The main protagonist, a male high school student with pink hair, calls his cram school teacher "a weird adult." It is uncalled for. There is barely anything different about her as she criss-crosses life and, in fact, does her best to be as middle-of-the-road as possible. She is 33, teaching at a cram school while living with her parents, hanging out with her friends and doing her best to turn away any and all situations that are not considered normal and conventional by her parents, friends or work.
Not weird at all.
Cram schools are notoriously popular for high school students in Japan. Top cram schools are impossible to get into and cost an arm and a leg too. There are many more applicants for top universities in Japan than there are spots and so it is not unusual to attend such preparatory institutions both weeknights and weekends for the more ambitious students. By now, A Story To Read When You First Fall In Love sounds like it could be a cross between Flying Colours, Meet Me After School/Chuggakuei Nikki (both featuring Arimura Kasumi) and Gokusen and you would be correct were you to think so.
Where the events take a turn for more thought-provoking and irregular is the potential for romance emanating from three men in the teacher's life. In the course of ten episodes the 33-year-old Harumi Junko (played by a 37-year-old Fukada Kyoko known for the fabulous Shimotsuma Monogatarai and the depressing Dolls) takes on the mission of teaching the cool-ish 17-year-old urchin Kyohei Yuri (played by the 23-year-old Yokohama Ryusei) in order to get him admitted to the elite Tokyo University. He falls in love with her and is adamant. Complicating matters is how she is being pursued by her cousin and former school-mate and another class-mate from the old days. This is where the serial shines. The story makes no apologies for the unconventional relationships and, aside from Junko's own trepidations, family and friends are by and large supportive and well-wishing. It is nice to see. Who needs another mainstream same-old same-old just because you, I or the majority may act haughty? In any event, at different paces and in different manners the old friend, the cousin and the student pursue Junko as she painstakingly slowly comes to grips with the reality of being coveted. Worth noting: Junko is walking around all day wondering why she cannot find a man. Also worth noting: she has no sensual bone in her body. See the cover and her legs? Strictly limited to the DVD cover and poster.
Trouble starts, and the episodes lose points, owing to the male actors and female characters. Two of the lead actresses Fukada and Takanashi Rin (she of the enigmatic Like Someone In Love) are difficult to imagine as lonely spinsters hopeless in love and desperately trying to not remain single. Tastes and opinions vary of course, but casting sex symbols as lonely old maids praying to the Shinto gods for a man to spare them a glance is just bizarre. That is the weird part one supposes! Then again viewers saw the exact same situations in Kekkon Aite Wa Chusen De featuring Takanashi and Damena Watashi Ni Koishite Kudasai featuring Fukada recently among others. 2017's Tôkyô Tarareba Musume and 2016's Hapimari followed the same trajectory. What is up with these casting choices? They seem to be normalized on Japanese large and small screens. On the male character front, the jarring age unbelievability aside, Masashi (played by Nagayama Kento) was barely believable as a hard-nosed and successful businessman and negotiator - after all he could not profess his love to a woman for 20 years - while Yamashita (played by Nakamura Tomoya) somehow went from a low-level crappy school teacher-cum-former ne'er-do-well to a three-piece suit on the fast track to electoral success. Blinking was a mistake presumably. Finally, and this is a pet peeve, like many many other Japanese series and movies of more recent years characters run into one another at astronomically astonishing rates. This is lazy writing and annoying and happens all the time and all over the place and this particular story being based on a manga does nothing to explain this recurrence. Either that or this Japan place is the size of a village and the fifty people who live there cannot help, but run into everybody else consistently.
She does choose one of the love interests at the end. Which one? You would either have to watch the series or fast forward to the end of the final episode.
