【Worth watching at least once】:2025 Japanese film “1st Kiss”, The Time-Traveling Romance
Welcome to the deep dive. Today we are launching uh head first into the extraordinary career of one of the most successful, most decorated directors in contemporary Japanese cinema, Aayukot Sukahara. Mhm. But our mission isn’t just, you know, to catalog her hits. We’re using her recent, highly anticipated collaboration as a kind of starting gun to map out the entire well the philosophical and aesthetic battlefield of modern Japanese film. That’s absolutely right because when you look at the sources we’ve gathered, articles on Sukahara, these deep theoretical dives into cinematic light, critical analysis of genres, they consistently reveal these two powerful and yeah, often antagonistic artistic traditions in modern Japanese filmm. Okay. Like what? Well, you have the tradition of humane realism, right? Represented by figures like Hiroazu Kada. And then you’ve got the opposing aesthetic tradition defined more by the sensory uh light obsessed style of someone like Shinji. Then Sukahar fits in. How? Well, Sukahar’s success, frankly, it proved she can operate in both universes, which makes her the perfect subject really for this deep dive. Okay, let’s unpack this director first, though, because her origin story is fantastic. Auko Tukahara is, yeah, a serious force of nature. She hails from Saitama Prefixure, and she’s affiliated with TBS Sparkle. That’s been her professional home since 97 back when it was still Kinoshida Productions. And what’s truly fascinating, like you said, is her start. She didn’t train as a director, not formally. She graduated from Chiba University with a bachelor of arts in literature. And she actually recounts how when she was job hunting, she saw an opening for a screenwriter position at this company. Her first thought was, well, literature degree, screenwriting seems like a natural fit. She thought she was applying to write dramas. That’s brilliant. The best kind of career misdirection. Applies to be a writer, ends up starting as an assistant director and advision series. Yeah. And her main duties for the first what decade, they were intensely practical, logistical, like the real grind, the trenches, finding the perfect locations, making sure the character settings were detailed, accurate, basically handling all the, you know, organizational chores that keep a set running. That’s 10 years spent right there. And that practical background, I I think it’s key. It gives her directing work this certain grounded realism, this logistical efficiency you can feel. Definitely. It wasn’t until 2005 that she made the decisive shift. You know, declared she wanted to work primarily as a director and she made her debut with the TV series Yimushu. And when she started directing, she just didn’t slow down. She’s become synonymous with some of the biggest, most critically acclaimed television dramas, which in Japan, that’s a massive part of the industry’s creative output, isn’t it? Oh, huge. Absolutely huge. The shows that really brought her global recognition. Yeah. Well, there’s the medical mystery Unnatural, the uh highly competitive restaurant drama Lron Mesa on Tokyo. Great show, and the hugely popular police procedural MIU 404. And the recognition followed that success naturally. She didn’t just win popular acclaim. She won serious critical awards. She earned the Galaxy Award for Excellence in Television for Unnatural. Impressive. Then crucially, she received the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technologies Art Encouragement Award in 2021 for MIU 404. I mean, that’s a massive endorsement from the establishment. Yeah. And just this year, 2024, she also secured a best director at the 49th Hochi Film Awards for her film Last Mile. So, she’s really not just a TV director who dabbles in film. She’s a powerhouse, adaptable across mediums, winning the highest accolades in both. And she’s doing it by mastering these incredibly complex high production value genre pieces. Exactly. Her adaptability is why she’s so central to this discussion right now. While her debut film was Cafe Ficoli Ficula back in 2018, she’s been incredibly focused on cinema recently releasing projects like the fantasy romance as long as we both shall live in 2023. The award-winning Last Mile just this year 2024. And the movie version of the TV series Lron Maison Paris also 2024. busy year, but the collaboration that has the industry absolutely buzzing. Yeah, that’s First Kiss, right? Scheduled for release in 2025. It’s the one. And this project is being hyped. I mean, really hyped in our sources as the ultimate collaboration between two of the most popular creators today. And the other half of that equation, that’s the screenwriter, Yui Sakamoto. Sakamoto is, well, without question, a cinematic titan right now. His presence alone elevates this project into absolute mustwatch territory. You just have to look at his recent track record. His original screenplay for We Made a Beautiful Bouquet in 2021. That was a cultural phenomenon. Huge