Your lie in April

Plot

Fourteen-year-old piano prodigy Kōsei Arima becomes famous after winning several music competitions. When his mother Saki dies, Kōsei has a mental breakdown while performing at a piano recital; this results in him becoming unable to hear the sound of his piano. He sees the notes fly off the sheet music and can only hear the thud of the keys coming down no matter how hard he plays the notes, even though his hearing is otherwise unaffected.

Two years later, Kōsei has not touched the piano and views the world in monochrome. He does not focus on excelling in any activities and often spends time with his friends Tsubaki Sawabe and Ryōta Watari. Kōsei meets Kaori Miyazono, an audacious,…

Development

Manga

When Naoshi Arakawa first wanted to be a manga artist, he entered a one-shot comic, which featured a male and female violinist performing together, into the Monthly Shōnen Magazine Grand Challenge. Arakawa later serialized Sayonara, Football, a manga focusing on association football. After completing the series, he got tired of sports manga and wanted to try something new. For ideas, Arakawa returned to the one-shot. Despite the rejection of his previous music-manga pitch, he settled on creating a music manga. Concerned about competing with the popular manga series Beck, which focuses on rock music, Arakawa decided his new manga would focus on classical music. To diff…

Manga

When Naoshi Arakawa first wanted to be a manga artist, he entered a one-shot comic, which featured a male and female violinist performing together, into the Monthly Shōnen Magazine Grand Challenge. Arakawa later serialized Sayonara, Football, a manga focusing on association football. After completing the series, he got tired of sports manga and wanted to try something new. For ideas, Arakawa returned to the one-shot. Despite the rejection of his previous music-manga pitch, he settled on creating a music manga. Concerned about competing with the popular manga series Beck, which focuses on rock music, Arakawa decided his new manga would focus on classical music. To differentiate it …

Anime

The Ōizumi-gakuen Station, one of the locations used as inspiration for the series Around the time of the release of the manga's third volume, Aniplex producer Shunsuke Saitō offered Kensuke Tateishi at Kodansha an opportunity to produce an anime adaptation of the series for television. The original offer was for an eleven-episode series but Tateishi rejected the offer because it would not have been a complete adaptation. Saitō changed his offer to 22 episodes, which Tateishi accepted. Saitō offered the role of director to Kyōhei Ishiguro because he had worked with Ishiguro on the seventh episode of Wandering Son and left a strong impression on him.

Because Ishiguro wanted the an…

Reception

Manga

Cosplay of Kaori Miyazono and Kōsei Arima By June 2017, the manga had over 5 million copies in circulation.

The Your Lie in April manga received mixed reviews. Some critics praised the plot for its realistic portrayal of relationships between the characters. Rebecca Silverman from Anime News Network (ANN) was more critical and said the plot is not as emotional as Arakawa intended it to be. The characters also received mixed responses. Some critics praised Kōsei's relationships and the adult characters for being more developed than adult characters in similar works, whereas others called Kaori mean and said that her actions toward Kōsei were difficult to interpret. A fe…