Every house-hunter knows the rule: if the rent looks too good to be true, check for damp, mice and the restless dead. Kori Momose, the heroine of Esu Omori’s manga Shiba Inu Rooms (Shibatsuki Bukken), finds a spacious new-build one-bedroom flat for 4,800 yen a month, roughly what a London landlord charges for looking at a radiator. The catch is Mu, the ghost of a Shiba Inu bound to room 101. TMS Entertainment is now adapting the series as a TV anime for summer 2027. The announcement and a teaser landed on 1 November, which Japan celebrates as “Wan Wan Wan Day” because 1-1-1 sounds like barking.
Readers of Orwell will enjoy the room number. Room 101 is where the worst thing in the world waits for you, and for Kori that turns out to be a dog. She is a horror fan who takes the supernatural in her stride, but she can’t cope with dogs, so she hatches a plan to spoil Mu until his spirit moves on. Mu, fiery and stubborn, has other ideas, and the result is an odd-couple comedy with a lot of fur and a surprising amount of heart. There’s a darker thread under the fluff, too. The building, Maison Shiba, stands where a bad breeder once kept dogs, which explains why its residents include more than one earthbound Shiba.
Osamu Yamasaki (Seirei Gensouki: Spirit Chronicles) is directing, with character designs by Rio. Niina Nakabayashi voices Kori and Mutsumi Tamura plays Mu. Tamura has previous here: she also voiced the Shiba Haru-san in Roaming the Apocalypse with My Shiba Inu, so she is fast becoming the industry’s go-to voice for Shibas in supernatural predicaments. TMS, a studio with decades of Lupin III and Detective Conan behind it, is in safe paws.
The manga began as a one-shot on Shueisha’s Shōnen Jump+ in July 2023, went to serialisation in June 2024 and reaches its ninth volume on 4 November. Viz Media publishes it in English, so curious readers can get acquainted with Mu well before he barks on television. Summer 2027 is a long walk away, but at least nobody will have to pick up after this one.
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