What Comes After Love: Episode 4

by Dramaddictally

More sadness and heartache this week as we get another seed of information about the big breakup in the past. There’s clarity around our hero’s intent, and the outcome he’s hoping for in this story, but our heroine still has a lot of soul searching to do.

 
EPISODE 4

Last week we ended with a marriage proposal. Kanna was at Jungo’s hotel room door wrapping him in a hug and hoping to get hitched. But this week we learn two things: she was super drunk at the time, and she and Jungo are not in any kind of relationship. It wasn’t totally clear to me last week what was up with them, but when we see the full scene, she says, “Please come back to me.”

The pain on her face is real when he removes himself from the hug and apologizes. And it looks like it causes him a lot of pain to hurt her so much as well. She’s in love with him. He knows it. And it’s like he just has no idea what to do.

Meanwhile, he wonders why he ran into Hong again. Was it to pick up where they left off? Or to give them closure? We learn that he doesn’t want it to be the end — and in fact, he wrote his novel hoping that she would read it and understand his side of things.

But in this episode, we get to understand Hong’s side of things much better. We already learned that the main reason for their breakup was Hong’s loneliness abroad and her overreliance on Jungo. But now we see he’s not the best boyfriend either.

When Hong was invited to a co-worker’s wedding, she got really excited — since she has so few events to attend in Tokyo. She wants Jungo to go with her, but he’s hesitant. She tries to take care of everything on her own (from understanding the customs to getting the gift), and even agrees to play a song at the wedding with her guitar.

Jungo finally agrees to go, but on the day of the event, he has an interview with a publishing house. They offer him a job, but they’re so short staffed that they need him to start that day. So, Hong sings and plays a love song while thinking of Jungo — and he’s not there to hear it. Worse, he doesn’t even message her to say he’s not coming because he mistakenly thinks he can finish working and still arrive. He can’t. He gets there when the party’s over.

At home, she’s upset and waiting for him and he explains what happened, saying he always wanted to work at that publishing company and he “couldn’t help it.” (Seriously, if there’s any way to get me on her side in a heartbeat, it’s him saying that crap.)

After some arguing back and forth, he says that he told Hong he’d try to go — it was never a definite yes. And she says that he should have just said no if he was going to act like this. Then she leaves the apartment and admits to herself that everlasting love doesn’t exist .

In the present, Jungo cancels his schedule for the day and makes a guess about where Hong might be going for her daily jog. He finds her. She sees him. And she runs right past him like he doesn’t exist.

Both of them are obviously upset by this encounter, but it brings up the question of why Jungo never tried to find her before. We learn that he sent her belongings to her in Korea after she left, which means he’s known where she was all this time. Did he want to be famous first? Or to try to grow up?

When Jungo sent her things from Japan, Hong was conflicted. For one, it meant it was really over between them. But also, she says, “It took me a long time to realize I wasn’t trying to forget Jungo, but the me who loved him.” And so, she tosses all her stuff into a closet and doesn’t look at it for five years. That is, until her sister wants to use her guitar and finds an unread letter tucked inside the case.

We close this week’s episode with Hong just about to open the letter, but in the interim, we see more dreamy flashbacks of our main pair falling in love. We know Jungo has a hard time saying how he feels out loud (that’s why he’s a writer), but he thinks that if your feelings are sincere, the other person will eventually feel them.

Hong knows how he feels, but it would be nice to hear him say I love you, she says. They joke around about it and he says that’s a tough one. But he promises to write a novel about what he feels for her one day. In voiceover, Hong tells us that they only spoke of a bright future together and avoided problems — which ended up snowballing into uncertainty inside them. “We were blind to the harsh realities of the world when we were at the peak of happiness.”

And then we see that Jungo’s novel is called What Comes After Love. While he’s doing a book signing, someone says they’ve had a similar experience to his female protagonist (which is based on Hong) and “It was extremely difficult to overcome borders and cultural differences with only love.” Does he still think that’s possible?

Jungo responds that he didn’t write the novel to send an overarching message. He just had so many memories and so much regret about a certain person that he wanted to write his honest feelings. He says that if that person happens to read the book, he hopes that she understands he was young and inexperienced when they were together. That hope helped him write the novel.

Hong is at his book signing, but she leaves without approaching him. Min-jun, however, goes up to get a copy of the novel signed and asks Jungo if he knows Hong. Jungo affirms, and we have our two male leads staring each other down over a table until next week when we see where this is headed.

Two more episodes to go and it looks like next week will be about reveals. We’ll see what Min-jun already knows (maybe what he learned from the novel) and what Hong is about to find out when she opens that letter.

I’m really torn about the ending I want for this story. Hong and Jungo appear to have grown as people, but the pain has had so much time to fester, it would be really hard to go back or start over. Still, they’ll probably never get over each other either, which brings another kind of pain. It’s a tough one.

 
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