Review of Sounds of Winter / 冬のなんかさ、春のなんかね

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I feel like a lot of my blog introductions, especially when it comes to movies, have been lamenting on the fact I don’t have a ton of time lately. I used to work as a film critic (which, in fact, was so incredibly underpaid that I now make more off of this blog’s display ads than I ever did publishing anywhere else), and then when I was in graduate school I was writing a lot about film, so I used to watch so many movies.

But now I work an 8-5, come home, and then doom scroll my evenings away instead of watching the movies I used to love so dearly. And recently I realized I want to stop doing that, so I’ve set limits on my phone and am fully prepared to sit back and watch more movies and read more books in order to feed my brain.

Sounds of Winter is actually a series I ended up watching week by week as the episodes dropped on Netflix. I spent about three months in a funk and literally did not write any blog posts at all, effectively ending my years’ long backlog of posts, and I watched this series during that time.

So this review is going to come out much later than when I watched it, but good thing I was very dedicated to this show! Let’s get into the review.

A Japanese novelist works on her third novel and explores the role of personal relationships in her life.

Our main character in this series is Ayana, who, at the start of the series, is twenty-seven. She’s a novelist by profession and seems to wander through life in some ways, even though she’s onto her third novel and has a job at a clothing store.

A core focus of the series is exploring her romantic relationships with others. She has a boyfriend right now and seems to be happy with him, but the more she begins to excavate her own past and feelings, she realizes that she has never actually looked someone and truly seen who they are, nor does she let herself fall in love the way we talk about with the movies and whatnot.

Thus begins a series of self-exploration and digging deeper into why exactly this is happening. She spends a chunk of the series contemplating and sorting through those past relationships, especially when it comes to the ones where she met that kind of barrier, and how she can confront her current relationship.

And it’s not just her throughout the series contemplating the course of her life and the people around her. A lot of the characters and friends she surrounds herself with are also going through similar sentiments and working through their feelings as well, making this quite the introspective series in that regard.

It’s slow because of this though. It kind of reminded me of the Korean drama When the Weather Was Fine, minus the rural setting and that romance, because of how slow this series was for me. I enjoyed hanging onto those languid feelings, even though in the end it did start to feel like it was dragging after a while.

Overall Thoughts

I would say that I enjoyed watching this series all the way through, even though towards the end I found myself lowkey wanting to give up and watch something else. But sometimes its these shows that make me feel like I have to go all the way through because it feels rewarding in the end.

Do I think I’m going to rewatch this? No, but I could relate to Ayana in a lot of different ways behind being a writer and trying to sort through her feelings in a time of life that feels like it’s difficult—even if people pretend that by your late twenties you have everything figured out.

That said, I would say watch this if you want a more philosophical drama that makes you stop and reflect. It’s not pure brainrot or romantic fluff, which I enjoyed in this moment of my life.

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