Synopsis

Based on a seinen manga by Kikuchi Naoe and Yokomi Hirohiko that ran in IKKI, this series follows a manga artist who gets roped into documenting train trips around Japan with her boss and a travel writer. The twist? It's completely real—the creators actually took these trips, and the manga is a straightforward record of what happened, complete with an upfront apology for the lack of drama. So yeah, it's mostly just people riding trains, waiting at stations, that sort of thing. The "travel writer" is a hardcore train otaku with encyclopedic knowledge of Japan's rail network, but he's also obsessively meticulous about planning—we're talking scheduling every moment down to the second. His actual goal is to eventually visit all 9,843 stations in Japan, and he treats the whole thing like a checklist. The mangaka, meanwhile, couldn't care less about trains. She's cynical, lazy, and mostly just excited about trying the next station bento. Their constant friction is genuinely entertaining. What makes it work is how real it feels. If you've ever traveled by train in Japan, the scenery and atmosphere will be instantly familiar. The artist nails the pacing and adds little touches that keep things consistently engaging even when nothing dramatic is happening. There's this weird recursive element too—some real people who showed up on these trips later appeared in the manga because they'd read previous episodes. You'll learn about actual obscure and interesting Japanese train lines along the way, though there's always this underlying sense of surreality—the train guy's obsessive checklist mentality means he's experiencing these places as boxes to tick rather than destinations to enjoy. It's a weirdly compelling look at train-otaku culture from the inside.

Content compiled by AnimeList.moe from publicly available sources.

Genres