Ao no Hana Utsuwa no Mori taps Tomohiro Hata for its theme

NHK has named the theme song for Ao no Hana Utsuwa no Mori, its autumn night drama. It is Fragments, written and sung by Tomohiro Hata, and it arrives with the show's finished key visual and a score by Shūichirō Fukuhiro. The broadcaster announced all three on 29 September 2026, four weeks before the series begins.

The drama starts on Monday 26 October 2026 and runs for 32 episodes over eight weeks. NHK General airs it Monday to Thursday at 22:45, with NHK ONE carrying it live and on catch-up. Yuki Kodama's manga is adapted for screen by Yōko Izumisawa, with Eihiro Fukagawa directing.

It is an adult love story set inside a Hasami ware pottery workshop, following Aoko and Ryūsei as the craft town's slow rhythm gets to work on them. The key visual is built from the same material — the white of porcelain and the blue of gosu pigment — with the floral pattern and title lettering hand-painted onto a ceramic plate and fired in a kiln with help from Hasami ware artisans.

Rena Matsui heads the cast, with Hayate Ichinose playing Ryūsei Manabe. The supporting line-up includes Hiroaki Iwanaga, who was born in Hasami itself, where much of the drama is set.

Hata wrote the song after reading the scripts. In comments released with the announcement, he described it as a love song about the beginning of a romance between "slightly misshapen fragments" — people who have been hurt, gone timid or tied themselves up in knots. He debuted in November 2006 with the single Synchro, and sang Himawari no Yakusoku for the 2014 film Stand by Me Doraemon.

Our opinion

Japan's late-night drama slots are where a song gets room to grow, and NHK has handed Hata an unusually long runway: four nights a week for two months means Fragments will be heard something like 32 times before the finale. A prime-time drama on a commercial network gives its theme one shot a week and a fraction of the shelf life. This is the kind of booking that turns a track into a standard, which is precisely how Himawari no Yakusoku outlived the Doraemon film it was written for.

The risk in a song written to a brief about a pottery town is that it comes out as tasteful furniture, and Hata's register — warm, slightly worn, never showy — is easy to mistake for exactly that. But a love story about people who have been knocked about a bit is squarely his territory, and the drama's own craft obsession, down to kiln-firing its title card, suggests the pair know what they are doing. Expect the song to be the thing people remember.