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Enjoy binge-watching this dorama!
66 Comments On “First Love: Hatsukoi: Open Thread”
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The thread is open!
gifs from @becomeundone’s tumblr
Enjoy binge-watching this dorama!
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Thanks @pkml3. Hmmm I should go look for this show.
Thanks for opening this @PackMule3! After I finish my work commitments I plan to watch this as a reward! I’m really looking forward to this show!
I’ve watched the first episode. This is a charming show, artistic visually and in its soundtrack. For this show, I feel as if the music is another narrator besides the voiceovers we hear. Then I checked back to the beginning and saw what I missed ie that this show is inspired by the songs “First Love” and “Hatsukoi” written by Hikaru Utada. The latter’s face (which looks remarkably like our FL’s face all made up!) appears on huge digital billboards. So the music is indeed another voice speaking with us, through the heart-tugging melodies, plaintive piano pieces and appropriate lyrics.
We follow around our main leads in the past and the present, separately as middle-schoolers (15-year olds?) and as adults 20 years later. The year range is 1998-2018. We see their dreams and their reality and are drawn in at once to care about them and to long for them to meet again, in the same way that we can tell they still remember and cherish the memories of their past together.
There’s a lot of non-linear story telling going on and it’s hard to figure out who is where and when at first, but it gets better towards the end of Episode 1.
As I mentioned in another post, although I know @Welmaris has written a thorough review (I’ve not read it yet) I still felt compelled to make notes as I rewatched the first episode, as so many scenes were full of significance.
Camerawork – Once again (like in Summer Strike) we get aerial views of roads and intersections and we know we are watching a story of people journeying, sometimes stopping for traffic, sometimes hemmed in by the many pedestrian crossings. There is a cross junction of main roads with pedestrian crossings which make a square with an X inside it. The FL, Yae drives her taxi through the intersection.
We find that maybe Yae and her first love, Namichi, may have crossed paths before, because one time she drives by as he walks on the crosswalk but they fail to see each other.
There is also a roundabout intersection of 6 roads with a tower in the middle, with cars going around and around the circle before they can exit. Like our characters who are spinning their wheels now in adulthood.
Each car or character is a piece of the jigsaw puzzle that Yae (the FL) speaks of in her voiceovers. Sometimes the pieces merge into the flow of the traffic, traveling side-by-side for a while, and then turn off on their own routes. She wonders about the lost pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. She asks: “People who drifted away from you. What about those big mistakes? Are they also part of the picture?”
(to be continued)
Episode 1 continued
In the background, on and off we hear the songs/music of the debut album, ‘First Love’ written and sung by Hikaru Utada. Hikaru had her birthday like Yae on 1209 (9th December) and they were the same age. Even 20 years later, Hikaru appears on digital billboards with the name of her new album ‘Hatsukoi’ (also meaning First Love). It’s as if 35-year old Hikaru Utada, was returning to her debut ‘First Love’ album of 20 years earlier. This reflects how Yae and Harumichi Namiki’s (HN) also return to thoughts of each other even after 20 years. It’s telling that HN retains the number ‘1209’ as his phone lock code.
There is clever juxtaposition of HN’s and Yae’s past 20 years ago, with the present, and their romance as teenagers with those of Yae’s 14-year old nephew(?), Tsuzuru Kosaka (TK). They are looking for their first loves. While the adults merely reminisce upon their teenage love, Tsuzuru the real teenager will get into action. We see the Hatsukoi billboard as TK runs past hoping to meet his idol, so we know that he, is going/running to his first love.
The images tell us of the theme of the dreams of youth and the reality of the present. We flashback to teenager Yae walking the path in a beautiful field of yellow flowers. She practises what to say if she were an air stewardess. She walks past beautiful expansive scenery. She runs in the sunlight, excited to watch a plane fly by. Traveling in the train, young Yae looks around happily in bright light, looking to the future perhaps of travel around the world. Then we cut to the present, twenty years later, it’s a rainy night, and cooped up in the taxi, adult Yae drives around the roundabout sedately, surrounded by buildings. The main light comes from the tower in the middle of the intersection. She goes around without a destination until the call comes in to go to a passenger’s pickup point. We get the aerial view of the cars going around the roundabout, reminiscent of a hamster in its cage.
Yae’s voiceover as she leaves the roundabout : “What would my life be like now if I had never met you?” (We assume she is speaking to her first love in her mind.) She leaves the roundabout and we transition to her flashback to the first meeting with Namiki. He and his friend on their scooter had saved Yae from the discipline master. The boys had distracted him by going round the oval shaped roundabout outside the school. Looking at her saviour, she had fallen in love with Namiki at that point.
Episode 1 continued
In 2018, HN had bought a bunch of Lilacs for his future mother-in-law and gone to meet his girlfriend’s father. However we see from HN’s flashback, that the Lilacs had been Yae’s favourite flower. Yae could not reach the Lilacs on a tree and Namiki had held the branch down for her so that she could smell the flowers.
HN runs for a cab and almost grabbed the taxi driven by Yae, but was forestalled by a pregnant lady who had flagged Yae down first.
In another cab, HN receives a call from Tsunemi Arikawa (his girlfriend?) and is affected by the call. The taxi driver turned the radio to a different channel which plays the song by Hikaru Utada. HN asks for the volume of the radio to be turned up. It seems the lyrics fit with his nostalgic mood. He thinks of Yae and the Lilacs.
Lyrics: “You are always gonna be my love.
If one day I ever fall in love with someone again
I’ll remember to love.
You taught me how.”
He changes his mind about meeting his future father-in-law, and tells the taxi to go back – in effect to return to the start, not to his girlfriend but to the past.
It so happens that fortuitously his taxi-driver is the guy who has a crush on Yae. The Lilacs pass from HN to this taxi-driver to Yae in an odd flow of coincidences, so that the flowers that HN had bought more with Yae in mind, actually fall into her hands. If this is not destiny I don’t know what is! LOL.
Episode 1 continued
In the present, Yae speaks to the pregnant lady in her cab who says that anticipating the baby is like Christmas Eve every day. Her delivery date is near.
Lady : “But when I think it’s almost going to end, I’m a little sad. Isn’t that stupid, just when we’re about to meet?”
Yae : “No, not at all. I’m sure every day will be Christmas after they’re born.”
She had not known that Christmas had almost come to her in the cab. If the pregnant lady had not taken the cab before Namiki, Yae and HN would have met. They still thought fondly of each other, but perhaps if they could begin a real search for each other, in anticipation of meeting again, they would be feeling like it was Christmas Eve. They should take a leaf from nephew Tsuzuru Kosaka’s (TK’s) book and start running after each other again.
2018 – Namiki hails a cab to Nakijima Park. The cab comes to the tower intersection with the big roundabout and they join the circle. From another lane, Yae drives and merges with the traffic in the circle too and HM recognises her.
In just the way she had recognised him 20 years ago in the snow (I don’t know how she could. He was all covered up in the dark!), HN now sees her driving next to his cab around the roundabout, but he cannot stop the car to speak to her, like she had been able to do. He misses the opportunity to reach her, as she turns out of the roundabout while his cab has to continue around the whole circle. Sometimes their paths can merge then separate. This time she’s the lost jigsaw puzzle piece.
The cars going around in a circle transition to the spinning CD of 20 years earlier. We are shown the notice on and about the album:
‘All songs written and composed herself! Debut Album’
HIKARU UTADA’S long awaited first album ‘FIRST LOVE’
12 songs including ‘Automatic’
‘OUR TIME HAS STARTED NOW’
I’m excited to watch their time start in Episode 2!
I’ve binge watched the entire 9 episodes and come off tearful but satisfied.
No Spoilers Brief Review
This Show was a sentimental, artistic piece that manages to stay clear of being maudlin, although I have to admit that a lot more tears were shed than I expected. I enjoyed it for the imagery, the analogies, the camera work, the scenery, the consummate acting, and the music. It was a true love story with meat and heft, (not just a light rom-com). It was relatable so that it tugged very much on the heart, without being overtly manipulating. I expect that those who have suffered broken hearts will have a field day sobbing into this movie. It will be cathartic. Despite the tears, this is a show that offers hope and heals. I can leave it with a smile.
Hint: watch the last episode until the very end, and I mean the very end.
As @Welmaris has also stated and I noted, Hikaru Utada really is a famous singer-songwriter who was active since she was 13 years old! Instead of getting songs written for a show, the Show came to be written based on the songs that were already released (First Love was released in 1999 and Hatsukoi in 2018). It’s amazing what the Writer came up with: a realistic story, round characters, understandable motivations, all fleshed out from the lyrics (I’d say insufficiently detailed lyrics) of two songs. But perhaps it’s because the songs are vague that more story could be created.
The Episode Titles:
Episode 1 – When the Lilacs Bloom
Episode 2 – Your Voice
Episode 3 – Napolitan
Episode 4 – Space Oddity
Episode 5 – Talk in Sign Language
Episode 6 – The Sixth Sense
Episode 7 – The Order of Dreams
Episode 8 – The Proust Effect on a Certain Afternoon
Episode 9 – Hatsukoi (first love)
I actually wondered if the titles are a play/pun on the names of movies like ‘Space Oddity’ might have been a play on ‘Space Odyssey’ … and there really was a 1999 movie called ‘The Sixth Sense’. I have not been following movies, hence I don’t know what other movie titles might have been used.
Just because I came across this…here’s the First Love Instrumental Soundtrack, music by Taisei Iwasaki.
I’m quite thunderstruck by the number of compositions that went into this short series. The music was really mostly lovely, a nice mix of light and pensive, upbeat, thoughtful, and hopeful pieces. They accompanied the emotional journey well.
I like that Hikaru Utada’s song(s) were used from time to time to drive the plot, and that all the background music worked well to create the mood, evoke the emotions and inform the story. It was also good that the First Love song was only heard a lot in the beginning and not repeated in the middle episodes. It made hearing it again practically nostalgic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGf5lv3eEgU
TRACKLIST
1 Roundabout
2 Hafid Syngur
3 Early Days
4 Thought of You
5 Signs
6 Blue Hour
7 A Ray of Light
8 Traces
9 Little Boat
10 Stray Around
11 Taxi Drivers
12 Lilac
13 Algesia
14 Pendulum
15 Clairvoyance
16 12th FTW
17 Under the Same Sky I
18 Under the Same Sky II
19 Wish You Well
20 Distant Dreams
21 Repressed Memory
22 Woe
23 PLANET-B
24 Flying in Formation
25 Light Years Away
26 Ignition Sequence
27 Today and Always
28 Irreplaceable
29 Captivated
30 Manhunt
31 Sketch for Backache
32 Dawning
33 Uncertainty
34 Serenade of Water
35 Blink of an Eye
36 Wish You Well
37 Mistiness
38 No Backward Glance
39 Head Wind
40 Blue Hour
41 Catastrophe
42 Thought of You
43 Even If You Know
44 Pale Fire
45 Meant to Be
46 U
47 The Ocean Sings
@GrowingBeautifully, Space Oddity is a song by David Bowie, who was inspired to write it after seeing the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. You’ve probably heard it because it’s so famous: “Ground Control to Major Tom…” The lyrics are heartbreaking, as the hero floats beyond Earth’s orbit, never to return. That’s what happened with the Japanese Mars rover: the mission failed because it didn’t enter orbit around Mars.
I loved how Yae is depicted having an explorer’s curiosity. In youth she collects objects that are mailed to her from all over the world. She loves maps. She loves airports and planes. As an adult, her dreams of traveling the world unrealized, she still explores other cultures via TV and internet.
The job Yae takes at the factory, preparing the food that is served on commercial airlines, requires her to don a cleanroom suit so she almost looks like an astronaut. To heighten this impression, before she enters the food prep area in the cleanroom, she has to go into an air shower–a high velocity air decontamination chamber–which makes me think of an air lock on a space station. The show capitalizes on this similarity when we see her go in there with tears coursing down her cheeks, and the tears are blown through the air in slow motion, looking weightless, and the window of the chamber changes to show a glimpse of stars in outer space. What an amazing way to show that Yae has lost her anchor and is drifting. As Major Tom hopelessly says at the end of Space Oddity, “Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do.”
