Kyotaro Ichikawa is in his second year of middle school and believes he is a dark person. He writes fantasies about hurting his classmates in a notebook and nurses them in the corner of the library. The classmate he watches longest is Anna Yamada, who is tall, works as a magazine model, and is impossible to miss.
Anna is not the kind of person Kyotaro imagined. She sneaks bread in the library, laughs at odd volumes, and has a shaky grasp of personal space. As the picture he built in his head comes apart piece by piece, so does the label he gave himself.
The series is very good at scale. Almost nothing large happens. Whether to say hello when you pass in the corridor, or whether to share an umbrella, will fill an entire chapter. What gets drawn in fine detail instead is where a gaze went and how a sentence trailed off. It reproduces the time sense of being fourteen.
Norio Sakurai has been drawing it at Akita Shoten since 8 March 2018. Volume 13 was published on 8 January 2026, and the afterword announced that the next volume would be the last. The final volume 14 is scheduled for 6 November 2026, and circulation has passed seven million copies.
Shin-Ei Animation produced the first season, twelve episodes from 2 April 2023. Carrying over the silences and the glances was the difficult part, and the adaptation chose to leave the wordless stretches alone.
With the ending close, starting now means very little waiting. How far the two of them get, though, is still unpublished until the last volume lands.
