Can You Kiss Me First? gets a live-action drama

The live-action adaptation of Yamayade's manga Can You Kiss Me First? begins on Fuji TV on Monday 19 October at 24:45 JST, which is 00:45 on Tuesday 20 October by the Japanese clock. Episodes stream free after broadcast on TVer and on Fuji TV's own FOD service.

Two leads carrying a very quiet love story

Jin Suzuki plays Ueno, the cool and unreadable member of the accounting department, and Gaku Oshida plays Kanda, the sociable ace of the sales floor. The two men are the same age and joined the company in the same intake, and to everyone at work they look like oil and water. In private the relationship is warmer than that: Kanda has been letting himself into Ueno's flat often enough to make it a weekly habit, and Ueno, who has told Kanda he is gay, cannot work out why the man keeps closing the distance without flinching. Kanda, for his part, has been stewing since Ueno announced flatly that nothing would ever happen between them. Around them the cast includes Tsubasa Kizu, Riko Kawase, Koya Matsudai, Aika Sonoda, Sosho Tomimoto, Takaaki Kanamaru, Jun Yamazaki and Sho Amemiya of the group GENIC.

Who is making it

Nazuki Takahashi directs, having built a reputation in Japanese boys' love drama with credits including Smoke Blue, Rain Clearing Up. Emi Amamoto writes the screenplay, Nobuhiro Tateno and Ami Yamashita handle music production, and Ryota Imamura and Minji Kim share the score. Humanax Entertainment produces with Cocoon as co-production partner, and NBC Universal Entertainment Japan is the producer of record.

The manga it comes from

The source is Yamayade's debut work, published by Sweet Pop under moment and still running: a sequel, Can You Kiss Me First? 2, is serialising now. More than 250,000 copies of the series are in print. The official site lists first place in the next-coming category of the BL Award 2025 and second place in the overall comic category, then a drama CD release in 2025 and fourth place in the drama CD category of the BL Award 2026. That is a strong paper run for a debut, and it explains why the adaptation has arrived only a few years after the first volume.

Our opinion

Japanese late-night television has quietly become the best place in the world for adaptations of romance manga aimed at adults, and this is a good example of why. Ueno and Kanda are not teenagers with a misunderstanding to clear up; they are two men in their twenties with jobs, a routine and one sentence hanging in the air between them. The whole drama lives or dies on whether the two leads can make a relationship that has already been declared dead feel worth waiting for, which is a harder performance than any confession scene. The choice of Nazuki Takahashi to direct is the encouraging part, because his work is built on restraint rather than volume, and a story this internal needs a camera that trusts silence. The risk is fidelity to a manga that is still being written. Adaptations of ongoing series either stop mid-air or invent an ending the author has not reached yet, and with a sequel serialising there is no tidy final page to borrow. That is worth watching as closely as the two leads.