Tragedy and romance have been linked almost since the dawn of literature. Why else would stories of doomed lovers like Shakespeare’s R...
Tragedy and romance have been linked almost since the dawn of literature. Why else would stories of doomed lovers like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or historical tales of Cleopatra and her lovers be so lionized? For many readers, the fine line between the potential for a happy ending and a sad one is part of the appeal of reading romantic fiction. That’s something that Hye Lee seems to understand very well in their mahwa series See You in My 19th Life, a love story that is as much about the tragic past as the hopeful present.
The story follows someone currently living as a young woman in modern Korea. Presently known as Jieum Ban, she’s unusual in that she remembers all of her past lives, with Jieum being her nineteenth. She’s been a man and a woman, living through different times and at different socio-economic levels, and normally it takes decades between her reincarnations. But Jieum was reborn just a year after she died in her previous life, and as these four opening volumes go on, she starts to be increasingly suspicious of that. As Juwon Yun, she died at age twelve in a car accident, which ripped her from the boy she had a mutual crush with, Seoha Mun. Juwon died in Seoha’s nine-year-old arms, and she’s pretty sure that that wasn’t supposed to have happened. Why else would she have reincarnated again while he’s still living?
Of course, that could just be what she wants to think, although a single line in volume four suggests that she’s right. Juwon and Seoha were very close, and in her life as Jieum, she’s determined to find her way back to him. The major problem, apart from them now having a ten-year age gap, is that where Juwon and Seoha were at the top of the socioeconomic ladder, Jieum lives at the poverty line. Finding him again means finding the means to go to where he is, and as a little girl, that’s not particularly feasible. The difficulties are compounded when Seoha is sent abroad by his cold father. Jieum, however, hasn’t lived so many times for nothing, and she translates her past life knowledge into a brilliant career at the Mun family conglomerate. When she’s twenty-three, she finally gets the chance to meet him again, but there’s something she hasn’t taken into account: Seoha has PTSD and a hearing disability from the car accident that killed Juwon, and he’s still living in that tragic past.
Jieum not realizing that she’ll have to do more than just find Seoha again is the emotional backbone of these volumes. Seoha (who clearly had a very sharp blow to the head in the accident) suffers from occasional hearing loss and fairly severe PTSD that manifests as panic attacks, and even more to the point, he’s still mourning Juwon. Jieum never considered that her previous death would have affected him so badly, likely because she hasn’t really recognized what it did to her. Although she doesn’t have the same aversion to riding in the backseat of cars or the trigger of loud sounds, the very fact that she’s so determined to reclaim something of her life as Juwon says a lot. She tells us that she’s never contacted people from her other lives even if they were still living in her next one, but here we see her do that twice – in her drive to find Seoha, she also hunts down her niece from the life before Juwon, when she was a male stage magician. This requires revealing her past life to the older woman, something she’s at least a little torn about when it comes to Seoha once she reconnects with him. She wants to tell him, but now she’s not sure what the effect of that will be.
While we can read this as at least being a little bit about unknown territory with a faster rebirth than normal, it also is about her emotional state. Jieum has spent most of her life trying to get back to Seoha, and that means that she has a lot invested in their relationship. When she sees how badly he’s been affected by her death, she wants to help with that, but a piece of her seems scared to make the reveal that she is Juwon, fearing a negative result. The fact that her younger sister from her previous life, Chowon, is also still in the picture only complicates things, although not for love triangle reasons, which is very nice. She drops hints for Seoha, and he’s starting to see them for what they are, but both of them are afraid to hope, although by the end of volume four, Chowon is almost certain that Jieum is Juwon. That gives this series a poignancy that you might not expect, an acknowledgement of how loving someone is making yourself vulnerable in ways that aren’t easy to recover from. Seoha, when he finally begins to let himself feel for Jieum, may be beset with guilt. Jieum may have doubts if he’s seeing Jieum or Juwon, even though they’re basically the same person. There are so many unknowns that nothing, it’s clear, is going to be simple.
That’s the greatest strength of these four volumes. Even when it dives into typical manhwa humor or plays something for laughs, it never loses sight of its tragic underpinnings. It does a good job of balancing its emotional elements with its lighter moments, and it ties them all together with a sense of anxious nervousness, both on the part of Jieum and Seoha and for the readers. Balancing the past with the present, it gives us an interesting story that works on several levels, and if the art isn’t always as good as it could be, it still more than gets the job done. If you like your romances to have a bitter undercurrent of sadness, this is not a series you want to ignore. It may not be perfect, but it more than makes up for its weaknesses with its strengths.
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