Is Weathering with You Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manga, 13 chapters, 3 volumes
Run	2019–2020 · completed
Community score	AniList 7.5
Content	Peril, mild violence, themes of self-sacrifice
Where to read	Kodansha — official

Overview

Hodaka Morishima runs away from his home on a remote island to Tokyo with barely any money and no plan, and survival in the city turns out to be harder than he expected. Then he meets Hina Amano, a girl with a strange, private ability: she can pray away the rain and clear the sky, at least for a little while. What starts as a small, almost magical party trick becomes a business — Tokyo's rainy season is relentless, and people will pay for clear skies — but the more Hina uses her gift, the more it becomes clear that it's taking something from her that she can't easily get back.

The manga adapts Makoto Shinkai's 2019 film, with Wataru Kubota handling the art across a compact run for Kodansha's Afternoon, and it was licensed in English shortly after its Japanese release.

What it does well

The way Hina's ability is introduced is the story's smartest structural choice. It starts small and almost sweet — a girl who can make the sun come out — before gradually revealing the real cost behind it, and that patience makes the eventual stakes land as an actual gut-punch rather than a twist pulled out of nowhere.

Hodaka's situation does a lot of quiet work too. He's not a chosen-one type dropped into a fantasy plot; he's a broke teenage runaway trying to survive in a city that doesn't care about him, and that grounded desperation gives the more fantastical elements of the story something real to push against. Kubota's art rises to the occasion for a story that's famously about weather — rain, light, and sky get real attention on the page, which keeps the atmosphere from getting lost in the shift from screen to print.

What elevates the story past a simple romance is its willingness to commit to an uncomfortable choice near the end, between what's conventionally "right" for the world and what Hodaka wants for the one person he cares about most. The manga doesn't soften that choice to make everyone comfortable, and that follow-through is what makes the ending stick with you.

Where it falls short

Some of the film's most famous sequences depended heavily on motion, music, and scale, and those moments inevitably lose some of their impact translated into still panels — this is a stronger read if you're not directly comparing it to the movie scene for scene.

The supporting cast around Hodaka and Hina, while likeable, doesn't get as much room to develop as the two leads, and mostly exists to keep the plot moving rather than to matter as fully realized people. The story's pace also accelerates noticeably in its final stretch, which can make some major turns feel more rushed than the patient early chapters would suggest.

Verdict

Weathering with You is a fast, visually minded fantasy romance that earns its emotional stakes by taking its central choice seriously instead of dodging it. If a compact story about weighing the world against one person sounds appealing, this delivers it with real conviction; if you'd rather have a slower, more grounded story, the fantasy elements and brisk pace won't be what you're looking for.