Koi No Yokan​: 

A Few Thoughts on Yoon’s “The Sun Is Also A Star” 

As a hopeless romantic, I love reading about love. Romance used to be something I only 
knew from pouring over pages or watching a screen. I’ve seen so many different kinds of couple 
tropes that I’ve wondered which one I’d like to have. It always made me think, “One day. I’ll find 
my person.” I never really knew what being in love was like, but it definitely did not stop me from 
dreaming about it. Many moons ago, I first read “The Sun Is Also A Star.” At the time, I thought 
that it was the closest depiction of love that I could get. 
This book basically tells a story of “koi no yokan”, a Japanese phrase that loosely translates 
to “a love at second sight”. Nicola Yoon described it as “the feeling when you meet someone that 
you’re going to fall in love with them.” In a span of a day, the poetic Daniel Bae, a 
Korean-American who had his whole life planned out for him, attempted to make the cynical 
Natasha Kingsley, a Jamaican-born who was being uprooted from her home, believe in love again. 
He wanted to show her that love is more than chemical reactions. He believed that the Universe 
unfolded events in a way that brought them to meeting in that record store. She did not believe 
that, but she was starting to. As the characters begin to know each other more, the readers also bear 
witness as they go through the finicky process of falling in love. 
Needless to say that I lived for the gooey romantic stories. Back then, the Universe had not 
done its work for me to meet the one who I would eventually fall for. In fairytales, I saw myself in 
the princess waiting for her Prince Charming. In this book, I saw myself in Daniel, drifting 
between scheduled plans, wondering about with a spark in his eyes. But in the time between the 
first time that I read this and now, I still loved reading about love, but I was numb to it in reality. I 
became more like Natasha. Amidst all my plans and ambitions, I came to believe that I didn’t have 
time for romance. I knew that I had to be realistic and my reality didn’t have room for that. Truth 
be told, a part of me still longed for my happy ending, but whenever the prospect of romance 
doesn’t work out, I’d convince myself that I wasn’t ready. I had bigger plans, or that's what I 
wanted to believe. 
When I read it again, it was like reading it under a new light. I didn’t have to dream about 
what romance was like, because I know exactly how it feels. No words can begin to describe it. I 
met a boy with whom I felt the “koi no yokan”, and with whom I most certainly did fall in love. As 
I write this paper, I think that I’m still in the process of falling. It’s nice to see my own story unfold.