[Drama special review] Bruised Like a Peach

by Dramaddictally

The last of the drama specials from O’PENing takes us on a memory-laden journey of love, romance, and regret as two people who miss the same person come to terms with their grief. As one of them makes big decisions about her future, the other finds relief in reimagining his past.

 
DRAMA SPECIAL REVIEW

Bruised Like a Peach starts out with both a mystery and a message. The message — written on a handmade sign in front of a fruit stand — warns away customers from pressing on the peaches. They bruise easily and pressing on them will ruin them. Hmm, is this a metaphor for our characters? We’re about to see their bruises, but luckily they’re not so easily ruined.

The mystery has more to do with the tone of the drama as we’re introduced to the main characters. We meet three people, all doing their best at work, but all having a tough time of it. We don’t know exactly what’s wrong, but when we see their day-to-day struggles, there’s a strong sense that we’re only seeing the surface of a problem.

JANG HA-KOO (Jung Yi-seo) works at a publishing house and is not progressing the way she’d hoped. We learn that her mother passed away about a year ago and she hasn’t yet begun to move on. Her close friend and former flame SONG HO-JAE (Noh Jong-hyun) is the head nutritionist in the cafeteria, where he watches the workers complain about his food and then toss it out. They’re both still fairly young, but there’s a sense of defeat hanging around them.

And then there’s KIM GANG-SOO (Choi Won-young) — being fired after 25 years with his company (which is housed in the same building as Ha-koo’s office). We meet him on his way out the door and something is off right away. All his colleagues are sad to see him go, making it clear that the reason for his dismissal is likely not something he did wrong.

Things start to match up when we see Gang-soo helping out at his noona’s restaurant. He can’t seem to remember even the little things and we come to learn that he was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s (this is the reason he lost his job). At the same time, we see Ha-koo sorting through remnants at a shop that belonged to her mother. It’s the same place we saw in the intro with peaches for sale outside (Ha-koo is the writer of that warning sign).

These two characters meet because, as it turns out, Gang-soo is a lifelong peach presser. Not only has he been tapping on the fuzzy fruits since 1998, but he’s been doing it at that very shop. Unbeknownst to Ha-koo, Gang-soo is a long lost love of her mother’s.

The problem now is that Gang-soo’s memory fades in and out. When Ha-koo storms outside to tell him not to ruin her produce, he sees her face and thinks she’s her mother, since she’s the spitting image of the woman he knew all those years ago. (Literally, since they’re played by the same actress.)

We then get two streams of memories happening simultaneously. On one side, after seeing Ha-koo, Gang-soo starts to remember when he met her mom, KANG HAE-SOOK (also Jung Yi-seo), and all the beautiful moments they spent together. On the other side, Ha-koo finds her mother’s journal while sorting through her belongings and begins to read about her love affair with Gang-soo (played by Shin Hyun-soo in flashback).

Back in 1998, we see Gang-soo notice Hae-sook on a city bus, exhausted and sleeping. We’ll later learn she’s just lost her husband and has suddenly become a single young mom to the infant Ha-koo. As she rushes off the bus that day, she drops a peach, which Gang-soo picks up to return to her. Fortuitously, he runs into her again, serving his table, when he and his colleagues are eating at her shop.

He drops by the shop again later to return the peach she lost and from there they’re spending their days on simple, sunshine-y dates. These two can find beauty in anything from flowers growing from the concrete to trains passing under a bridge. They connect over their love of books, spending an afternoon between narrow bookshelves, and Gang-soo even passes her his pager number by writing it in a novel he’s gifting her. They’re so wrapped up in how happy they are, Hae-sook doesn’t want to spoil it by telling him about her circumstances.

It soon becomes clear that Hae-sook can’t be both a mother and a woman who goes on dates. She’s spending a lot of time with Gang-soo and she’s not there for Ha-koo when she needs to be. Something’s gotta give. With the pressure mounting, she breaks up with him to take better care of her baby.

Upon reading this in her mom’s journal, Ha-koo is overwhelmed with guilt. We’re never given a sense of what the mother-daughter relationship was like, but now Ha-koo is obviously understanding something about her mother that she didn’t before. Her mother loved her a whole lot (even if this makes Ha-koo feel like a burden) and she also loved Gang-soo.

By this point, Ha-koo has learned that Gang-soo has Alzheimer’s and that he doesn’t always remember their encounters — and sometimes he still thinks she’s her mom. After realizing the level of her mother’s love for her, she decides to share the journal with Gang-soo, so he can understand the level of Hae-sook’s love for him too.

Gang-soo seems to remember more about the past than he does about currently unfolding events in his life. And so, he talks to Ha-koo about his memories after she’s let him read the journal. Gang-soo has some regrets (and we learn their breakup wasn’t as clear cut as the journal made it sound). But while they’re each missing this person that they both loved, there’s a lot of healing going on.

Enough healing, in fact, that they can start to move on with their lives. For her, it means realizing that the publishing house isn’t the only way to feed her love of books (a thing she and her mom had in common). And for him, it means reshaping the memories he still has into ones that don’t contain so much fear and regret. Plus, a rekindled romance is afoot between our newly freed book lover and her nutritionist lost love (I guess she learned from Mom’s journal in more ways than one).

The drama doesn’t present anything earth-shatteringly new and I think that’s its strength. It’s a quiet story about love and regret, the confluence of our choices and our circumstances, and the odd places we sometimes find what we need. The flashback dating scenes are enough reason to watch on their own — with everything shot in that sort of sepia but also sunlit way that K-dramas do so well. If you’re looking for a healing drama but don’t have 16 hours to spare, give it a try — it might do the trick just peachy.

 
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