The Garden of Words poster

The Garden of Words (2013)

Film · 46m · Rated PG-13 · In Japanese

Animation, Anime, Drama, Foreign (non-English), Romance

A young shoemaker and a mysterious woman find solace and connection on rainy days in a quiet garden.

Melancholy and romantic. A late-night trip at a measured pace. Emotionally it is heavy.

Streaming on Kanopy (free).

The Garden of Words parents guide

No surprises for a PG-13: some innuendo or implied sex and mild language.

Rated PG-13, but by what is on screen our estimate is fine from about 10.

Scare
Not scary
Jump scares
None noted
Gore
No gore
Violence
No real violence
Sex and nudity
Mild
Mild means innuendo, or sex implied off screen, with no nudity.
Language
Mild
Mild words like damn, hell or crap.

How we rate: an AI reads what is known about each title and tags it 0 to 3; we check the tags against a hand-rated set and correct them by hand when readers tell us. Estimates, not a scene-by-scene review. Spot a mistake? Tell us.

What is The Garden of Words about?

Takao, who is training to become a shoemaker, skipped school and is sketching shoes in a Japanese-style garden. He meets a mysterious woman, Yukino, who is older than him. Then, without arranging the times, the two start to see each other again and again, but only on rainy days. They deepen their relationship and open up to each other. But the end of the rainy season soon approaches.

Does it have a happy ending? (spoiler-safe)

Bittersweet. It earns its ending, but not everyone gets what they want.

Cast and crew

Directed byMakoto Shinkai
StarringMiyu Irino, Kana Hanazawa, Fumi Hirano, Takeshi Maeda, Yuka Terasaki, Takanori Hoshino

More like The Garden of Words

The Garden of Words is on our Under 90 minutes, Anime films, Romance on Kanopy, Animation on Kanopy and Romance lists.

More like this feeling

Prompts we typed into CouchRot, and the lists that share its tags.

Lists with the same feel: Melancholy and Late night.

Five more like The Garden of Words

Say the mood. Five picks with where they stream, right here.

Uses the TMDB API; not endorsed or certified by TMDB. Intensity, content, tone and pace tags are CouchRot's own.