Thanks @Welmaris for the info and for pointing out how beautifully this production gives us visual storytelling. It says so much more, is so poignant and many times I know I get emotional about a scene, but I don’t even know why.
SPOILERS TO ENDING BELOW
SPOILERS BELOW
Yes, Yae (and Harumichi Namiki) wanted to spread her wings and fly. Perhaps even beyond Earth into space. I noticed how HN was in the wide open spaces where he could see the stars, but Yae in her cheap choc-a-bloc lodgings could only see a sliver of sky. She would be repeatedly hemmed in from that time on, until she regained her memory and decided to take the plunge to do what she wanted. The same advice she’d and others had given.
The theme of spreading wings comes up repeatedly. She loved the sound of airplanes flying overhead, she’d been chuffed at having her name in the Mars orbiter, and after the Titanic movie, our young couple play acted the ‘I’m flying, Jack’ part to much embarrassment. That was such a nice image of young HN behind her, supporting Yae in her dream, as a prefiguring of their future. At the end, Yae going to HN and to join him as stewardess as he flew the private airplane was really a dream-come-true for them literally. They were together at last and doing what they both had dreamed of since their youth.
I felt that I’ve not done this artistic little show (with it’s many Easter eggs) justice. On re-reading my scanty notes, I realise that not knowing what I know now, I’d made a bunch of errors in interpretation.
A question comes to mind too…
As Yae drives around the big roundabout, maybe feeling that her life is just going around in circles, we hear her voiceover : “What would my life be like now if I had never met you?”
Not knowing at this stage, that she suffers from amnesia and cannot recall HNm I assumed she is thinking of her first love. However later we see that she’s buying a present for someone and that when she tests a fountain pen, she writes the name Tsuzuru. I imagine, therefore, that the ‘you’ she refers to is Tsuzuru.
Good question, @GrowingBeautifully: Who is the “you” Yae is thinking about when she wonders, “What would my life by like now if I had never met you?” Although this show mixes up timeframes, I think we can assume in the opening sequence she is still suffering partial amnesia, since she drives by Namiki without registering any recognition.
In my review of Episode 1, I wrote that the question can be applied to many people in Yae’s life, remembered and forgotten. One person who has an impact on Yae–she even quotes his remarks about life being a puzzle–is her coworker Urabe, who has a crush on her. She does not reciprocate his love, but she does value him as a person and a friend. She listens to him, and learns from him. Another person who has changed Yae’s life is her doctor that dated her (breaking doctor-patient rules?), impregnated her (taking advantage of her weakened judgment after a traumatic brain injury?), then became her husband. With him she lived a life of material comfort, but emotional turmoil because of his lack of regard for her or their marriage vows. Yae developed backbone because she was so disappointed in her marriage relationship. Without remembering her loving relationship with Namiki, Yae still knew she and her husband lacked the connection her heart needed. Interacting with her snobbish mother-in-law also caused Yae to decide what she valued in her life, and what she was unwilling to overlook.
Another important “you” in Yae’s life is herself: the person she used to be, who she can’t remember but by whom she is unconsciously influenced; and the person she became after her memories of the past became inaccessible.
In appreciation for this show, I had to watch it again. It is pensive yet delightful, and rewarding.
SPOILERS BELOW
Notes I felt like making…
The Colour Blue
I’m sure it’s obvious to those of us who watched this show that blue turns up repeatedly throughout the years. It’s a colour worn over and over by various characters.
“Chinese and Japanese Color Symbolism”
“East Asian countries are among the many global nations and regions that place value on colors. … While each traditional Japanese or Chinese color may not represent the same ideals, they are recognized for their symbolic meaning and deeply engrained involvement in many activities. …
Blue in Japanese Culture – …”Blue commonly represents the sea and the sky … and symbolizes purity, dignity, calmness, stability, security, and fidelity. …”…
https://study.com/learn/lesson/colors-japanese-chinese-culture.html#:~:text=Blue%20in%20Japanese%20Culture&text=Blue%20commonly%20represents%20the%20sea,leaves%20of%20the%20indigo%20plant.
The people who appear in blue project an image of being steadfast, faithful, full of integrity, and this is the image the show is giving us of this particular first love. It’s an idealistic first love, at first sight, and it is mutual at that, but I hear that it actually does happen. (HN tells us on the beach that the odds were 1 in 6,000,000,000). In any case what blue means is what makes this artistic piece of work extra romantic. It is the fact that from the first, HN’s and Yae’s hearts were true, so that despite meeting roadblocks or going off on tangents, or moving round in circles, they were destined to find their way back to each other.
After a quick rewatch, I’m guessing that all characters shown to be wearing a particular shade of blue (a blue turquoise?) would be the ones who’d be faithful friends or the ones who’d promote the true love of Harumichi and Yae. Besides the costumes, many scenes seem to have been designed so that there was blue light on white backgrounds, giving many things a blue tinge.
These are just the ‘blue bits’ I noted for the fun of it.
Yae wore the most blue. She’s often in blue clothes, or scarf, or cap, and shoes. Her knapsack was blue and she wore blue on her date. Her taxi driver jacket’s blue was pretty close in colour to the turquoise. As an adult she receives a blue cardigan from her son. She travels to Iceland wearing blue and even if her clothes were more colourful, she had on blue earmuffs.
HN wrote his letter to Yae for the time capsule in a blue notebook. Adult HN wears a blue shirt and blue coat when walking with Yae. When we first see Tsunemi and HN, they are in a greener, duller blue but after this I believe he’s hardly ever in blue when he’s with Tsunemi. A visual suggestion that his heart lay elsewhere.
To be continued…
Continued…
Tsuzuru wore a shirt with a blue collar. Later he’s in blue shirts and his bed cover is blue as he composes his music, thinking of Uta. He rushes to the airport to say goodbye to Uta in blue cap, shirt, pants and coat. His phone case is blue. He’s the one to bring Yae and HN together although in advertently the first time, and then again with the song ‘First Love’ by Hikaru Utada, when he invites Yae to listen with him.
Uta looked for her blue hair tie and her dance took place in blue light. Later she gives Tsuzuru a gift wrapped in blue which is the pair of sunglasses in a blue case. She’s in blue denims at the airport. She enables Yae to locate HN again, contributing to their reunion.
HN’s best friend Bonji and sister, Yu, got married wearing light turquoise under blue tents.
Side note: Red seems to be the colour for HN’s family (symbolising strength, love, joy). It’s nice to see that when HN went to visit them, she was in pink and red and she’d bothered to learn sign language so that she could communicate with Yu. From her youth, Yae fit right in with HN’s family, but clashed with her husband’s.
HN remembers that he and Yae as teenagers had been on a gondola to Mount Tengu before, and it had been blue. There’s mention of the stain from an ink called ‘Blue Hour’ and I believe their names, ‘Yae Noguchi’ and ‘Harumichi Namiki’ which were written on the coaster, were written in that blue ink. When Yae and HN took a walk in the wee hours of the morning and had ice-cream on the bridge, she called it twilight, but it is also known as the blue hour before sunrise: their private time of connection on a bridge, watching a new day come.
When Yae dressed up as an air stewardess to cheer herself up after losing Tsuzuru to her husband, and when she finally did become an air stewardess she was in a blue uniform. By chance, she found a lost child in the airport who was also dressed in turquoise blue. They matched the carpet of the airport so well, which was the colour of the sea, but ironically they were the only bright spots in a sea of drab coloured people.
Yae’s father who was unfaithful towards his wife but who did not dissuade HN from pursuing Yae, had a tie with a bit of blue on top and a blue kerchief in his coat pocket. The wrapping paper he had used to wrap the gift for Yae was blue.
By contrast, I don’t recall ever seeing Yae’s faithless ex-husband and arrogant ex-mother-in-law in blue. Yae’s mother separated Yae and HN, and at most she’s in a grey blue or a multi-coloured shirt with some blue in it, but a different shade.
When Nonko, Yae’s friend came to visit, she’s in pale blue… a faded memory. Yae’s upset that she cannot recall Nonko and pulls out a pale blue box of her school mementoes. Her journal has light blue pages in it, but the friends pictured in it have become strangers to her.
Yae runs to Husavik dressed in a turquoise blue jacket and blue ear muffs. After Yae and HN finally are reunited, they still wear blue, although they don’t have to, since they spend time inseparable under the blue sky, finally fulfilling their dreams to fly, and together.
No, I’m not over this piece of art yet. I’ve found a lovely edit of the show giving the story of Harumichi and Yae (I believe covering some 25 years in all) in a little over 11 minutes. Knowing the full story, this brings on all the feels.
Hurts so good and ends so right.
Warning: SPOILERS in FMV!!!
@GB,
thanks.
I’ll open a separate thread for this.
pm3
Thanks @pkml3, although I don’t really think it’s necessary. I thought I’d just come by from time to time, slowly, as and when I have the chance to put into words the choice of what is shown and the beautiful way scenes are interspersed to evoke so much emotion. Strong in the feels, (with Easter eggs to find) is this little show.
I just did it so it’s easy for me to find when I start watching this drama. It’s no biggie if you or @Welmaris can’t continue writing about it during the holidays. No stress. 🙂
One of the winning things in this series is the choice of songs from a myriad songwriters (I think less mainstream ones) and the many instrumental pieces. The latter were composed especially for the show but the songs chosen have poignant lyrics. One song in particular stood out for me (aside from the titular ‘First Love’).
The song “The Fairest of the Seasons” by Nico played in the background of Ep 3 when Yae was studying and succeeded in her application for a student exchange program with Canada’s Vancouver University.
The lyrics are so apt because at this stage she was still in a relationship with Harumichi Namiki, whom she had not seen for 8 months, and the exchange program would take her away for years. She was probably torn because it was her dream to travel as well. She never had the chance to tell him properly about the exchange programme and his finding out about it, almost broke them up.
In the end, it was HN who was forced to leave, in “the fairest of the seasons”, after he had gained his ‘wings’ in his first solo flight.
“The Fairest of the Seasons” by Nico
Now that it’s time
Now that the hour hand has landed at the end
Now that it’s real
Now that the dreams have given all they had to lend
I want to know do I stay or do I go
And maybe try another time
And do I really have a hand in my forgetting ? (This is a poignant question, because soon after getting her passport made for the trip, Yae loses her memory.)
Now that I’ve tried
Now that I’ve finally found that this is not the way,
Now that I turn
Now that I feel it’s time to spend the night away
I want to know do I stay or do I go
And maybe finally split the rhyme
And do I really understand the undernetting ?
Yes and the morning has me
Looking in your eyes
And seeing mine warning me
To read the signs carefully.
Now that it’s light
Now that the candle’s falling smaller in my mind
Now that it’s here
Now that I’m almost not so very far behind
I want to know do I stay or do I go
And maybe follow another sign
And do I really have a song that I can ride on ?
Now that I can
Now that it’s easy, ever easy all around.
Now that I’m here
Now that I’m falling to the sunlights and a song
I want to know do I stay or do I go
And do I have to do just one
And can I choose again if I should lose the reason ?
Yes, and the morning
Has me looking in your eyes
And seeing mine warning me
To read the signs more carefully.
Now that I smile,
Now that I’m laughing even deeper inside.
Now that I see,
Now that I finally found the one thing I denied
It’s now I know do I stay or do I go
And it is finally I decide
That I’ll be leaving
In the fairest of the seasons.
(https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858604857/)
Here’s the link if you’d like to hear the song, The Fairest of the Seasons by Nico
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5JX4-zZbiY
I forgot to mention, but probably it’s obvious, that although the words of whether to leave or stay applied to Yae, she never had the chance to choose after her accident. The melancholy note despite the upbeat tempo of the melody, and the abrupt end of the song, makes it sound unfinished: a reflection of Yae’s promising future.
Napolitan
EPISODES 1, 3, 4, 5 and 8
The Title of Ep 3 is ‘Napolitan’ but references to this Japanese pasta dish includes Episodes 1, 3, 4 and 5 and even Episode 8.
SPOILERS BELOW OF COURSE
We know that this show has been so well planned, that the appearance of something as mundane as a mundane Japanese pasta dish can be significant, especially if it gets mentioned multiple times.
