Major spoilers for Nezumi’s First Love.
In June 2024, with the series already hitting records as the fastest-selling debut in Young Magazine history, Ooseto Riku gave an interview to Da Vinci Web. The headline used his own words: he wants to drive readers to the depths. 「読者をどん底に突き落としたい」.
This interview exists only in Japanese. The quotes have not been translated or circulated through English fan channels in any substantial way. So the two communities have been reading the same manga with different information. That’s worth saying plainly, because it changes things.
What he actually said
The full どん底 quote has more context around it. Ooseto said he intends to avoid predictable narrative patterns all the way to the end, “ありがちな流れ” is his phrase, and that rather than standard thriller tension, he wants to produce the kind that “みなさんの精神を狂わせてしまうくらいのドキドキ” — drives readers slightly mad. He said he wants people reading this to have their mental state worn down a little more with every chapter.
This isn’t a description of genre. It’s a description of an intended psychological experience. He’s not saying the story will be dark. He’s saying he’s deliberately building something to take you somewhere specific, and he wants the journey itself to cost you something.
He also said something that cuts against how dark romance usually works: no matter how bad things get around Nezumi and Ao, their love won’t waver. He wants readers to feel, simply and without complication, that what these two have is good. The darkness isn’t aimed at the relationship. The relationship is what stays steady while the darkness does its work around it.
On reader feedback: he checks responses sometimes, but he’s never let them change the direction of the story. The ending was decided in advance. He intends to reach it without being moved by anyone’s opinion.
What this did to Japanese fan reading
The interview didn’t add plot information. It clarified the contract. And that clarification settled something in how Japanese fans were processing the series.
There had already been signals. The title has 初恋 in it, first love, which in Japanese carries something elegiac, something about the particular fragility of something being experienced for the first time. The official copy describes the story as “あまりに残酷で、あまりに切ない” — unbearably cruel, unbearably sad. Readers were already reading those signals.
But naming it explicitly did something. One reader, after sitting with the series for a while, wrote: “ハッピーエンドだけは許されない” — a happy ending alone cannot be permitted. The framing is interesting. Not “I don’t think it’ll have a happy ending.” Not “the genre suggests otherwise.” A happy ending alone is not permitted. Like it would violate something. That’s someone who absorbed the interview’s logic and applied it to the story itself. The author told you he’s taking you somewhere. You start reading as if you’re going there.
The mood in Japanese fan communities around this series is distinctive. People describe wishing for Nezumi’s happiness while carrying a certainty that the story won’t give it to her. Wishing and knowing at the same time, and continuing anyway. That’s not standard dark-romance fan sentiment. That’s a community that understood the contract early and decided to keep reading on those terms.
Where this leaves English fans
A real argument runs through English fan discussion about whether there’s hope for these two. Some readers point to signs of softening in the story, moments of genuine peace, the way Ooseto keeps returning to tenderness between them. Others read the setup as structurally tragic. It’s treated as a genuinely open question.
In Japan it feels less open, not because the ending is known, but because Ooseto said what he was building and Japanese fans believed him. He said he’d wear your mental state down. He said he wouldn’t follow the expected shape. He said the love would stay pure. All of that together points somewhere specific.
The argument some English readers make, that there are signs of softening, that Ooseto might be steering toward something less bleak, is possible. But it runs against what he said in 2024. An author who announces his intention to drive readers to the depths and then delivers a redemptive ending isn’t subverting expectations in the way he described. He’d be subverting his own stated project. Japanese fans don’t find that likely. They read the interview as a commitment, and they read the series as a commitment being kept.
What the interview clarifies, more than anything else, is the relationship between the love story and the darkness. English readers sometimes wonder whether the series is, underneath its dark surface, actually a love story at heart. Ooseto answered this directly: yes, the love story is primary. The assassin elements were the vehicle he chose to get readers into it. The love is real and it will stay real. And he’s still going to take you somewhere painful.
Those two things are not in contradiction. They’re the whole design. The love being genuine is what makes the destination painful. A love story where the feelings were fake would just be a thriller. What Ooseto said he’s building, and what Japanese fans understand they’re reading, is something where the feelings are completely real and the outcome is going to hurt anyway. English readers who find that information will read the series differently. Until then, the two communities are in different relationships to the same manga.
There’s something worth sitting with in that last point. The Japanese and English fan communities are, in a real sense, reading different versions of this series. Same chapters, same art, same story. But one community is reading it with the author’s stated intentions in hand, and the other is inferring those intentions from the text alone. Both are valid ways to read. They produce different results. The Japanese community knows what they’re walking into. The English community is finding out.
This blog exists partly to close that gap. Not by spoiling anything, but by making the context available: what Ooseto said, what Japanese fans understood from it, how that understanding shapes what you notice when you read. You don’t have to read Nezumi’s First Love the way Japanese fans do. But knowing that there’s a specific contract the author announced, and that he intends to keep it, changes what you’re doing when you turn each page.
Ooseto gave Japanese readers the map in 2024. This is the map. The destination he described is still ahead. But knowing the destination exists, and knowing the author committed to reaching it, is the difference between being surprised by where you end up and being prepared. Japanese fans chose prepared. They’ve been reading accordingly ever since.
The interview is still out there in Japanese, untranslated. If you read Japanese, go find it. If you don’t, what you have here is the part that changes how the rest reads: he knows where he’s going, he’s been heading there since chapter one, and the love between these two people is exactly as real as it looks. Everything else is the road he built to take you somewhere you didn’t fully realize you were agreeing to go.
The other thing the interview reveals, and this I find genuinely interesting: the love story came first. Ooseto said he wanted to reach more people, wanted to sell, and decided romance was the entry point. The assassin elements came from there. The center of the manga is what it looks like: two people in love. Everything around them is the vehicle Ooseto built to take the reader somewhere painful.
Understanding that changes the shape of the whole thing. The manga isn’t a dark story with a love story inside it. It’s a love story that Ooseto is using to get you somewhere you wouldn’t have agreed to go if he’d been upfront about the destination from the beginning. He told Japanese readers in 2024. English readers are still finding their way there, without that information, which means they’re reading a different version of the same manga.
That asymmetry is something I think about when I look at English-language commentary on the series. Not because the English readings are wrong, but because they’re working with less. The series is doing something very specific, and Ooseto said what it was, and that statement is sitting in a Japanese interview that most of the English fandom hasn’t encountered. The difference in how the two communities are reading the series: the settled certainty on the Japanese side, the genuine debate on the English side about where this is going, is partly a function of that information gap. One community has the map. The other is navigating by feel.
If the author’s stated intentions interest you, this post goes deeper into why Japanese fans don’t believe Ao is who the story says he is:
