About First Love
First Love is a sweeping Japanese romance that unfolds across decades, following two people whose lives keep circling back to a love they formed as teenagers. Inspired by the music of Utada Hikaru, the series weaves the songs First Love and Hatsukoi through its story, letting melody and memory do as much storytelling as dialogue. It opens in the snowbound landscape of Hokkaido in the late 1990s, where a quiet schoolgirl and a daydreaming boy fall into the kind of feeling that marks a person for life.
Years later, that first love has been buried under accident, amnesia, and the dull weight of grown-up disappointment. She drives a taxi through the cold city nights, carrying a past she can no longer fully reach; he has traded the open sky for a soldier turned security guard existence, haunted by what he cannot stop missing. The narrative slips fluidly between their radiant youth and their worn, watchful present, asking whether two people can find their way back to each other after time has rewritten almost everything.
Tender, patient, and quietly devastating, the show treats heartbreak and hope as two sides of the same long road. It is a story about the songs we cannot forget and the people we measure every other love against. The adult lovers are played by Hikari Mitsushima and Takeru Satoh.