Since childhood, Hina Katagiri has kept having the same dream on rainy days, of a boy waiting in a garden she has never seen. That dream is now moving to television, as Rainy Day Serenade showed its first anime footage in a teaser trailer and named the two voices at the center of its story
The news arrived in two updates: the first carried the teaser trailer and the first key visual, while a companion post laid out Hina and Takaaki's character profiles with comments from Yume Miyamoto and Takeo Otsuka attached — all of it posted on the official website of Rainy Day Serenade.
In the teaser, the first anime footage from the adaptation plays out around the dream scene Hina sees again and again. It also marks the first time the voices of Hina and Takaaki Hongo can be heard, as the moment their story quietly begins to move unfolds on screen.
Watch the teaser trailer here:
A first key visual arrived with the teaser, showing Hina in her school uniform in front of Takaaki in a brown Meiji-era suit on a wet street, with a domed Western-style building behind them. In the water at their feet, a beautiful garden and two young children are reflected, tying the pair in the image to distant memories and a past neither has let go of.
Yume Miyamoto leads the cast as Hina Katagiri, an energetic high school girl with earnest, straightforward eyes. Hina has repeated the same dream since she was a child, until one day she suddenly time-slips to 1907, the 40th year of the Meiji era.
Miyamoto said the feelings that do not change even across time stayed with her, and that she wants to treasure Hina's forthrightness as she plays her. She added that she hopes a lingering feeling, like the sky after the rain, remains in viewers' hearts too.
Takeo Otsuka plays Takaaki Hongo, the heir of the Hongo family and the young master of Hongo Trading. Takaaki still carries the memory of a girl he met as a child, and Otsuka said he will stay close to the secret feelings that sometimes lie behind the character's words.
Takashi Kamei directs the anime at Tezuka Productions, with Yoko Yonaiyama handling series composition. Nobuteru Yuki provides the character designs, Hiroshi Kato serves as art director, Kunio Tsujita handles color design and Yoshie Ito is the director of photography.
What is Rainy Day Serenade about?
Rainy Day Serenade is a romance, drama and science fiction manga written and illustrated by Haruka Kawachi. It ran in Kodansha's josei magazine Kiss from November 2014 to November 2025, and its chapters fill 14 collected volumes, with the official introduction calling the result "a bittersweet and beautiful time-slip romance."
The anime adaptation was first announced in February 2026, on the same day the manga's 14th and final volume went on sale in Japan. Kawachi also drew a celebration illustration for that first announcement, before the cast and footage arrived with this update.
Kodansha USA publishes the manga in English in two-in-one omnibus editions. The story follows Hina after her recurring rainy-day dream leads her to a garden from those dreams, where a young man named Takaaki mistakes her for his fiancée Hinako, and a girl who looks just like Hina is waiting where he takes her.
Kodansha USA describes the manga as follows:
On rainy days, Hina has dreams about her younger self playing with a mysterious boy in a garden she's never seen before—until, by chance, she stumbles upon the place. There's a young man there, Takaaki, who mistakes Hina for his fiancée Hinako. He whisks her back to what he thinks is her home, where Hina's doppelganger is waiting, and Hina realizes this isn't the Tokyo she left behind but Japan in the year 1907! Is this all a dream or something much stranger?
Rainy Day Serenade will broadcast in Japan beginning in April 2027. A spin-off manga, Namidaame to Serenade Gaiden, is also on the way in Kiss, extending Kawachi's story past its main run as the anime approaches.
