with the idea of an unmarried man and woman living together. So they do what seems logical: they get married, promising to each other that it is purely a financial arrangement. But of course, not only does the rest of the world have ideas about what marriage is, they also find themselves questioning what it means for their relationship to be quite so transactional.

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Someday, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time

Kitchen book coverKitchen
by Banana Yoshimoto
translated from Japanese by Megan Backus

This novella and short story about grief are an excellent demonstration that you can depict dark, devastating emotion without being hyperbolic or overwrought.

“Kitchen part 1”, “Kitchen part 2” and “Moonlight shadow” each follows a young person (college age ish) who has lost a significant person from their lives. The relationship to the deceased is different and on the surface the reactions are different, but at heart the grief is similar.

One of the keys that Yoshimoto taps into is the comfort of specific places, for example a kitchen or a bridge in a park, in helping the process of grief. In “Kitchen”, Mikage doesn’t even need a specific kitchen to help her feel better – any kitchen will do, though she is particularly enamoured by the kitchen of her friend Yuichi, a young man she barely knew before her recent bereavement.

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A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness

The heart is a lonely hunterThe Heart is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers

This is a beautiful, devastating novel that explores loneliness and poverty. It starts quietly and builds to an angry climax. I can’t quite fully believe that Carson McCullers was only 23 when she wrote this.

Set in a small mill town in 1930s Georgia, the plot revolves around John Singer, a deaf man who touches the lives of several others. He has a job at a jeweller, is educated (including knowing sign language) and serenely gets on with his life. After his deaf friend and room mate Spiros Antonapoulos is taken away to an asylum, some of the town’s more disaffected residents begin to notice Singer, turning to him as a confidante.

This group includes Mick Kelly, a tomboyish teen girl who is developing a deep love for music, though her family can’t afford for her to pursue this love beyond listening to other people’s radios. She tries to describe music to Singer in a way that is so moving that it doesn’t seem strange.

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K-drama review: Ms Panda and Mr Hedgehog

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I deliberately picked another TV show that looked light and fluffy – I mean, it’s called Ms Panda and Mr Hedgehog (2012 Channel A). This romantic drama about patissiers certainly delivered on the fluffy front, but also managed to surprise me in a few areas (while being both lame and predictable in others).

Go Seung-ji (Lee Dong-hae AKA singer-songwriter Donghae) is a skilled 26-year-old patissier working in a small neighbourhood bakery run by the sweet, elderly Park Byung-moo (Park Geun-hyung). He’s also a little rough and wild, making money on the side as a loan shark. His nickname is Dochi (“Koseumdochi” is hedgehog in Korean) because he is prickly on the outside…

Pan Da-yang (Yoon Seung-ah) is a 28-year-old former journalist desperately trying to keep the family business Cafe Panda afloat following her parents’ death. Her younger sister Da-na and her aunt Mi-ra help out, but they are all reliant on hired baker Gil Dong-goo who is terrible at his job. On the verge of having to sell her home to pay her debts, she serves Dong-goo notice and advertises for a new baker – one willing to work solely for room and board for the first few months,

It’s a tall order, but handily Dochi has just learned that he is being paid more than the old man can afford, so he fakes a desire to strike out on his own and takes the job at Cafe Panda. Sparks immediately fly between him and Da-yang, but he doesn’t like to get close to anyone.

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That faraway summer when he discovered magic

Prince of MistThe Prince of Mist
by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
translated by Lucia Graves

This was my Spain choice for my EU Reading Challenge, which I am clearly not going to finish before the UK leaves the EU, but maybe I’ll manage it before the end of the year. I guess it’s appropriate for this month that I didn’t really enjoy this book.

This is a YA mystery by the author of The Shadow of the Wind, which I loved. It’s not the first of his YA books that I’ve read, but this was definitely inferior to The Watcher in the Shadows. This may be related to the author’s note that opens the book, which says that this was Zafón’s first published novel.

It starts strong. It’s 1943 and the Carver family decide it will be safer to leave the city for a sleepy seaside town that is less likely to be bombed. The three children Alicia, Max and Irina are unimpressed by the move and hope it’s just for the summer. Their new house is described in classic Zafón style as a creepy wooden house with a sad history. Then the weird stuff starts, beginning with a stray cat.

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K-drama review: When the Camellia Blooms

When the Camellia Blooms poster

I really enjoyed this recent release, which came out in September – November 2019 (KBS/Netflix) and is already award winning. When the Camellia Blooms effectively combines a really sweet romance with a modern twist and a suspenseful crime drama.

(I say “modern twist” because it’s about an unmarried mother finding romance, which wouldn’t be particularly novel in a European or American drama, but in Korean TV these things just don’t get depicted.)

Oh Dongbaek (Gong Hyo-jin, who I know from the excellent Don’t Dare to Dream and the mediocre Pasta) moves to the small (fictional) town of Ongsan as an unmarried single mother of a toddler. She opens a bar and surprises everyone by braving the locals’ cool reception and malicious gossip to make a modest success of her life. Six years later, romance comes knocking but at the same time, Kang Jong-ryul (Kim Ji-seok), the father of her son Pil-gu, finally tracks her down. He’s been busy playing pro baseball and making a reality show about his perfect-on-the-surface marriage to model Jessica, so he has money but not a lot else going for him.

