After Summer Project Overview
About After Summer
"After Summer is an illustrated retro-anime romance thriller set between 1985 and 1995 — told through prose, character art, cinematic stills, music, and lost-OVA-style fragments."
It begins with a forgotten summer and returns a decade later, in a world of payphones, cassette tapes, neon arcades, mountain roads, secret wars, and memories that refuse to stay buried.
A story told through fragments
Prose
The novel is the spine of the project: a long-form romance thriller following Natsumi, Ryoji, and the hidden war surrounding them.
Character Art
Every chapter is supported by visual moments featuring characters, fashion, places, vehicles, rooms, cities, and atmosphere.
Music
The music acts like the ghost of a soundtrack: opening themes, ending themes, radio memories, driving tracks, and emotional anchors for the story.
Manga & Anime
What the prose, the art, and the music are quietly building toward: a manga that redraws the story in panels, and animation — trailers and moving sequences — where the world finally breathes and the soundtrack plays.
Made for the few who find it
After Summer is a solo project — one person writing, directing, and building every part of it. The novel, the website, the character art, the music, the videos, the visual archives.
If you grew up with 80s and 90s anime, with city pop and eurobeat and ballads that hit too hard on a late night drive, with OVAs that never got a second season, with late-night television blocks that no longer exist — this was made with you in mind.
Welcome back.