Tomoko Ninomiya’s Nanatsu-ya: Shinobu and Her Jewelry Box is getting a TV anime in 2027. The announcement went up on a new official website on Wednesday, together with a teaser trailer, a teaser visual, and the main staff.
Chiaki Kon is directing at J.C.Staff. Seishi Minakami is writing the series scripts, and Mai Furuki is designing the characters.
Kon is the interesting name in that list. She directed Nodame Cantabile: Paris and Nodame Cantabile: Finale, which means she has already adapted Ninomiya’s most famous manga once. Now she is doing it again with a different series, seventeen years after Finale aired and sixteen after it finished. Whatever working relationship the two have, it clearly survived.
Minakami’s credits run across A Certain Scientific Railgun, Sugar Apple Fairy Tale, and Sacrificial Princess & the King of Beasts. Furuki’s design work includes I.Cinnamoroll and Mewkledreamy, which is a softer, rounder register than the staff list first suggests. Put the three names next to Kiss magazine and the shape of the show gets easier to guess.
The story: Shinobu is a second-year high school student whose family runs Kurata-ya, a pawn shop in a central Tokyo neighborhood. She works the counter when school is not calling, and she has one useful trick, an ability to see the aura that gemstones give off. She has no boyfriend. She does have a fiancé her grandfather picked for her, Akisada Kitagami, a man from a distinguished family who was taken in by Kurata-ya when he was young and now sells jewelry for a first-class brand. He also has more secrets than a jewelry salesman should. Kodansha’s K MANGA service publishes the manga in English, and that summary is the publisher’s own description of the setup.
Ninomiya launched the manga in Kodansha’s Kiss in November 2013, and it is still running. The 28th collected volume arrives on November 13, two days after the anime announcement, which is how these things usually go. Adaptation news tends to land on a volume week.
The series has had a rough patch. It went on several hiatuses between 2018 and 2019 because of the author’s health.
Why Ninomiya’s name carries weight
The short answer is Nodame Cantabile. Ninomiya launched it in Kiss in 2001 and ended it in 2009. Del Rey brought out 16 volumes in North America before the publisher stopped releasing manga altogether, and Kodansha USA later put out all 25 volumes in English digitally. The series became three television anime, a live-action drama, and live-action films.
That is an unusually complete adaptation record for a josei romance, and it explains why Nanatsu-ya got picked up while the manga is still mid-run. Publishers look at a track record like that and see a property that already proved it can travel.
Josei manga from Kiss does not reach anime at the pace shonen titles do. When one does get greenlit, it usually means someone at the production committee likes the material for reasons beyond the magazine’s circulation. Here that someone looks like Kon.
What the announcement does not include
No voice cast. No premiere month inside 2027. No episode count, no streaming platform, and no confirmation of how far into the manga the first season will go. The teaser is a teaser, not a full trailer.
Anyone who wants to start reading now has options. K MANGA carries the series in English, and volume 28 is the current tip of the story in Japan.
The bigger picture
Kiss has been quietly busy this fall, with a Rainy Day Serenade spinoff scheduled for November 25. That is the sort of scheduling a magazine does when it is investing in the titles it already has, and a 2027 anime for one of its long runners fits the same mood. Kodansha is putting animation behind magazines that are not Weekly Shonen Magazine, and the results have been landing more often than they used to.
For Ninomiya, this is the second anime adaptation of a long-running Kiss manga, more than fifteen years after the first one finished. That is not a small thing for a career built on a single legendary series. Nanatsu-ya has run since 2013, which means it has already outlasted Nodame Cantabile‘s entire eight-year serialization by five years, and it is still going.
The 2027 date is broad enough that a delay would not surprise anyone. J.C.Staff is also handling the Teenage Mercenary adaptation for the same year, and studios juggling two 2027 titles tend to move one of them. For now, the teaser and the staff list are what exist.
Featured image: the teaser visual for the Nanatsu-ya: Shinobu and Her Jewelry Box anime, with Shinobu holding a red gem beside Akisada in front of an open jewel chest, via Anime News Network.
