Revisiting Touch Your Heart: Yoon In-na and Lee Dong-wook’s sweet, innocent romance feels like comfort food

There are typical, clichéd, over-the-top K-dramas that lack a coherent story but are still weirdly enjoyable (Business Proposal, What’s Wrong With Secretary Kim). And then there are the intense and heartfelt love stories packed with meaningful plots (Our Beloved Summer, Twenty Five Twenty One), and then there are those absorbing, melodramatic thrillers where the romance isn’t in the foreground but its presence looms over the story (It’s Okay Not To Be Okay and Flower of Evil). Touch Your Heart hovers between the first two categories; it ticks most of the K-drama tropes, but doesn’t go entirely overboard with the romance. It’s like comfort food, warm and soothing.

Office romances are always welcome in K-dramas, and this time, instead of being the arrogant CEO of a company, Lee Dong-wook plays a rather stiff attorney Kwon Jung-rok, while Yoon In-na is a high-profile actress Oh-Jin Sim, who was caught in a scandal for no fault of her own. To resuscitate her career, she is offered a role to play a lawyer in a film. She preps for this new opportunity by working as Jung-rok’s assistant and as they navigate a minefield of cases, obviously, love blooms. The romance is soft, breezy and sweet. Not at all treacly or saccharine as one would initially fear about a romantic K-drama, just very enjoyable. Lee Dong-wook melds well into one of his rare non-supernatural roles, as a rather restrained lawyer, while Yoon In-na is charming and sweet, but of course, a damsel in distress to be saved at points.

A scene from Touch Your Heart (Photo: Netflix)

It’s one of those romances that you would watch to beat the blues away, or if you were rather miserable about the pairing’s ending in Guardian. The show doesn’t intend to delve into profoundly troubling matters; there’s an episode where a stalker runs wild, but that’s just a set-up for Lee Dong-wook to exhibit his latent punching skills and say, “Stay away from my girl.” Don’t look in too deep for a message on stalking and women being trapped in scandals by powerful men; there isn’t any.

There are several sweet moments scattered like gems in a cake through the show, including Jung-rok gifting her a stuffed hedgehog, or when they view stars through a telescope, or just cooking together. Of course, true love never does run smooth, and the two hit a rough patch in their relationship, and in true Roman Holiday style, the hero ‘decides to let her return to her world’. You know they’ll obviously end up together, but it is still rather distressing to see Jung-rok trying to restrain his tears at the bus stop and finally breaking down after seeing her poster. Nevertheless, they find their way back to each other quickly, and all’s well that ends well.

It’s probably too much to hope to see Lee Dong-wook and Yoon In-na in another show again, so at this point only rewatching Guardian and Touch Your Heart can tide us over the blues.