I only have two issues with The Oath. My first issue is the way Tatum handles explaining the situation to Morgan after he walks in on TDMC messing around in her kitchen. Before I'd finished the book I was discussing it with an online acquaintance who remarked that Tatum annoyed her, and once I reached the confrontation between Tatum and Morgan, I understood what she meant. So I followed up with this acquaintance, "Having finished the book, I see what you mean about Tatum being annoying. Because, 'I didn't judge you for being gay and dating my TA who's older than you, so don't judge me for you catching me in the kitchen of our family home getting fingered by your three quasi-uncles after your father recently died' is WILD to me! Those two things, while both non-conventional, aren't the same at all!" I feel like Richardson knows (or should have known) that that's not a sufficient argument on Tatum's part, especially since Tatum's a professor who grades essays and literally teaches students how to substantiate arguments for a living. So I can't account for Richardson's choice, I just know that I didn't like it. My second issue is a small gripe that has been needling me: Why spend time acknowledging the need for STI testing and condoms when Tatum discusses DMC's offer with her friends, and why have Tatum mention testing and condoms as requirements to DMC when she accepts their offer, if Tatum is just going to have raw, penetrative, ejaculatory intercourse with DMC every time anyway? If all that safe sex talk is mere lip service (no pun intended), then why bother including it at all?
DeelaSees
What have you noticed lately?
Saturday, August 2, 2025
BOOKS! (The Air Between Us + The Oath + The Offer)
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
BOOKS! (One Day I Saw a Black King + Sisters of the Yam)
"Agnes knew Dot had given up the streets for her. Most of the time she was glad she had, but sometimes she saw sadness in her sister's eyes. Not the kind of sadness that came from losing a lover, but it reminded Agnes of the kind of heartbreak that can only come from giving up. Dot had chased after something her whole life and never seemed to be able to catch up with it. Whenever Agnes asked her about it, she'd just shrug her shoulders and say she was tired. Eventually, Agnes guessed that maybe the chase was all Dot had ever been after, anyway" (18)."Ain't no limits, less you make 'em, Little Bird. Trust me, this time. I know what I'm sayin'" (91)."He sensed it almost immediately. Denver, Colorado, lacked seasoning, and he'd grown accustomed to places with flavor, like New Orleans. Hot and spicy food, women, and music. Southern to a fault, dripping in molasses and cayenne pepper, burning and sweetening the tip of his tongue, reminding him that he was alive. Or Atlanta, Southern-fried, pecan-pied, funky soul thick enough for him to curl his toes into. Even Texas had a flair for understated, unmentionable drama. The kind of drama people openly wallowed in but turned a blind eye to, feigning indifference. Denver had none of that from what he could see, so he knew he wouldn't be here long" (103)."Agnes stared into his eyes. Dark, handsome eyes... She'd done everything in the world to keep from looking into those eyes when he was a child. Lord! How many more blessings had she let get away from her?" (291).
"And I thought we should call our support group 'Sisters of the Yam' to honor Bambara’s work and the wisdom she offered to us. I also felt the 'yam' was a life-sustaining symbol of black kinship and community. Everywhere black women live in the world, we eat yam. It is a symbol of our diasporic connections. Yams provide nourishment for the body as food yet they are also used medicinally—to heal the body" (6)."In a space before time and words, the world was covered in a thick blanket of darkness. It was a warm and loving covering. Since it was hard for the spirits who inhabited this space to see one another they learned to live by and through touch. So if you were running around lost you knew you were found when arms reached out in that loving darkness to hold you. And those arms that held the spirits in that beautiful dark space before time are holding us still... I made up this story because I wanted this little brown girl to grow up dreaming the dark and its powerful blackness as a magic space she need never fear or dread... I held her hand, just like my father’s father, Daddy Jerry, a man who worked the land, who knew the earth was his witness, had once held my hand in the darkest of summer nights and taught me that the blanket of night I was scared of was really longing to be my friend, to tell me all its secrets. And I reminded her, as he reminded me way back then, that those arms that first held us in that dark space before words and time hold us still" (59-60)."Where is the love when a black woman looks at herself and says: 'I see inside me somebody who is ugly, too dark, too fat, too afraid—somebody nobody would love, ’cause I don’t even like what I see;' or maybe: 'I see inside me somebody who is so hurt, who is just like a ball of pain and I don’t want to look at her ’cause I can’t do nothing about that pain.' The love is absent. To make it present, the individual has to first choose to see herself, to just look at that inner self without blame or censure." (108).
