The anime adaptation of Mai Matsuda’s Walking Home with You has a release window. The series’ official website opened on Wednesday, confirming that the show will be a television anime and that it will premiere in April 2027 on the NTV channel.
The site also unveiled the anime’s first teaser visual, which carries the tagline, “The requirement for joining the club is walking home with me.” Matsuda drew a commemorative illustration to mark the reveal.
What Walking Home with You is about
The manga is a gentle, character-driven comedy, and the premise is easy to summarise. Digital publisher Omoi, which licensed the title, describes it as follows:
Shun was the star of his middle school’s soccer team, until an injury forced him to give up on his dream. Now in high school, he’s adrift, with no real interests or passions … until he meets his oddball upperclassman Naoki. She ropes him into joining her unofficial “Hyper-Epic Heading Home Club,” a club with only one member dedicated to turning every walk home into an adventure. As Shun follows Naoki through her flights of fancy in search of elaborate detours, secret treasures, and anything else that catches her attention, can the Heading Home Club bring color back to his drab everyday life?
That setup places the series squarely in the slice-of-life lane: a quiet, low-stakes friendship story rather than a plot-driven one, with the daily walk home as its recurring frame.
Publication and creator history
Matsuda launched the manga — known in Japan as Hōkago Kitaku Biyori — in Futabasha’s Manga Action magazine in August 2023. The series has been collected steadily since, and Futabasha will publish the seventh compiled volume on Thursday, October 8, the day after the anime’s website opened.
The anime adaptation was first announced in March 2025, so the project has been in production for well over a year before this first concrete scheduling update.
Matsuda’s earlier series, Hikaru in the Light!, ran in Manga Action from May 2021 to August 2022. Futabasha published four compiled volumes, and Omoi — then operating under the name Azuki — licensed and released all four in English. That means English-language readers already have a track record with the creator’s work, which should help the new adaptation find an audience outside Japan.
Key details at a glance
- Title: Walking Home with You (Hōkago Kitaku Biyori)
- Creator: Mai Matsuda
- Publisher: Futabasha (Manga Action)
- English license: Omoi
- Format: TV anime
- Premiere: April 2027 on NTV
- Announced: adaptation first revealed March 2025; website opened October 7, 2026
No studio, cast or exact premiere date has been announced yet, which is typical this far ahead of an April 2027 broadcast. More information, including the main production team, is expected as the show moves closer to its slot.
Why it matters
An April 2027 premiere puts the series into one of the two busiest windows on the anime calendar, the spring season. For a slice-of-life title, that is a comfortable fit — the spring slate is traditionally where warm, low-conflict shows find their audience, and a reliable source manga with seven volumes already published gives the production plenty of material to work from.
It also adds to a growing cluster of 2027 anime with already-confirmed windows. Hirayasumi arrives in January 2027, while Glasses With a Chance of Delinquent is also targeting April 2027 — a sign that the spring season is filling up early.
For now, the teaser visual and April 2027 window are the confirmed facts. Fans should expect studio and cast details in the months ahead.
Source: Anime News Network, citing the anime’s official website and Comic Natalie.
Featured image: Mai Matsuda’s commemorative illustration for the Walking Home with You anime, via Anime News Network.
