Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Kanojo no Inai Jikan
(彼女のいない時間 -그녀가 없는 시간- / Kanojo no Inai Jikan -Geunyeoga obsneun shigan- / The Time Without Her)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

When I mentioned in my last review that I hoped to post another one within this month, I didn’t expect that the next one would literally only take me a day to finish, lol. So here we are again, with a surprise review. I don’t even remember how I came across this short series, but I might’ve put it on my list when I went through Kim Hyun Joong’s dramas after finishing When Time Stopped). I always find it interesting when Japanese and Korean dramas collide, like with Haru ga Kita, so I was curious what this one was going to be about. I saw that it had super positive reviews on MDL, but the summary didn’t really give me a clear idea of the plot, so I went into it with an open mind. I’m glad I did, because it turned out to be a real gem. It actually felt more like watching a movie than a short series, also from the way it was shot and built up. I’m excited to share my views on it.

Since the series is so short, I decided to watch it twice, so I could double-check things I may have missed. I would actually recommend doing this, because it really doesn’t take long and I did notice things I didn’t see the first time around. If you choose to watch it again, I’d suggest focussing on the subtle ways Mai’s face is hidden during the funeral and in the flashbacks, and whether the people Eun Tae and the girl meet on their trip actually acknowledge the latter. It’s quite interesting watching something back while knowing the full truth, and this series lends itself for that perfectly.

Kanojo no Inai Jikan is a Nagoya TV mini series that consists of four episodes of about 30 minutes each. MDL lists it as a Japanese drama, and although it felt more like a Korean drama with Japanese elements to me, it’s true that it’s formatted as a J-Drama; the Korean dialogues are all subtitled in Japanese, suggesting it’s targeted at a Japanese-speaking audience. As such, I also followed MDL in using the Japanese title for this review. By the way, as far as I could find, the only way to watch the full series is through this YouTube channel, which has decent English (and Spanish) subtitles. Admittedly, not all the subtitles are correct (it did help that I understood Japanese), but it doesn’t take away too much from the story or the dialogues, so it’s not too bad.
The story focusses on Cha Eun Tae (played by Kim Hyun Joong), a Korean man in his late thirties who just lost his beloved Japanese wife, Mai. Due to the shock of her death, he suddenly finds himself unable to remember her clearly, both in terms of how she looked and their history together. It’s not just in his head – he’s actually diagnosed with temporary amnesia. The thought of not even being able to remember his wife and cherish his memories with her now that she’s gone causes Eun Tae to lose all hope, including his will to live. Just as he is contemplating following Mai to the afterlife, a photo appears out of nowhere. It shows him at a young age, holding a time capsule with the words “To Us in The Future” on it, written in both Japanese and Korean. Thinking that this photo might help him regain his memories of Mai, Eun Tae decides to take one last trip before deciding whether or not to leave this life.
After arriving at Jeongseon, where there’s a big time capsule park, a Japanese girl in a high school uniform (played by Tenshō Amane) calls out to Eun Tae at the station, handing him his wallet and saying she saw that he lost it. Eun Tae is immediately thrown off by her blunt way of speaking when she insists that he should be thankful to her and that he should even treat her to a meal. After revealing the purpose of his trip to her, the mysterious girl insists on joining him on his journey to regain his memories. With his new companion, Eun Tae embarks on a trip that will help him regain much more than just his lost memories.