Tuesday, May 6, 2025
The J-Drama Drop #35
Believe it or not, I had so many book and J-drama reviews planned for the first half of 2025, and yet here I am in May, just now publishing something new on this blog for the very first time this year. Charge it to my hormones, not my heart. (Backstory: I started a new medication in January. It's serving the purpose it was prescribed for, but it's hard to write about the stuff you read and watch when you're not finishing anything, and it's hard to finish things when your brain is foggy and your concentration is sometimey.) Anyway, I think I've finally adjusted enough to get back into writing again, so here's my review of a scandalous infidelity-themed J-drama that I watched in the second half of 2024, a heart-wrenching yet adorable father-daughter J-drama that I finished this February, and an honorable mention K-drama that I finished last month.
夫の家庭を壊すまで (Otto no Katei wo Kowasu Made/Until I Destroy My Husband's Family/Until I Destroy My Husband's Household) - TV Tokyo, 2024
- Minori is a Waseda University-educated mother and housewife, and Yudai works in sales. Minori believes that they've been happy together for the past 17 years, until she sees a text on her husband's phone from a mysterious contact named "W.M." Suspicious, she follows her husband around one night and discovers that he has a whole second family. This family includes a hairdresser/salon owner named Riko who was one of their high school classmates, and her 18-year-old son Wataru (the "W.M" who's been texting Yudai). Back in high school, Yudai knew Riko first before getting close to Minori. Sometime after marrying Minori, Yudai rekindled his relationship with Riko (after she had a baby by a different married man), and has been spending time with Riko and Wataru on the side for about a decade.
- Minori's female lawyer friend strategizes a divorce plan for her, but thousands in alimony isn't enough. Minori wants to punish Yudai for his "crime" of adultery, and destroy his second family too. She begins by getting herself hired part-time as one of Wataru's juku (cram school) tutors, so she can gain intel via proximity and manipulate Wataru via the crush he develops on her. Which is how she learns that Riko is pregnant with Yudai's child. More sleuthing reveals that not only does her mother-in-law prefer Yudai's side family, but mother and son have been plotting on Minori since high school! Minori is the secret love child of a former employee of the Tsukishiro jewelry company and the company's current chariman, and Yudai's mother knows this because she used to housekeep for the Tsukishiros. Yudai was coached by his struggling single mother to date and marry Minori, so they could eventually manipulate Minori out of an inheritance that she didn't even know she had. (Minori's mother died when she was a child, and her maternal grandfather raised her without informing her of her heiress status.)
- Armed with the full knowledge of her husband and mother-in-law's scheme, her grandfather's deathbed confession about her parentage, her father's resources, and Wataru's misplaced loyalty, Minori enacts her revenge. She gets her mother-in-law fired, gets Yudai exposed at work and demoted, rubs their deceit and imminent poverty in both of their faces, causes Yudai to abandon Riko, demands that Yudai sign divorce papers, and leaves town with her and Yudai's young son Tsubasa. Seven years later, Minori (now 40) is running a kid-friendly cafe in the countryside, and by pure coincidence Wataru (now 25) shows up as a new teacher at Tsubasa's school. He makes clear that he still desires her and that he's not a kid anymore, which she repeatedly rebuffs at first. Meanwhile, Yudai is a pitiful shell of his former self hoping Minori will give him a second chance, and having learned nothing from their comeuppance, both his mother and Riko devise ways to get back at Minori.
