Review of First Love / 初恋 (2022)

First Love is one of the many shows I happened to stumble upon while aimlessly scrolling through Netflix. I typically tend not to go for Japanese dramas, as Korean dramas tend to be my area of interest.

There’s something about Japanese dramas that never manage to suck me in the same way that the Korean ones do, but when I got shown a small snippet of this show on my feed, I knew I wanted to watch it immediately. Just from the trailer alone, I got this sense that there was a lot of chemistry between the leads both in their high school and adult days, which was something that caught my interest immediately.

I also have a fondness for dramas that like to incorporate more cinematic elements, and wow—this show has some really gorgeous shots throughout.

Onwards with the review!

High school sweethearts meet years after the accident that tore them apart.

As a series, First Love isn’t that long—it clocks in at a grand total of nine episodes, but that’s all it needs to be. I kind of wished it was longer because by the end I was attached to these characters, but I can see why they chose to end it where it’s at.

It opens in the nineties, when a girl, Yae, goes to high school in her native Hokkaido. She’s caught the eye of every boy in the school and constantly gets asked out, but bad boy Harumichi is the one to end up nabbing her. The show transitions between the past and the present.

First, we learn that Yae grows up to be a cab driver in what I presume is Tokyo. She has a son and is divorced, but shows no recollection about her relationship with Harumichi. He’s become a night guard with a complicated relationship with his fiancé, who, as the show goes on, we learn was his therapist after serving in the air force.

The two of them live completely separates lives, but the narratives set in the past show how close they were. They were thick as thieves in their relationship and everyone knew it, and Yae even learned sign language to communicate with Harumichi’s deaf sister.

Their paths cross again in the present day when Yae’s son comes to the building Harumichi works in. He lets her son sneak in to see his favorite performance artist, and they become closer despite the age gap. Her son has a crush on the performance artist, making that an entirely different subplot throughout the show.

When Harumichi sees Yae driving her car one day, his thoughts become geared towards her yet again—as his sister points out, his passcode is still her birthday after all of these years.

The flashback scenes further show their relationship, and what ended up causing it to end.

Harumichi joins the air force because Yae once said it would be cool for a guy to be in it, and Yae goes off to college. She had a knack for English when she was in high school, as pointed out by one of her teachers, and her dream is to become a flight attendant.

When in college, she starts to pave out a life for herself independent of Harumichi, despite telling him everything through their letters and calls, but one day she ends up receiving an acceptance to study abroad.

She doesn’t tell Harumichi about that, but when he comes to visit and one of her friends leaks the info to him, he becomes upset, leading to a big argument. Harumichi turns around after leaving her behind, calling her on the phone, but realizes something terrible happens.

He runs back to where he left her, and discovers she has been hit by the car. This leaves her with amnesia, and when she returns home, her mother intercepts his letters to her in hopes she would forget who Harumichi was. It works and Yae ends up pregnant and engaged to her doctor, which breaks Harumichi’s heart when he finds out.

At the same time, this is tragically sad because we can see that Yae was such a bright girl with a great future ahead of her, but she ends up having to leave everything behind because of the accident.

That relationship crashes and burns though, as Yae’s new husband’s family can’t accept the fact she grew up from a poorer background and he ends up cheating on her.

She takes her son to her mother’s home, but is forced to give him up because of her financial situation, creating the visitation rules where he can only see her once a week. In the present moment, Yae and Harumichi continue to meet again and seem to continue right where they left off, even though he’s engaged and she can’t remember anything about the shared past they had.

They end up falling in love, and, in the final episode when he leaves everything behind to go to Iceland, she remembers everything and follows him, becoming a flight attendant and achieving that dream that was abandoned when she had the accident.

Overall Thoughts

It’s a pretty decent drama. I thought it says a lot about the yearning these two had (although subconsciously for Yae) for each other, and when they do meet, it shows that they never truly forgot about each other instinctually.

It reminds me of videos I would watch of World War II veterans returning to Europe in their nineties to meet long lost loves they met during the war, then they would actually still have the love for each other. The scenes in this drama can be gorgeous too, as the cinematography unfolds a bit like a movie.

Pretty sure it was shot on film because of the quality, which adds an even more dream-like quality to it all. Some questionable decisions though scattered throughout, especially considering Harumichi calling her and making everything worse is kind of the reason her life got screwed up.

But accidents happen. All in all, I was kept watching until the end, making this one pretty solid.

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