Starting off the story with a protagonist who tries to off himself is pretty heavy, and it immediately sets the tone for Eun Tae’s state of mind. He’s almost like a living ghost in the way he wanders across the train platform when he arrives in Jeongseon. Still, he is able to find the strength to take this final trip with only a single photo in hand, even if he has no idea where to look or what to expect.
The only backstory we get from him is his history with and love for Mai, and this is further underlined by the crippling regrets and feelings of guilt he carries with him. As it turns out, he feels responsible for Mai’s death, as she died in an accident while she was on her way to see him after he’d called her out. Apart from that, there’s all these things that he never got to do with her, like going on trips and taking pictures together. Despite the fact that he’s losing sense of Mai, the sharp stings of these regrets stay with him. One quote that jumped out to me in the first episode came from the man at the train station when he asked about the purpose of Eun Tae’s visit. When Eun Tae says there’s “a hole in his memory that he means to fill”, the train guy corrects him by saying that “that means there’s a hole in his heart, since memories are connected to the heart”. In hindsight, I think this quote qualifies as considerable foreshadowing. At that point, Eun Tae is only thinking of regaining his memories and sharpening those blurred images, but he doesn’t know yet that the trip will ultimately help him fix the entire hole in his heart that Mai left behind.

The mysterious girl who remains unnamed until the last episode is an enigma throughout the story. From the moment she walks up to Eun Tae for the first time she’s incredibly quick on her feet, witty and even flirty with him. One moment she acts as if she’s just a runaway kid, the next she drops hints and makes comments that suggest there’s more to her than meets the eye. While she initially gets on Eun Tae’s nerves for being so straightforward and nosy, the things she says and does keep striking chords with him, and he eventually admits that she reminds him of Mai. While at first it really just seems as if she’s in Korea on a solo trip because she felt like she had to get away from home and didn’t get the chance to travel and make memories before, the fact that she keeps popping up at the same places as him even after disappearing for a while is uncanny – it almost feels like she’s there especially for Eun Tae.
Personally, I deducted fairly early on that the mysterious girl probably wasn’t real. The way she approached Eun Tae was weird to me from the start, simply because I didn’t find it realistic for a Japanese high school girl to suddenly hit on a random foreign man like that. When the strange occurrences increased, like how she kept disappearing and reappearing, switching outfits and skipping through unknown territory as if she knew it like the back of her hand, I quickly found myself looking for signs that other people couldn’t actually see her. When rewatching the series it’s very clear that this is the case, but I have to say that they managed to keep it very subtle. In any case, as soon as the guesthouse lady couldn’t remember if there’d been a second person, and when the guy at the time capsule park was like “You were here on your own the other day”, it didn’t really come as a surprise. Still, it’s not like that was the only plot twist.
In the end, it’s revealed that the mysterious girl is actually Mai, or at least what she looked like as a teenager. What I liked about this plot twist was that it only added more substance to the revelation that she wasn’t real. It’s not just that she was a ghost or a spirit or something like that, she was Mai’s spirit that appeared in order to guide Eun Tae on the trip they never got to go on, and persuade him to keep living as long as he could remember her. The fact that she appeared to him in her high school uniform was probably because that’s what she’d looked like when they’d buried the time capsule together.

After rewatching the series, I jotted down a bunch of indicators that subtly foreshadowed the truth about the girl, both in terms of her not being real, and her being Mai.
With regards to her not being real, if you look carefully, you can actually see that none of the people that Eun Tae meets along the way throw her a single glance. It’s framed very subtly, because Eun Tae and the girl are often standing very closely together. But if you look at their interactions, they’re always only addressing Eun Tae.
During the first encounter between Eun Tae and the girl at the train station, after she returns his wallet to him, the guy on the train platform stands very closely behind the girl as he confirms that it must indeed be his wallet. However, in hindsight it could be possible that he just saw Eun Tae stare blankly at his wallet (which he might have already been holding or which just appeared to him, just like the photo in the beginning) and, making the connection with that he’d lost his memories, just confirmed that to him.
The lady at the first restaurant where they eat together only nods at Eun Tae when she puts the food on the table, and when the girl wonders why she’s looking at them so weirdly, it might have been due to the fact that he ordered two portions of food for himself (and possibly the fact that he was talking to air).
The man at the time capsule park only looks at Eun Tae when he’s giving him directions, and despite the long and tiring climb up the hill, the girl doesn’t break a sweat while Eun Tae struggles a lot.
When the guy at the second restaurant invites them in, he also only keeps looking at Eun Tae even when the girl swiftly passes him as she skips inside.
The lady at the guesthouse has no recollection of another person staying in Eun Tae’s room, although she chalks it up to her fuzzy memory. Even if there had been another person, they didn’t pay their share for the room. Inside the room, the girl mysteriously switches from her bathrobe outfit to pajamas in a second, just like the way she disappears at the temple when playing hide and seek, even though she keeps holding on to him until the final second.