hit. Huge. Grossed 3.8 billion yen. Capture that universal angst and tenderness of modern urban romance. It was commercially massive, but also just deeply emotional. Yeah, it really resonated. And if that cemented his commercial status, then monster in 2023, well, that cemented his critical global status. That screenplay directed by Hiro Kazu Coretta, no less, won the prestigious best screenplay award at the Can Film Festival. That was like unprecedented, wasn’t it? First time a Japanese film had won that specific screenwriting recognition, placed him firmly in the global cinematic elite. So, okay, you combine a director like Sukahara, who’s proving she can handle massive scope and win major directing awards, with a writer like Sakamoto, who’s mastered both blockbuster emotional resonance and award-winning critical drama. The expectations for First Kiss are well, they’re monumental. Absolutely. Which brings us to the plot because the story they’ve crafted is what really allows us to look at these two competing aesthetics of Japanese cinema. Okay, so listener, we do have to give you a quick spoiler warning here. We are going into the core mechanics of the film based on the press notes we reviewed. Just a heads up. Right. So the premise centers on Kanuzuri played by the phenomenal actress Takcomatsu. She suffers its enormous personal tragedy when her husband Kakaru played by Hokuto Matsumura dies in a devastating accident. He was hit by a train trying to rescue a child. Oh wow. Heavy start. But the setup is layered with regret, isn’t it? The sources emphasize that their 15-year marriage was well fundamentally broken. Yeah, in a slump. They slept in separate bedrooms, actively headed toward divorce. So, initially, Kana feels this almost perverse sense of freedom. Starts enjoying her second life, free of that marital stagnation until until the narrative catalyst arrives. Kana is involved in a separate massive highway accident. But instead of dying or just waking up in a hospital, she finds herself transported back in time. Wo! wakes up at the very hotel where she first met the younger Kakaroo 15 years prior. Okay, that’s the moment of reversal. Seeing him young, unburdened, remembering the love they once had, Kana is flooded with realization she truly loved him. And crucially, she knows his precise fate in 15 years. So, her immediate desperate mission is to save him. She begins repeatedly trying to change the past, actively engaging in narrative action, you know, trying to alter the plot of their life. But the real philosophical punch comes later, right? Exactly. It comes when Kakaroo discovers the truth about her time travel, about his impending death, and instead of reacting, well, typically, which would be panic, or trying to figure out how to physically avoid the train in the future, does something else. He chooses not to avoid death, he accepts his finite timeline. Instead, his focus shifts entirely, fundamentally, to changing how he lives his remaining days with Kana. Wow. Okay. So, this is where the plot structure really meets the cinematic philosophy we were talking about. Precisely the film’s core question stated right there in the source material is what is a life with the one you love. Kana is focused on the action, the sequence of events changing the outcome. Kaguru is focused on the quality, the effective state, the feeling of every remaining moment. And that dichotomy right there, that’s the split. That’s the tension between the realist tradition and the aesthetic tradition we’re about to explore. Okay. So to fully appreciate Kakaru’s choice that focus on the quality of life over the you know the sheer length of it we need to establish this tradition of humane realism first epitomized today by Hiroazu Coretta and the genre of shaman giki. Exactly. Let’s nail down shanaki. Literally it translates to common people drama but cinematically it’s a genre really characteristic of Japanese film that chooses to prioritize finding these small yet significant moments in daily life. Right? It deliberately avoids intense dramatic conflict, massive action set pieces, or like big plot shockers. It’s a cinema of observation. And that is such a powerful distinction. Our sources note how this contrasts sharply with, say, contemporary Korean cinema, which often relies on shocking plot twists, intense violence, highstakes revenge narratives. Courageous films feel different. They’re soft, serene, almost domestic. They achieve enormous emotional weight not through sudden action but through the accumulation of poignant details gently waiting for the right moment to reveal deep often unspoken feelings. He is undeniably the heir to Yasuju Ozu isn’t he? Ozu was the definitive master of Shmani. He really set the technical standard. Absolutely. Think about Ozu’s famous Norico trilogy, Lakes Spring, Early Summer, Tokyo Story, all centered on family relationships, duty, aging, often using that same trusted ensemble cast like Setsuko Har and Chishiru. And this is where we need to get into the technical elements of this realism, right? Because