Speaking of Wataru, I appreciate how much 'Otto no Katei' is willing to lean into giving us someone to hate (in addition to Yudai and his mother), that someone being Wataru's mother. Riko is such a bird! Sure, she's been desperate for love her whole life and has never been anyone's first choice. But the show never lets the audience forget how much of a bird she is, and the audience is allowed to keep judging her for it, especially since Yudai is getting his just desserts too. We can look down on them both! Which is so much fun! (For those who don't know, a "bird" is what Black people have been calling women who forsake their dignity in order to get, keep, or align with men for decades, long before "pick-me" became the more recent popular slang term for that same phenomenon.) You are a MOTHER! Why does your SON have to run away, then agree to move back in on the condition that you leave your married boyfriend alone, in order for you to finally stop messing with said married boyfriend? I know I just waxed on and on about empathy, and I know Nichole Perkins said side chicks are deserving of empathy too. But some (fictional) side chicks deserve to be told about themselves, some of them deserve to lose something, and shows like this and the K-drama 'Doctor Cha' understand that in a way that satisfies the petty subsection of my soul. Nonami Maho truly did her job playing this character, because literally the only thing I liked about Riko was the fact that she resembled the singer Che'Nelle.
海のはじまり (Umi no Hajimari/Umi's Beginning/The Beginning of the Sea/Where Does the Sea Begin) - Fuji TV/2024
- Eight years after the last time he saw Mizuki (his ex-girlfriend from college), Natsu gets word that Mizuki has died from cervical caner. At the funeral, he meets Mizuki's 7-year-old daughter, whom Mizuki's mother Akane (the child's grandmother) reveals is his daughter too. Natsu impregnated Mizuki in college, but didn't learn this until she had him sign an abortion consent form. She couldn't go through with the abortion but also didn't want to limit Natsu's future prospects (knowing that he'd drop everything to father his child if he knew she kept it). So she let him believe that she underwent the abortion, then dropped out of school without telling him, and then broke up with him over the phone, lying that she fell in love with someone else. She proceeded to raise the baby (the titular Umi) as a single mother, with increasingly more help from her friendzoned library co-worker Tsuno and her parents as her cancer was diagnosed and worsened.
- At the funeral, Akane tearfully asks Natsu to consider raising Umi, but doesn't give him a chance to process and respond before walking away and taking Umi with her. On the other hand, Umi becomes so obsessed with forging a connection with Natsu that the next day, while Akane is out running errands, Umi sneaks out and visits Natsu at his apartment all by herself. (She knows the way because Mizuki had previously walked her there and told her that this is where her father "Natsu-kun" lives.) This leads to a loose visitation arrangement, where Umi and Natsu alternately spend time at each other's homes and on outings, Natsu learns more about how Mizuki was living before she died, and Mizuki's parents patiently advise Natsu while waiting for him to decide if he wants to assume his parental rights to Umi or not.
- Natsu comes from an unconventional family himself (a blended family consisting of his once-divorced mom, his stepdad, and his younger step-brother), and so seeks their input on the Umi situation. This is in addition to the input of his supervisor at work, and that of his girlfriend Yayoi, who often participates in his visitations with Umi despite her own complicated relationship with the notion of motherhood. Even as Umi is ready to love Natsu and Natsu gradually embraces the changes he must make to be the father she needs, hiccups abound that they both learn to bounce back from. And while Natsu must decide whether to legally acknowledge his daughter, Umi must decide who she wants to live with, and if she's willing to change schools and leave her grandparents to live with Natsu. All of this, while everyone continues grieving Mizuki in their own respective ways.
