NHK announced plans to adapt Yuki Kodama's romantic manga Ao no Hana Utsuwa no Mori (Blue Flower, Forest of Vessels) into a live-action series debuting this fall on the network's Yorudora programming block.

Rena Matsui, known for her work as a member of SKE48 and Nogizaka46 before transitioning to acting, will headline the cast. Yoshihiro Fukagawa is directing, with Yōko Izumisawa handling the scripts.

The story is set in Hasami, a town in Nagasaki prefecture renowned for its pottery traditions. It follows Aoko, a ceramics painter, and her romance with Tatsuki, a young man who visits her studio. The manga ran in Shogakukan's Flowers magazine from March 2018 to March 2022 and concluded with 10 compiled volumes.

Kodama has built a solid track record with romantic narratives adapted across different media. Her most celebrated work, Sakamichi no Apollon (Kids on the Slope), received both an anime adaptation that aired on Fuji TV's Noitamina block in 2012 and a live-action film released in Japan in March 2018. Crunchyroll streamed the anime series, and Sentai Filmworks released it on home video.

Currently, Kodama is working on Wolf's Daughter: A Werewolf's Tale (Ōkami no Musume), which launched in Flowers in October 2022 and remains ongoing. Seven Seas is releasing an English translation, with the third volume having arrived in April.

The live-action adaptation represents another step in translating Kodama's character-driven stories to the screen. Her work tends to focus on intimate relationships and the settings that shape them, making her manga suitable material for both animated and live-action formats. The Hasami pottery setting offers particularly rich visual potential for a live-action production, grounding the romance in a specific cultural and geographical context.

Matsui's casting signals NHK's commitment to pairing established talent with literary source material, a strategy that has worked well for the network's Yorudora programming block in the past.