Kiseki: Dear to Me

Bai Zong Yi (Taro Lin) has his future mapped out: study hard, qualify, become a doctor. Then he finds Fan Ze Rui (Hsu Kai) injured, takes him home and nurses him back to health, which is how a young gangster comes to be living in a medical student's flat. The two grow close over dressings and revision timetables, but Ze Rui's obligations do not stay outside the door. His family ties to organised crime follow him in, and what is owed to an organisation begins pressing against what is owed to a person. A second pairing runs beside them, Chen Yi (Nat Chen) and Ai Di (Louis Chiang), who are pursuing their own search for the missing Zhang Teng (Wayne Song) and asking the same questions at a different stage of life.

Consequence is the steadiest concern here. Caretaking carries most of the emotional weight, with injuries, treatment and study schedules recurring as the settings in which these characters show what they will not say, and the thirteen episodes are built in two halves separated by four years, so decisions taken quickly in the first have to be lived with in the second. Loyalty inside a criminal organisation is held up against loyalty inside a relationship, and neither is allowed to be the easy one.

Lin Pei-yu took three jobs on this production. She wrote the source novel 奇蹟, adapted her own book for the screen, and shares the producer credit with Anita Sung; Sharp Point had published it in 2021, where it topped the books.com.tw bestseller ranking for a month and was voted by BL readers the novel they most wanted to see adapted. Hope Wu directed for Brains Entertainment Production, and filming opened with a ceremony in Zhongli rather than Taipei on 1 March 2023. Kiseki sits in a later phase of the Taiwanese market than the HIStory units, arriving on a terrestrial broadcaster, GTV, and built from the outset as a Taiwan and Japan co-production, bringing Rakuten Group, SPO Entertainment and Video Market in at production stage with TAICCA carrying it in the national pavilion slate to seek pre-sales. Thirteen episodes of about 26 minutes ran on Tuesdays from 22 August to 7 November 2023, and an unusually senior bench of supporting actors, Yang Lieh, Hsieh Cheng-chun and Liang Che, was cast against the young leads, with Song Wei-en of HIStory3: Make Our Days Count turning up in support four years on.