Haruko Ichikawa has a new series. Cosmic Mimimi launches in the next issue of Kodansha’s Monthly Afternoon, which goes on sale November 25. The announcement ran in the magazine’s December issue, out now in Japan.
Kodansha is billing the series as “neo kawaii sci-fi.” The premise is short and strange. Mimimi lives in a city described as both “cool” and “dreaming,” and its goal is to make everyone happy. The magazine says strange and happy things happen around this creature of happiness. That is the full description released so far: no page count, no schedule past the first chapter, no staff credits besides Ichikawa herself.
What the teaser hints at
Readers who followed Land of the Lustrous will recognize the problem that description creates. Ichikawa’s previous series was beautiful, funny, and quietly devastating, often inside the same chapter. A happiness-seeking lead in a dream city could be a total change of direction, or the setup for the same slow turn her fans have learned to expect. Kodansha has not said which.
Worth remembering that monthly magazines give their artists more pages per chapter than weeklies do, and Afternoon has let its big names work at that pace for years. If Cosmic Mimimi runs long chapters, the first installment may cover more ground than the teaser suggests.
Land of the Lustrous set a high bar
Land of the Lustrous began in Afternoon in 2012 and ran for twelve years. It ended in April 2024, and Kodansha published the thirteenth and final collected volume that November. Kodansha USA Publishing handles the English edition. The 12-episode anime adaptation from 2017 still gets brought up as one of the more striking-looking TV productions of its decade. HIDIVE streamed it outside the United States and Canada, then added those territories in June 2018, while Amazon’s now-defunct Anime Strike had it in the US and Canada at launch. Sentai Filmworks released a steelbook complete collection in January 2019.
The manga kept collecting awards long after the anime finished. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan gave it the grand prize at the 45th Nihon SF Taishō Awards in 2025, and the Japanese Association for Gender, Fantasy, and Science Fiction handed it the top prize at the Sense of Gender Awards that August. Those are literary prizes, not fan polls. They put Ichikawa in the small group of manga artists whose work gets read as science fiction on its own terms.
Why a two-line announcement matters
That context explains why this is worth writing about. Ichikawa has been quiet since Land of the Lustrous wrapped. Cosmic Mimimi is her first new serialization in roughly two and a half years, and it stays in the magazine that ran her previous work for over a decade. That last part is not automatic in Japanese publishing. Artists at her level often move magazines or jump to a digital app for a fresh start, and Kodansha keeping her in Afternoon says something about how the relationship has held up. Other creators have taken the other road recently: Oreko Tachibana announced a winter launch after Firefly Wedding ended, and yoruhashi moved to Weekly Shōnen Champion with Tatarigatachi.
Monthly magazines also run on cover dates set weeks ahead, which is why the December issue is on shelves in October and the January issue arrives on November 25. The first chapter will be dated 2027 even though readers get it this year. That gap between cover date and street date trips up readers every winter, and it is the reason a series announced in one year’s final issue officially belongs to the next.
No English release yet
Kodansha USA has not said whether it will pick up Cosmic Mimimi, and K MANGA has not listed it. Kodansha’s recent form suggests an English release may not be far behind the Japanese one: the publisher added Shinobu Ohtaka’s Geek and Crown to K MANGA a day before its Japanese debut on Magazine Pocket. That is a pattern, not a promise, and anyone who wants to read chapter one legally in English should wait for an official listing.
One detail is worth watching when the first chapter lands. Ichikawa’s art in Land of the Lustrous leaned on clean line work and near-abstract mineral forms, and the anime’s reputation rested partly on how well that survived animation. A “neo kawaii” premise points toward softer character designs, which would be a visible shift from her best-known work. Whether the melancholy stays underneath is the actual question, and it will be answered on page one.
Monthly Afternoon’s next issue is dated January 2027 and reaches shelves on November 25.
Source: Anime News Network, citing the December issue of Kodansha’s Monthly Afternoon.
Featured image: Cosmic Mimimi announcement artwork by Haruko Ichikawa, via Anime News Network / Kodansha.
