Watashi no Hatsukoi Aite ga Kiss shiteta
My First Love's Kiss

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I just finished My First Love’s Kiss by Iruma and I still can’t get over it. It’s one of those books that doesn’t comfort you but strikes you, and it does so from the very beginning: the prologue is shocking, a girl just beaten, maybe by a parent. In a few lines you realize you’re no longer in the suspended and gentle world of Adachi and Shimamura, but in its negative, the same universe seen from the other side of the glass — with characters from both stories even making brief cameos that tie them together.

The main character, Hoshi, is forced to live with Umi, ... the daughter of her mother’s friend. At first it’s all awkward silences and irritation, but Hoshi can’t stop watching her: too composed, too distant, and disappearing at night for reasons she won’t explain. Most of the time we see things through Hoshi’s eyes, but at certain points Umi’s voice takes over — just like in Adachi and Shimamura — and suddenly the picture breaks. Her elegance turns out to be a shield, her distance a defense, and behind it lies something much darker.

The tone shifts dramatically whenever the woman in the kimono appears. On the surface she’s kind, warm, almost maternal, but every smile carries an undertone that makes you uneasy. She’s the real gravitational center of the story, a yandere-like figure who binds Umi to her with sweetness that slowly reveals itself as control and obsession. More than once I felt that she was the true protagonist, with Hoshi and Umi caught in her orbit.

The yuri element here is raw and unsettling. Hoshi’s feelings for Umi grow slowly, full of jealousy, fear and longing, while Umi is already trapped in a relationship that’s everything but pure. That contrast — innocent love on one side, toxic dependence on the other — gives the novel a unique weight. And just when you think it can’t get any heavier, a hidden truth surfaces that makes the whole relationship even more disturbing. It’s the kind of twist that forces you to rethink every scene before it.

If Adachi and Shimamura was about two souls destined to meet again and again, My First Love’s Kiss is about two souls who, no matter what they do, can never truly meet. It’s cruel, melancholic, and honest. I closed the last page with a knot in my throat and the certainty that I wouldn’t forget it anytime soon.