BODY: Riders on the Keikyu line who spot the railway's elusive yellow train this month are in for a second surprise: the whole interior now belongs to a Meiji-era assassin and the noblewoman he adores.
The collaboration, titled "Hotaru no Yomeiri ~Ai ga Susumu, Omoi Kasanaru~" (roughly, "Love Advances, Feelings Overlap"), launched October 19 and runs through November 6 aboard the KEIKYU YELLOW HAPPY TRAIN. It marks the release of the 13th and final volume of Oreco Tachibana's Hotaru no Yomeiri, published the same day alongside a spin-off collection, Hotaru no Yomeiri Gaiden: Hitokiri to Yōdō ("The Killer and the Child").
Serialized on Shogakukan's MangaONE app, the series follows Satoko Kirigaya, a young woman of good family who dreams of marrying well to make her father proud, and Shimpei Goto, the hitman who loves her far too much — a contract-marriage romance-suspense that has pushed past five million copies in circulation and is currently airing as a TV anime in Fuji TV's noitaminA slot, Fridays at 11:30 p.m.
Inside the cars, Tachibana has drawn Satoko and Shimpei specially for the campaign, hung alongside panels of famous scenes and lines. The standout piece is a set of overhead posters threaded with real mizuhiki cord tied in an awaji musubi — the knot that pulls tighter the harder you tug both ends, chosen as a wish for the couple and for the bond between the series and its readers. One car also carries the first art from Tachibana's next serialization, due to begin on MangaONE this winter and billed as the strongest woman versus the strongest man. Volumes 1–4 are free to read digitally through November 8.
The insider take
The choice of train is the joke locals will get instantly. The Yellow Happy Train is a single eight-car set painted in the yellow of Keikyu's old maintenance stock, and because only one exists across a network stretching from Shinagawa to Haneda Airport and down to the tip of the Miura Peninsula, catching it is treated as a stroke of luck — schoolkids photograph it, and Keikyu leans into the superstition with yellow goods and lucky-charm tie-ins. Putting a story about a doomed, fate-bound couple inside the one train nobody can plan to ride is a neat piece of casting. There is a tidier fit, too: Keikyu was founded in 1898, deep in the Meiji years the manga is set in.
Originally reported by コミックナタリー - 最新ニュース (Japanese).