A Chain-Smoking Cat Girl Won Over Makoto Shinkai
Japanese entertainment news site Real Sound has published a look at an odd pattern in the current adaptation market: manga built on subject matter most productions avoid are landing anime deals one after another. The Real Sound column, syndicated via Yahoo! News Japan, groups four titles under that umbrella, and the one already on air is Chainsmoker Cat (ヤニねこ).
The series, which runs in Kodansha's Weekly Young Magazine, is set in a world where humans and beast-people live side by side. Protagonist Yaniko Sato is a lazy heavy smoker who lights up even in the bath, and Real Sound notes that tobacco makes it into nearly every scene. The anime, produced at Bibury Animation Studios and airing since July 2026, puts particular care into the smoking details and plays them for laughs that smokers will recognize. Her neighbors widen the range of touchy material: Aruneko loves her drinks, while Yakuneko carries a past she can't tell anyone about.
Real Sound argues the show never tips into mean-spiritedness. The beast-people are written as social minorities who had no other way to live, and the apartment's landlady watches over them with genuine warmth. That balance has earned the series some famous fans. Makoto Shinkai, the director of Your Name and Weathering With You, posted on X that the anime is "incredibly entertaining."
MAPPA Is Taking Jimoto Saiko! Straight to Netflix
Jimoto Saiko! (地元最高！) started as a web manga that creator Usagi posted on X, later collected in print by the publisher Saizusha. The art is cute and the cast is entirely female, so at a glance it looks like a sparkly slice-of-life series. The actual setting is a hometown district overrun with violence, crime, and drugs. Protagonist Chanel can barely read kanji, and her memory has deteriorated from overusing sleeping pills. She navigates the local underworld alongside her friend Chihiro. Shinya Kusaka, an editor with deep knowledge of Japan's criminal underground, supervises the series, which Real Sound credits for the realism of its street-gang storylines.
MAPPA (Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man) revealed the adaptation during its 15th-anniversary livestream on June 19, 2026, and Netflix will stream it exclusively worldwide. Real Sound frames it as a project only Netflix could greenlight, pointing to the platform's history with dramas too hard-edged for Japanese broadcast TV, such as The Naked Director and Tokyo Swindlers. Plenty of fans posted variations of "can this really be animated?" when the news dropped, but the announcement also drew replies from painter Yoshitomo Nara, literary critic Kaho Miyake, and writer Mafia Kajita. Real Sound reads those replies as a sign that the manga's readership stretches well beyond manga circles.
The Adaptation Everyone Is Arguing About
The newest and most contested entry is Mii-chan and Miss Yamada (みいちゃんと山田さん) by Nene Azuki. The manga runs on Kodansha's Magazine Pocket app and has topped 2.8 million copies in circulation across just six volumes, and the TV anime, announced in late July, is scheduled for 2027. The story follows two hostesses working in Tokyo's Kabukicho nightlife district in 2012. Fans celebrated the news, but as the Real Sound piece notes, social media immediately filled with a harder question: should this work be animated at all? The Japanese backlash has centered largely on the manga's handling of a protagonist with an intellectual disability, and the production has said it will move forward with input from subject-matter experts and appropriate content warnings.
Rounding out Real Sound's list is Dokagui Daisuki! Mochizuki-san, Kamome Maruyono's comedy about 21-year-old Mikoto Mochizuki and her binge-eating habit. TOHO Animation announced a TV adaptation on August 4, 2026, with studio Passione handling production.
Looking Ahead
Chainsmoker Cat is the easiest of the four to check out right now: the anime is streaming on Netflix, and Seven Seas publishes the manga in English. Jimoto Saiko! will stream worldwide on Netflix, though no premiere date has been announced. Mii-chan and Miss Yamada is set for 2027 with no cast, staff, or international distribution details yet, and Mochizuki-san's broadcast window is still unannounced. We'll find out as they air whether all four survive the jump from page to screen intact. The through line Real Sound points to is distribution: material that Japanese terrestrial TV once kept at arm's length now has a global streamer ready to fund it.