First love, or hatsukoi, is a perennial, popular theme for seishun eiga ("youth films"), ranking right up there with tragic early death.
Several Japanese films even have "hatsukoi" in the title, though their stories are not always about puppy love. Tetsuo Shinohara's "Hatsukoi" (2000) starred Rena Tanaka as a teen who tries to find her cancer-stricken mother's first love (who was not her father), while Yukinari Haniwa's "Hatsukoi" (2006) featured Aoi Miyazaki as a lonely girl who falls under the spell of a moody student radical and takes part in his plot (based on a real-life 1968 incident) to steal ¥300 million.
The latest "Hatsukoi" film, directed by Show Nobushi, is based on the novel "First Love" by Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev and mainly follows its boy-pines-for-girl plot line, with some localized twists. Though its buff young hero rides a mountain bike and its flighty heroine is umbilically linked to her cell phone, the film has a timeless feel.