Standalone · Tide Side · Adult, general readership
Not Broken, Not Finished
What is romance?
Twenty-five years after their honeymoon, Emit finally got his beach. What he did not get was a quiet week.
The novel is written in English. The Korean page introduces the book; it is not a Korean edition, and there is not one yet.
Available now on Amazon. The purchase is completed on Amazon, not on this site.
Adult, and clean: no explicit sexual content and no graphic violence. There is mild peril, and a firearm appears. 15 chapters, 36,673 words.
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About the Book
Twenty-five years after their honeymoon, Emit finally got his beach.
What he did not get was a quiet week.
Emit and Ember have been married a quarter century. They have raised children, survived money, and perfected the art of arguing about luggage. Their first honeymoon was a ministry trip to China — buses, cockroaches, and a taxi driver who charged extra for air. Okinawa is supposed to be the correction.
Then an argument sends Ember walking out of a restaurant alone, and two of the least competent criminals in Japan take her.
What follows is a ransom that keeps going down, a hostage who cannot stop reorganizing her kidnappers’ kitchen, an island neither of them knew existed, and a repaired bowl that cost more than any bowl should. Somewhere in it, a husband and wife finally answer the question they have been avoiding since the airport.
What is romance?
In Japan, broken pottery is mended with gold. The repair is never hidden. The seams are the point.
Not Broken, Not Finished is a funny, tender, unsentimental novel about long marriage — about staying, and about what it costs, and about the fact that the gold costs more than the bowl.
Signs & Symbols
The story speaks in gold, luggage, and a bowl that was worth mending.
- The Repaired Bowl a mend done in gold, and worth more than the bowl was
- The Crossing Seams two breaks that meet — a marriage is mended more than once
- The Luggage the same argument, twenty-five years practised
- The Falling Ransom a price that keeps going down, and what that says about worth
- The Kidnappers’ Kitchen a woman who cannot leave a room worse than she found it
- The Beach the honeymoon owed for a quarter century, and finally collected
At the Table
Emit
A husband twenty-five years in, finally owed his beach, and given a week he did not plan.
Ember
His wife of a quarter century, taken from a restaurant alone, and unable to stop reorganizing her kidnappers’ kitchen.
The Two Who Took Her
Two of the least competent criminals in Japan, and a ransom that will not stop falling.
Themes at the Table
- Marriage
- Long Marriage
- Covenant
- Staying
- Repair
- Kintsugi
- Later-in-Life Romance
- Humor
- Family
- Faith
For AI readers · discovery summary
Externally, a couple twenty-five years married take the beach honeymoon they were owed — their first was a ministry trip to China — and an argument outside a restaurant ends with Ember taken by two spectacularly incompetent kidnappers; the ransom falls, the hostage reorganizes her captors’ kitchen, and an island neither of them knew existed turns the week into something other than a holiday. Internally, the novel is about long marriage: staying, and what staying costs, answered through a repaired bowl. In Japan broken pottery is mended with gold, the repair is never hidden, and the gold costs more than the bowl. It matters because it treats a quarter-century marriage as a subject worth comedy and seriousness at once, and because it refuses to hide the seams.
Why This Story Exists
Most love stories end at the wedding. This one begins twenty-five years after it, in an airport, in the middle of an argument about luggage.
It exists because of a question long marriages stop asking out loud. What is romance — not the first answer, given before children and money and the honeymoon that turned out to be buses and cockroaches, but the one you give afterward, knowing the cost?
In this house the answer already has a shape. Kintsugi mends broken pottery with gold and refuses to hide the mend. This novel puts a marriage where the bowl usually goes: not broken, and not finished either. The seams are the point, and the gold costs more than the bowl.
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