In Ep 1, in 1998, when a boy asked teenage Yae what her favourite food was, it was an attempt to start a conversation and to show that he liked her. Harumichi Namiki who witnessed this and sniggered at the boy’s nervous running off without even getting Yae’s answer, noted sagely to Yae that the boy had asked her what her favourite food was because he liked her.
Yae, ever the one to take the initiative, promptly asked HN what his favourite food was, because she liked him, and the dunce didn’t even get the significance of the question that he’d just explained to Yae. Instead he replied : “Napolitan” and let Yae leave without reciprocating with a similar question, to show that he too liked her.
Although adult HN is sad that Yae still does not remember him, his protective instinct is fired up when he finds out that her washing machine had broken down and she was at the laundromat. He remembers how she’d lost her underwear at a laundromat 20 years earlier and thinks it’s a dangerous place, frequented by perverts. LOL.
He runs across town to locate her where she’s taking a nap at the laudromat while waiting for the washing to be done. He covers her legs with his cardigan against the gaze of a male stranger who’s looking at her, and settles down to wait for her to wake up, like her faithful bodyguard. His concentrated gaze as he watches her sleep tugs at the heart. He even imitates her when she licks her lips in sleep, just as he’d done 20 years earlier when he’d first seen her by chance, sleeping on a train.
Yae wakes to find him looking at her and recognises him at once as Tsuzuru’s friend. We next see him successfully fixing her washing machine, after which he prepares to leave, but once again it’s Yae who takes the initiative to invite him to stay for dinner.
Her question about what his favourite food is startles him. But her realises that she does not recall the great significance of this question. It had marked the beginning of their relationship. Like her, his taste has not changed: he still likes Napolitan. Like her, he likes what he likes, and he never stopped liking her.
To be continued…
Napolitan continued
Adult Yae queues up to eat at a restaurant that makes Napolitan the way she likes it. She messages HN to tell him about it and informs him that she’s eaten there five times already. He’s amused by this, possibly remembering that she had watched Titanic more than 5 times. She says she is persistent when she gets into/likes something. She also informs him that on the 11th of each month, the restaurant offered a free upsize of pasta, so HN should go on that date.
HN finally takes the initiative to ask her out : “We should go together then.”
His message shocks her into a loud gasp, LOL, but she accepts with pleasure.
The plan to eat Napolitan together was their own delicious secret (pun intended) and would be the sign of a special connection that they had.
Although her acceptance of the Napolitan date is a happy thing, HN hits his head on the table and looks pensive. A foreshadowing, methinks!
He remembers why he does not initiate meetings with Yae. Her mother had told him to stay away from Yae, who had amnesia. Yae herself was not ready to try to remember. At that time, Yae had been upset that she could not remember her best friend or anyone from her past. She had looked at her high school yearbook without recognising anyone in it, then shoved it and her box of mementoes back into her closet.
A second time that HN had attempted to re-establish meeting Yae, he had been shocked to discover that not only had she totally forgotten him, but his letters had never been opened (or given to Yae) and that she was pregnant and about to be married. Her mother had begged him to forget Yae so that she had a chance of a happier life than what her mother had had.
In Ep 5, when Yae finds out that HN has a girlfriend/fiance, she avoids going anywhere near where she might run into him. However fate has the upper hand in this and she finds that despite trying to avoid HN’s workplace, she is forced not only to drive a passenger there, but to enter the building as well. She falls down the steps in this place but HN hurts himself saving Yae.
Yae is deeply regretful. However he shrugs it off as part of his job and comforts her saying that he couldn’t let her die on him (during his security watch) and that they had not had their Napolitan yet. It indicated that despite having a girlfriend, he regarded their Napolitan date as important enough for him to keep.
Unfortunately in the end, he never did keep that date. He was forced to cancel on the 11th of August, but even after breaking up with Tsunemi, it could be that HN decided that it was too risky to keep his connection with Yae, in case he caused her to remember her accident of 20 years ago, and it triggered more trauma. In any case, he had made up his mind to separate himself from her.
It was on the 11th of another month… perhaps September, when Yae was waiting with anticipation in the restaurant for him, that he chose to tell Yae that he would not make it for lunch and that he was leaving Japan. He stood outside, near enough to see her and to know how she took the news. He said goodbye but she takes the opportunity to tell him what she needs to.
Yae: “I really regret it. Lying to you. I lied to you. I really like you. A whole lot, actually. I always have felt that way. I’m sorry. So you take good care, okay?
HN with a tear rolling down his cheek : “Yes. You as well. If we can’t meet, please have a wonderful life, all right?”
Yae in tears : “Yes. Thank you very much.”
He may have felt that she should not be with him because he could not risk causing her trauma, however as long as he stayed, Yae, too, would not be able to like anyone else. His leaving without eating Napolitan with her was the cleanest and best option for their separation, and a sign that their special connection was no more.
While HN walked away bowed down in tears, Yae stayed to eat Napolitan tearfully by herself, but (as we see her do) she was able to muster a smile, and to enjoy her meal. It was a poignant, fitting farewell to their youthful romance, in particular for HN, who had never been able to let her go. It was over Napolitan that HN finally got closure for his enforced separation from Yae, and that at last marked a mutual understanding of where they were in relation to each other.
Sadly it was not a closure for their broken hearts.
Episode 4 – Space Oddity
As @Welmaris explained above, Space Oddity is a song about an astronaut, lost in space. At times the space oddity may refer to Yae who lost her bearings when she lost her memory. It might also refer to Harumichi Namiki who took his bearings from Yae. However, it does not apply to Tsunemi.
Harumichi Namiki had been a trouble maker as a kid. To an extent this was driven by guilt, because he deplored his inability as a child, to save his drowning sister, Yu. She lost her hearing in that near-drowning accident, and subsequently, as if to make up for it, HN had started fights with those who made fun of Yu for being deaf.
We find that Yu as an adult has figured out that HN had a similar feeling of being responsible for the accident to Yae. Yae’s accident and subsequent loss of memory was to HN, tied to their having had their big fight, ending on bad terms. This was likely the reason why HN decided not to help Yae remember their past together. He had been determined to locate her again, once he saw her driving the taxi, but it was likely to find out how she was and to see if she remembered him. When it was evident that she did not remember, and that she was fine, it appeared as if he had planned to let her be.
However he had not counted on Yae, herself, being attracted to him again, as she had in her youth. Although he had sought to protect her in the laundromat, and to fix her washing machine, he did not plan on re-establishing their romance.
It was Yae who made the first moves after that. She told him where to eat Napolitan, and she called him about the close approach of Mars. Without meaning to start or restart a romance, they found that they were somehow in the same place at the same time. Yae might have called it coincidence, while HN called it fate.
I do feel sorry for Tsunemi. She was sincere and willing to continue the relationship with HN, even knowing that he was being swayed by meeting Yae again. However, to his credit, HN did not play false with Tsunemi. He did attempt more than once to talk about their relationship, and to explain who Yae was. In the timeline, it’s not clear exactly when Tsunemi met Yu and learned from her about Yae and HN. But after knowing what Yae meant to HN, I like that Tsunemi did not prolong the inevitable. She did her best with the preparations for a wedding, but as a psychologist herself, she could read the writing on the wall. The way that HN looked at Yae was different from how he looked at Tsunemi.
In the end Tsunemi, whose name means fixed star, decided to remain shining on her own, outside the orbit of HN.
Continuing Episode 4 – Space Oddity
Episode 4 began with images that are close ups of writing then dots and streaks of light that make us feel that we are shooting off into space, and then we are in space seeing Earth and its moon. A man-made satellite passes by the Earth and goes off screen. We remember that Yae often looked up, wanting to fly away.
We zero in from space into Japan. An airplane passes in front of us as we continue our aerial view zooming into land, looking like black and white drawings. The buildings finally become recognisable as houses in the snow. We find ourselves outside Yae’s home. We see her as a young child receiving a package sent by her father from Switzerland. As a teenager, she continues to receive gifts from around the world that she collects. Her father inspires her to send her name to be included in the Mars Orbiter, Nozomi, writing in his letter: “Miss A student, when things are tough, Just look up at the sky. Another version of yourself is traveling through outer space.”
Yae wants to believe that there are Martians who would be able to read the names sent in Nozomi. Her mother laughs at her and is a cynic. Later we see even as an adult, Yae speaks over the phone to HN : “Do you believe that Martians really exist out there?”
HN : “Of course. If there’s a colonisation mission announced, I’ll be the first to raise my hand.”
Yae :“What? Even if it’s a one-way ticket?”
HN :”Fine with me. David Bowie should be arriving soon.” (This is a reference to David Bowie’s song ‘Life on Mars’).
Yae laughs. She says she believes Martians exist.
They both say they’d love to go to space, and then are surprised to encounter each other outside the Observatory on Earth LOL.
Outside the Observatory, Yae and HN sit looking up at the night sky.
HN : “It’s beautiful.”
Yae : “It kind of feels like a time machine.”
HN is startled, because in their youth, they buried a time capsule which Yae does not remember : “What?”
Yae speaks of the starlight that takes years to reach earth, so that being able to see distant stars is like looking at a past that no longer exists. (Ironically, HN had written 20 years earlier, that seeing a bright star made him feel she was close to him. However he was looking at her now, who was close by and realising that to her, their past did not exist. The time capsule that was supposed to evoke memories, of a past long gone, was no better than the light of a distant star.)
HN : “Oh, then it’s even brighter I guess.”
They lean back on their hands, just about touching each other.
Yae asks HN if he had heard of Nozomi.
Yae : “Back then I naively and honestly thought that Nozomi might change the world.”
HN : “What about now?”
Yae : “The mission completely failed. It fulfilled its role, though, and is now drifting through space somewhere. And you know, my name is traveling with Nozomi too. It might not have any purpose whatsoever now, but it’s out there.” HN insists that it has a purpose.
In the beginning of the episode, at around timestamp 6:00 the orbiter in space bypasses a mechanical set up, simulating bodies in space orbiting around a planet endlessly. This image transitions to cars going around in circles, including Yae’s taxi, driving around the traffic roundabout. Yae had sent her name on the Mars Oribiter, looking to break the boundaries of staying in one place, but even bodies in space were sometimes stuck in orbit. Ultimately, paradoxically, because Nozomi failed to enter orbit, Yae’s name came to be on a one-way ticket, traveling beyond the boundaries of known space.
Continuing Episode 4 – Space Oddity
I began by saying that HN was a troublemaker as a young teen. He was without aim in life until he met Yae. Getting to be with her and impressing her was the driving force behind his decisions. The other objective he had (as he mentioned in that touching epistle to her in the time capsule), was to make her happy. I’d say that despite their fight, and the enforced separation, he was true to his aims. Yae was HN’s anchor, she was the body around which he wanted to orbit. (It occurred to me that the loss of connection to Yae was to HN a far greater loss emotionally and psychologically than anyone knew. His self-sacrificing decision to not make contact with her, for her good, was an extremely noble deed (and not idiotic at all)).
When HN passed his first solo flight, he went to Yae’s home to see her again, but met only her mother who returned all his unopened letters to Yae, and begged him to forget her. This coincided with Yae’s trip in a bus after receiving the ultrasound photo of her baby. Her joy in expecting a child was tempered by sadness with news that the Nozomi had failed to enter orbit. We cut to HN bitterly burning all his letters to Yae. Without knowing it, both mourned their failure in entering into orbit: HN’s into Yae’s orbit, and Yae’s to orbiting Mars.
From the opening scenes of cars going round in a circle, we see that Yae’s taxi breaks ‘orbit’ and turns out of the roundabout. We see her deciding to do something new. She sends a message to HN about the Napolitan restaurant.
Another time she calls him about the close approach of Mars, and he remembers that he had written to her about the previous occasion when Mars was close to the Earth. Mars had shone brightly. Pathetically in the letter, HN had said : “When I see a star shining this brightly I feel you close to me.” However Yae had never received that letter.
But this time, in the present, by chance (or fate?) adult Yae and HN end up outside the Observatory, surprised to meet each other. They spend the day together. In the evening, they awkwardly appear to prepare to separate, but do not. At the vending machine, somehow Yae finds that HN has followed her and remains with her. They do not seem to be able to part company, like bodies in orbit around each other, until another force, in the form of Tsunemi comes to move them.
