Somebody at Kodansha has a sense of humor! The Long Summer of August 31, Ikkado Ito's manga about two students stuck reliving the same day, announced its TV anime today. Today just happens to be August 31st. Coincidence? I think not…
The anime is going to SHAFT, per the announcement posted on the series' official X account and picked up by Anime News Network. A live-action series is also in the works.
Specifics are thin on the ground. There's no premiere window for either version, no director, no series composition, no character designer and no composer, and the live-action side arrives with no network, no producer and no cast. So far this amounts to a studio, a teaser visual, and a commemorative illustration from Ito.
In Japan, August 31st is the last day of summer vacation. It's the day the homework you've been ignoring since July comes due, and it carries a specific dread for anyone who went through the Japanese school calendar.
Ito's premise takes that dread literally. High schoolers Takaya Suzuki and Kana Takagi are the only two who keep their memories as August 31st runs again and again, which turns the last day of summer into a day with no end and no consequences.
It's a comedy first. Expect a warm summer-vacation farce with a soft heart under it.
Ito has been telling it in Kodansha's seinen weekly Morning since March 2023, which means the manga has now spent three real summers on a single fictional day.
SHAFT is an interesting choice… The studio built its reputation on stylized, talk-heavy shows with a restless visual grammar, the kind that will hold on a single image for an uncomfortable beat or cut through a conversation at speed. That toolkit suits a story whose whole structure is the same day arriving over and over with small differences. The studio has also spent years on Puella Magi Madoka Magica, whose Walpurgisnacht: Rising film reaches theaters next month after a long run of delays. A repeating-day structure gives that house style something to chew on, since the whole form is built on repetition with variation.
The manga has reached 13 volumes, and English readers are covered on both fronts already: Seven Seas Entertainment holds the print license and has been putting out volumes since April 2025, while Kodansha's K MANGA app has carried it digitally since September 2024. The audience an adaptation would be courting can already read the source legally, in full, today.
Staff announcements are the next thing to watch for. Until those land, the only date attached to any of this is the one on the cover.
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