This one makes you feel the clock ticking. Matsumoto sets the whole thing in 1999 with a tenth planet closing on Earth, and then makes you watch it through Hajime, an ordinary grade-schooler who loses his house and his father to a lab explosion in the first stretch and gets shipped off to his uncle's observatory. The crush he's been nursing turns out to be Yayoi Yukino, the woman chosen once every thousand years to rule from La-Metal, which is a hell of a way to learn your first love has a job description older than your species. It's the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter rebuilt as apocalypse sci-fi, all long-limbed Matsumoto heroines, silent starfields, and grown-up melancholy aimed straight at a kid's chest. Forty-two episodes of a boy figuring out that the person he loves already knows how the world ends.

In 1999, Amamori Hajime is an ordinary elementary school student until an experiment his father is running explodes and destroys their home, leaving him orphaned. His uncle, an astronomer, takes him in. At the observatory Hajime meets Yukino Yayoi, a girl he has noticed before and has a bit of a crush on. Her parents run a ramen shop in town, and she works as his uncle's assistant. Yayoi is secretly the Millennial Queen, chosen by her home planet LaMetal and sent to Earth. LaMetal follows a highly elliptical orbit that brings it close to Earth once every thousand years, and the encounter sets off natural disasters. She was chosen with LaMetal's protection in mind, but her own plan is to move as many people as possible to LaMetal so humanity survives if Earth is destroyed. The leader of the Millennial Thieves works to stop her, and how he knows about the Millennial Queen is a mystery. The series is a drama with mystery and science fiction elements.