Episode 5 and beyond – Talk.in.Sign.Language
SPOILERS for EPISODE 5 and MORE
SPOILERS BELOW
Side note: I applaud this Show for the choice of very appropriate young actors to play Yae, HN, Bonji and Yu. They look and behave very like their adult counterparts.
= = =
There were several instances that signs communicated something to someone. This first instance was the obvious one.
Yae’s Sign Language Conversation with Yu
Yae was a frequent visitor to Harumichi Namiki’s home.
At one visit during the family meal, even before Yae ‘spoke’ in sign language to HN’s deaf sister, Yu, I was struck by the fact that she wore a red t-shirt with a pink over-shirt. Instead of her preference for blue, she wore red which is the predominant colour of the Namiki family. However she also chose pink to show her individuality. This was non-verbal language that she would blend right in although she was her own person too.
The family meal and conversation is chaotic. They speak of mixing 2 things together into 1, such as shampoo with conditioner in one bottle. During all the back and forth dialogue, no one but Yae notices that Yu has been unsuccessfully asking for the tartar sauce.
Yae gives Yu the tartar sauce and speaks to her in sign language.
Yae to Yu : “Tartar sauce and shrimp are the best together.”
HN is stunned to see that Yae is speaking to his sister.
Yae continues :”Although sauce and lemon is pretty good too.”
The family suddenly fall into silence watching Yae talking in sign language and Yu responding. We have the winning combinations… shampoo and conditioner, tartar sauce and shrimp, sauce and lemon… and Yae and Yu become friends.
Yae’s sincere desire to speak with Yu not only gave Yae a friend, but also won Yae HN’s even greater admiration. It was obvious that Yae would have been a perfect fit for the Namiki family who were all so full of love and camaraderie. I liked how they accepted Bonji as one of them all along. I enjoyed their raucous conversation and later how they tried to help HN decide on his future career by pointing out that his sparse good points included mainly his strong body, good eyesight and good health LOL.
Yae’s lonely life with her mother could have been greatly improved if they had the friendship with Yu and the Namiki gang.
Towards the end, Yae’s mother wondered if she had made the right decision to cut HN out of Yae’s life. My opinion as an omniscient viewer is that she had made the wrong decision, although at that time, it had looked like the better choice.
To be continued…
Sign Language continued…
Tsunemi’s Interpretation of HN’s and Yae’s Encounter
I feel that with Tsunemi we are in between ‘Sign Language’ and the next Episode 6 ‘Sixth Sense’. Tsunemi was a Psychologist. She could read the signs between people and so in a sense, she had a sixth sense: the inkling that something was slipping away. I believe that many women would have had the same understanding of what was going on between Yae and HN, without words ever being spoken.
Tsunemi knew that she was no longer holding HN’s interest. He was distant and distracted in her presence. However when Tsunemi coincidentally saw HN and Yae staring at each other, she did a double take before calling HN’s name. In the short few seconds that she had observed them, Tsunemi understood without words that something significant was passing between them, that had never passed between herself and HN before.
On Yae’s part, she wanted to project a message that there was nothing to fear from her. When HN introduced Tsunemi to Yae as his girlfriend, Yae immediately hid the Grainy Corn Pottage that HN had bought for her. (The canned drink had taken on the greater significance of ‘a gift from HN’, and it had become personal. She did not want to share the sight of that gift with Tsunemi).
Yae’s sign language to assuage any suspicion that Tsunemi might have was to make a quick exit, although HN wanted to suggest that he got her a taxi. Yae ran off, while Tsunemi noted that HN continued looking after her.
HN, to his credit did not want to hide anything from Tsunemi, but Tsunemi refused to let HN explain or speak of Yae, or of their own relationship. She sped into getting his mother’s approval for a parents’ formal meeting, booked a wedding dress and hall, and then began on the choice of photographs that were to be included in their wedding video. However it was notable that among the photos, the photo of Yae and HN stood out. It was likely seeing that photo that got Tsunemi to finally ask HN who he would think of if he was about to die. He honestly admitted that the person would not be her.
HN’s apparent lack of enthusiasm in the wedding was loud sign language. Although HN was not allowed to speak the words that Tsunemi did not want to hear, she heard what he was saying. I like that she finally addressed the elephant in the room, gathered her self-respect, and broke off their relationship, although it broke her heart.
To be continued…
Sign Language continued…
Sign language in the sky for a teenage HN
Twenty years earlier, when teenage HN was unable to come up with an answer for the questionnaire on his future career, his family’s suggestion that he join the SDF was rejected by him.
We cut to the view of a railway track leading into the distance of unknowns destinations, an apt metaphor for HN’s state of mind. HN is at the railway station trying to decide what to do for his future. He sees a poster on the SDF “Join the SDF. Protect Loved Ones” but he is not convinced.
In a walk with Yae, she’s all admiration when a formation of 4 airforce jets fly overhead and separate in fancy maneuvers to do some sky writing. She says :”That… that’s so cool.”
HN turns to look at Yae. The camera focuses on her blue ice-popsicle… she’s so enamoured over the jets that she lets the ice melt. Yae’s obvious admiration for the pilots in the jets and of the sky writing of a heart with an arrow in the sky was the sign for HN.
He returns to the railway station to stare at the poster, reading : “To give a safer world to your family and loved ones.” Protection of Yae and looking cool in her eyes were two very important considerations for young HN. He answers the career questionnaire in very untidy handwriting : “SDF (Pilot only) because it’s cool. The end.” LOL.
Sign language continued…
Sign Language for the Viewer
Yae and Tsuzuru are like mother, like son and more interconnected with HN’s relationship with Yae than either realised. We see that there are distinct similarities in their behaviour. Tsuzuru’s sudden standing up in class when he saw that Uta had followed him in social media, is mirrored by Yae’s sudden loud gasp when HN suggests that they eat together.
Similarly both mother and son curl up and toss in bed (wearing blue) when heart sick. Yae is upset that HN has a girlfriend and Tsuzuru, because Yu has a boyfriend.
Yae befriended Uta whom Tsuzuru crushed on and helped him make it on time to say goodbye to her, while confessing his feelings. Reciprocally, through Uta and Tsuzuru, Yae gets to know where she might find HN again.
Tsuzuru started off as and remains the link between Yae and HN, without realising it himself. It was because Yae went in search of Tsuzuru that she met HN again. It was because Tsuzuru gave HN information about his mum that HN was able to re-establish contact with Yae.
The can of Grainy Corn Pottage that HN had bought and wiped the top of, for Yae, remained unopened, cherished as a sign of his regard. Later, Tsuzuru notices it, and is puzzled by its being placed in the display case.
In the end it was so very fitting that HN’s CD player, with Hikaru Utada’s song in it, came into Tsuzuru’s hands. It was because he shared the ear bud with Yae that she was able to listen to ‘First Love’ again after 20 years, (the very same CD, in all probability, that she’d left in that CD player, hence the empty CD case that her university friend told her about) and regain her lost memories.
Ironically it was Tsuzuru, the son by the ‘other man’, who was instrumental in bringing Yae and HN together. Despite being separated, the child, the fruit of the separation, was the one who united Yae and HN: a sign to us that destiny (fate?) played a hand in the OTP relationship.
Among the lyrics of the OST First Love by Hikaru Utada, are the most appropriate ones for this moment when Yae starts to remember.
“You are always gonna be my love
Even if someday I fall in love with somebody once again
I’ll remember to love, you taught me how
You are always gonna be the one
Now it’s still a sad love song
Until I can sing a new one”
“The frozen time is about to move
And it’s full of things I don’t want to forget, oh”
We see the return of Yae’s memories and know that the frozen time is thawing.
Last comment on Episode 5 and beyond. Sign Language continued with a recap and lots of inter-cuts from different times, bringing together …
…The Sign Language of Saving Someone
The events of 11 years prior when Bonji proposed marriage to Yu in sign language, and their subsequent wedding is intercut with the present when despite Yae’s best attempts to avoid Northern Lights Building so that she would not accidentally meet HN again, she finds that not only does she have to bring a passenger there, but that she has to enter the building to return his phone to him.
While Yae’s passenger gets caught by HN for stealing, we cut to the wedding when HN makes a speech verbally and in sign language. He says that his sister losing her hearing was his fault, because he was not able to save his sister from near drowning.
Cut to the present where Yu and her daughter, Airu, are waiting for HN to finish work. Airu who can hear the bicycle bells, saves her mother from being hit by a cyclist.
Cut to the wedding with HN making the speech about how he wanted to be like Ultraman…. (We remember that young Yae had mentioned Ultraman to HN before, saying that his having a time limit before his energy was depleted was cool.) HN says : “…but in reality I’m a weak, vulnerable and powerless person who couldn’t save his drowning sister.”
Cut to when he was a child and his sister had just been saved by his family members.
HN : “I had to become really strong. The reason I was able to feel this way was because of how Yu faced adversity and smiled. I believe all encounters and partings may be guided by fate. Every event we experience is an irreplaceable piece in our lives.” (This is HN’s take on encounters and partings. Unlike Yae who said that these were coincidences, he believes they were fated.)
We see his memory of young Yae turning around to look at him, and to wave happily, mouthing his name, ‘Harumichi’. (Even at his sister’s wedding, Yae is present in his mind.)
HN : “I may not be able to save the world but I want to be a man who can at least always protect my loved ones and really be there. The world’s greatest little sister and my precious partner will become a family. Let’s celebrate this magical night.” There is much applause and tears at this speech.
Yu runs to her brother to hug him tight, followed by Bonji. (I’m also in tears.) The guests both clap hands and use sign language to signal applause. Mum is in happy tears.
In the present in Northern Lights Building, HN catches Yae as she is pushed by the running thief and they fall down the stairs together with HN cushioning Yae’s fall. When they land at the base of the stairs, HN is more concerned about whether Yae’s in pain, holding her tightly, and cradling her head familiarly, as if she was the most precious person to him. He’s super relieved that she’s fine, possibly because she remembers how she’d been unresponsive in the accident of 20 years ago. He had been unable to save her before or to save his sister, but he risked his life to save Yae in the present.
HN ends up in hospital, since the fall aggravated an old back injury. He tells Yae who’s at his bedside that he wanted to catch her and be cool like Jason Bourne in the movie. (I guess he was referring to The Bourne Identity movie and the stairwell plunge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhpJ11dNp2o)
The motive for HN’s rescue of Yae was a mixture of wanting to protect Yae and also to look cool in her eyes, the same reason why he had joined the SDF. But of course the foundation for this was his love for her. HN had wanted to protect his loved ones, and saving Yae was the sign that he loved her still.
When Yu and Airu run into the hospital room Yae sees them communicating in sign language. She finds that her body remembers and she automatically talks in sign language to Yu, surprising herself, since she cannot recall knowing it.
This episode is bookended with the scene of 20 years previously when Yae first talked in sign language with Yu. Yae had said she wanted a family like Yu’s. Yu had told Yae naughty secrets about HN and they had ended their time happily with the Bonji and HN play wrestling over whose fault it was that they paid an extra 20,000 yen for an overdue porn video.
Another Note on the Circle Motif
In Episode 6, the multiple drawings of little Tsuzuru of many circles in red and yellow, drawn by repeatedly applying the crayons round and round as whirly balls, stand out for us. Tsuzuru tells mum that they are oranges. Little Tsuzuru’s oranges are reflected in the end credits of every episode, appearing as lines of light, as if we see the light drawn by sparklers. At first it’s a small light ‘fluttering’ like a butterfly and it becomes squiggly, whirly circles of light drawn in changing shapes, which later break into other patterns and then returns to the ‘butterfly’. The OST is The Ocean Sings or Hafið Syngur in Icelandic. It may represent anything we wish, but perhaps also the trajectory of Yae.
Yae and little Tsuzuru had fallen asleep on the living room carpet, curled up facing each other with hands connected, and they looked like two halves of a circle, or jigsaw pieces (if we use the other metaphor from one of Yae’s first voice-overs) joined together. They are surrounded by many drawings of oranges.
