Chie Shinohara’s time travel fantasy shoujo manga Sora wa Akai Kawa no Hotori (AKA The Sky Is on the Banks of the Red River or Red River or Anatolia Saga) will receive an anime adaptation. Tatsunoko Studios announced the news on a newly opened website on February 15th. The series will debut in Summer 2026.
Red River is the story of Japanese student Yuri Suzuki. Her big plans to enter college and deepen her relationship with her new boyfriend are derailed when she is pulled from her own time to the year 1500 B.C. through a magical puddle. To make things even more dire, Yuri was summoned to Ancient Anatolia (Modern Day Turkey) to be a human sacrifice! Queen Nakia of the Hittite Empire needs the Japanese girl’s blood to enact a terrible curse. Only the intervention of a mysterious young Hittite prince and Yuri’s knowledge of 20th century ideas may save her from a gruesome fate and return home. Things become even more complicated when the people of Anatolia begin to see her as an incarnation of the Goddess Ishtar…
Tatsunoko also announced Kōsuke Kobayashi will be directing the anime. Yoriko Tomita will handle script composition. Kenji Fujisaki will be in charge of character design. Both Kimiyoshi Matsumura and Daisuke Yoshida from the Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology will provide consultation on historical accuracy.
Red River was originally serialized from January 1995 to June 2002 in Shōgakukan’s Sho-Comi magazine. Its original run was collected into 28 volumes and would be later reprinted between October 2006 and May 2007. It was published in English in North America by Viz Media from February 2004 to January 2010 and later republished in 3-in-1 omnibus editions starting in October 2024. As of March 2019 it had over 20 million volumes in circulation and is considered one of the best-selling manga series of all time.
About the Author: Chie Shinohara is a manga artist and novelist whose first work was published in 1981. Her series Purple Eyes in the Dark (Yami no Pāpuru Ai) ran from 1984 to 1987 and won the 1987 Shogakukan Manga Award in the shoujo category. Shinohara would again win this award in 2001 for her work on Red River. Her latest completed series was Yume no Shizuku, Kin no Torikago, which ran from 2010 to 2024 in 20 volumes and covered the life of the famous Ottoman consort Roxelana (Hürrem Sultan).
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