If the embed won’t play, the teaser is also here on YouTube.
Most time machines need a flux capacitor, a police box or at the very least a large Victorian brass contraption with a saddle. Hina Katagiri needs only a spot of drizzle. The TV anime of Haruka Kawachi’s manga Rainy Day Serenade (Namidaame to Serenade) released its first teaser and key visual on Friday, and confirmed that it begins broadcasting in Japan in April 2027. Tezuka Productions, the studio Osamu Tezuka founded in 1968, is animating it.
The premise is a lovely bit of old-fashioned time-slip. On rainy days, Hina, a modern high-school girl, dreams of playing as a child with a mysterious boy in a garden she has never seen. Then she stumbles across the garden for real, and finds a young man there called Takaaki who takes her for his fiancée, Hinako. He marches her home, where Hina’s double is waiting, and it dawns on her that this isn’t the Tokyo she left that morning. It’s 1907, the late Meiji era, when Japan was busy stringing up telegraph wires and pretending it had always worn Western suits.
The key visual sells the idea neatly. Hina and Takaaki stand back to back on a wet Meiji street lined with telegraph poles, while the puddle at their feet reflects them as the children in her dreams. Yume Miyamoto voices Hina and Takeo Otsuka plays Takaaki Hongo. Yoko Yonaiyama (A Sign of Affection) is handling series composition, and the character designs come from Nobuteru Yuki, a veteran of the Record of Lodoss War OVA and The Vision of Escaflowne, which is a pedigree that rather suggests the kimonos will be immaculate.
Kawachi serialised the manga in Kodansha’s josei magazine Kiss for eleven years, from November 2014 to November 2025, across 14 volumes. Her earlier Natsuyuki Rendezvous became a noitaminA anime in 2012. English-language readers will be able to catch up when Kodansha USA starts publishing the series as two-in-one omnibus editions in January 2027, and a spin-off series begins in Kiss on 25th November.
British readers will spot a familiar ancestor here. A child who finds a secret garden that belongs to another century is pure Tom’s Midnight Garden, Philippa Pearce’s 1958 classic in which the garden only appears when the clock strikes thirteen. Add a dash of Jack Finney’s Time and Again and Japan’s own The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and you have a very respectable lineage of time travel powered by longing rather than lightning.
The rain mechanism does raise one practical worry, though. If this happened in Britain, the whole of Manchester would be living in 1907 by teatime, and nobody would notice for a week.
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