When it comes to indicators that the girl is Mai, there are many other hints besides the fact that she acts super familiar with him and her surroundings when she’s allegedly never met him or visited Jeongseon before.
One of the first things she says when she starts following him after their encounter at the station, is “Don’t you remember me? (…) I don’t mean from just now.”
When they’re waiting for the bus to the time capsule park, she actually looks melancholic when she says that she’ll have to come with him now that she knows the reason he’s here.
When they’re eating at the second restaurant, there’s a certain urgency in her voice when she talks about how lonely she would be if she’d disappear from the world and no one would remember her, and how that’s all people really strive for, to be remembered by at least one loved one. Speaking of this discussion, I think the point that she was trying to make her was that she tried to urge Eun Tae to keep remembering her (Mai) for as long as he was alive. Even though Eun Tae said that him not remembering Mai didn’t mean she disappeared from the world completely because there were more than enough people who could acknowledge that she had existed, meaning it didn’t necessarily need to be him, the girl tried to show him that it only mattered that he, the person she (Mai) loved the most, would stay alive to remember her, that it wasn’t the same as being remembered by other people. That’s what I got out of it, at least. It also ties in with the way the girl is constantly complimenting him for going out of his way to regain his memories of her (Mai).
When the girl is blowdrying her hair in the guesthouse, it sounds like she’s humming the same tune as in one of Eun Tae’s earlier flashbacks of Mai.
When they’re having tonkatsu and Eun Tae opens up about his suicide attempt and admits that he now no longer wants to die, the girl smilingly affirms “All thanks to me, right?”
When they’re resting after having tonkotsu, the girl casually mentions that he shouldn’t be such a downer because maybe this day they just spent together “was a very long-awaited day to someone”, again referring to the fact that they didn’t get to go on a trip together before and Mai had been looking forward to it so much. She also encourages Eun Tae to tell her more about Mai and the regrets he had towards her, and says that she wants to laugh as much as she can while she’s alive for Mai’s sake as well. She also talks to him about why taking pictures as happy memories is so important to her, adding that if she should forget, the time they spent together will be lost forever.
All in all, there are a lot of very subtle indicators that make it tricky to see the truth. Sometimes it’s hard to see whether the people they meet actually acknowledge the girl or not, and a lot of the girl’s dialogue can be interpreted as that she just joined him because she wanted to make special memories for herself and was interested in his mysterious amnesia. In that sense, I think this show was written very cunningly, and it would take thinking back and reconsidering things multiple times to actually realize what it all really meant.
Besides being very familiar and friendly with him, the girl actually flirts a lot with him as well, for example by saying that even if someone saw them together, “age didn’t matter in love” (which is a strange thing to say to someone you literally just met). She also eventually snuggles up to him as they go to sleep and actually kisses him when they’re at the temple, although she covers that up by saying she just wanted to give him a shock to see if that would jolt his memories, since it was a shock that made him lose them in the first place.
Towards the end it becomes less and less of a secret, when she mutters Eun Tae’s name even though he never told it to her, and when the time capsule guy straight up tells him that he was alone when he visited the park the first time. After that, Eun Tae discovers the girl doesn’t appear on any CCTV footage or pictures that he took of her. In the end, he finds her at the place where he and Mai buried the time capsule together, right after she read his wish card at the temple that said “I will meet you at the place that holds our memories, wait for me there” in Korean.

