Is With You and the Rain Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manga (seinen), 8 volumes
Run	2020–present · ongoing
Community score	AniList 7.4 · MangaUpdates 7.3
Where to read	Kodansha — official

Overview

Fuji is a reclusive novelist who lives alone and has a particular fondness for rainy weather. One wet evening, she finds an animal huddled in a cardboard box. When she wonders aloud whether it might be a dog, the animal responds by writing on a sketchpad: "I am a dog." Convinced, or at least willing to go along with it, Fuji takes the creature home, names it You, and the two begin living together. Acquaintances occasionally raise an eyebrow at You's true nature. Fuji, unbothered, keeps introducing it as a mixed-breed dog -- and You keeps confirming it, in writing, every time.

What it does well

The premise sounds like a one-joke gag, and the fact that it isn't is the whole achievement here. Ko Nikaido keeps the bit alive by never resolving it -- You's insistence on being a dog stays funny because the manga treats it with total sincerity, and because Fuji's decision to simply accept it says as much about her as it does about the joke. That's a hard balance to hold for eight volumes, and the series manages it by keeping each chapter small: a rainy afternoon, a visit from Fuji's father, a trip to the vet where the joke gets tested again. Nothing chapter to chapter is trying to do too much, and that restraint is what makes the whole thing work.

The art carries a lot of the comedy's weight, since You communicates almost entirely through gesture, posture, and the occasional scrawled note rather than dialogue. Nikaido gets real personality and comic timing out of that limitation -- You's body language does what a voice actor would normally handle. The relationship between Fuji and You also earns its warmth rather than assuming it; you can watch two guarded characters (one human, one maybe not) slowly relax around each other over the course of the volumes.

Where it falls short

This is about as low-stakes as manga gets, and that's going to be a dealbreaker for some readers. There's no arc building toward a climax, no threat escalating in the background -- just daily life, rendered gently. If you need forward momentum to stay engaged, the chapter-to-chapter structure can start to feel like treading water even when individual chapters are charming on their own.

The central mystery of what You actually is also stays a tease rather than a real plot thread. The manga clearly isn't interested in answering it anytime soon, which is consistent with its whole approach, but readers hoping for that question to pay off narratively will be waiting a long time, possibly indefinitely. And because the humor stays gentle by design, it can read as slight in a single sitting even when it accumulates real charm over a full volume.

Verdict

With You and the Rain is a small, unhurried comedy that knows exactly what it's doing: keep a good bit alive, let a relationship deepen slowly, and never rush either. It won't work for readers who need plot momentum or a mystery that actually gets solved. But if you want something gentle and funny to sit with in short bursts, this is a genuinely well-made example of that kind of manga, and its Next Manga Award nomination wasn't a fluke.