Struggling to pay his mother's hospital bills, Hakyung receives an offer: the fees will be taken care of. The catch? In exchange, he must pretend to be a girl he once knew in order to deceive the chairman of a powerful company. It's going well until Yoonsung, the chairman's grandson, appears...

Reunion has a story by 2coin. English translation is done by RIDI Corporation. Published by Manta (June 16, 2026).

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Not every melodrama needs to strain our credulity, but it's really part of the fun of reading the genre. 2coin's Reunion understands that. The story tells the tale of Hakyung and Yoonsung, two young men who first met seven years ago…when Hakyung was hired to impersonate a girl who died ten years ago. The girl in question was both his next-door neighbor and the granddaughter of a friend of Yoonsung's grandfather. Now nearing the end of his life, the old man is desperate to reconnect with someone related to his friend's memory, and his unscrupulous son has been hiring fakes to try to sweeten his father's attitude in hopes of getting more inheritance. Hakyung is the latest in a line of impersonators, but since he actually knew the girl in question (before she was murdered by her father at age ten, something the old man is unaware of), he's the first successful one, despite being a twenty-two-year-old man. But his mother is sick and he needs to pay for her care and feed himself and his younger brother Gunwoo, so he takes the job.

While he does fool the old man, Yoonsung is unconvinced. But the two strike up a friendship that seems to be on the verge of blossoming into something more before an as-yet-unrevealed accident robs Yoonsung of his memories of the summer they spent together and puts an end to the charade. Told in alternating chapters – one in the present, one in the past, and so on – 2coin lets us slowly discover what happened when they first met as we also learn about how the two men react to suddenly being reunited. It seems almost certain that they fell in love in the past, although whether or not Yoonsung realized that Hakyung was a man isn't clear. I suspect he knew based on how he reacts to Hakyung in the present, but if he did know, Hakyung himself was unaware. Yoonsung desperately wants to regain his lost time and knows that Hakyung can help, but Hakyung isn't sure that this is a great idea, although again, the promise of money to help support Gunwoo (now a college student) is enough to make him agree to spend time with his old acquaintance.

The plot is, it must be said, slightly ridiculous. But 2coin writes it with such earnestness that you don't really realize that until you've put the book down. The translation has a few small errors, mostly of the typo variety, but overall reads well. The catch is that this is, as of this writing, only available on Manta's site and app, without a traditional ebook release. But if you don't mind reading that way, it's worth picking up.