Born with a hearing impairment, Yuki Itose is college student who rarely interacts with others because of her disability. However, when she has an awkward interaction with a foreigner on her daily commute to school, the multilingual Itsuomi Nagi steps in to intervene.
Learning of her impairment and having an interest in travel and learning various languages, soon Yuki and Itsuomi bond over his new interest in learning sign language to better communicate with her. As they spend more time together, their relationship continues to grow even deeper.
Romance anime centered around a disability is a difficult route in navigate, but for the most part A Sign of Affection treats it delicately while focusing on the abundance of non-disability-related character drama. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like A Sign of Affection, head on down below.
Anime Like A Sign of Affection
For Fans of Adult Romance
The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague
Himuro and his family are descended from a snow yokai which resulted in his family having a strange power. Whenever he is excited or deep in concentration, it produces a Arctic winds and snow around him.
Finally starting a new job, he meets his cool co-worker Fuyutsuki. She is a calm woman with a stoic personality that always provides him simple solutions to the problems his powers create.
Himuro finds her absolutely adorable and vows to do whatever it takes to win her affections.
Both A Sign of Affection and The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague are romance anime following a relationship between two adults. However, their biggest similarity is the sort of subdued nature in which the story is told.
When it comes to the actual relationship, there are no bursting, intense feelings, but rather small casual moments spent together talking and getting to know each other. However, while the relationship in A Sign of Affection advances at a steady pace, The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague is sluggish with romantic advancement primarily because it is a workplace romance, and he doesn’t want to be inappropriate to his co-worker.
My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun
After her boyfriend cheats on her, Akane Kinoshita flees to her favorite MMO and vents her frustrations on some in-game mobs. While doing that, she happens across Akito Yamada who bluntly asks her to leave while he farms those mobs for a specific item.
While she initially finds him pretty rude, she meets Yamada again by chance in an offline meetup event for the game. It turns out she, like so many others, misinterpreted his poor social skills for antagonism.
From then on, Akane finds herself meeting Yamada more and more both in-game and offline as her feelings for him grow.
Both A Sign of Affection and My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun focus on a building romance between college students.
While both series have more cheerful female leads and more quiet and reserved male leads, My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun has a different dynamic. Unlike A Sign of Affection where Yuki and Itsuomi develop an interest at the same time, My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun has the female lead falling hard first and the male lead falling slower, barring the romantic progression for a bit.
In the moments outside of romance, both series focus on character drama, but the character drama in My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun is often gaming-themed and less nuanced.
Wotakoi – Love is Hard for Otaku
After discovering they work at the same company, a gaming otaku and a fujoshi rekindle for the first time since middle school.
After some good old-fashioned after work drinks, they decide to start dating, but dating an otaku as an otaku is more difficult that one would think.
Like A Sign of Affection, Wotakoi follows the multiple different romantic relationships of adults. However, all the adults in Wotakoi are some form of otaku.
While the otaku element adds flavor and gives everyone a common interest, the plot of Wotakoi is very much the three different types of romantic relationships it explores. It has the long established couple, the new adult couple unsure of their feelings, and the younger immature college couple. As it focuses on these three different types of relationships, it leaves little time for character drama like A Sign of Affection fills its non-romance-focused time with.
A Galaxy Next Door
After the death of their father, Ichirou Kuga supported his two younger siblings on their inheritance and by taking up drawing manga. However, with tight deadlines, he finds himself in need of a new assistant to help him meet his schedule.
While growing dangerously near his breaking point, Shiori Goshiki takes the job. She is incredibly fast and also detailed, a real dream assistant.
However, one night while working late, Ichirou gets pricked by something on Goshiki’s body and suddenly finds out that now they can’t be too physically far apart without him suffering ill effects, but they are, according to the customs of her homeland, engaged to marry.
Both A Sign of Affection and A Galaxy Next Door are softer sort of romances that happen between mature adults. However, while A Sign of Affection is a college-set romance, A Galaxy Next Door is a romance between a manga artist who is taking care of his younger siblings and the assistant that comes to live in his apartment house.
While both series are more mature romance anime, A Galaxy Next Door doesn’t have as much character drama. In fact, it doesn’t have much drama at all and instead focuses on more wholesome aspects of the relationship as well as its slight supernatural plot point.