Speaking of those pictures he took of her, there’s only question I’m left with. If Mai wasn’t actually physically there, then who took that photo of him in the hotel? That picture would’ve at least proved there’d been someone in there with him, right? The same went for all the stuff she gave him, like the photo, the camera, her school bag, the diary… You’d think she wouldn’t be able to leave him anything tangible, right? I guess we’ll never know.

When you consider the fact that Mai appeared to Eun Tae in order to both help him regain his memories of her and simultaneously fulfill their shared regret of not being able to travel together, the ways in which she helps him out as the girl actually become much more meaningful. She reminds him of things they did and places they visited together by very subtly providing him things that trigger his memory without him even noticing it. She mentions she never got around to travel and that she loves taking pictures. By saying that waiting for the pictures to get developed “the old way” beats taking instant pictures with a cellphone, as it adds an element of excitement to making memories, she may have also hinted to the fact that she grew up in a time when cellphones didn’t exist yet. She keeps a diary, scolds him for speaking his mind too thoughtlessly and takes him out for tonkatsu, and all of these things trigger memories within Eun Tae.

I’d like to say something about the romantic element in this series. To be completely honest, I couldn’t help but feel a little uncomfortable with the fact that Mai returned in the form of a high school girl and started hitting on Eun Tae like that. While the dynamic of an unusual friendship between a grief-stricken man and a bright young girl worked, I did actually “eek” when she kissed him (there is a 20-year age gap between the two of them in real life, after all). Although I’m positive that they didn’t really kiss – you can see that their lips don’t actually touch – I still would’ve preferred it if they divided the younger and older versions of the characters, instead of only aging Mai up and down. I found it a bit strange that they didn’t use a younger version for Eun Tae in the picture. I couldn’t find any information on other credited actors in this series, so I guess it was also Tenshō Amane in the blurred flashbacks of adult Mai, although they made her voice sound much older.
Speaking of which, I’m not even sure of the exact timeline between them. I deducted from Mai’s urn that she’d been 38 when she passed away (it says 1986~2024), so she and Eun Tae must have been around the same age. It’s not clear from the prologue where or how they met exactly, only that they decided to settle down in Korea after going back and forth between their respective countries for a while. Seeing them in the flashbacks and the pictures taken when they buried that time capsule in Jeongseon, I couldn’t help but wonder at what age they actually met. They must have been teenagers when they buried that capsule together, so it seemed kind of surprising that they already decided to stay together forever at that point.

Now that I’ve covered all I wanted to note about the content of the series, I’d like to mention a couple of practical things that stood out to me. I deducted earlier that this series was probably listed as a Japanese show because it left the Japanese dialogue un-subtitled and only captioned the Korean dialogue, but I noticed they also occasionally played around with the subtitles in some parts quite randomly. When Eun Tae goes to pay for his room at the guesthouse and has a short interaction with the lady running it, the Japanese subtitles don’t appear at the bottom center of the screen as usual, but in the air around the characters as they’re speaking, only putting them back at the start of the next scene.

This happens once again halfway through the conversation between Eun Tae and the guy at the time capsule park when he tells him there was no girl with him before.

I wonder why they decided to add these captions if they were just going to keep switching back to regular bottom center subtitles straight after. It was kind of an odd inconsistency, so I wondered if there was any reasoning behind it. As a subtitler myself, I can’t help but notice these things.

By the way, I just realized that I find the title quite puzzling as well. In each language, the title translates to the same meaning, “the time without her”, or “the time when she isn’t there”. I’m guessing that “the time without her” refers to the time in which Eun Tae is left alone after Mai’s death, possibly even the entire duration of his trip until he remembers her again. However, we can now say for sure that Mai was actually with him the entire time. She’s the one making sure he notices the photo of the time capsule, before physically appearing in front of him as a mysterious girl, keeping her name a secret because he needed to remember it by himself. In the end, she’s even able to leave him a farewell note. So what “time” are they actually referring to in “the time without her”? This actually kind of reminds me of my similar question regarding the title of When Time Stopped. While it’s definitely a catchy title, I do think it’s good to at least make clear what exactly it refers to.

