Eleven episodes and it takes you apart with a rice bun and a name written in a notebook. This is the show where Yukiatsu puts on Menma's sundress in the woods because grief made him a liar first and a person second, where Tsuruko keeps her glasses on and her love unsaid, where Poppo cracks open and admits he stood on the riverbank and watched and did nothing. Jinta in that hoodie, ditching school, arguing with a ghost only he can see, is one of the truest portraits of arrested adolescence anime has ever drawn. Yes, the melodrama is turned to eleven and the ghost logic doesn't survive a hard squint, but the finale earns every tear when the Super Peace Busters play hide and seek one last time and take turns saying it out loud. "Found you." Then Secret Base plays and you sit there with a wet face, texting a friend you stopped calling.

Jinta Yadomi spends his days shut away at home, skipping school and playing video games. One hot summer, his childhood friend Meiko "Menma" Honma turns up and nags him to grant a wish, even though she died years ago and can no longer recall what that wish was. Jinta first writes her off as a heat-induced hallucination, but he comes to believe she really is Menma's ghost. After her death, their close group of friends drifted apart, and by high school they barely thought of each other as friends. To grant the wish, Jinta has to reach out to Naruko Anjou, Atsumu Matsuyuki, Chiriko Tsurumi and Tetsudou Hisakawa, none of whom he has spoken to in a long time. Coming back together stirs up the pain, guilt and old feelings they have kept buried, as they try to help Menma move on and find a way forward for themselves. The result is a supernatural drama with romance and slice-of-life elements.