For Fans of Quiet and Timid Female Leads
Kimi ni Todoke
Quiet and relatively timid, Sawako Kuronuma is misunderstood by her classmates. Due to her long black hair and shyness, they have taken to calling her Sadako, the ghost girl from The Ring.
Longing to make friends, she is drawn to Kazehaya Shouta, the most popular boy in school and his refreshing personality. However, when Kazehaya starts talking to her, Sawako’s lonely world begins to open up.
Both A Sign of Affection and Kimi ni Todoke are romance anime that follows the slow-burning romance between a quiet girl and the handsome, more popular boy that has taken an interest in her. However, while A Sign of Affection has the female lead mute through deafness, Kimi ni Todoke follows a female lead who has no specific disability other than looking scary and not being able to properly communicate with people.
Similar to how A Sign of Affection focuses just as much on character drama and inter-personal relationships as much as it does romance, Kimi ni Todoke is sluggish as a romance, but an excellent series showing a girl coming out of her shell and forming meaningful relationships with others for the first time.
Both series have character drama, but Kimi ni Todoke is often kept a little lighter and more wholesome than A Sign of Affection, which can have some heavier emotions at play sometimes.
My Happy Marriage
Despite being the firstborn daughter of a noble family known for its supernatural abilities, Miyo is treated little different than a servant by her father, stepmother, and stepsister after not manifesting any supernatural abilities.
After years of abuse and neglect, Miyo is told that she will be married off into the Kudo household. Kiyoka Kudo has built a reputation as a cruel man, having chased off several fiancees already. Knowing that she can’t return home and will be left homeless if the marriage fails, Miyo is ready to bow and scrape. However, she finds Kiyoka Kudo to be a quiet, but kind man. Unfortunately, not everyone takes her marriage into the Kudo family so well.
My Happy Marriage is distinctly different from A Sign of Affection in its setting as it is set in a fictionalized version of the Meiji Era. However, what these series most have in common is a tender romance between a cool, but not cold male lead and a quiet and timid female lead.
However, as My Happy Marriage is a series about an arrange marriage, the relationship begins quickly, but the love builds over time. Instead of a slow and steady build up to a relationship like A Sign of Affection presents, My Happy Marriage is mostly focused on building the female lead’s dismal self-esteem that was decimated by her abusive family prior to her arranged marriage and new happy life.
For Fans of Complicated Character Drama
Skip and Loafer
In order to pursue a career in politics to make a positive change for Japan, Mitsumi leaves her rural town to go to high school in Tokyo. While she has a clear life plan for herself, she is still a country girl in a big city and ends up late and lost on her first day.
Luckily, Mitsumi is noticed by a fellow new student, Sousuke Shima, and he guides her to school. This laid-back guy is charmed by her motivated personality and strikes up a friendship with her, supporting her as she tries to make meaningful friendships with her classmates.
Both A Sign of Affection and Skip and Loafer have a sizable cast of characters that are all intertwined with each other, and the bulk of the plot is about the personal and inter-personal drama in that group.
However, while A Sign of Affection is very obviously a romance anime, Skip and Loafer is a little more ambiguous and complicated when it comes to romance. The feelings are there in Skip and Loafer, but the series is more aimed at nuanced character stories than actual romance.
Regardless, both series present character drama in a way that you actually get very invested in each of the characters and their stories outside of the romantic relationships.
Insomniacs After School
Every night, Ganta Nakami is overtaken by insomnia that leaves him grumpy during the day. However, he happens across the easygoing Isaki Magari from his class sleeping in the Astronomy Club’s abandoned, supposedly haunted observatory. It turns out that she, too, suffers from insomnia and uses this room to sneak away for naps.
While the pair at first agree to share sneaking naps in the observatory, they are soon caught. In order to preserve their beloved nap spot, they persuade the school to let them revive the Astronomy Club where they soon share a growing love for the stars as well as each other.
Both A Sign of Affection and Insomniacs After School are part of a newer school of romance anime where character drama is prevalent, but not ham-fisted and laden with tired romance drama tropes. Instead, they both follow characters that are more grounded and realistic as they explore their feelings for each other while balancing their own personal problems.
While Insomniacs After School is a high school romance, it still maintains a more mature tone throughout as it does deal with heavier drama than A Sign of Affection. