This one sneaks up on you because it was never built for a streaming queue. It's a short film made for the Tale of Genji Museum in Uji, which means it has to do in a handful of minutes what most period romances fumble across a full cour: make a thousand-year-old novel feel like something that happened to a person. Hana gets turned into a cat and dropped into the Heian court, and the cat conceit does real work, because a cat can sit in rooms where a modern teenager never could and watch Hikaru Genji operate up close. What lands is that it treats Murasaki Shikibu's emotions as the actual subject, not the costumes. Slept on for the obvious reason, it lives in a museum in Kyoto instead of a season chart. Find it anyway, then go read the Uji chapters.

A modern high school girl named Hana is turned into a cat and sent a thousand years back in time, arriving in the Heian era as The Tale of Genji depicts it. There she meets Hikaru Genji, the hero of that celebrated novel, who acts as her guide. Through him, Hana feels for herself the emotions Murasaki Shikibu wrote into her book, and, as the title suggests, the cat falls in love with Genji. The short special mixes fantasy and romance with scenes drawn from The Diary of Lady Murasaki and other historical records. One of them shows the real nobleman Fujiwara no Michinaga taking early drafts of the novel because he is too impatient to wait for new chapters. The film was made for The Tale of Genji Museum in Uji City, Kyoto, which screened it for its 20th anniversary.