This image, together with what I noted above about how mother and son had similarities in behaviour and how Tsuzuru was the link between Yae and HN, beautifully suggests their intimate relationship and how their lives connected and flowed in unison, like traffic around the roundabout, even when Tsuzuru grew older.
When Yae became a taxi driver, she took instructions on how to enter the huge roundabout that linked several roads. The advice of Outaro Urabe, her instructor, highlights the premise of this show, as it offers the metaphor for our lives.
Urabe says : “Ms Noguchi, roundabouts are similar to our lives. If you can’t follow its flow, then you’ll never become a real taxi driver.”
Yae gets horned at before she can enter the roundabout because she’d extended her taxi into another car’s lane, and they stop suddenly to let the car with the right of way go first.
Yae, frightened and humiliated, puts her head on the steering wheel but Outaro says : “Knock it off, Noguchi! Look forward. Take a breath. And go!” She enters the roundabout, but again is on the wrong lane to make a quick exit to the freeway.
She gets horned at again, and stops awkwardly positioned across two lanes, and cars end up stationary behind her. Yae has to go around another lap. However she ultimately does make it out of the flow of the circling cars, taking a new direction.
In living harmoniously, we filter into life’s lanes and go according to the flow of traffic. If we omit care or patience, we cause roadblocks both for ourselves and for the co-travellers in our lives.
When Yae had to stop to let the other cars go first, it might be seen as a reflection of when she lost her memories and chance to go abroad to study, or to become a flight attendant according to her dream. It was also a reflection of how she stepped back with regards to HN, because Tsunemi was in his life and had the right of way.
HN previously, when he’d spotted Yae on the roundabout, and this time Yae herself, had been forced to continue around the roundabout another lap, when they had wanted to leave it earlier. HN found himself going around in circles, remembering Yae, and wanting her to remember him as well, while not being able to remind her. He decided to break out of the circle by breaking away from Yae, breaking up with Tsunemi and leaving Japan.
At times we may take longer, …having to go the extra laps, as if circling in place, but we can use that time to take a breath and prepare to launch into something new. At the same time we allow others to move and give way, as they too adjust their speed and direction to accommodate us.
Yae, too, found herself aimlessly circling in her life, like the many whirly lines drawn by Tsuzuru. She told Uta that she did not care to break the inertia that held her, to try for her dream to fly. She faced several hard knocks in the break-up of her marriage, her loss of Tsuzuru, and loss of job, but because she found the puzzle piece of HN again, she took Outaro Urabe’s advice. She did look up again, take a breath and move forward. When she did finally choose to break out of the endless loops, she did take a totally new direction to follow her heart.
Episode 6 – The Sixth Sense
Side note on the opening credits of Episode 6 – I thought the gurgling laughter of little Tsuzuru with the BGM was absolutely delightful. What a sweet introduction to Yae’s new life. At that time, she did not yet have any inkling, ie the sixth sense, that what was so promising would change.
By ‘The Sixth Sense’, we might be referring to the movie with Bruce Willis, playing a psychologist, Malcom Crowe, who did not know that he was dead, and a boy, Cole, who sees ghosts and accepts their help. Crowe, as a ghost, helps Cole who is afraid of ghosts, to confront them, and to help them complete their unfinished business, and in return, the boy, Cole, helps the dead psychologist to bring closure with his wife and move on.
We are shown Yae’s past as a teenager. At that time, she is unaware that it would be a dead past, ie dead because she would not be able to remember it, and dead because the dreams that she expressed at that time would not yet come true even when she was an adult.
HN and Yae made a trip (a return trip, but only HN is aware of this) on a gondola up Mount Tengu, to look out at the vista of Hokkaido from above. On the way up, we get inter-cuts with scenes of teenage Yae’s English speech contest.
Teenage Yae: “I have a dream. But what world lies beyond that dream?” Her references to a street corner lit by a gas lamp and a steam engine whistling are references to the Harry Potter books that her father had given her. She started with a dream of what might seem fantasy worlds, but ended triumphantly with her confidence that one day she would indeed be able to fly. The memory of this time comes to HN who looks at Yae as they gaze upon the view of Hokkaido’s city lights.
Yae inexplicably finds herself crying as she looks at the gliterring lights. Without realising it or understanding how, she has been hit by a sixth sense of great loss. The future and the dream that she’d spoken of in that English contest, had become ghosts that she could not see, but HN was aware of them. She’s surprised at herself, at how she breaks into tears so easily lately. It started when she realised that she was in love with HN, but could do nothing about it. Possibly too, being with HN was starting to trigger some emotional memory, although she could not recall cognitively; in the same way that her body had remembered sign language, but not her cognitive mind.
She tells HN that she cannot recall what kind of student she had been, but remembering the Speech Contest, he assures her: “I imagine you were radiant. Like you are now.”
(to be continued…)
(The Sixth Sense continued…)
We cut back to the Speech Contest.
Yae: “I’m taking my first steps towards these dreams. I’m going to run as fast as I can with my arms wide open,…” (like Rose in the movie Titanic) “towards the glittering world that awaits me, believing that, some day, I, too, will be able to fly.” She gets enthusiastic applause for her speech (and we hear later wins third prize).
The smiling teenage Yae is replaced by troubled, adult Yae, looking at the glittering world below her. She is ironically, paradoxically, thinking the opposite of what her young self had proclaimed.
Adult Yae says of her past and future: “I try not to think about it: what my past was, or what my future might be. I gave up on my dream and my life living with Tsuzuru, and that period of my life when I accomplished nothing. I’m not expecting anything from my future. I’m certainly done getting my hopes up for nothing.” (This mirrors what she had said about getting her hopes up over her father’s promises.)
She looks at HN with a smile to hide the pain: “But you see, sometimes, very occasionally, well, I get this crazy inkling, like a fake sense in my dull and insignificant life, deep down at its core that I’ve lost something so critically important.” (This is her Sixth Sense.)
Before this, there was a scene of teenage Yae who had just seen her father again after 3 years. Yae had no illusions about her father, who was kind, but who was also a liar, who had gotten another woman pregnant even before Yae was born, so that Yae had a step-sister who never acknowledged her.
Her father had made promises to watch the stars with her but he did not keep them.
Yae: “Each time, I got my hopes up, get disappointed and think about her (step-sister) again. She’s actually the one looking at the beautiful stars and the world he said he wanted to show me. I already know that I had better move forward.” (This hearkens to the movie ‘The Sixth Sense’ and Malcom Crowe and his wife needing to move on from his death.)
Yae: “But I’m scared of losing him some day. I always try to stop myself before I mess things up or get hurt.” (This explains her diffidence in entering contests. She was an ‘A’ student but did not want to put herself forward. This too is mirrored in adult HN, who does not want to lose Yae, but who is then caught, unable to move forward.)
(to be continued…)
(The Sixth Sense continued …)
Teenage HN, touched by Yae’s pain, had pulled her into an embrace then, and promised her: “Just know this. I won’t go anywhere. I’ll always be on your side. I’ll never let you go.” To the extent that he’d been allowed to, he had kept his word.
As an adult, when Yae’s own husband cheated on her, she knew she was already looking at a ghost of a marriage, because of what her father had done to her mother. She had taken action to gain closure from her failed marriage, when her husband’s mother denigrated her mother.
In the present on Mount Tengu, when HN sees Yae cry at the sight of the lights of Hokkaido, and hears her speak of giving up her dreams, while in his memories he recalls how radiant she had been, he sees in the present, sad Yae, the ghost of all she had been and could still be.
Just as in the past his heart hurt over her pain, and he’d embraced her to comfort her, so too in the present, he kissed her, unable to put into words the assurance of knowing all that she’d been, the words of comfort over her loss, and as a tribute of what she still meant to him. As a youth he had said that he would never let her go, but as an adult, he knew that was a promise he should not make, although he wished to.
In ‘The Sixth Sense’, Cole told Malcolm Crowe to speak to his wife when she was asleep. It was only when Crowe realised that he was dead, and a ghost, that he was able to help his wife find peace and move on, and then he too is able to move on to the afterlife. The speech that HN would make to Yae, to bring about closure, would come in a later episode.
Like Malcome Crowe, HN was caught in the memories of his and Yae’s unfinished story, trapped in nostalgia and yearning, next to her, but without resolution. Like the boy, Cole, HN had to lay the ghosts of the past he knew, to rest, in order to attain some closure, and be able to break away from Yae, so that both of them could move on.
Episode 7 – The Order of Dreams
After a few false starts, I’ve decided that I’ll concentrate on the metaphors of missing the turn off or making a wrong turning, and the metaphor of the blue hour.
The kiss on Mount Tengu affected Yae enough to cause her to miss her turning. Unfortunately she had a mysogist for a passenger, who was irate that he had to go 20+ extra miles, and who derided Yae not for her lack of attention, but for being a woman.
Her memory of the kiss focused on the time after it, when HN had apologised and she had eventually said it was okay. But obviously it was not okay. It was not something that could have been brushed off easily under any circumstances, and more so when Yae found HN attractive. I’m guessing that she was more affected by his apology than by the kiss itself, and by the fact that she had to pretend that it was just something ‘normal’ and not a big deal, to save face. She was in a situation where she had to ‘lie’.
The other thing that must have upset her was the unspoken reason why HN had kissed her. She could only guess that he, too, found her attractive, but was never going to hear him say it. HN was caught and unable to say anything except to apologise, because he already had a fiancee. And Yae was caught, unable to reciprocate. (This was their being stuck in twilight.)
To his credit, HN did not avoid the issue and apologised again in a message to Yae, and still took the time to meet her after her night shift.
The scene: It’s in the wee hours of the morning just before sunrise. HN waits outside Yae’s work place in order to speak with her. When she sees him, she’s embarrassed about meeting him after the kiss and can’t decide whether to go back into the office or leave it. In the end she leaves and he accompanies her but a few feet apart from her and slightly behind so that they are not walking side by side. It was considerate of him because it acknowledged that she was uncomfortable with him and he did not want to force her to look at him or speak with him.
However in her normal style, Yae takes the initiative to start a conversation: “I thought it was only just taxi drivers, drunks, and the crows who walk around at this time.”
HN : “I’ve been on nights (night shifts) …I safely passed my last examination (post surgery). I wanted to tell you and thank you.”
HN refers to the kiss : “And about the other night, …”
Yae waits as they take a few steps in silence and says : “Did you know this part of the day is known as “twilight” (the blue hour). It lies between day and night and light and dark.” She breaks off to go into a convenience store, surprising HN who watches her, but remains outside.
(Yae and HN found themselves trapped in twilight/the blue hour, between the day and night and light and dark. HN could neither deny Tsunemi nor accept Yae, with a clear conscience. Yae could not reciprocate HN’s feelings for her, but had to instead hide how she felt, while putting on the appearance of being fine with it. They were both unhappy.)
Yae comes out of the store with ice-cream and sees that HN is waiting for her.
HN: “Is that breakfast? Or are you having dinner now?”
Yae: “It’s just my twilight ice-cream meal. I let myself enjoy it when something good happens, you know, or when something bad happens.”
HN : “Which is it?” She just looks at him with a smile. “I’m sorry, stupid question.” He looks down, embarrassed.
(It’s not so much that something bad happened but that the ease with which they had interacted was now affected.)
Yae smiles to herself and gives him an ice-cream.
They stand on a bridge to eat ice-cream, where they can watch the sun rise. Yae tells HN about missing the turn on the freeway.
Yae: “I was stuck for 20 miles with an angry customer, until the next exit. It’s hell on earth to keep driving, knowing it’s just a wrong turn.”
(HN interprets this to mean that the kiss was a wrong turn, and that it was hell for Yae.)
HN apologises again : “You know, I’m sorry for the other day.”
Yae puts on a smile, and lies : “You’ve got to stop. (This was the third time he was apologising for the same thing.) I told you I don’t think about the past. I enjoy eating, and it’s done. (The kiss is over and done with). And besides, I don’t think of you that way at all. Not in that kind of way at all.”
She leans back and gestures the distance that they are keeping between them : “It’s the same as always.” She nods and he nods back in agreement.