Ozu didn’t just tell stories about ordinary people. He invented the way of seeing ordinary people. His camera technique is crucial. Yes, the tatami shot. Placing the camera extremely low, usually about 3 feet off the ground, it mimics the eye level of a person seated on a tatami mat. And that low angle immediately makes you, the audience, feel like you’re inside the scene, seated with the family, rather than looking down on them. It forces a kind of intimacy. Exactly. And the camera, it rarely moves. It’s often fixed. This deliberate lack of cinematic dynamism forces the audience to slow down, to observe the tiny physical gestures, the slight shifts in expression, the often uncomfortable silences that fill real domestic life. The drama isn’t external. It’s all contained within the frame within those subtle performances. And Ca inherits this method. He uses minimal music, long takes, patient observation. That’s how he builds his humane realism. We see this subtle humanism playing out beautifully in his family dramas where the emotional battlefield is always well domestic. The drama is held captive in the living room or around a shared meal. Think about Still Walking from 2008. The entire film narrates the family’s lingering grief around the death of the eldest son years earlier. And the pain is amplified by this tragic irony. Yeah. promising son the doctor to be died saving a child who grew up to be in the family’s bitter assessment aimless and lazy and that tension that unspoken regret the masterclass is how created captures it all in just a mundane dinner table conversation a slow simmering thing or uh after the storm from 2017 magnificent film the cracks in this small divorced family are exposed when a typhoon forces them to shelter together overnight the mother played by the brilliant Kieran and Kiki. She tries to fix her son’s relationship with his ex-wife and their daughter, but she’s essentially powerless against his flaws. Which leads to the profound philosophical heart of the film where she articulates the core anxiety of Shamgiki, this fear of not being content with reality. She tells her son, it’s a quote that really resonates beyond the scene. What does she say? She says, “I often wonder why men can’t be content with what they have. They either endlessly pursue the shadows of what they’ve lost or hold on to an elusive dream. How can you enjoy life with a mindset like that? Wow, that quote perfectly encapsulates the goal of this tradition, doesn’t it? Finding deep, profound truth and accepting the reality of the small life you have, rejecting the allure of dramatic, elusive fantasy. But Kurida applies this humane realism even when tackling really dark societal topics. He’s known as a master of these dark society films addressing issues like child neglect, abandonment, systemic poverty. And this is crucial for you, the listener, to understand, even when his films touch on shocking social subjects like the abandoned children in Nobody Knows or the illegal activities in poverty and shoplifterss. He never sensationalizes the shock. No, he quietly seeks the deep sociological reasons why these characters act as they do, why the family structure is so fragile. Yeah, western critics have rightly labeled him a director of humane realist drama because the humanity always outweighs the plot mechanics. He consistently shines a light on the marginalized, focusing on the victims of instability. Despite Japan’s outward image of prosperity, Cored’s cinema reveals the fragility beneath the surface with children often bearing the brunt of modern familial instability. We see it in Nobody Knows, Shoplifters, Broker, even Monster. And his commitment to this unvarnished truth extends right to his endings. He’s rejected that western expectation for, you know, neat character arcs and redemption. He actually stated, “Many viewers want to see characters mature and strengthen, but I don’t want to make those kinds of films. They’re false.” He refuses the cinematic lie of false hope. Yeah. You feel that refusal? Yeah. And we see the devastating consequences of that honesty in his visual choices. Think about the ending of nobody knows. Oh, brutal. where the eldest brother, isolated and broken, is forced to dispose of his youngest sister’s body by stuffing it into a suitcase and burying it outside. Or the grim practical necessity and shoplifterss. The grandmother dies and the family has to bury her beneath the floorboards of their shabby home simply because they cannot afford illegal burial or risk reporting her death. Those are unromantic, visually devastating moments that just anchor the film in reality. The drama isn’t about what happened, but the painful necessity of how they respond to profound loss. That is the Kareah lineage. A commitment to the painful truth of action and consequence in the small real world. Okay, now let’s execute the pivot. We are moving from the cinema of profound truth and observation to a cinema of pure sensory experience of visual poetry, the aesthetic tradition championed by Shinji. Right. So Coretta