What’s in A Title: After the Rain

白雨

白（はく）

This kanji is the word for white. It can be read as しろ、はく、 はっ、etc. 

雨（う）

This kanji is the word for rain. It can be read as あめ、あま～、 う、etc. So together, we have a “white shower”. Could the white be coming from the white clouds? Surely it’s not raining milk. So perhaps…

Put together it means a “rain shower” or “sun shower”. In other words, rain that falls when it is sunny and white clouds are in the sky.

Simply put this was a fairly easy translation. However I wanted to discuss the anime’s title and break that down to some degree as well.

恋は雨上がりのように is what it is called. I’ll break down the title as well.

恋（こい） means love. And we know that は is a particle that is used to talk about a topic. In this case love. In short we can read this as “Love is” for now.

雨上がり（あめあがり）

It has the kanji for rain, 雨 and the kanji for rise, 上がり. When put together, it means “after the rain” which is what the official translation has given us as the title. However, as you can see from the “Love is” there is more to this title than just that.

の in this context is a possessive particle but when put with ように it ends up translating to “like” or “similar to”.

So a more direct translation would be “Love is Like After the Rain”.

I’ve been wanting to watch this show for many years. Unfortunately, the show was on Amazon’s anime streaming platform Anime Strike when it aired. Had to be an Amazon Prime member and had to pay an extra fee in order to watch the anime that they licensed. Pretty crappy on their part but I digress.

HiDive has licensed it, so I was finally able to watch it. Now that I have some books under my belt and my reading skills have improved, I’ll buy the manga on Bookwalker since it ended back in 2018. Plus, it only has 10 volumes. 

The show follows a former high school track star who ends up falling in love with her manager at the diner she works at. They have quite the age gap and yet she still is in love with him. For these types of relationships to be explored in one of my favorite mediums is interesting to say the least. I’ve enjoyed what I saw. An 8/10 score for me.