Review of Kissing the Ring Finger / 王様に捧ぐ薬指

There was one day I was really bored. Like I was willing to watch anything kind of bored, and I had just finished up my last Korean drama that I’d been obsessed with watching (Dali and Cocky Prince—which I also reviewed on this blog).

So I booted up my Viki account, and there this was. I’d never heard of Kissing the Ring Finger, but Viki had marked it on my account as something suggested for me, and it was also marked as something that had come out recently.

And usually I don’t really watch Japanese drama. I have some secondhand trauma from my anime days, so I have a tendency to avoid Japanese television shows.

But like I said before: I felt like I was willing to watch anything, it was only ten episodes long, so I kind of just shrugged and decided to watch it. If I didn’t like it, I was going to drop it immediately once the vibes were off to me.

Spoiler: I watched all of it and it became a guilty pleasure, if I will admit.

Let’s get into the review!

After entering a fake marriage to fool everyone, the main characters find themselves actually falling in love.

Our female lead in this drama, Ayako, is at a unique situation at the beginning of the series: every man she works with ends up falling in love with her.

She’s just so beautiful that these men can’t help themselves, which causes major problems in almost every single job she’s been in.

Having been fired from her most recent job because of this, Ayako finds a new gig at a bridal planning company, but all of her coworkers hate her and she has just been accused of stealing a man yet again because of her looks by a bride to be.

Enter: Togo. The wealthy CEO of the company, he’s Ayako’s age. When he hears of the situation, he summons her to his office and has a proposal for her: what if they got fake married?

They wouldn’t have to do it long, and she agrees to it because he’s about to pay her a fancy penny in order to go through with this. It’s also a win-win situation: people can stop nagging him after he declined all of the girls on a dating show, while Ayako can flash the ring finger and men will go away.

So they have a wedding! For the camera and social media, they play it up, but once they stop recording, they wipe off their cheeks wherever they touched and gag at the thought of kissing each other.

No one knows their secret except the editor cameraman who figures it out after they accidentally record their disgust, but the drama is just getting started.

The conflict is largely internal between the two leads, especially once they start falling for each other. Ayako is also from a poor background, with lots of siblings, and her parents own a struggling fishcake shop.

Their business is impacted by the relationship, and when Togo’s stepmother starts getting involved in a nefarious way with everything going on, everything gets worse on Ayako’s end.

There’s also the fact that Ayako is still having work drama, and at one point she even starts considering resigning. It truly isn’t easy being poor and beautiful, and now having a sham marriage to a rich man. Let’s not forget what might happen if that got leaked, too. It might end both of them for sure.

Overall Thoughts

For only ten episodes, this moves quite fast but quite efficiently. I didn’t find it lacking really, and was fine for what it is. I will admit I ended up binge watching this though, as I was quite obsessed with it over the course of watching the series.

It also kickstarted a spiral where I began watching other Japanese and Chinese dramas, which I usually don’t do, in favor of my typical Korean ones.

It truly opened up my world! That said, if you haven’t watched this already, watch the first two episodes. You might enjoy it a lot like I did, despite the cheesy premise.

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