The episode opens with a 15-year-old girl named Iwakura Mitsumi leaving her small town and going to Tokyo to attend a school that will help her reach her goals of going to a prestigious university and achieving her lofty aspirations. While Mitsumi is a smart girl, she’s so focused on her goals that she isn’t truly prepared the city life she experiences in Tokyo.

She moves in with an aunt in Tokyo, and the aunt is concerned about how Mitsumi will do on her first day. While the aunt wants to accompany her to the entrance ceremony, she has to be at work early. When Mitsumi responds to this by saying that nothing was going to go wrong, I knew there was going to be trouble. Since Mitsumi comes from such a small town that no longer has railroad service, she doesn’t realize that Tokyo has more than one service. Because of this lack of knowledge, she gets lost on the way to the entrance ceremony.

The episode also introduces Shima Sousuke, a handsome and laid-back boy who is also a new student at the school that Mitsumi is attending. He’s nonchalantly running late to the ceremony, and he finds a distressed Mitsumi at the train station. He helps her get to the school, and gives up his normally nonchalant attitude to run with her to the ceremony.

It turns out that Mitsumi is the class representative, since she has the highest grades in the class, and she’s in a hurry to get to the ceremony in order to present a speech. While she makes it in time to give the speech, she doesn’t realize that she left it in her bag. However, even though she’s mentally flustered, she actually delivers a speech without missing a beat. Unfortunately, she’s so overwhelmed by everything afterwards that she ends up throwing up on one of the teachers and earns the nickname of “The Puker.”

We see Mitsumi in her new class, trying to make friends with the girl sitting behind her, but the girl seems to shrug her off. Sousuke enters the classroom and starts talking with Mitsumi, saying he wants to be friends and exchange info. We hear the girls in the class murmuring in the background about how cute Sousuke is, and then we see the girl who shrugged off Mitsumi right before this asking for her info as well. I suspect that the main reason this girl asked is because she saw Sousuke talking to Mitsumi. Without seeing the cute boy talking to Mitsumi, this girl had no mtovation for being friendly with Mitsumi. We see this girl appear in the opening and ending credits, so I assume she and Mitsumi will become friends, but it feels a little sus that this girl suddenly was open to talking to Mitsumi after seeing her and Sousuke being friendly with each other.

There’s also a scene of Sousuke hanging out with his friends from middle school and they talk about their day. They learn about Sousuke running late to his entrance ceremony and how he ran with someone to get there on time. They laugh and say that’s not like him, and when he’s asked if it was a girl he was with, he dodges the question and suddenly leaves. As Sousuke is on the train, we see him looking contemplative.

We also get a scene of Mitsumi’s childhood best friend talking with Mitsumi on the phone after her first day. After learning that one of Mitsumi’s new friends is a guy, her friend automatically asks if he’s hot. Mitsumi doesn’t outright call him hot, but it’s obvious that she seems to have some kind of interest in him.

By the end of the first episode, I’m getting the sense that this is going to be a story about a fish out of water (Mitsumi) trying to adapt to new surroundings. There also seems to be hints that we could see this series also being a romcom at some point.

This first episode did a great job of establishing Mitsumi and Sousuke as characters, and I was left wanting to watch the next episode to see what happens to them. I’m hoping that by the time this season is done, these two will show noticeable character development for a slice-of-life series.

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