is seeking profound truth in the ordinary, rejecting anything that smells like fantasy. But UI, our next subject, he seems to be chasing something completely different, like a total visual dream state. Why did he feel the need to reject the established tradition, the Uzu Coretta path, so completely? Well, I Wai came of age professionally during a really challenging period for Japanese cinema back in the 80s and 90s. And he specifically criticized what he saw as the established directors being too obsessed with the representation of Japanese identity. H interesting critique. He felt this obsession, this constant need to prove Japaneseeness was creating this artistic barrier that hindered international appeal and maybe more importantly for him alienated younger domestic audiences who wanted something more modern, something less constrained by tradition. And that tradition he’s reacting against is what you call the aesthetics of shadow or kinobigaku. Precisely that tradition heavily influenced by Junichiro Tanazaki’s seminal 1933 essay in praise of shadows. It champions subdued light muted colors the beauty found in darkness. It was a very conscious aesthetic choice to distinguish Japanese filmm from the bright direct often kind of garish lighting of western Hollywood films. So I in response became a revolutionary was the term. Aizaka. Aizaka. Yeah. Often translated as a visual artist or film expressionist rather than just a plot director. His rebellion was to totally invert the aesthetics of shadow by championing the saturation of light. A distinctive visual style known as the ey aesthetics. And the primary technical tool for this revolution was contraure. Backlighting. Backlighting. He refined this distinctive visual language over a decade with his cinematographer Noru Shinoda, creating these intensely bright, ethereal, often overexposed images that instantly separate his work. Okay, so here’s where the technical dive gets necessary, but let’s go slow. When we discussed Coreya, light was a tool for realism. Warm light for comfort, shadows for mystery, that sort of thing. You’re saying EY uses backlighting as an anti-narrative force, prioritizing visual sensation over plot. How does light actually stop us from thinking about the story? Okay, that takes us into the philosophy of Jill Doo and his work logic of sensation. To really get ey, we have to distinguish between figuration and sensation. Figuration, as Doo uses it, is when we watch a film and we’re constantly connecting the dots. Okay, this character did this, which causes that event, which means the plot moves. Here we are basically narrating the film to ourselves, interpreting everything. We’re seeing the visual elements as merely illustrative of the story. Correct. But Ewi, and this is his radical genius, wants to break that intellectual chain. He wants you, the audience, to stop interpreting and start experiencing. Sensation in this delusian context is defined as a block of sensations. A pure compound of percepts and effects that hits you viscerally immediately independently of your interpretation of the plot. You feel it, you don’t rationalize it. And Ei actually articulated this himself, didn’t he? He said that introducing intense movement like a dizzying sequence of dancing or running or a character physically reeling stops us from thinking. And by thinking, he means following the narrative logic. Yes. and backlighting becomes the key mechanism to achieve this sensory state. The primary effect of strong backlighting is isolation. Our sources emphasize that isolation is the most effective way for a visual artist to break with representation to disrupt narration to escape illustration to liberate the figure to stick to the fact. So if the figure is isolated by light, we are no longer watching a character in a scene. We are watching the character as a scene. Is that right? Precisely. Look at those iconic Iwa shots. Itsuki Fuji reading alone in the library in Love Letter surrounded by that light pouring in behind her or Alice doing her beautiful lonely ballet dance in Hana and Alice. The backlighting creates this bright sharp contour of light that physically separates the figure from the background. Right? That figure is now liberated from the need to advance the plot. It becomes an event site of pure movement and aesthetic intensity. And these figures themselves, the protagonists of Ewa’s films, they’re often defined by their passivity or awkwardness, aren’t they? Which further pushes them away from being active narrative drivers. They share common traits. Yeah. Itsuki, Fuji, Nurano, Usuzuki, Hasumi. They are often passive, rarely communicating clearly, sometimes almost pathetically incapable of navigating the adult world. They inhabit this transitional stage, a zone of iniccernability, which you called sayun, adolescence, which is inherently rebellious and highly sentimental. In this context, they are not defined by what they do in society, but by their feeling about society. They’re emotionally intense, but physically constrained, which makes them the