One aspect of the wrong turn was that HN should never have been spending time with Yae in the first place, and of course, he should not have kissed her.
However the important thing about wrong turns is that there’s always a way to get back on the right route. It will generally mean a detour, taking a long way around, but one can ultimately get back on the right track and head towards the original destination. It just takes more time, it might cost more in terms of petrol/gas and it could involve being able to tolerate an unpleasant drive for several miles, but it is possible to rectify the situation of a wrong turn if one takes the action to find the next exit and go back to the path. But this wrong turn was compounded by the lie.
From HN’s point of view: HN has been on the wrong route for some time, mistakenly ‘traveling’ with Tsunemi along the path of her choice, when he wanted a different traveling companion and a different path. HN knew that he should look for the next exit, and had been trying to tell Tsunemi so.
From Yae’s point of view, it was a metaphor for herself being wrongly in love with HN, when she knew that he was to marry someone else. But more than that, Yae’s decision to lie that the kiss meant nothing and that HN meant nothing too, meant that she was keeping on the wrong route.
From a bird’s eye view, the biggest wrong turn was that both HN and Yae had given up their dreams. HN and Yae were not fulfilling their full potential in their work and relationships. In the area of their romance, the path that they kept to was not the order of their dreams, where as teenagers the order would have been Yae and HN together, with Tsunemi as the outsider.
Looking for an exit and making a detour back to their original paths was needed in their lives.
Here’s another great review of this Show by @kfangurl on her blog.
https://thefangirlverdict.com/2023/01/08/review-first-love-hatsukoi-japan/#comments
She says much of what I want to/did say and then some. I give this Show a Grade A too.
Episode 8 – The Proust Effect on a Certain Afternoon
About Forgetting and Remembering
In Episode 8, Yae as an adult, and already divorced, hears the TV astrology report that persons of her star sign (Sagittarius) should be wary of being forgetful.
As teenagers, Yae and HN had walked in the snow to bury their time capsule. It was to be opened 10 years in the future as a peep back into their past. Little did they know that circumstances would change in less than 10 years.
As they trudged through the snow, making their one set of couple footprints,.Yae told of how in the Winter, squirrels hid nuts and forgot where they were, bringing about an amazing by-product: the growth of new trees in the Spring.
Yae: “Without forgetful squirrels running around, all of the nuts would get eaten, and then the forest couldn’t really grow.” (Good things could still come from forgetting, or from being forgotten. A hopeful sign for us as we think of adult Yae who struggles without her memories and for adult Harumichi who would be the one forgotten. The time capsule was particularly poignant, because it was itself about to become a forgotten nut buried for the Winter. [Thanks to @kfangurl for her post that mentions this!])
Teenage HN announced: “We need to make sure that we don’t forget about this thing. It’s March 11th, year 2001.”
He suggests they retrieve it in 10 years.
HN: “Back at this place in 2011.”
Yae : “Ten years from now. That’s a long time though.”
HN : “I’ll be the ultimate Japan maverick, you know? A tough and brave man, who faces all the dangers while protecting his family and lovely home. And my wife, classy flight attendant who travels the world.”
(In 2011, HN was halfway right as predicted, he was a pilot but still without a wife. And Yae still had a love for the job of a flight attendant, but she’d put her dreams on hold.)
They laughed at their predictions of their future and we get an aerial view of the pristine snow around them and only their footprints showing how they had walked side-by-side to the lilac tree, where they had buried their time capsule.
Many years in the future, HN would go by himself to add a postscript to his letter in the time capsule. And it would be a time after this, that Yae herself would remember the time capsule and find his letter and postscript, each unknowingly passing by each other in time, possibly just by a few days.
To be continued…
About Forgetting and Remembering continued…
In an ironic turn of events, when HN meets Tsunemi for his therapy sessions, it is she who tells him about the Proust Effect, named for Marcel Proust who had written the “À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu” (meaning “In Search of Lost Time”).
“Proust nails the phenomenon of “involuntary memory”. This is the way that a sensory experience can suddenly bring back a hidden recollection.” https://www.premiumscenting.com/blog/proustian-effect/
“The Proust effect refers to the vivid reliving of events from the past through sensory stimuli.” https://academic.oup.com/book/11350
This might have been why HN had wanted to meet Yae again. When they were face-to face with each other, he was stunned to see her, and paused, but to his disappointment, Yae failed to recognise him. The Proust Effect might also have been why he asked her to go with him up Mount Tengu where she might recall their first trip, and perhaps partly why he kissed her. Somehow the sights, sounds, scents, and tastes did not work as powerful triggers of recollection, until Yae heard the song, ‘First Love’ by Hikaru Utada.
It was the song that she’d listened to over and over again, and during which Yae and HN had shared their first kiss.
I wrote before that adult Yae was probably listening to her own music CD, that was playing on the same CD player that she’d used as a teenager, the most significant song in her life, and that this finally brought on the Proust Effect, so that her memories came flooding back vividly.
She even remembered the smell of smoking cigarettes that came with the kiss and we see her later buy cigarettes to get a whiff of that scent again.
When HN came to attempt to speak with Tsunemi again about their relationship. Tsunemi had been sorting out their photos for the wedding video, but she had taken the bull by the horns to ask him just one question.
She had asked who he would see (in his mind) when he was about to die. He had never lied to her, despite knowing that it would cause her unhappiness. He admitted that the person he wanted to see would not be her.
HN : “There is someone I’ve never been able to forget.”
Without ever needing the Proust Effect, HN had continued to cherish his memories of Yae.
On the table we see that among the photos of HN and Tsunemi, were photos of HN and Yae as teens, and that they had been visible to Tsunemi throughout her photo sorting. She wisely let him go.
HN could not pretend to not remember his past with Yae that had ended abruptly, unresolved. I’ve mentioned HN’s farewell to Yae in another post during which they gained closure in a proper goodbye.
Unfortunately the Proust Effect came into effect for Yae just as HN left Japan. She would not be able to go out in search of him until some 3 years later. Then, just as she’d done as a teenager on the snowy night when she had stopped her mother from driving on, so that she could meet HN, she would once again go out in the snow on her own to meet him.
It’s particularly gratifying that just as on that first meeting in the snow they first confirmed their love for each other, so too would their meeting again after their parting in 2018 be a reaffirmation of their first love being their forever love.
@gb, I binged this show in one day when it was first released. I’ve just been going back and reading your notes (haven’t finished yet) and I appreciate you taking the time to dissect. One thing I’ve noticed that stuck with me even during my speed watch, was the mother/son relationship. As someone with a tendency towards overbearing/interrogational/dictatorial parenting (kidding, kind of), I’m in awe of how she handled her teenage son. She showed interest and appreciation, she didn’t get eye-rolly at his dramatic love life, and she didn’t pry too much. I hope I can emulate some of that once my children reach their teens.
Hi there @birdie007, I binged this show too!!! Couldn’t stop watching it and I’m still watching it here and there in between other shows. It seems to just get better with each watch and I get to notice more nuggets along the way.
Yes, Yae’s respectful, un-fault-finding, trusting parenting style is not easy to emulate. The ‘controlling parent’ is the more usual model of parenting that we see and know. I feel that I’m a bit more like Yae in how I am with my kids. They are young adults now, but still kid-dy enough that they may sometimes act like uncommunicative teens. I’m still waiting for them to ‘grow up’ to when they’ll voluntarily have an adult conversation with me! 😝 😇
Thanks for letting me know that you’re reading my notes. It’s always great to find that I’m not exactly talking to only myself here, LOL. (I feel like I’m some sort of crazy woman who just can’t keep quiet on the thread! 🤪 😵💫 😵 😬 😅 😃)
Episode 8
Taking the Plunge with Fate or Destiny
I like the sincere Outaro Urabe who had taught Yae as she drove, how to enter the roundabout and exit from it. She had made mistakes and stopped the taxi, putting her head on the steering wheel. The advice that he gave her over driving, he gives about facing a relationship head-on: “Look forward. Take a breath. And go!”
After Yae rejects Outaro, she tells him that having known the feeling of being in love makes one grateful to be alive. It is an amazing feeling “No matter where they are, or what they’re doing with any person, it does not change anything. So I think that’s enough. Well, I guess should be more than enough.” (Her take on encounters was that they were coincidences, rather than fated meetings, so that just having experienced love was good enough, and one need not confess it or pursue it.)
Outaro says : “Yae, I want to say that I think fate exists.”
He speaks of how meeting her made him able to eat shrimp again: “You might think I’m exaggerating if I called it fate, but if one day I become a successful shrimp farmer overseas, in theory, and I build a fortune and find a beautiful wife, and people would then say, Yae Noguchi changed Outaro Urabe’s precious life.”
Outaro: …”But life is just so full of special, meaningful encounters like that. And back to what you said. Do you really think you are okay with that? Lying about your feelings and hiding them?” (To Outaro, this was ‘running away’.)
Yae : “You get used to loneliness. I sure did.”
Outaro who instructed her in her taxi driving, now instructs her in living her life without running away.
Outaro: “Okay then. If you won’t regret it, then I’ll fully support you! Although I’d say, if that’s not the case, you don’t run, Yae! Look forward. Take a breath and go, Even if you get hurt or embarrassed. In life you have to take the plunge!”
This is the same advice that HN gives to Tsuzuru, and which he takes himself, when he ran off to protect Yae in the laundromat. Both HN and Outaro believe that the encounters between people were fated. Both HN and Outaro take the plunge with Yae, so that they have no regrets.
(To be continued…)
Taking the Plunge with Fate or Destiny continued…
There is a nice parallel. While Outaro gave Yae advice to not run away, but to acknowledge her feelings for HN and to move on, HN told Tsuzuru the same thing, over his loss of Uta.
HN spoke of airplanes taking off against the wind, flying in the face of the wind that would help the planes to gain height and glide.
(“Planes like to take off into the wind, because it’s the only thing in aviation that’s free and provides lift. When air flows over the wings, flight happens, and the wind helps with that during take off.” https://thepointsguy.com/news/how-windy-does-it-have-to-be-before-planes-cant-take-off/)
This was a metaphor for choosing to live life against the flow, to take the plunge to gain something more. HS’s view was that Tsuzuru should not have decided unilaterally that he would stop liking Uta, without ever telling her in the first place.
We recall that there were other scenes of HN moving against the flow. To begin with he had been a troublemaker as a teen. As an adult there was a scene of him walking against the flow of pedestrians on a bridge, when the earthquake struck, another one of him running against the flow of people to the laundromat, and one of him trying to get through the crowds in the airport to reach Yae whom he’d seen in costume.
When Tsuzuru asked HN if he was happy having met someone he cared about and then breaking up, HN admits that it was fate or destiny. Just as an airplane would have to take off when it reached a certain speed, ‘V1’, on the runway, so too there were special moments when there was no turning back: one would have to fly (or take the plunge). But in flight, there would be the opportunity to go with the flow of the wind and glide so that one traveled further than by one’s own volition.
HN : “Life presents us with a few of these exceptionally very unique moments. For you, kiddo, and for me as well. What do you want? Face all the unpredictable rough winds out there? Or do you get there and fly and glide?”
Yae had told Tsuzuru that he could go ahead to live the life that he found fulfilling instead of following in his father’s footsteps. Advised by both HN and his mum, Tsuzuru went against the flow of his father’s wishes, returned to music, and gained recognition as a composer, by age 19. He even got the girl, at least as a good friend.
It was good to see that Yae took Outaro’s advice to heart. Before it was too late, she confessed to HN that she’d lied about not having feelings for him, when she’d liked him from the start. She made a good exit from this roundabout of being miserable over liking HN and not being able to express her feelings for him. It made the end of their relationship poignant and meaningful, and allowed both of them to have some closure and head off down different lanes.
It was also good to see that Yae gained a spirit of adventure, and of being willing to take the plunge, when she regained her memories. In the past she had been unwilling to take part in competitions, and as an adult she’d let inertia set in, so that she remained stagnated.
But when she regained her memories, she tried out smoking, she took leave in preparation to travel and made that one-way trip to Iceland by herself, in pursuit of HN.
Just watched the first episode and now I am going through the comments and notes here. Really like it so far.
