Summer Time Rendering

Summer Time Rendering is a 2022 mystery thriller anime about a young man who keeps dying and waking up earlier in the same island summer, trying each time to stop something that is quietly replacing the people around him. Studio OLM adapted it from Yasuki Tanaka's manga, which ran on Shueisha's Shonen Jump+ from October 2017 to February 2021 and fills 13 volumes. Shinpei Ajiro, raised by the Kofune family after losing his parents, returns from Tokyo to Hitogashima for the funeral of Ushio Kofune, the girl he grew up with under one roof, and hears that islanders have been seeing their own doubles, the Shadows, shortly before they die.

The other two Summer Time Rendering characters you will spend most time with are Mio Kofune, Ushio's younger sister, and Hizuru Minakata, a mystery novelist Shinpei already admires, who arrives on the island with plans of her own. Hitogashima is modelled on Tomogashima in the Kitan Strait off Wakayama, with the village borrowing from Wakayama City's Kada district and Ogijima in Kagawa.

The staff list explains why it feels so polished. Ayumu Watanabe, who directed Studio 4°C's Children of the Sea and several Doraemon films, gives the doppelganger scares a patient, sunlit eeriness; Hiroshi Seko, who scripted the Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man anime, handles series composition; and NieR composers Keiichi Okabe, Ryuichi Takada and Keigo Hoashi of MONACA wrote the score. Our honest caveat: the second cour swaps dread for strategy, and some episodes stop for long rule-heavy briefings about how the Shadows work, which loses viewers who came for horror.

It is one complete run of 25 episodes (April to September 2022) covering all 139 chapters, so there is no sequel to wait for and nothing left unadapted. Outside Japan, Disney held the streaming rights (in the US it reached Hulu in January 2023), which is a big reason so few fans found it. A live-action adaptation, first announced in 2021, was confirmed in July 2026 as a film directed by Ken Ninomiya; as of October 2026 it is slated for 2027.

It suits viewers who like a thriller to play fair with its rules. It ranks among our best horror anime of all time, and closes our list of anime like Death Note for its plan-and-counter-plan duel with an enemy that learns.