perfect material for a cinema of pure sensation rather than a cinema of action. Exactly. So now we move from the concept of sensation to how EY makes the invisible forces acting on these isolated figures visible on screen. Doo calls this the action image where the use of light in space moves beyond just description and becomes purely effective. Okay, let’s go deeper into the space itself. That backlighting transforms a physical location, a school corridor, a library, a grassy field into what you called an any space whatever. Explain that again. Right. in any space whatever is a theoretical term for an effective space. It stops being a specific recognizable location in the narrative like the school where the bullying happens and becomes this non-specific pure locus of possibility. It’s defined only by the affect or the quality it expresses outside of concrete time and geography. And we can break this effective space down based on how the backlighting is deployed. First, there’s the rim light space. This is where the light source, typically a window, illuminates the subject at an angle, creating that halo effect, a soft glow around the hair and shoulders. Right? You see that a lot. And the halo effect of rim lighting often serves to beautifully elevate the often awkward or pathetic adolescent figure. Take Nero in April’s story, awkwardly introducing herself at the university gathering. The rim light gives her this quality and almost sacred glow. This transforms the face into what the theory calls a feeling thing or a dividual. Wait, individual? Can you break that down simply? What does that mean? Okay, the term dividual is used here to signify a figure who unites a kind of collective reflection with an individual emotion. Think of that scene in April Story. Urino is awkward, yes, but the beauty of the light makes her feel representative of all youthful veridity or maybe romantic stupidity. Oh yeah. The individual face bathed in that light expresses a universal pure quality of adolescence that we all recognize somehow. It transcends Narina’s specific plot point. Got it. It moves from this is Nero to this is the feeling of that moment in youth. Okay. Then we have the second type, the kiro space created by strong direct high contrast backlighting. This light configuration is much harsher. It dissolves the figure, often making faces indistinguishable, turning them into pure silhouettes, just a duality of light and shadow. We see this in the flashback scene in Love Letter. When the boy checks out the library cards, the figure becomes less important than the contrast itself. Right? And when figures become pure contrast like that, they function as a diagram, a germ of rhythm. They reject figurative realistic reading and instead they express pure potentiality. Pure potentiality like the energy of what could happen. So in that library scene, it expresses the latent tragedy or the unrequited love inherent in that silent backlit moment. The director is capturing not the action but the powerful energy of the internal emotional state. Absolutely. Now we apply this to the action image, the millu and the binomial. The millu is the situation, the determined geographical historical spaceime. In Eway’s darker works like all About Lily Chochow, the Millu is the grim reality of postbubble economy Japan. Crushing poverty, constant bullying, family trauma. These problems are synthesized as powerful invisible forces acting on the characters. And the binomial is the character’s response. It’s the duel of forces, the internal battle against that oppressive millu. But since we’re operating in a cinema of sensation, not realism, you can’t just show this fight with plot points. You have to show the invisible force made visible through light and movement. Exactly. Let’s look at the two key forces EY actualizes this way. First, the force of dissipation. This is the figure’s desire to fade away, to return to the field, to dissolve into the environment as a response to an overwhelming millio. Okay, that sounds intensely abstract, but the visual example you mentioned is stunning. It is. We see this most dramatically in Suda suicide sequence in All About Lily Chowo. After enduring immense emotional and physical trauma, she stands silhouetted against this massive stark industrial pylon. Ewa uses backlighting deliberately here to create what our sources call an enormous ring of light right at the vanishing point of the image. So the figure is completely isolated but also simultaneously pulled toward that bright structure. Yes. The light causes the figure to pass through that contour dissipating into the bright sharp structure of the pylon. The shot itself is the binomial. It physically actualizes her final action, the force of dissipation. And it’s coupled perfectly with the sudden, jarring switch to rock music. And her last words, her last spoken words, I want to ride on a kite. I want to fly through the sky, describe this very desire to dissolve her physical form. It’s not just a character dying. It’s a body being consumed by light actualizing an internal force. That is, yeah, a profound translation of trauma into physical aesthetics. The other key force you mentioned is the force of defamation. This is the force that turns the body into a body without organs where form is contingent and unstable, a pure figure of sensation enduring intense pressure. The classic example comes from Picnic. The protagonist Sattoru is escaping the mental hospital. His spasmotic fall from the wall. The physical trauma combined with the hysteria of his escape is captured in an extreme backlit closeup of his face and body. Tell us what we see there. How does the light make the force visible? Well, the strong direct backlighting illuminates the sheer violence of his physical movement, the contractions, the elongations, the spasms of his body. The light flattens the form, but highlights the movement of this intense effective athleticism. It’s not just a fall. It’s a moment of pure hysteria reacting against the oppressive millu of the mental institution and the outside world. So, the light makes that intensive force visible. Exactly. It captures the moment where the character’s physical body is temporarily dissolved into pure raw kinetic sensation. So in EY’s hands, backlighting is far more than just a stylistic flourish. It’s a precise theoretical mechanism used to translate internal invisible effective responses, trauma, despair, desire into external visible material forces captured right there on screen. It’s cinema as pure visual philosophy. So we have spent this deep dive defining two vastly different yet equally powerful approaches to modern Japanese filmm. On one side we explored the humane realist drama of Cory eta the true heir to ozu focused on the morality the structure and the painful often unromantic truth of the showki family unit. The emphasis is on truth found in observation and consequence. Right. And on the other, we navigated the aesthetics of sensation of UI, the visual artist, the Isosaka, who uses light and composition as anti-narrative tools, capturing pure effect, isolation, invisible forces, often focus on that vulnerable adolescent figure. The emphasis there is on immediate sensory experience. And Sukahara’s entire career trajectory, her ability to execute these highstakes genre blockbusters while winning awards for deep dramatic nuance shows she can navigate both traditions flawlessly. She gets both worlds, which makes her collaboration on First Kiss with Yuji Sakamoto perhaps the most significant fusion yet, precisely because it sets these two aesthetics in direct philosophical conflict within the story itself. Exactly. We return to that powerful central dilemma in First Kiss. Kana, the wife, is trying to change the past. She’s trying to enforce a new desired plotline that is traditional narrative action. Mhm. The Coretta impulse maybe change the outcome. You could say that. But Kakaru, knowing his fate, chooses instead to change how he lives the remaining 15 years, focusing entirely on the pure aesthetic quality, the savoring of the moment, the sensation of his love, regardless of the plot’s tragic end. That’s the EY impulse. Live in the feeling, the light. In a film that uses time travel, the ultimate plot device, as its central mechanism, the director and writer are implicitly asking you, the viewer, to decide where true value lies. Is it in the action image, the attempt to change the physical chronological outcome? Or is it in the affection image, the savoring and elevating of the moment, the pure quality of sensation? So this knowledge of these powerful cinematic forces, it gives you a whole new lens really through which to watch not just first kiss when it releases, but every piece of contemporary Japanese drama you consume from now on. Absolutely. The next time you watch a film, don’t just ask what the characters are doing in the story. Ask yourself instead, is the director building narrative tension through observation and consequence, or are they dissolving the figure in light to capture pure unthinking sensation? It changes how you connect with the screen, doesn’t it? Gives you the key to understanding the deeper forces at play. [Music]
Penwise’s sources collectively provide a comprehensive overview of the 2025 Japanese film “1st Kiss,” detailing its creative team, plot, and reception. The movie is a time-travel romance/fantasy about a wife, Kanna (played by Takako Matsu), who loses her estranged husband, Kakeru (played by Hokuto Matsumura), in an accident and travels back 15 years to the day they met to save him. Key collaborators include acclaimed screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto, known for films like Monster, and award-winning director Ayuko Tsukahara. Reviews praise the film for its balance of emotional depth and humor, its focus on the significance of everyday love, and its decision to skip overly complex science fiction explanations, trusting the audience’s familiarity with the time-travel genre. Additionally, Box Office Mojo confirms the film’s international box office success following its February 2025 release in Japan.