One Hour Before the First Time

Storyline

The whole story, ending included.

An omnibus set in the hour before couples first sleep together — hesitation as the whole story.

Each half-hour episode begins an hour before a couple sleep together for the first time and ends just before they do. Four directors, Ryosuke Hashiguchi, Daisuke Miura, Akiko Ohku and Kohei Taniguchi, each wrote and directed their own stories from a manga of the same name: twelve in all, eight broadcast and the last four released straight to streaming.

Two lonely people who met at a gathering of custom-doll collectors take their dolls to a hotel, and the woman wants the dolls to watch. Two university students, three months into their first relationship, spend an evening in her flat doing everything except the thing they are both thinking about. Two old classmates in their late forties, a third-generation liquor seller whose wife left with the children and the part-timer who came home from Tokyo worn out, talk in his delivery truck along the coast until one of them leans in. A young man staying at his girlfriend's flat, which she shares with her sister, fends off the sister's teasing while his girlfriend is in the shower. A woman at a video production company, unhappy in an affair with her boss, keeps her junior late on a Friday as usual; he always buys chocolates, and condoms he never uses. Two people who have wanted each other for five years while living with other partners end up drunk in a love hotel, inventing reasons why cheating would make them kinder. A woman on a first date warns the man that sleeping with her might kill him, because everyone who gets close to her has terrible luck; his company goes bankrupt that night, and he stays anyway, through a storm. Five friends caught in one-way crushes share a hotpot, and two of them are left in the room at the end of the night.

The streamed episodes follow a theatre director and an actress who have held back because of what they are to each other; two radio listeners who know each other only by their on-air names, adrift near the Budokan after missing a concert; a bookshop worker who has sworn to lose her virginity before she turns twenty, trying in the last hour before her birthday to make a colleague notice; and Zukkun, a shy worker at a karaoke bar staffed by misfits, and Sakurako, the woman who comes there to see him. Every story stops at the same threshold. What happens next is left out.