K-Drama Flashback: ‘Winter Sonata’

Winter Sonata (2002), weaves intense emotions emanating from the beauty and pain of a sublime love story.

The second part of director Yoon Seok-ho’s classic tetralogy, the Endless Love drama series, Winter Sonata, is a masterpiece of performances, seamlessly sweeping you into its profundity. It’s heartwarming and poignant in how love exists in our lives—from the love between two people to the bond between friends and family members—this drama touches on the many ways love manifests itself.

Winter Sonata opens with Kang Joon-sang (Bae Yong-joon) moving to a Korean hamlet. He has heated conflicts with his mother and feels abandoned, believing his father has passed away. One day, while riding the bus with him, his classmate Jeong Yoo-jin (Choi Ji-woo) nods off on his shoulder en route to school. In a matter of weeks, they get closer, falling in love soon, but it comes crashing abruptly when Joon-sang becomes amnesiac after a fatal car crash.

Joon-sang’s mother decides to follow him to the United States so he can start afresh as Lee Min-hyung. A decade later, Min-hyung is now an architect of distinction in the US, with no recollections of his stint in Korea. But when he returns to Korea, Yoo-jin spots him on the street and calls off her engagement. She is oblivious that Min-hyung is seeing Oh Chae-rin (Park Sol-mi), her friend and former rival. It picks up steam when Yoo-jin’s interior design firm receives an assignment from Min-hyung’s architecture firm, stirring up feelings in the process.

Winter Sonata’s universal themes of love and loss, together with its poignant depiction of longing and nostalgia, ring true in a variety of cultural contexts. It’s a perennial classic in the world of K-dramas for the way it can elicit genuine, untainted emotions and its transcendence of cultural borders.

Bae and Choi’s collaboration in Winter Sonata is an alliance of power that culminates in one of the more beautiful romances in the K-drama universe. Choi delights as she vividly captures the essence of Yoo-jin; Bae’s portrayal gives her the utmost weight to her role. They thrive on extracting the most overwhelming feelings from one of the best-known love stories. Winter Sonata is a welcome reminder: the ending, or perhaps a new beginning, of your story depends on you, and living in the present is what it takes to be happy.

Its moody OST, which effectively echoes the drama’s themes, furthers the beauty of its visual components. Winter Sonata is a hymn to love; its effects are often uplifting and seldom unfavorable, but eventually its enchantment and all-pervasive power. The music speaks of the throbbing emotion and adds a new element of passion to the already powerful story that encapsulates the protagonists’ experiences.

Winter Sonata conjures up melodies and melancholy, in addition to the delicate manner in which it mixes retro, romantic, and melodramatic components. With its massive impact on fostering Korean culture and luring travelers to the idyllic island of Nami, Winter Sonata is feted for being at the forefront of the second wave of the Hallyu Wave. 

Winter Sonata became a staggering hit in Japan, creating a Yonsama craze that referenced Bae Yong-joon’s ubiquity in the country. The suffix “sama” attached to his name is said to be reserved for Japanese nobility. The drama’s breakthrough in Japan opened the door for K-dramas to become a more widespread phenomenon outside of Korea and helped establish them as a cultural export.

When you’re feeling low, it’s worth coming to Winter Sonata, an aesthetically designed gem, a classic K-drama. There’s much love as well as anxiousness intertwined, with surprises and a sense of respite in its finality. It’s dreamy and enchanting; it may be a recall of how you felt in love.