First Love
First Love 初恋
The Moonlight essay
CinemaFirst Love and the Feelings That Return After You Thought Life Had Moved OnRead the essayStoryline
The whole story, ending included.
Two decades after a first love severed by an accident, a taxi driver and a grounded pilot turned security guard cross paths again in Hokkaido.
In Sapporo in 2018, Yae Noguchi is the only woman driving a taxi for her company. She is divorced, and her teenage son, Tsuzuru, lives with his father, a brain surgeon. Harumichi Namiki works as a security guard and is about to marry Tsunemi Arikawa, a counsellor, but his phone's passcode is still Yae's birthday. He glimpses her taxi at a crossing, finds her company by listening in on taxi radio, and when they finally meet she greets him politely, as a stranger.
The series moves between three eras. In the late 1990s, in a small town in Hokkaido, Yae is a popular girl who dreams of becoming a cabin attendant, and Harumichi is the boy who has loved her since he saw her on a train; on a snowy night they tell each other so. In 2001 she is at university in Tokyo and he is training as an Air Self-Defense Force pilot. After a quarrel in a Tokyo restaurant, as he rings to apologise, she is hit by a car and loses her memory of their years together. Her mother keeps his letters from her. When he comes to find her, he is told she is engaged to her doctor and expecting a child. He burns the letters.
Her marriage wears her down, through her husband's affairs and a mother-in-law who looks down on the mother who raised her alone. Yae leaves, works in an in-flight meals factory and cleans at the airport, and when the factory lays her off she lets her former husband take their son. Harumichi flies transport missions to Iraq, is sent for counselling on his return, and his counsellor, Tsunemi, becomes his partner. A back injury later takes him off flying.
In the present, without knowing why, Yae is drawn to him again, and they kiss. Tsunemi lets him go. He tells Yae he is leaving Japan to try for a job with an airline abroad; she tells him she loves him, and afterwards eats a plate of spaghetti Napolitan, his old favourite, alone and in tears. Listening to Utada Hikaru's 'First Love' on a player he gave her son, she remembers everything. She digs up the time capsule they buried as teenagers, but the pandemic stops her following him. Three years later a photograph shows Harumichi in Iceland. Yae flies there with the letters from the capsule and finds him flying passengers from an airfield. Months later he is smiling at the controls, and she is working as a cabin attendant.
Starring
Hikari Mitsushimaas Yae Noguchi
A taxi driver in Sapporo who lost years of memory in an accident, and with them her first love.
Yae Noguchi’s story
Yae is the popular girl of a small Hokkaido town in the late 1990s, dreaming of flying as a cabin attendant; on a snowy night she and Harumichi tell each other how they feel. In Tokyo, just after a quarrel with him, she is hit by a car and loses their years together. She marries her doctor and has a son, until her husband's affairs and his family's contempt for her mother drive her out; laid off, she lets her former husband take the boy. In Sapporo she greets Harumichi as a stranger, and is drawn to him anyway. When he says he is leaving, she tells him she loves him. A song on an old player brings everything back. Years later a photograph leads her to him in Iceland, and she flies at last as a cabin attendant.
Takeru Satohas Harumichi Namiki
A former Air Self-Defense Force pilot working as a security guard, who has never stopped loving Yae.
Harumichi Namiki’s story
Harumichi falls for Yae on a train and works his way into her school; on a snowy night they tell each other so. He joins the Air Self-Defense Force because she thinks jets are cool. After her accident Yae's mother keeps his letters from her and tells him Yae is engaged and pregnant; he burns them. He flies cargo to Iraq and is sent for counselling on his return; his counsellor, Tsunemi, becomes his partner, and his back grounds him. In Sapporo, a security guard whose passcode is still Yae's birthday, he finds her again and never tells her what they were. They kiss. Tsunemi lets him go, and he leaves to fly abroad. Three years later Yae finds him in Iceland; in time he flies the plane and she works in its cabin.
Rikako Yagias Yae Noguchi (young)
Yae in the late 1990s, a high-school girl in Hokkaido who dreams of flying as a cabin attendant.
Taisei Kidoas Harumichi Namiki (young)
Harumichi as a teenager, who falls for Yae on a train and follows her to her high school.
Kahoas Tsunemi Arikawa
The counsellor who met Harumichi after Iraq and is about to marry him.
Towa Arakias Tsuzuru Kosaka
Yae's teenage son, who lives with his father, makes music and falls for a dancer.
Why it matters
First Love takes a pop song as seriously as a novel. Two Utada Hikaru songs, 'First Love' from 1999 and 'Hatsukoi' from 2018, gave the series its title and its span, and the writer-director Yuri Kanchiku, who was in Utada's school year, has said that the twenty years between the two songs became the twenty years of this couple. The issues beneath the romance are harder than it is: a memory lost in an instant, a mother deciding what her daughter may know, a woman who gives up her son because she has lost her job and cannot keep him. Not every reviewer was persuaded; the Guardian found it idealised, 'romance as designed by Marie Kondo'. But the question it asks stays open after the last episode: if a woman cannot remember loving someone, is the love still hers?