When Innocence Meets Reality
Few films encapsulate the early stages of young love and its subtle heartbreaks the way First Love does. A 2022 Japanese romantic drama directed by Yukisada Isao, First Love serves as a poetic tribute to undying love, despite the obstacles that life, time, and circumstances impose. In addition to Hikari Mitsushima and Takeru Satoh, the film focuses, as the title suggests, on intimate relationships and the souls of the characters as they drift apart and find one another in a divergent world, encapsulating the romantic dream of the lost union.
On the surface, First Love appears to be a tale about lost youthful love and its subsequent rekindling. However, the primary focus of the film involves the deeper emotional theme resting on the concept of the enduring love that remarkably anchors the primary characters to their youthful selves, notwithstanding the emotional labour and psychological scars that their performances so vividly portray.
The Girl Who Forgot How to Dream
Yae Noguchi (Hikari Mitsushima) is a memorable character from First Love; a woman who once dreamt, quite literally, of soaring in the skies. In her teens, she wanted to become a pilot, but a tragic incident caused her to fall into a coma for many years. After waking up, she discovers a world that has drastically changed, along with her first love, Harumichi Namiki (Takeru Satoh).
Yae attempts to rediscover who she is, and along with that, a new romance. She is a former dreamer, trying to make her way in alien modern Japan. Confusion, detachment, and longing become powerful metaphors for a nation in the throes of recession-adjustment. This excessive reframing, latching on to the nostalgic, is what the director points toward in the balance of each shot.
Hikari Mitsushima dedicated herself completely to this character, and the results are impressive. Mitsushima, celebrated for her courage in acting—especially in Love Exposure and Drive My Car—approached Yae as, “a woman trapped not by memory, but by time.” In past interviews, Mitsushima expressed how, Yae’s narrative resonated with her on a deeply personal level particularly for the stagnation phase she experienced in her career, transitioning from the pop group Folder5 to acting professionally. “I knew what it felt like to wake up and feel that everyone has moved on but you,” she said. Such emotional honesty is what most people lack in their portrayal of a character, and Mitsushima’s honesty is what made her performance beautiful. When confronting the world in her character, Yae, you can see the world of weariness in her eyes. Their world of emotional reinvention is what character Yae, and most people fighting the world, see.
The Boy Who Couldn’t Let Go
Harumichi Namiki, played by Takuru Satoh, is Yae’s counterpart as a character. Before the events of the film, Harumichi was a pilot, but a career that was once seen as prestigious, loses direction like Yae, after a crash by life’s unforeseen circumstances. Unlike Yae and their previous moments, when he meets her again after years, their audience sees two individuals shattered, trying to remember a world that once fueled their idealistic glory.
Satoh’s transformation into Harumichi was extraordinary. After playing a swordsman in Rurouni Kenshin, where he garnered a lot of attention, he expressed that he wanted First Love to “strip away all heroism.” He collaborated with Yukisada to capture Harumichi’s understated strength — the man of quiet desperation, the pain of whose guilt manifests in invisible luggage.
Satoh was said to have spent weeks staying in character, journaling, and writing letters in his imagination to Yae, pretending that he had never stopped thinking about her. This, he explained, helped him to channel emotional continuity across the decades. “I didn’t want to play an old flame,” he said. “I wanted to play someone whose fire never went out.”
His restraint is remarkable in the film. It is one of the most talked about aspects online. Silences in Harumichi’s dialogue have a power that is deeply engrained in Japanese culture and most people will understand it. In one scene, the weight of years and missed opportunities is palpable in the air as Harumichi watches Yae leave without a word.
A Love Story Written in Two Eras
First Love plays with time like memory itself: fluid, overlapping, and, at times, cruel. It shifts between the 1990s adolescence and the 2020s adulthood of the characters, illustrating love not as a singular moment but as something that echoes.
Yukisada Isao, the director, wanted to create something that wasn’t just a romantic film but something existential as well. “Love, especially first love, is about who you are when you first learn to care deeply for someone. It never really leaves you, even when you think it has,” Isao explained.
There is harmony between the film’s structure, cinematography, and the themes. Younger Yae and Harumichi are depicted in expansive settings: summer fields, open train stations, and under blue sky. In contrast, their older selves are in confined and darker places like shadowy apartments and rain-drenched streets. The difference goes beyond aesthetics. It defines emotional geography.
The importance of the music cannot be overstated. The film is based on “First Love,” an iconic and generational song in Japan by Hikaru Utada. “You are always gonna be my love, even if I fall in love again someday,” encapsulated the emotional essence of the film, and for the Japanese audience, the song was not just a soundtrack but a memory that was vividly revived and cherished.
Before Netflix releases the film, First Love’s marketing was a quiet phenomenon, stirring activity online. The morose pacing of the trailer, combined with spectacular visuals and Utada’s ethereal voice, evoked powerful feelings of nostalgia. Fans who grew up in the late “90s” when the original song was released, reminisced about their first loves, heartbreaks and the accompanying emotional turmoil around the song.
Social media responses were predominantly emotional. Many admitted to sobbing throughout the film, mourning not only the characters and the story but also their past, their youth. For its audience in Japan, the film First Love was not only a romantic drama, but also an emotional experience. It was a cinematic lullaby for an entire generation. To critics, it was simply an emotional event.
Behind the Quiet Magic
Though First Love may seem effortlessly beautiful, the production was quite the contrary. The team was bound to face logistical difficulties while filming in the winter and summer seasons of the year in Hokkaido and Tokyo. Most troublesome were the scenes that required the use of natural falling snow in winter and matched to particular story beats.
Constructing the on-screen relationship between Satoh and Mitsushima represented another nuanced challenge because both actors are emotionally intense and had to control for emotional excess. During certain scenes, Yukisada’s directorial approach to letting actors ‘feel’ the scene, as opposed to working for it, was a refreshing break. The iconic Yae face caressing scene, for example, was unscripted. As Mitsushima describes, the unscripted moment was a long overdue dialogue, “After so much silence, touch was the only dialogue left”.
Like the main character, Yukisada was also inspired by his childhood and youthful experiences. In a previous press conference, he described his storytelling development and passion as being inspired by an early storytelling romance, “I think we all spend our lives chasing that purity again”.
What makes First Love timeless is The Echo that Never Fades. The First Love ache is about the honesty that some memories are meant to ache, and that love does not fade when it is true, but instead shifts forms. The film captures a profoundly personal experience through Yae and Harumichi, and Mitsushima and Satoh, but it is for all the audience to see.
In that sense, First Love isn’t about looking back. It’s about understanding that even when the song ends, its echo remains — softly, endlessly, like the sound of someone you once loved whispering your name through time.