Behind the paper screen / Considering 'Winter Sonata'Part 1 of 2
Belatedly, I've become hooked on Fuyu no Sonata (Winter Sonata), or Fuyusona for short, a 2002 South Korean soap opera that was broadcast in Japan on NHK in 2003 and became an explosive hit. I heard of it through Japanese media and my family and acquaintances in Japan and was aware of the massive Kanryu Bumu (Korea-style boom) that it triggered. I was also aware of the craze over "Yon-sama," as the lead actor Bae Yong Jun is called by adoring female fans. Yet, it seemed like a plain, old-fashioned melodrama, and I had no intention of watching it, until recently.
It came to me in California via a curiously long and winding road. After its major success in Japan, it went to China and also became a huge hit there. In 2005, a Chinese DVD version came out in Hong Kong, with subtitles in Chinese and English. one of my Chinese-speaking colleagues--a historian who has been studying Asian visual culture for some time--heard of Fuyusona's transnational fame and purchased the DVD set. He lent them to another colleague--an expatriate Japanese and a good friend of mine--who called me and told me that she was hamatteiru (hooked) and that I, too, must watch it.
It's hard to pinpoint Fuyusona's addictive qualities--a funny thing for a person to say after she was glued to the screen for three days to finish all 20 episodes. The storyline itself is rather predictable: Two young lovers, who first come together in high school, are separated by a tragic turn of events, and the rest of the drama evolves around various obstacles that make it seem impossible for the two to reconnect.
Our protagonists are depicted with sensitivity and played by very attractive young actors but are in many ways quite ordinary, just like you and me, in the way they react to the trials and tribulations they must endure.
In the meantime, we as the audience can see through it all--a jealous mother maneuvering to keep her son away from his love, a former girlfriend withholding information that might bring the lost lovers back together, a seeming "nice guy" turning into a manipulative villain. We are pretty sure that there will be a happy ending, or at least some sort of reconciliation in the end, but happily go through moments of agony and joy, sadness and elation, loss and fulfillment, with our beloved protagonists. If this emotive resonance between the protagonists and audience is the secret of Fuyusona's popularity, then predictability and familiarity are indeed the keys to encourage the audience to identify with protagonists and immerse themselves in the emotion of the moment.
There must be something deeply convincing or satisfying about this emotional resonance, as the craving for classic melodrama returns over and over again, even as the new storylines and settings are invented and new genres of TV dramas come and go. Fuyusona is very much like older Japanese soap operas that many of us were fond of back in the 1970s, such as the Akai (Red) series that made Momoe Yamaguchi an even bigger a star than she already was. For that matter, it resembles every other tearjerker in the classic melodrama genre that uniformly takes the audience through a protracted emotional roller coaster, yet reliably delivers a cathartic ending of one sort or another. In the mid-1990s, at the height of the "trendy drama" boom (which featured hip young adults and their contemporary tastes and lifestyles), a classic tearjerker, Hoshi no Kinka, became a breakout hit. A decade later, there is Fuyusona.
Good drama--from ancient Greek tragedy to Shakespeare to today's soap operas--reflects basic human needs and concerns and gives us an opportunity to experience and reexperience what it means to be human. It is, to paraphrase cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, "the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves." In this sense, drama's appeal is universal as a form of self-reflection and catharsis.
One key element in melodramas seems to be the preciousness of first (or at least youthful) love. The grown-up audience watches the young lovers with nostalgia. Not that every viewer's first love met the same obstacles that beset the young lovers in Fuyusona--fatal accidents, amnesia, jealousy, deception, staunch family disapproval--but we all remember that moment a long time ago when we developed an earnest yearning for someone for the first time, and agonized, in our youthful awkwardness, not knowing what to do about it.
The adoration of youthful love is a cross-culturally found melodramatic ingredient, which is often exaggerated and prolonged by various dramatic devices. Family disapproval, for example, tears apart the devastated young lovers (think Romeo and Juliette), who are forced to make a hard choice between their families and each other, and to take a long detour until they are reunited (in case of Romeo and Juliette, only in their death).
Another important plot device is amnesia, which is, as translator and film critic Kiichiro Yanashita points out, a classic theme in melodramas everywhere, because it makes a love relationship necessarily lopsided and causes the male and female protagonists to keep missing each other at crucial moments.
In Fuyusona, amnesia does exactly that for the mid-section of the drama, from the moment the female protagonist encounters a man who so closely resembles her first love, who later turns out to be, indeed, her first love, who has suffered amnesia after an accident. Even after this fact comes to light, amnesia continues to haunt both the male and female protagonists, because his memory of the past remains incomplete.
These key melodramatic elements are, interestingly, all related to memory, which is always tinged with ambivalence. While we may feel nostalgic about the earnestness of young lovers that we (as middle-aged adults) no longer possess, we are also relieved in a way that we are past those agonizing moments. Family, the symbol of memory that stretches far beyond an individual, connotes intergenerational continuity, which is the most fundamental source of love and support and, at the same time, the biggest source of restraint and conflict standing in the way of individual fulfillment.
Losing memory is to lose one's self, but remembering, too, can bring a great deal of pain. And if memory is what makes us who we are, as suggested repeatedly in Fuyusona, then our own entire being is also infused with a sense of ambivalence.
@: Kurotani is an associate professor of anthropology and director of Asian studies at the University of Redlands in California.