Rainy Day Serenade is coming back, and not with a sequel. The December issue of Kodansha’s Kiss magazine announced on Friday that Haruka Kawachi’s series will get a spinoff titled Namidaame to Serenade: Gaiden, which translates to Rainy Day Serenade Side Story. It starts in the magazine’s next issue, out November 25.
The focus shifts to Kikunoshin. In the spinoff he is heartbroken, and the story follows him into a commotion at the Fuji Sakura cafe he frequents. That is the whole premise Kodansha has given so far.
Kawachi launched the original manga in Kiss in 2014 and ended it in November 2025. The final chapter ran in the issue that went on sale November 25, 2025, and Kodansha shipped the 14th and last collected volume in February. Kodansha USA Publishing has the English license and is releasing the series in two-in-one omnibus volumes, starting this fall.
So the spinoff begins on the same date the final chapter’s issue reached stands a year earlier. Whether that was deliberate or just how the magazine’s schedule fell, it is a tidy bit of timing.
What the original series was
Rainy Day Serenade is a time-slip romance. On rainy days, Hina dreams about her younger self playing with a boy in a garden she has never seen, until she finds the place for real. The young man there, Takaaki, mistakes her for his fiancée Hinako and pulls her back to what he thinks is her home. It is Japan in 1907. The series spends its 14 volumes working out whether a relationship across that gap can hold.
There is also an anime adaptation on the way in 2027, announced in February by the production company Kotowari, with an official site and a celebratory illustration from Kawachi. That is likely why this spinoff exists now rather than at the moment the manga wrapped. Publishers look for ways to keep a finished property in front of readers when an anime is coming, and a side story in the original magazine is a cheap way to do it. Readers who arrive from the anime will also find the main series already complete and easy to binge, which is close to ideal for a license.
Kawachi’s track record
Kawachi has stayed busy since the original ended. Musashino Rondo launched in Shodensha’s Feel Young in 2020, with the first volume out in September 2021 and the fifth in July 2025, and it inspired a live-action series in April 2025. Natsuyuki Rendezvous got an anime on Fuji TV’s Noitamina block in 2012, the same year the manga ended. Request o Yoroshiku ran in Feel Young from September 2014 to 2019, with a fifth and final volume in 2020. JManga published Sekine’s Love in English.
That record explains why Kiss would hand her a spinoff slot. She has finished several long series and seen three of them adapted into other media, a better hit rate than most manga artists manage.
Kiss is a monthly josei magazine, and a side story about a supporting character fits its readership better than a full sequel would. It also costs the magazine almost nothing in risk: the character exists, the audience knows the world, and the anime is doing the marketing.
What is still unknown
Not confirmed: the length of the spinoff, whether it is a single installment or a short run, and whether it will be collected in a volume. Given the framing as a side story about a supporting character, a limited run seems likely, though Kodansha has not said so. Kodansha USA has not announced English plans for the spinoff either, and its handling of the main series in omnibus form means a single spinoff volume would not slot neatly into that release pattern.
Anyone following the manga’s endgame this year can see the pattern in other Kodansha titles too, with Twisted Sisters closing out at 11 volumes and Haruko Ichikawa’s Cosmic Mimimi launching on November 25, the same day this spinoff begins.
Source: Anime News Network, citing the December issue of Kodansha’s Kiss
Featured image: Cover of Rainy Day Serenade volume 1 by Haruka Kawachi, featuring Hina and Takaaki, via Anime News Network.
