Anime like Ai Monogatari: 9 Love Stories

NINETEEN 19

Studio: MADHOUSE
Status: Finished
Genres: Drama , Romance

19-year-old Kubota is ready to find a girlfriend. The perfect chance arises when he meets Masana Fujisaka, his first love, in a club. She's just broken up with her longtime boyfriend and is surprised to run into Kubota, who sees that the perfect opportunity has just arisen.

Tags: Unrequited Love , Heterosexual , Coming of Age , Primarily Adult Cast , Bar

Bobby ni Kubittake

Studio: MADHOUSE , Kadokawa Shoten , Project Team Argos
Status: Finished
Genres: Drama , Romance

The "Bobby" referred to in the title is actually 17-year-old Akihiko Nomura, an underachieving high school kid with a deep love for motorcycles. His grades are failing, and his father – traditional and strict (but who must have also at some point gave in and allowed him to have a motorcycle) – is trying everything he can think of to get the kid to apply for college. His mother is so silent, she might as well not even exist. Really, his support system lies entirely in his twinkle-toed little sister, who's nosy but cheers him on in her own way.

Bobby really does little else but work on his bike. He cleans his bike. He tunes up his bike. He rides his bike. One would call him a motorcycle otaku. His most recent achievement seems to have been getting photos of himself on a road trip printed in a motorcyclist hobby magazine. This leads to an unexpected result: a girl his age, who picked up that issue on a whim, decides to write him a letter. A long, rambling letter, but dreamily romantic just the same. Bobby admits to his sister that he's never gotten a letter from a girl before. He writes back, "I got your letter. I'm happy 'cause it was from a girl."

Bobby is not a well-rounded kid. He barely speaks – even to his own family – and the "letters" he writes back to the mystery girl usually consist of a single sentence or so. His motorcycle obsession is all-consuming, to the point where he happily quits school to work at a biker bar. Of course, his father, at a loss, kicks him out of the house. Staying with a friend, he's delighted when his female pen pal says she'll call him. On that day, his boss at the bar decides to take him to a motocross track. But that's a day that wouldn't end in a way that anybody would expect.



Note: Based on the novel of the same name by Yoshio Kataoka.

Tags: Motorcycles , Tragedy , Male Protagonist , Coming of Age , Foreign

Heart Cocktail

Studio: Fairy Tale Co.
Status: Finished
Genres: Romance , Slice of Life

Chalk-Colored People-creator Seizo Watase's 1983 series of short manga in Comic Morning is adapted into dozens of romantic vignettes, each designed to tell a simple love story in "no more time than it would take to smoke a cigarette," which often means that there is little time for even revealing people's names; many tales simply star "Me" and "Her."

Stories include Emblem of My Father, Two in the Beer Garden, Old Hawaii Corner, My Brother's Zippo, and Takeru's Love of Two and a Half Millennia. The tobacco analogy may sound strange in these politically correct times, but it is better than the alternative, remembering that such short manga stories are actually designed to take no longer to read than the average dump.

(Source; Anime Encyclopedia)

Tags: Iyashikei , Episodic , Primarily Adult Cast , Male Protagonist , Heterosexual , Urban , Seinen , Coastal , Snowscape , Bar , Restaurant

Otona Joshi no Anime Time

Studio: bones , NHK , Ashi Productions , The Answer Studio , WAO World
Status: Finished
Genres: Drama , Romance

A series of animations based on prize-winning short stories for women.

Kawamo wo Suberu Kaze (January 7, 2011)
In the story, 33-year-old Kanazawa native Noriko had decided long ago not to accept an ordinary, provincial life for herself. So, she had gone to college in Tokyo, worked on her own, married a man at an elite trading firm, and had a child. She has just returned home from five years abroad with her husband and four-year-old son. However, she senses a large emptiness in her heart since coming back. Moreover, there is a man who shares a big secret with Noriko.

Yuuge (March 10, 2013)
Mimi, a wife in her late 20s, leaves her family and begins living with a young man.

Jinsei Best 10 (March 17, 2013)
Hatoko, a business woman, faces her upcoming 40th birthday and reunites with the person with whom she shared her first kiss in middle school, over two decades ago.

Dokoka Dewanai Koko (March 24, 2013)
A 43-year-old housewife gets a glimpse of a complicated relationship between a mother and a daughter.



Tags: Anthology , Female Protagonist , Primarily Adult Cast , Episodic , Family Life , Primarily Female Cast , Heterosexual , Work , Food , Marriage