Mao, the latest manga by Rumiko Takahashi, has been announced to receive an anime adaptation in Spring 2026. The anime will air on NHK in Japan, with animation by Sunrise, the same studio which animated InuYasha. A one minute promotional video has been released.
The anime is set to be directed by Teruo Sato. Yuko Kakihara will serve as script supervisor. Music will be provided by Shu Kanematsu. Character designer Yoshihito Hishinuma will be tasked with adapting Takahashi’s characters into anime form.
The manga is a return to Takahashi’s InuYasha style time traveling feudal era battle Shonen. While her previous series Kyokai no Rin-Ne had supernatural elements such as shinigami and yokai, Rin-Ne was first and foremost an episodic romantic comedy set in modern Japan. Mao returns to a more serialized story format, with less emphasis on comedic misunderstandings, and more focus on drama and action.
After the Rin-Ne manga wrapped up its 40 volume run from 2009-2017, Takahashi took a year and a half off from weekly serialization to develop a new series. On May 8, 2019, Takahashi released her newest series’ first chapter in Weekly Shonen Sunday magazine. In September 2021, Viz began releasing graphic novels of the series.
Mao’s plot focused around a modern day teen girl named Nanoka who survives an accident that wiped out her family. Through a blood curse from a ghost cat called Byoki, she is drawn over a hundred years into the past to Japan’s Taisho era. There, she meets and falls in love with a cursed onmyoji mystic named Mao. Like InuYasha, Mao has to overcome ties from his past life in order to be with the one he loves now. A love triangle similar to InuYasha-Kikyo-Kagome develops when Mao’s ancient love Sana returns in the form of Yurako due to the machinations of Shiranui of the Goko clan. With the aid of Natsuno, an earth element user made of porcelain, Nanoka must learn to master sword techniques tied to her cursed blood in order to help overcome their ancient curses.
While several past Rumiko Takahashi anime have been produced, almost all of them have failed to adapt the entire series. Alien romantic comedy Urusei Yatsura, despite a nearly 200 episode original run in the 1980s, concluded before the manga. Genderbending martial arts series Ranma 1/2 suffered a similar fate, with the manga going on for four years past the anime’s conclusion. These two works have received remakes in recent years, but they have yet to fully adapt the lengthy source material and are significantly censored. Rin-Ne’s manga also outlasted the anime, which ran three seasons but never received an English dub or widespread popularity in the US on the level of Takahashi’s past works. InuYasha received a more robust adaptation, with practically all chapters save the one with the gag mosquito vampire being adapted in either InuYasha or its sequel InuYasha: the Final Act. Because InuYasha quickly caught up to the manga, a large number of episodes were anime original stories, and the Final Act conclusion was delayed for several years until the manga could get far ahead of the anime. Since Mao already has 24 released volumes, and most anime release on a seasonal rather than year round basis now, the need for filler episodes of Mao is likely to be obviated. This could allow Mao to join romantic drama Maison Ikkoku as one of the few Rumiko Takahashi series to receive a full filler free adaptation.
Do you prefer Takahashi’s work on action series like InuYasha and Mao or romantic comedies like Rin-Ne and Urusei Yatsura? Leave a comment on this article on the ToonZone forums.
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