One rainy day a woman sees an abandoned animal in a box. It’s not a normal animal either — it has a leaf on its head, has thick fur, and can write words on a sheet. Well, that last one was what convinced her to take this animal home…especially since it insists it’s a dog. Well, is it a dog? Or are we just playing with alternate nicknames?
With You and the Rain is a very simple manga that definitely feels like it was published on the web, with its short chapters and little backstory over the course of two volumes. To sum that part up — the only thing we know is this pretty adult woman is a novelist who must be doing well enough to live by herself and then take in a dog. She does have a couple friends and family that really only appear in volume 2. We get the names of everyone else except her and the dog. Funny, I recognized throughout the whole read that there was no attempt to give the dog a name and found it somewhat comical, but then I started realizing that we didn’t get the name of the woman either!
Obviously there’s nothing super serious or deep about this manga. It’s all about how these two react and bounce off each other, which this manga does fairly well. We get the usual slower chapters with the two doing mundane activities, but then we’ll get a chapter where an experienced vet meets the dog and knows immediately it’s definitely not a dog but plays along because of its insistence of what it is. The better chapters usually involve additional people — see when her friends show up, only for one of them to be given the cold shoulder by the dog — but its more chill chapters do show either an attempt to relax or to ponder about the present, which works well enough.
Which means, what exactly makes this stand out from other one-trick manga series? The art. That’s the part that puts it over the top for me. Characters look great, the flow of each panel is appealing, and the many reactions by the dog as it either tries to get the woman’s attention, runs away from the woman’s friend Mimi, or gets totally played by a friend’s cat on a visit turn out to be real fun and engaging.
So will we ever know why this dog got left by the wayside? Will we learn more about this woman’s novel career (the most we did get is a flashback to her and her friends in school)? Will she even get a name? And will this dog finally admit what it really is?
Well, this manga likely doesn’t need to answer those questions to succeed. As long as it can come up with creative displays of dog and human bonding, With You and the Rain will be worth reading for slice of life enthusiasts in need of something simple and light.