Studies of Koreans’ relationships with the Japanese and the Japanese Empire have been undertaken in South Korea during the last three decades. This trend can be understood broadly as an attempt by South Korean scholars to intervene in a colonial history and culture that had been heavily ideology-ridden. They have explored multiple dimensions of colonial culture by engaging with topics that complicate the hierarchy of the colonizer, the colonized, and the imperial order. Also, scholars in the English-speaking world have added nuanced investigations of people and culture in colonial Korea in the last decade in the fields of history, literature, and film, widening the horizon of colonial scholarship. Su Yun Kim's Imperial Romance: Fictions of Colonial Intimacy in Korea, 1905–1945 is a welcome contribution to this growing scholarship that focuses on literary imaginings of elite colonial subjects’ intimate relationships, more specifically intermarriage, which has been understudied. Kim's emphasis rests on the intricacy of the social and emotional structure of intimacy as imagined in cultural products, especially in literature; this provides a critical tool to understand the context of the Japanese Empire's assimilation program.

Su Yun Kim does a wonderful job of bringing together various sources written in Korean and Japanese languages beyond literary pieces, such as magazines, cinema, and official and nonofficial documents. As Kim rightly explains, while the direct impacts of the Japanese colonial government's policies on intermarriage are difficult to measure and the “published data in the colonial period are flawed,” these sources, literature in particular, “[offer] an alternative picture of intermarriage through the imagination and fantasies of the Korean public” (p. 67). Kim's close examination of Korean perspectives embedded in these sources, she argues, reveals that Korean writers and cultural producers showed their “fascination” with the Japanese and the moments they became “active participants in and agents of Japanese and global imperialism” (p. 4).

Chapter 1 examines the discourse of “home” and “love” at the turn of the century by reading government documents and Japanese-language media, followed by an analysis of two fiction works penned by Yi Injik and Yi Kwangsu. Kim's analysis of Yi Injik's Tears of Blood (1906) emphasizes the narrative of adoption and kinship between the female protagonist and Japanese figures, as well as the representation of the Westernized home that reflects the writer's vision of a passage to enlightenment. In contrast, Yi Kwangsu's portrayal of failed male-male romantic relationships in his fiction, Kim argues, represents the unsettling notion of modernity and changing perspectives of heterosexual love. By analyzing the public discourse of a royal wedding between the Korean prince Yi Ŭn and the Japanese blueblood Nashimotonomiya Masako in 1920, Kim discusses the changes to family law for intermarriages in colonial Korea, which did not fully reflect Japanese family law and the colonial state's policies. Instead, Kim shows how questions of ethno-national identity and social class became the main problems that people dealt with through her investigation of Yŏm Sangsŏp's fiction, Mansejŏn.

Chapter 3, 4, and 5 are the book's highlights, with extensive discussion of literary and media representations of intermarriage, mixed families, adoption narratives, and international marriage during the wartime period. Kim compares the media sensationalization of international marriage and Korean-Japanese marriages in print media, in which the former “strengthened the Korean-Japanese intermarriage ideology by creating a new cosmopolitan model of ‘intimacy’ for all forms of intermarriage” (p. 17). Despite this media promotion of the assimilation program, Kim's close analysis of literary works by Yi Kwangsu and Yi Hyosŏk and wartime propaganda films illustrates that intermarriage became a contentious site of the colonial and racial hierarchy.

Imperial Romance opens up a new possibility in reading Koreans’ relationship with the Japanese Empire through the theme of intermarriage with a wide range of sources and careful readings of both literary works and archives. While the analysis of literary pieces helps readers understand how intimacy was imagined, the reason for selecting literature can be explained much earlier, more specifically, in the introduction. It is not clear how the male-male relationship in Yi Kwangsu's work intervenes in the discourse of home in chapter 1. Kim's explanation of the quantity of works on intermarriage requires further scrutiny because of her seemingly inconsistent statements. For example, Kim states that intermarriage was dealt with “in a small but significant number of literary works” during the wartime period (p. 59), but “the production of fiction and other cultural products on the topic of intermarriage proliferated in the post-1937 period” (p. 13). Some very interesting terminologies and observations are left unexplained. One example is about a film “made by Korean residents in Japan” (p. 78): what is the original term written or used either in Japanese or Korean when referring to Koreans living in Japan before the end of World War II? A more extensive provision of the aesthetic and political (im)possibilities of film, and a discussion of the target audience, would complement the analysis of literature.

These points do not lessen the contribution that Kim makes. By dealing with intermarriage, which has rarely been taken up in the scholarship of colonial Korean history and culture, this book will be an illuminating read for scholars and students in Korean history and literature, comparative culture, and empire studies.