This is Kyoto Animation doing Meiji-era Kyoto, and it shows in every frame of Fushimi Inari's torii gates and the sake brewery Inako keeps failing to live up to. Her whole world is scoldings and shrine prayers until Kihachi Sakamoto shows up mocking the gods and talking up some incoming age of progress, and that friction between old-world faith and Second Industrial Revolution swagger is the actual engine here, not just romance window dressing. Reviewers are right that the adaptation buries the love story under scope and filler it doesn't always earn, so go in ready for a slow, contemplative burn rather than a tight romance. But if you're the type who watched Chuunibyou for the quiet character work and Beyond the Boundary for the mood, Inako's small, stubborn hope against a father who never approves will get you. It's polarizing because it asks for patience most shows don't, and either that patience pays off or you drop it by episode four.

In the summer of 1907, fifteen-year-old Inako Momokawa, second daughter of a sake brewer in Kyoto's Fushimi district, is scolded by her father daily and finds comfort only in praying to the gods. At Fushimi Inari shrine she meets Kihachi Sakamoto, a free-spirited young man who dismisses the gods and proclaims that an age of electricity is coming. When her father starts deciding on a marriage for her without asking her, Kihachi helps Inako admit that she wants to run away from her family. Their one hope of stopping the marriage is a strange book called the Electricity Catalog, a set of predictions about electricity that Kihachi wrote as a child. His older brother Seiroku took it, and no one knows where it is now. The two set out together to find it, searching across Kyoto and Shiga. The series is an adventure romance.