Hwang Yong-sik (Kang Ha-neul, who has the most adorable goofy smile) is a police officer who was raised in Ongsan but has been away for years. Now he’s back, causing problems for his mother, his police superiors and for local criminals. He’s passionate and tends to throw himself full-throttle into situations. He falls hard for Dongbaek when he sees her stand up for herself to a rude customer and begins to woo her. And when he realises that an old serial murderer he’s been looking into may have reason to target Dongbaek, he makes solving the case his priority (despite being a junior officer whose responsibilities lie more in the realm of petty theft and neighbour disputes).

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Part of the natural evil that permeated man’s existence

Deep Water book coverDeep Water
by Patricia Highsmith

I picked this up in a huge secondhand bookshop in Amsterdam where I was overwhelmed with choice. I always like a crime novel on holiday and this is a thriller par excellence. I don’t think Highsmith has let me down yet.

This psychological thriller seems cosy at first but with an undercurrent of something terrible coming. In the small New England town of Little Wesley, Massachusetts, there is a cocktail party under way. Local publisher Victor Van Allen is making small talk, but he is embarrassed that his wife Melinda has insisted on bringing along her current lover, Joel Nash. Vic is sure that everyone else knows the nature of Melinda and Joel’s relationship and that they all judge him for accepting it.

This is not Melinda’s first extramarital affair. She has had a string of them for the past few years and Vic didn’t mind much at first, but it is starting to bother him. So he decides to have a word with Joel before they leave the party. It just happens that an ex-lover of Melinda’s, Malcolm McRae, was murdered six months earlier and the case has not been solved. Vic decides to tell Joel that he was the murderer, to see how Joel reacts.

It’s an intriguing introduction to a character. Though the narrative is not first person, it is a very close third person that gets right into Victor Van Allen’s mind. And though it gradually becomes clear that Vic’s mind is not a comfortable place to be and that he has the potential to be capable of doing terrible things, you also sympathise with him right from the start.

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Life is nothing like a story in a book

tokyo ueno station book coverTokyo Ueno Station
by Yu Miri
translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles

This is an astonishing novella, packing so much insight and commentary and humanity into so few pages. And it taught me snippets of history as well. I’m really not sure how Yu managed it.

The tale is narrated by Kazu, an old man who has spent the last few years homeless, living in Ueno Park in central Tokyo. He tells his life story, but not linearly. An overheard conversation will remind him of his son. A piece of rubbish will remind him of a friend who died. A rain storm will remind him of a certain day in the past. And so on.

Kazu is an ordinary man, which is of course the whole point. He didn’t become homeless because he’s a junkie or had been in prison. Yu doesn’t spell out the reason he ended up in Ueno Park, but as we see his long lonely life getting sadder and lonelier, we can fill in some of the gaps.

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Sorrow rose from memory’s deepest dwelling place

Exemplary Tales book coverExemplary Tales
by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
translated from Portuguese by Alexis Levitin

This is my Portugal choice for the EU Reading Challenge. Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen is best known as a poet but little of her work has been translated into English. This collection of her short stories took me some time to track down but was worth the effort.

The stories tend to have religious or moral themes, which I would usually find offputting, but something about Breyner Andresen’s tone meant they worked for me. It’s a weird tone for stories that are – for the most part – grounded in reality.

The opening story, “The bishop’s dinner”, reads like a Biblical parable. A rich man has two guests in the same evening: a planned visit from the bishop and an unexpected visit from a beggar. The story contrasts how the two visitors are treated, the differing reaction of their host and his staff. The religious undertones are underlined by one character being a bishop and conversations revolving around a local priest, but the tenets of Christianity are far from being on display here.

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K-drama review: You Are Beautiful

Tae-gyung, Min-ho/Mi-nyeo, Jermy and Shin-woo are the members of fictional K-pop group A.N.Jell.

This has not been a great few months for me, healthwise, so I am always glad to find TV shows that are entertaining, ones that don’t use too much brainpower but aren’t, you know, shit. You Are Beautiful (SBS 2009) perfectly fit the bill.

This light comedy romantic drama starts with a major nod to Sound of Music, as our heroine, a novice nun, runs clumsily late to mass. This is Ko Mi-nyeo (played by Park Shin-hye, who I know from Doctors and Pinocchio – which I loved – and Memories of the Alhambra – which I did not love – among others) and we learn that she is planning to take her vows soon, but her Mother Superior isn’t convinced this is the right choice for Mi-nyeo, and so enthusiastically encourages her to take a leave of absence to join a singing group as part of a ridiculous plan that is brought to her by music manager, Ma Hoon-yi.

Mi-nyeo’s brother Mi-nam has apparently won a talent contest to join K-pop group A.N.Jell, but he then had some botched plastic surgery that means he needs to secretly stay in hospital for a while. Handily, Mi-nyeo is his identical twin, so could she dress up as a man for a month so that the music label doesn’t find out? Also handily, her singing voice sounds a lot like her brother’s, so the only training she needs is to add emotion. Oh, how will she find emotional meaning surrounded by handsome young men?

Mi-nyeo agrees to this plan based on lies and dishonesty both to save her brother’s career and in the hope that if her brother becomes famous, their mother will come and find them. The twins were raised at an orphanage run by the convent after their composer father died, and never knowing their singer mother is their greatest sorrow. Hoon-yi and the band’s stylist Coordi will help keep Mi-nyeo’s secret until the real Mi-nam returns.

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