Despite the small inconsistencies and questions I still have after finishing the show, I won’t deny that this was a very beautifully written and executed short series. It captured the raw reality of a man desperately trying to remember his most beloved person, and I thought the build-up to Eun Tae both regaining his memories and finding closure with Mai’s death was very powerful. I can even overlook the age difference issue because it was relevant to the plot for Mai to appear to him like that, like she literally stepped out of the picture they took on the day they vowed to stay together forever. I loved how it all came full circle, like how the voice he’d heard on the night he was goin to kill himself echoed Mai’s words from when they’d assembled the time capsule, and how that ultimately led him back to her. Through concise and striking dialogues and the recurring theme of taking pictures and keeping diaries to emphasize the importance and value of making and recording memories and literally bringing Eun Tae back into the light, the writers and directors really did a great job at putting together a short but powerful story about dealing with loss.

Now that I’ve wrapped up my main analysis, I still want to jot down some cast comments, even though this will be quite short since there’s only two main actors.

Let me start by saying that this is without a doubt the BEST performance of Kim Hyun Joong I’ve seen so far. It was really great to see him as a regular man instead of the mysterious handsome flower boy guy he’s usually made out to be. This is honestly the most realistic and raw I’ve ever seen him act, and it was very impressive. Even despite the haggardness caused by his deflated will to live, he was still able to do so much with his expressions, and his crying scenes were very heartfelt and convincing. Move over, Boys Before Flowers, Playful Kiss and When Time Stopped! Since is the most recent thing he did and I don’t have any of his other shows on my to watchlist, I’m actually not sure if I’ll get to see anything more from him for the time being, so I’m really glad that I got to see him in this at least.

Apparently, apart from one movie and a couple of TV specials, this is the debut and so far only drama that Tenshō Amane (or Fujioka Amane) has appeared in so far. I was kind of surprised to find that out, since I just assumed she’d be more active. I liked how she just exuded this natural confidence when moving around and dragging her co-star along. She didn’t give the impression of being new to the screen at all, which I guess can be chalked up to the fact that she’s also a model. Still, modelling and acting are too different things, and I found her very charming. She looked very natural next to Kim Hyun Joong and also didn’t seem shy to act playful, flirty and affectionate around him. I was actually impressed with how fondly her eyes sparkled when she looked at him, she was able to convey Mai’s love for Eun Tae in a really mature way for her age. I hope for her that she’ll get more acting opportunities, because she definitely seems to have the looks and the skills for it, and she’s only 19! She still has her whole life ahead of her, so I wish her the best of luck. Fun fact: I actually did some research on her and it seems like she’s definitely got the celeb genes from her family, both her father and older brother are actors, and she and her two sisters are models – her younger sister is also called Mai, by the way, written with the exact same kanji as her character in this show! Thought that was a fun detail to share. Also, I really want to know which hair products she uses.

And with that, we’ve reached the end of this short but special review. I’m glad this show found its way onto my list, even if I don’t remember exactly how I came across it. I wanted to make sure I made note of as much details as possible since it’s such a short series, and because it deserves to be acknowledged for every hidden hint that was so masterfully written into it. It was a very touching and heartfelt depiction of a grieving man who rediscovered the meaning of the beautiful memories he shared with his wife, and learned how to keep using his love for her to keep going even after she was gone. It was incredibly sincere and impactful in its simplicity. It didn’t try to make things more exaggerated or emotional than they were, it was powerful because it was so realistic and genuine. All in all, this was truly an unexpected gem, and I’m glad to have discovered it.

I guess I’ll now repeat the same words I did last time and say I hope I’ll get to finish another drama within this month, lol. It was actually nice finishing two shows in a row, it’s really been a while since I’ve had the time and space to squeeze in two back-to-back reviews. I’m really curious to see what show my Wheel of Fortune app picks out next.

Until then! x