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The Garden of Words Manga to End Next Month
posted on by Crystalyn Hodgkins
The October issue of Kodansha's Monthly Afternoon magazine is revealing on Saturday that Midori Motohashi's manga adaptation of Makoto Shinkai's Kotonoha no Niwa (Garden of Words) anime film will end in the November issue on September 25. Motohashi launched the manga in the June issue of the magazine.
The Garden of Words follows the story of shoemaker-in-training Takao, who begins sketching shoes in a Japanese-style garden. He meets a mysterious older woman and the two start meeting and deepening their relationship. Shinkai previously wrote that The Garden of Words was his first story about love in the traditional Japanese meaning of the word. Originally, "love" was written as "lonely sadness" (koi), and, according to Shinkai, the modern concept of "love" (ai) was imported from the West. While The Garden of Words set in the modern era, it is about koi in the original "lonely sadness" meaning — of longing for someone in solitude.
The original film opened in Japan on May 31, and then the DVD and Blu-ray Disc releases shipped in Japan on June 21. Sentai Filmworks released the film on Blu-ray Disc and DVD in North America on August 6.
