March comes in like a lion

March Comes in Like a Lion is based on a manga by Chica Umino. It has run in Hakusensha's Young Animal magazine since 2007 and has won many big prizes, including the Manga Taisho in 2011, the Kodansha Manga Award, and the grand prize of the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 2014. Studio Shaft turned it into an anime for NHK, Japan's public broadcaster. The first season has 22 episodes and aired from October 2016 to March 2017. A second season of 22 episodes followed from October 2017 to March 2018. Akiyuki Shinbo and Kenjiro Okada directed.

The story is set along the Sumida River in Tokyo, in quiet old neighborhoods by the water. Its main character is Rei Kiriyama. He is only 17, but he is already a professional shogi player. Shogi is a Japanese board game a lot like chess, and top players can earn a living from it. Rei earns enough money from his games to live alone in his own apartment. But his life is very lonely. As a young child, he lost his parents and little sister in an accident. A friend of his father, a shogi teacher named Masachika Koda, took him in. In that house, Rei always felt like he was causing trouble, and Koda's daughter, Kyoko, is openly cold toward him. So in the end he moved out.

Now Rei barely connects with anyone at school, and his shogi career has stopped moving forward. He feels empty and unsure why he even plays. Then he gets to know the Kawamoto sisters. Akari is the oldest, Hinata is in the middle, and Momo is the youngest. They live in a small, cozy home in the area, and they open their door to Rei. They feed him, laugh with him, and slowly help him feel that he has somewhere to belong.

The show moves between two worlds. One is the warm, often funny daily life of the Kawamoto home, full of shared meals and small family moments. The other is the tense, silent world of the shogi board, where Rei faces older and stronger players and must decide what kind of player, and person, he wants to be. Rei grows slowly, step by step, through wins, losses, and new friendships.

At its heart, this is a gentle drama about sadness, loneliness, and healing. The show is honest about depression, which means a long, heavy sadness that makes everyday life hard. It often shows Rei's inner feelings through creative, dreamlike images instead of plain scenes. But it also has lots of warmth and humor. Critics praised how deeply it shows its characters' minds, and outlets such as IGN and Crunchyroll named it one of the best anime of the 2010s. A two-part live-action movie starring Ryunosuke Kamiki also came out in 2017. You do not need to know anything about shogi to enjoy it.