Hi there @Snow Flower, isn’t the show lovely? And the music!!! So appropriate, so evocative. I’m still not over this show. 🙂
Thoughts about Tsunemi
As Second Female Leads go, Tsunemi makes a nice one whom I can get behind. What she does is perfectly understandable. She’s a good person, patient, undemanding, and not at all mean. She was unfortunate in that she fell for Harumichi, when his heart was already taken, and he didn’t tell her.
Perhaps Tsunemi’s happiest time with Harumichi was when she quit her job in Hokkaido to be with him in Sapporo. A sign of how well they were getting along is demonstrated by them both wearing a matching mild yellow. However this still paled in comparison with Yae and HM in their dynamic turquoise blue.
It might be another metaphor – on top of the one in the sinking of the Titanic – for how Tsunemi’s and HN’s relationship would go, but on their first day of sight-seeing, the vehicle that they travel in has a breakdown in the middle of nowhere. A relationship that was not destined to reach its destination?
However this vehicle breakdown gave Tsunemi the chance to meet HN’s family. She finds out about Yae from HN’s sister, Yu. Since this is pretty early on in their relationship, this means that Tsunemi knew Yae’s name and what she meant to HN. This explains why when she found that HN had reestablished contact with Yae, she hurried HN into wedding preparations and refused to let him talk about Yae or about their own relationship. She must have known from pretty early on, that she didn’t have a chance against HN’s lingering feelings for Yae.
I was glad that Tsunemi took the initiative to end the relationship. As she wisely said to HN: “You can’t keep waiting around for someone who won’t love you.” She declares again that her name means that she would be the fixed star that would go on shining on her own. “Of course I can survive without you in my life.” She pushes HN towards the door and breaks down to cry, having only her bird, Pippi for company.
I feel sorry for Tsunemi who’d invested some 7 years in that relationship, only to come out of it empty.
Farewells
It’s interesting to contrast Harumichi’s farewells with the two ladies.
From the beginning of his relationship with Tsunemi, HN had taken the time to feed and interact with Pippi, the parakeet, so much so that Pippi was very at home with him. When Tsunemi decides to end her relationship with HN, she declares that she’s a fixed star in the sky that would go on shining even without him. HN has no chance to say goodbye to her properly or to Pippi. Tsunemi is understandably in tears, but stops crying to listen to, and to speak to Pippi, declaring that she’d tried her best. Tsunemi’s tummy rumbles. Poor Tsunemi is left empty with just her bird.
Before he met Yae again, HN had befriended her son, Tsuzuru. The farewell with Yae takes place when she waits for HN inside a restaurant, while HN stands outside the restaurant, where he can see her as he says goodbye. Yae takes the opportunity to confess that she’d lied about not liking him, when in fact she’d liked him a lot from the start. Although she cries over losing HN, unlike Tsunemi, she stays on to eat her fill by herself.
HN had also the chance to say a proper goodbye to Tsuzuru and to leave him his old CD player. Later, Yae gets to enjoy the company of her son, to prepare a meal for them and even to listen to her favourite song of the past that is still in the CD player. Unlike Tsunemi, this is not the end for her but an awakening of her memories, and the start of her breaking out of the stagnant life she’d lived. Quite unlike a fixed star.
I finished Episode 9 and immediately rewatched Episode 1. This show is like a beautiful blue puzzle, impossible to forget.
Does anyone know the meaning of the names of our OTP, Yae and Harumichi?
Hi @Snow Flower. I too wish I knew the meaning of their names. We know that Tsuzuru means compose. Since Tsunemi kept repeating the meaning of her name, (from he first introduction to herself!) as if it defined her, I’ve wondered about the meaning of the names of the leads too!
Yes, lovely, unforgettable show.
Looking back to the beginning and different parts of this show, I find that it is replete with metaphors for Yae’s life.
Episode 9
Ticket to Ride
After the Proust Effect finally takes place for Yae with her hearing the song, “First Love” that played when HN and Yae shared their first kiss, Yae finally recalls everything of her middle and high school years, and how significant a person HN was to her.
Episode 9 is called ‘Hatsukoi’ which means ‘First Love’. This is also the name of the song by the same singer, Hikaru Utada, but although the song has the Japanese title translation of her earlier song, ‘First Love’, it has a different sound and feel. While the older song was nostalgic and regretful, and accompanied Yae in her youth, the later one is purposeful and urgent, filled with certainty about how a particular first love, was also the only love. It accompanies Yae in her active efforts to reunite with Harumichi, once she remembered that he was her first love.
I thought it was a thoughtful choice to give us the first encounter (well sort of) between Yae and HN only in the very last episode, and on a moving train. They were fellow travelers on their way to the same place, but they did not know it. When they were separated, they did not know for sure that they would meet again.
Their separation was temporary. In the end they would travel the same path when they became a couple in their youth. This would be mirrored in their experience as adults. They would be separated but they were destined to end up together in the same place.
I like how show gives us intercuts and match cuts between scenes of different times, so that we either get the connection or are able to compare and contrast them.
As the young Yae leaves on a train for her mock test, with a little uncertainty, we see a train arrive and suddenly we are in the present, as adult Yae emerges from it. As a girl she had started on her way to experience a practice test. As an adult she returns with assurance to the place of her youthful romance after undergoing many tests in her life. She returns, remembering her youthful exuberance and the Lilac tree, under which she and HN had buried their time capsule.
At last we get the whole story. Both HN and Yae had noticed each other on the train to the mock test held in Kitami. HN had observed Yae throughout the train journey. She knew he was watching her while she had read her book and fallen asleep. He was too shy to speak with her, but he wanted to help ensure that she did not lose her page in her book. He chose to unwisely leave his train ticket in her book as a bookmark, and consequently was stopped from leaving the train station since he needed it to exit.
Yae had also observed HN and paused when she found that HN was held back by the ticket guards and could not follow her, because he had lost his ticket. It’s only later that she finds to her surprise, a train ticket in the book she’d been reading. How apt that a ticket which is a means to travel was what was left in Yae’s book, and that it was HN who left it for her (more about that at the end). Just as HN had been blocked from following Yae by the lost ticket, so too Yae had been kept from HN by her lost memory.
In the time capsule that adult Yae unearthed, we find that Yae had kept that bookmark train ticket. She had figured out that HN had left it to mark her page and she’d gone back to the starting point on that ticket, which was Appaushi train station, to wait for HN, in order to thank him. When he didn’t show up by the end of the day, she left a message of thanks on the station black board and went home.
(Sidenote: It seems like Appaushi Station does not exist!! At least Googling it did not bring up the search results that I expected.)
I like @kfangurl’s interpretation of that scene of Yae waiting in Appaushi station as a metaphor for her life. Yae came to a pause in her life, taking shelter until it was time for her to get going. She is thankful for the warmth and the comfort of food offered by a stranger, and she goes after leaving a note of thanks. So too does an adult and thankful Yae start moving again after a long break.
At last, in Episode 9, she is able to take steps to head towards HN as she did as a teenager. Just as she had waited for HN at the station, so too HN would, in effect, wait for her for over 20 years, until she returned to her starting point with him, remembering that he was her first love.
To be continued…
Episode 1 and Episode 9
Ticket to Ride continued with the roads metaphor
In Episode 1, some of the first scenes are of the city roads. We are given an aerial view of the rigidly drawn patterns of pedestrian crossings, boxing up parts of the cross junction. There were signs and rules to follow in navigating that junction. It might have been the same junction that HN crossed in order to visit Yae in university, and is the junction at which Yae meets Tsuzuru on his days to visit her. They were just tiny figures in masses of moving human beings. Even the cars looked like scurrying ants from above. An indication, perhaps, of how Yae had found her life as a divorced woman, expected to abide by the social rules, working (the rat race) to earn a living, with nothing much to look forward to, except Tsuzuru’s visits.
The other aerial view of the road is the one of the roundabout with 6 lanes leading to and away from it. I mentioned in one of my posts the metaphor of divergent paths in life. HN is seen crossing the junction or taking taxis that circle the roundabout. Yae has to follow the traffic rules or cause a disruption in the smooth flow of traffic. At times one has to go around the roundabout more than once before being able to take a new path.
In their youth, they were forced to take different roads in life and to part ways, but always with the possibility of encountering each other again along the familiar roads. There was at least one instance (Ep 1) of Yae driving past HN who was crossing the road.
When Yae could finally leave Japan in order to seek out HN in Iceland, she finds that there is basically just 1 main road to travel on with little traffic. She hitches a ride and finds the space to walk around, enjoying the wide open vistas of a winter wonderland, before asking for directions to Husavik. What a contrast to the busy streets of Sapporo that she had left behind.
Husavik has few enough people in it that it’s considered small, so that another Asian has been noticed as an individual instead of being lost in a mass. There is again only one route to follow, no turn offs, no roundabouts. The one main road leads her back to HN without any detours.
The Mars Orbiter with Yae’s name in it never did make orbit. It went its own way, lost in space, a Space Oddity, forever. What a satisfactory ending we get when the train ticket that HN had left in Yae’s book, (or what it meant in their relationship), was the impetus to Yae’s making the journey to reunite with HN in Iceland. It is so fitting because not only is the ticket a symbol of travel, which both Yae and HN wanted to experience, but also it led Yae to finally fulfill her dreams of becoming a flight attendant. How appropriate that a ticket to travel really brought Yae into HN’s orbit once again and enabled them both to work together on the same airplane, traveling on the same path in life’s journey.
In the first Episode, teenage Yae had walked in a beautiful field of yellow flowers, practising what to say if she were a flight attendant: ‘Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Welcome aboard Norn Airlines Flight 627 to Reykjavik, Iceland.’ She had run and tried to ‘touch’ an airplane that flew overhead saying in English: “Your attention please.” What a great pre-figuring of her future since we see adult Yae as a flight attendant in Iceland, speaking to her passengers in English: “May I have your attention please. Welcome aboard our flight.”
Yae and Tsuzuru
When we think of first love, we usually only consider romantic love. However it occurred to me that Tsuzuru’s first love was his mother, Yae. And of course, Yae’s first love as a mum, was Tsuzuru. On top of the delightful snippets of bromance (HN and Bonji), and brother-sister-mance (HN and Yu) we get a rather rare mother-young son-mance in Yae and Tsuzuru. It’s more common to see senior mums with their grown up sons being good with each other, but seldom a teenage boy and his young mum.
Our first scenes with Tsuzuru are delightful ones with Yae spending time with him as a toddler, while he played and she cleaned. In the afternoon they ended up exhausted, napping together on the living room carpet. Their curled bodies facing each other in sleep, making a circle. They were meant to be always connected.
The show in Episode 1 starts off with an endless stream of movement. I imagine it is to suggest that much is in flux, that people are busy running around in circles, but not really getting anywhere. The Show begins with a view of congested buildings in 2018 Sapporo and with car horns blaring. Then we have scene after scene of movement. The OST is ‘Roundabout’.
Cars and people move and our view of the city scenes are all from a moving vehicle. Scene after scene hardly has anyone being still or slow, except perhaps, Yae. It’s all dynamic, a bit hectic, until we come to the past and see the field of yellow flowers that stand still while teenage Yae skips along and stops to try to touch a passing airplane.
I understand (now) why I and other viewers were confused about the time portrayed in the beginning. Show has done a ballsy thing in placing a teenage Tsuzuru in the foreground of a moving train (the first moving train), with a teenage Yae of some 20 years in the past in the background of the same coach. They appear to be in the same period of time, when they are not, but by placing them in the same coach, we know that they did occupy about the same space in that moving train, across a span of 20 years, and were heading in the same direction towards the same destination.
In the last episode, we find that Yae first saw her first love, HN, in a moving train. Perhaps Show was telling us even before we ever knew of their connection, that the first love between mother and son was destined to cut across time (age) and space, just as the love between Yae and HN would cut across amnesia, 25 years of separation and the space between Japan and Iceland.
In the beginning we do not know that like mother, like son, they would both be instrumental in each other’s love life, and that they would be heading in the same direction together, in friendship with HN. But in that first moving train, they were unknowingly heading towards the same destination of being each other’s buddies.
