NaraLookpeach

I finally finished Our Youth.

I actually put this series on hold for quite a while. There were too many new shows, too little time, and from the beginning I had the feeling that this wasn't a series I could casually watch in the background. It asks you to be present.

And I'm glad I eventually came back to it.

Our Youth belongs to the same category of BLs as Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo for me: quiet, heavy, emotional, almost poetic. Watching it sometimes feels less like following a television series and more like reading a novel — something you have to sit with rather than simply consume.

I'm not usually a huge fan of high school dramas. Maybe because my own school days are far enough behind me that I mostly remember them with a mixture of amusement and relief. But I understand the appeal. There is something inherently nostalgic about watching stories set in that particular period of life — that strange space where you're old enough to have very real feelings, but still young enough to have very little control over the world you're living in.

Our Youth uses that coming-of-age framework for something much heavier than first love and queer awakening.

It's about childhood abuse. Neglect. Isolation. And the ways children learn to survive when the adults around them fail them.

On the surface, Jin Minase and Haruki Hirukawa couldn't seem more different.

Jin is the perfect student: disciplined, intelligent, obedient, careful. Haruki is the delinquent everyone has already decided is trouble — skipping school, smoking, getting into fights, constantly covered in bruises.

But the longer you watch them, the more you realise that these two boys aren't actually coming from completely different worlds.

They're both lonely.

They're both being shaped by adults who aren't really seeing them.

They're both learning how to make themselves smaller in order to survive.

Haruki's situation is obviously the more brutal one. His father beats him, and the school keeps failing to see what is happening directly in front of them. The bruises. His behaviour. His absences. The alcohol. The fact that this kid is visibly struggling and everyone has already found an easier explanation for it: he's a delinquent.

And that broke my heart.

Because Haruki isn't simply a rebellious teenager who doesn't care about anything. He's a child who has learned that asking for help doesn't work.

And perhaps the most devastating thing Our Youth does is make Jin witness it.

Jin has this very clear worldview: there are perpetrators, victims and bystanders. Three separate categories. Three separate seas that aren't supposed to mix.

And when he sees Haruki's father beating him, Jin chooses to remain a bystander.

That decision matters.

Because Jin isn't cruel. He isn't indifferent. He simply doesn't know how to cross the line between observing someone's suffering and actually becoming involved in it.

Haruki, meanwhile, has almost the opposite problem. He has learned to expect nothing from people, while simultaneously desperately wanting someone to stay.

And then there is Jin.

The irony is that Jin is also being hurt. Just in a much quieter way.

His mother is physically absent but constantly present through her expectations. His father is there in name more than anything else. Jin is praised for being disciplined, successful and well-behaved, but very little of that seems to come from genuine freedom. He has learned to be exactly what everyone expects him to be.

Haruki initially sees Jin as something almost unattainable — an anomaly, someone who belongs to a completely different world. Something he shouldn't be allowed to have.

And yet he keeps coming back.

Again and again.

Until eventually going back to Jin isn't an option anymore, because Haruki has to break the cycle he's been trapped in.

That's what I found so moving about their relationship. Neither of them really saves the other. They simply become the first person who sees the other clearly enough to make change possible.

There is something wonderfully restrained about the way their relationship develops. The show doesn't need to constantly tell us how important they are to each other. It lets little things carry the weight: sharing food, watching films, remembering details, the way they look at each other, the way physical affection gradually becomes something neither of them has to be afraid of.

And then the series grows up with them.

The time jump is bittersweet because they're both better off — but neither of them has simply escaped the consequences of what happened when they were teenagers.

Haruki has found a future for himself. Jin has changed too, although in ways that aren't entirely healthy. Their relationship has survived.

But being together privately is not the same thing as being able to exist openly.

And that's where the final episode got me.

They're sitting around a table with friends they've known since school. Friends who are getting married. Friends who have grown up within the kind of heterosexual life trajectory that everyone simply assumes is normal.

And only a few hours earlier, Jin and Haruki were in bed together.

"Today we'll tell them."

Then Haruki says that he had a crush on Jin back in high school.

And suddenly the silence is deafening.

The faces around the table.

That split second of confusion.

The desperate hope that this must be a joke.

And then:

"Of course it's just a joke."

That moment hurt me more than I expected it to.

Because Jin's nightmare isn't really about his friends rejecting Haruki. It's about the sudden realisation that even the people closest to him don't necessarily know who he is.

So where exactly is he allowed to be himself?

If he can't even tell the people who have known him for years that he loves another man, what does it actually mean to have a life that is his own?

For a series that spends so much time talking about perpetrators, victims and bystanders, I think that's ultimately what Our Youth is interested in.

What happens when you stop being a bystander in your own life?

Haruki has to learn that surviving isn't the same as living.

Jin has to learn that being good, obedient and invisible isn't the same as being happy.

And somewhere between those two things, they find each other.

Our Youth is not a particularly loud series. It doesn't need to be.

It is melancholic and sometimes painfully quiet, but there is so much feeling underneath that quietness. It's a story about two boys who initially seem to come from completely different worlds, only to discover that their loneliness speaks the same language.

And perhaps that's what stayed with me most.

They don't meet because one of them needs to be saved.

They meet because, for once, someone looks across the water and realises:

"Your sea and my sea might not be so different after all."