First Love – the _

[2969] First Love as unfulfilled human potential

First Love is a sad story, with an unsatisfying happy ending. Over the past few weeks, I have slowly rationalized the sadness—why did I feel so sad?—by linking two disappointments together. One disappointment is about unfulfilled love, and the other, which is our focus today, is unfulfilled human potential.

While watching the series in the first week of December, I felt sad quite early, well before I understood how First Love was about unfulfilled love (ignore the title and the song it refers to, as both foretell the story ahead of its narrative arch by too much). I knew the cause of my sadness quickly: both lovers, after growing up dreaming of achieving something great, ended up becoming a building security personnel and a cab driver. They became failures.

Both jobs are unglamorous. The two would not rank highly in things most young men and women would like to do during their mid-life years in any economy.

In the series, there is a subplot where one cab driver laments about the direction of his life. In telling the story of adult Yae Noguchi somewhere in the middle of the series, we are told that she has fallen on hard time: unable to finish university due to an accident, married early, divorced and then forced to give up her son due to relative poverty.

As the series progresses and jumping around the timelines, the sadness intensifies, because… well spoiler if you have not watched me… both of them worked hard to get into a good school. In some ways, those are underemployment, a reality for many.

p/s — happy new year. Speaking of potential, I have further thoughts on output gap and BNM rate hikes. Maybe I will post them just before Thursday, the rate decision day.

[2967] Replaying First Love, over and over again

Do you remember, a time before the new millennium, before the internet was a real thing, when a movie or a series you were watching that you liked very much, were coming to an end, and you wished it had not? Its end created a feeling of loss inside of you that could only be filled up with a replay. Yet, there was no chance for that, because it was on TV, or playing at the cinema, or it was on a rental tape you must return today.

If you were lucky, you would own the tape and replay it to your heart’s content. I remember moments when I had it and kept replaying a particular scene or two. I had Disney’s Aladdin, and became an expert at rewinding em to almost the exact time when A Whole New World would start. When I was even younger, I had a Walkman filled up with Sesame Street’s songs, that I kept shooting for C is for Cookie a hundred times or more.

I have been going through that feeling again recently after watching the final episode of First Love, a short Japanese series inspired by Utada Hikaru’s song of the same title. That song was widely circulated via illegal mp3 (was there ever a legal mp3?) among adopters of the 1990s internet, downloaded maybe from Kaaza, or mIRC, or Napster, or from some random server in wild wild web.

The series is full of beautiful shots, and moments, but the one I have been returning over and over again, thanks to Netflix, is the final scene of Episode 8. Spoiler here (a big one indeed), but it is the scene where Yae Noguchi, a victim of memory loss, finally remembers Harumichi Namiki’s significance in her life, and tears up. Her sudden recollection is triggered by a song of their first kiss from two decades ago in the late 1990s.

All the best threads of the series end at that particular scene, which, I think, can move the hearts of stone.

Episode 8, The Proust Effect On A Certain Afternoon, is not the final part, but I think it should have. The final episode tries to create an and-they-live-happily-ever-after ending, but I feel it is an afterthought. As somebody said to me, most first loves, ends sadly. That makes Episode 8 all the more powerful, and closer to reality.

So, I pretend Episode 9 does not exist.

p/s — the guy is from Samurai-X!