Honorable Mention: What Comes After Love - Coupang Play, 2024
Based on a 2005 novel of the same name co-written by Gong Ji-Young and Tsuji Hitonari, 'What Comes After Love' is technically a K-drama, but since it's another bilingual show set between Tokyo and Seoul about a Japanese person and a Korean person falling for each other (similar to 'Eye Love You'), I decided to include it here. I've also never forgotten the impression Sakaguchi Kentaro left on me in 'Soshite, Ikiru' and was eager to watch him work again. Contrary to the pairing in 'Eye Love You,' this time the people falling in love are a Korean woman and a Japanese man.In the spring of 2019, an aimless but optimistic college grad and musician named Hong (Lee Se-young) moves from South Korea to Japan to try living on her own for the first time, taking her fellow Korean friend up on her offer to split the rent. Upon arrival at her new home station near Inokashira Park, she runs into Jungo (Sakaguchi Kentaro), who helps her get her luggage unstuck from an exit ticket gate, takes a picture of Hong and her friend together per their request, and bids them goodbye. Hong and Jungo meet again while both vying for a job at a ramen shop, and the two see each other every day due to Jungo working at a nearby food truck and them both volunteering for their neighborhood business association's clean-up crew. Aside from their mutual attraction, they bond over a shared love of literature: as the eldest daughter of a renowned Korean-Japanese interpreter/translator Hong has enrolled in Japanese classes at a local university with plans to pursue a graduate degree in literature, while Jungo is already a literature graduate student who dreams of publishing his own novel one day. After they start dating Hong moves in with Jungo, and the lovers give each other cognate nicknames in their respective languages; Jungo calls Hong "Beni" and Hong calls Jungo "Yun-o."
Unfortunately, as Jungo becomes increasingly absent due to his multiple jobs, the isolation of being emotionally neglected in a foreign country while her family faces financial and health struggles back home becomes too much for Hong (plus, her best friend had already moved back to Korea). So she leaves a parting letter for Jungo before moving back to Seoul in the middle of the night. By 2024 (the present), Hong has thrown herself into her career as a director at her father's publishing/translation company and is unenthusiastically engaged to a doctor and longtime friend. Of course, when she's required to assist one of her subordinates in picking up a Japanese author client named "Sasae Hikari" from the airport to promote his new book in Korea, "Sasae Hikari" turns out to be none other than Jungo. (The novel he's promoting has the same title as this K-drama. It's a fictionalized version of their relationship, with reflections on where he went wrong, written in hopes that she'd read it and understand why he so regrettably fumbled their relationship the way he did.) Jungo tries multiple times to speak with Hong privately, and Hong avoids him like the plague. Meanwhile, Hong drags her feet on wedding planning and Dr. Rebound notices. Meanwhile, Jungo's literary agent Kanna (my girl Nakamura Anne from 'Kikazaru Koi' and so many other things) unexpectedly joins him on this promotional trip; Kanna and Jungo dated before he met Hong, and Kanna wants that old thang back.
Thursday, November 28, 2024
BOOKS! (Jesus Wept)
For someone like me who is both a believer and a critically thinking person, the last chapter of Jesus Wept is certainly an eyebrow raiser. The way it uses seeds as a metaphor to emphasize how death liberates us from this world and is a blessing from God, and how humans can't realize their full potential until after they die (entering the realm of limitless possibilities that is the afterlife), I couldn't help but consider how easy it's been for people to argue that Christianity is a death cult. At the same time, I couldn't deny how strongly this metaphor resonated with me, even though I'd heard it before. Reading it in this context reminded me of an animated short film I watched this summer called Ninety-Five Senses, which similarly suggests that death opens up an entire host of new possibilities (95 additional senses, for example) that we simply cannot fathom or access during our temporal lives here on Earth. And who wouldn't want to be able to imagine their loved ones experiencing and enjoying more on the other side than what life allowed them the first go-round? I know that kind of imagining has done wonders for me and my grieving process.
"But he knows beyond the hills there is a valley where life is pleasant" (15)."For school to be out merely closes the classes—not the life of the student. It rather gives him a chance to rest from his studies and to enjoy his learning. So goes life in a world designed to be a preparatory school. In it we learn from many sources. And after the learner has finished his course, it is only natural for him to go home" (25-26)."He considers the welfare of the dying as well as the living; and His calling one home is not to hurt us who remain, but to help him who departs" (32).