The Boy and I Who Will Break Up in 100 Days

The Boy and I Who Will Break Up in 100 Days (Japanese: 100日後に別れる僕と彼; Hepburn: Hyakunichigo ni Wakareru Boku to Kare) is a 2026 Japanese boys' love drama about a couple who have to keep being a couple after they have stopped being one. Yuma Kasuga (Kentaro Ito) and Itsuki Hasegawa (Kanichiro) went viral almost by accident: an interview about their local government's partnership oath system caught the internet's attention, and overnight the two of them became the country's image of an ideal same-sex couple, photogenic, articulate, reassuringly ordinary. Yuma, who believes that visibility can do real good, agrees to let a documentary crew film a hundred days of their life together. By the time the cameras arrive, he and Itsuki have already broken up.

Neither of them says so. The film is directed by Shiho Kayano (Yui Narumi), who has no idea that the domestic warmth she is capturing is a performance rehearsed each morning before she rings the bell. Across episodes with titles like "The Falsehood of 'Playing Lovers'" and "Searching for the Real 'You,'" the gap widens between what the lens records and what the two men actually feel. Yuma throws himself into being the perfect partner, because being perfect is the point of the project and, increasingly, the only role he still knows how to play. Itsuki suffocates under that ideal, the version of him on screen is someone he was never asked whether he wanted to be. Around them, figures like Isao Hinode (Naoto Takenaka) press on the couple's carefully maintained surface, and the countdown keeps running.

The series is adapted from the novel by Asahara Naoto, an author whose fiction about queer life in Japan drew wide acclaim before his death, and it keeps his interest in the distance between being accepted and being understood. Shogo Kusano directs from a script by Naoyuki Miura, with C&I Entertainment, the production company behind Drive My Car, giving the six episodes an unhurried, observational texture closer to film than to television romance. It premiered on 26 May 2026 in MBS's late-night Dramaism slot, streaming on FOD Premium in Japan and on GagaOOLala internationally. Its sharpest idea is structural: a story about representation told through a documentary that is quietly lying, asking what a hundred days of pretending finally counts down to.