We get a little more insight into the breakup backstory this week, as our leads sit in silence together in the present. Also, an important woman from our hero’s past makes an appearance, giving us a total of four characters who are tortured by unhaveable love.
EPISODE 3
We’re only issued one episode this week, which doesn’t give us a ton of new information to grab onto, but this story has enough raw emotion to make up for it. Last week, we ended with Jungo stepping in front of Hong’s car to stop her from leaving. This week, as soon as she stops, he waltzes over to the passenger side and hops in.
They drive around in silence for a long time before Hong tells him there’s nothing left to say. Anything she used to want to ask him, it’s too late. Jungo tries to get past her ice wall by calling her “Beni,” like he used to. But she maintains the distance between them by calling him by his pen name, with a stern “Mr.” tacked onto it. He wants to clear up any misunderstandings that might exist, but Hong shuts the conversation down promptly by telling him she’s about to get married.
After she drops him back at his hotel, without so much as looking in his direction, she pulls out of sight and takes a breather. After five years, she had no idea she wouldn’t be over him yet.
Later, when Hong is with Min-jun, shopping for a wedding dress, she still can’t stop thinking about Jungo and how he said he’s never once forgotten her in five years. She remembers a time when she once tried on a wedding dress with Jungo and tears well in her eyes. The hurt on her face is terrible and I feel every second of the heartbreak in this scene. She’s not excited about marrying Min-jun, and even though the dress she’s trying on is beautiful and fits her perfectly, she doesn’t show it to him and says it didn’t fit.
Through flashbacks we learn more about what led to the breakup in Tokyo. At first, it’s all love and smiles while Hong shows up at each of Jungo’s many part-time jobs to wait for him until he gets off work. She tells us that she didn’t want to be away from him for a second. And she didn’t realize at the time that it wasn’t just a normal way love would make someone behave.
It isn’t until her friend and one-time roomie, PARK JI-HEE (Mi-ram), leaves Japan to return to Seoul that things become more stark. On the days that Jungo is stuck serving tables until late at night, we see Hong sitting home alone waiting for him. In fact, whenever he’s not with her, she’s alone.
One night, she’s out jogging and hurts her ankle. He can’t answer his phone while he’s at the restaurant. And by the time he gets home and she’s already been to the hospital and on crutches, she’s fuming. An argument ensues where she says that work always comes before her. He apologizes for not being there for her that day, but she sees it as a pattern. She insists he quit all this jobs.
He reminds her that he’s working to pay for his studies and she starts asking, “What about me? What am I in your life?” Finally, she lands on the pertinent question: “Why am I always alone?” But Jungo is a little confused. He responds by saying that they go to bed and wake up together every day. “Because I want to be with you. I’m working hard and doing my best,” he says. She’s contemptuous, remarking that she doesn’t know what he’s doing his best at. And then she says, “I’m sick of the fact that the only person I can get mad at is you.”
And now we’ve hit the root of it. I questioned in last week’s weecap if Hong’s loneliness abroad would play into their breakup, and now we’re seeing that it’s the main problem. In voiceover, Hong says, “Desolation makes people anxious. Loneliness weakens love. And, with youth added to that, everything becomes unstable.”
I want to take a second out here to say that while this dynamic is utterly believable, the lead up to this emotional scene was not enough, in my opinion. We’ve just seen that Hong got accepted to grad school, but she told her sister that she got rejected. Why is she not going to university? And what happened to the job she had at the ramen shop? Both of those things would get her out meeting new people. And let’s not forget that she speaks the local language perfectly.
We still don’t know what pieces of the story are missing, but by not putting those pieces up front, it takes the bang out of the argument they have. I find it hard to empathize with Hong (even though I’ve lived a version of her story myself) because she has ways to integrate available to her. I can think of reasons why she may not, in spite of that fact, or why it would be hard anyway, but we haven’t seen them. And without some explanation, she sounds unreasonable in this scene (although, from experience, I know she’s probably not).
The other big thing that happens this week is that we meet Jungo’s ex-girlfriend, KOBAYASHI KANNA (Nakamura Anne), whom he dated prior to Hong. We see that after Hong left Tokyo, Kanna ran into him heartbroken at a bar. She says she feels bad because he was never that hurt when she broke up with him. In the end, she asks, if he’s in so much pain, does he want to get back together?
Cut to the present and we see Kanna in Seoul meeting up with Jungo. She says she’s there for work and thought she’d surprise him and hang out for a few days. But later, at dinner, she reveals that she’s really there to see him. She’s been waiting five years for him to love her again, she says. And I’m confused about what exactly that means. Did he turn her down that day about getting back together? Or are they a couple right now and he just doesn’t show any love to her?
After Kanna says that bit about waiting for him to love her again, Jungo’s eyes go red and he looks away. She guesses he must have run into Hong. And after they part ways and he goes back to his hotel room to think about Hong and be sad, Kanna shows up at his door and exclaims, “Let’s get married.” She’s hugging him and he’s looking like he’s not sure what to do.
That’s how the episode ends, but I want to note that we also get a little insight into Min-jun’s character this week. We see in flashback that when Hong returned from Tokyo (with nothing because she left in such a rush), Min-jun was at the airport with Ji-hee waiting for her. He’s a doctor and was taking care of Hong’s father in the hospital just then. As the weeks go by, Hong is working hard to help out her dad’s publishing company, and Min-jun is working hard to take care of her.
There’s a moment after the wedding dress shop, where Hong and Min-jun are out having snacks and drinks and he says that he missed her while she was in Japan, and that’s why he finally decided to go after her. She begins to speak, and he cuts her off when the food arrives. But then he says that her feelings might change, and she might never need to say whatever she was about to say. And so, the point is, he knows she doesn’t feel the same way about him that he does for her.
Oof. Well, it’s doing a good job of making my heart hurt. Now I feel for all four characters instead of just the two. Min-jun and Kanna are in tough positions also, playing the back up and the safe bet, who are both clearly in love. They know that their love interests have their hearts elsewhere — and yet they continue to stick around and love them anyway. It’s got to be a kind of constant heartbreak. But I love that the drama is letting us see from their perspectives and not treating the main leads as the only ones we’re supposed to feel for.
My only real qualm is that I wish we had two episodes to dig into. I care about the characters and the story, but the little taste of what happened in Tokyo was not enough for me. I guess I’ll just sulk and be sad as I wait for next weekend.