I did note before that both mother and son are often seen in outfits of the same blue, and that in some situations, they even behaved in the same way. Little Tsuzuru displayed Yae’s thoughtfulness when he decided to forgo getting his own toys, in order to donate the money to earthquake victims. He even shared his strawberry with her on his birthday.
In the scene where Tsuzuru shares the ear buds with his mother so that they both listen to ‘First Love’ together, they are even in similar looking clothes, that make them look like they are in couple wear. By sharing the song with his mum, Tsuzuru inadvertently completed the broken circle of her memories, so that she finally experienced the Proust Effect of regaining her past.
When they could not meet during the Covid period, mother and son bothered to see each other from a distance and chatted on the phone like best friends. We know that Yae was instrumental in helping Tsuzuru express his feelings towards Uta, so that they kept in touch. Then it was Uta who discovered the whereabouts of HN, which Tsuzuru revealed to Yae. The good things came back full circle to Yae, because of Yae’s kindness to both Tsuzuru and Uta, and Yae got to know where to go to look for her first love.
The suggestion of how there’s movement, of something going around in a circle and ending with Yae, was shown to us before, when the bouquet of lilacs that HN bought for Tsunemi’s mother, because he still remembered that Yae loved lilacs, came into Yae’s hands instead. And it was the thought of Yae and their first kiss with the song, ‘First Love’ in the taxi, that made HN leave the lilacs there. What were the odds that the taxi driver happened to be Outaro who admired Yae, and so would automatically give the lilacs to her. Show is suggesting that despite the rush and chaos of movement, whatever was destined, would finally find its way to its destination.
How lovely to see everything working out, moving in full circle, coming back to Yae, and that the reunion of Yae and HN was achieved in the roundabout of life.
@GB, I keep returning to this thread to read your wonderful notes.
Thank you kindly @Snow Flower. I’m so pumped to know anyone at all is reading this thread LOL.
I do have one more note which I have not yet finalised to post here. I feel more galvanised now to look at it and see if it says anything of interest before I decide what to do with it.
Best wishes and hugs to you! 🙂
https://youtu.be/Z6M2wtcimBE
The importance of the color blue in “First Love” made me think about “Dazzling Blue,” a song by Paul Simon.
Thank you so much @Snow Flower. What an appropriate song. It could well have been one of the songs chosen for this show’s OST. It has added another layer of enjoyment to knowing this show.
The lyrics:
“Miles apart, though the miles can’t measure distance
Worlds apart on a rainy afternoon
But the road gets dirty and it offers no resistance
So turn your amp up and play your lonesome tune
Maybe love’s an accident, or destiny is true
But you and I were born beneath a star of dazzling blue
Dazzling blue”
– seem particularly apt for this show … where Yae and HN are miles apart literally, and worlds apart not only in distance but in memory.
– where even the long journey offers Yae no resistance to finding HN again.
– where it was a lonesome tune of first love that got Yae re-started in her life’s direction, just as it was the same tune that kept HN stalled in the taxi (and he really had asked the driver to amp up the volume).
– where Yae ponders if it’s just coincidence or destiny to meet the people we love, as our paths converge and separate.
It was frustratingly ironical that Yae finally remembered HN only as he left the country, so that their separation was longer, but it was a stretch of time she needed to find herself and her past.
How poetic are Paul Simon’s lyrics.
“Sweet July, and we drove the Montauk Highway
And walked along the cliffs above the sea
And we wondered why, and imagined it was someday
And that is how the future came to be
Dazzling blue, roses red, fine white linen
To make a marriage bed
And we’ll build a wall that nothing can break through
And dream our dreams of dazzling blue”
EPISODE 9
While looking again at my notes on Episode 9, I happened to see what I wrote for Episode 7: The Order of Dreams and it’s strangely just right to include this here, under the dreams of ‘Dazzling Blue’ by Paul Simon (above).
What dreams did our protagonists have?
Harumichi had no dreams until he met Yae. The funniest scenes were the ones where teenage HN, who had been a bad student and a delinquent, decided to make a 180 degree turnaround in order to enter the same school as Yae. He barely slept, in order to study for the entrance exam, and ended up shocking his family (LOL) by succeeding to enter the good school that Yae had chosen. He fulfilled the first dream when Yae became his girlfriend.
His next dream was to get a cool job (he wanted to impress Yae), and seeing that she admired the airforce pilots zipping past in the sky, he trained to become a pilot in the defence forces. Again he fulfilled his dream, but by then, Yae had lost her memory of him. It seemed he had lost his first dream.
Tsuzuru’s first dream was to become a composer (just like his name!) and his second was to befriend Uta. While his father was an impediment to his first dream, he was more fortunate with his mother. Unlike her own mother who had stopped her from renewing her friendship with HN, Yae encouraged and supported Tsuzuru both in his pursuit of music and Uta. We see that even HN made a good mentor-uncle-pseudo dad in how he listened to Tsuzuru, shared his experiences with him and gave him advice. It’s not surprising that these positive vibes helped Tsuzuru to fulfill both his dreams early in life.
Yae’s dream was to go beyond her little world, to study overseas, to travel as a flight attendant, to imagine herself unbounded in space on the Mars Orbiter. Achieving all these took a backseat, and may even have seemed impossible as she began to lose one thing after another.
The failure of the Mars Orbiter which ended up lost in space, was a sign of how her trajectory would go. Her accident took away her chance to have the student exchange with the Canadian University. It brought her into the doctor’s orbit so that she married early instead of going for her dream job.
Her next dream was to be with those she loved: to have a happy marriage and her son close by her, but this dream sadly ended, so that Yae was left alone, drifting like the Mars Orbiter.
I like that at her lowest point, after Tsuzuru left with his dad and just before Yae’s last day of work in the airport in-flight services, she decides to at least enjoy the semblance of having fulfilled her first dream. I loved that she dressed up beautifully as a flight attendant in ‘dazzling blue’ (lol), put on that lipstick deliberately, and walked confidently all the way through the busy airport.
What a contrast to when she was the cleaning lady at the same airport. Where before no one had noticed her except to give her trash to throw away, now she turned the heads of several men who looked after her appreciatively. It was so nice to see her smile, knowing that she was being admired (and even respected as one with a high profile job).
Perhaps when Yae changed out of her costume into her dull work clothes, and wiped off her lipstick, she felt that she was saying goodbye to her dream. But the fact that despite being beaten down by circumstances, she had taken the opportunity to enjoy a brief stint as an attractive flight attendant, indicated that Yae’s spirit was never totally lost.
Years later, she admits to Uta that she had let inertia set in so that she accomplished nothing. But Uta reminds her in Episode 9, that all she needed was a little push to break the inertia, maybe in the desire to achieve a dream or in the person of a beloved.
Uta : “Applying a force on this so-called immoveable object are your big dreams, some curiosity, or the existence of someone you love. So how about that? … All these seemingly hopeless old desires that spring from your heart can sometimes move boulders! It’s a really famous law.”
In the end it really was the dream to be with someone she loved, that breaks Yae’s inertia. I love that in the process of pursuing this dream, she fulfills her first dream to fly.
It’s good that while HN let go where his dream love was concerned, he continued to fulfill his second best dream as a pilot. In the roundabout of life, he had to stay still, so that Yae could find him, and make his first dream come true.
Making Memories
Young HN and Yae had made memories in the snow, laughing at the story of the forgetful squirrels who lost the nuts that they had hidden away. They had placed their memories in safe-keeping in a time capsule under a Lilac tree. Ironically, Yae would be like a squirrel who would forget the time capsule for some 17 years.
Having learnt the importance of expressing feelings before it’s too late, (from kind Outaro Urabe), adult Yae drives Tsuzuru (at dangerous speed!) to the airport so that he can say goodbye to Uta and tell her how he feels about her. The OST chosen is ‘Such Great Heights’ which as usual is right for the scene and can apply to both Uta and Tsuzuru, and to Yae and HN.
In the same way, Yae later takes Outaro’s lesson to heart when during their farewell, she confesses to HN that she had liked him a lot since the beginning.
Their respective farewells were bittersweet memories for Tsuzuru and Yae, but because they had confessed their love, they were more sweet than bitter in the long-run.
The lyrics of ‘Such Great Heights’ recall that Yae had begun her Voiceover speaking about life being like a jigsaw puzzle and wondering if people who drifted away were important puzzle pieces of her life. The song goes on to say that certain people were made to fit together, and that’s what turns out to be the case for HN and Yae, even after 20 years.
Such Great Heights (by The Postal Service)
I am thinking it’s a sign
That the freckles in our eyes
Are mirror images
And when we kiss they’re perfectly aligned
And I have to speculate
That God Himself did make
Us into corresponding shapes
Like puzzle pieces from the clay
And true it may seem like a stretch
But it’s thoughts like this that catch
My troubled head when you’re away
And when I am missing you to death
And when you are out there on the road
For several weeks of shows
And when you scan the radio
I hope this song will guide you home
They will see us waving from such great heights
Come down now, they’ll say
But everything looks perfect from far away
Come down now but we’ll stay
I tried my best to leave
This all on your machine
But the persistent beat
It sounded thin upon the sending
And that frankly will not fly
You’ll hear the shrillest highs
And lowest lows with the windows down
And this is guiding you home
They will see us waving from such great heights
Come down now they’ll say
But everything looks perfect from far away
Come down now but we’ll stay
They will see us waving from such great heights
Come down now they’ll say
But everything looks perfect from far away
Come down now but we’ll stay
They will see us waving from such great heights
(Come down now)
(Lyrics from https://www.google.com/search?q=lyrics+postal+service+such+great+heights&oq=lyrics+postal+service+such+great+heights&aqs=chrome..69i57.8465j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)
After they reunite, we really do see HN and Yae literally taking on great heights on the plane together. Best of all, we get to see lovely scenes of Yae and HN having fun as a couple, making up for lost time, once again making memories in the snow.
Epilogue: several minutes into the closing credits, (timestamp 1:01:30) we suddenly are gifted with a scene of Yae and HN at work in Husavik Airport. There’s time and space for them to step aside for quick kisses, before they continue in their dream jobs, broad smiles on their faces.
Now that’s what I call a satisfyingly happy ending, and the making of great memories in my drama-watching.
Thank you for this thread. I am really enjoying this show. And may not have restarted it without these postings, because the first time I watched the first episode, I found it difficult to orient myself to the show.
Another thought
I was unfamiliar with the idea of the gods view. The aerial view of what I call a scramble intersection where everybody crosses at the same time and all the cars stop is another expression of the experience of the characters and the audience. Controlled mayhem on the ground not the flight into their dreams.
Hi @Monmor, how many episodes have you watched? I’m glad you’re enjoying it. I really like the soundtrack and the interesting camera-work.
I can’t tell you exactly where I am in this show because I was falling asleep last night when I was watching it. Somewhere between episode two and three.
HAVE YOU WATCHED THE JDORAMA “Silent”. I really enjoyed it.
So much music on this original soundtrack. I look forward to listening to it. It can be frustrating sometimes that background music is not part of the o s t although I can understand why it is not. Perhaps there will be more than just the obvious soundtrack in this o s t?
I am listening to the soundtrack and having a wow experience. I will need to watch the show on my television with my headphones to get the full Enjoyment.
@Monmor, yes I’ve watched Silent and commented a lot on the BOD thread there as well. I still prefer ‘First Love’ to ‘Silent’ though.
@Monmor, I downloaded the OSTs and play them now and then. Although they are a mish-mash of songs from different artistes, they somehow go well with the scenes and the story.
Such a lovely drama! High on my rewatch list.
I watched Lost recently after avoiding it for awhile because I knew it was a depressing theme. The 2 main actors were revelations for me with the quality of their acting and have led me to other dramas they have been in.
I am commenting here though because this was another drama where the images from the main theme song -Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah- fit so well with the story. I am sure some of the scenes were designed to match parts of the song. I wonder now if I have missed this in other dramas because I have not been as familiar with the music.
@monmor, in the case of First Love: Hatsukoi, the plot and the drama actually is taken from the song “First Love” by the well known Japanese singer, Utada Hikaru, that’s why that particular song fits. At the same time, even the English/Icelandic songs and of course those specially written other melodies really fit the images of the mother and child, the cars going around in circles. 🙂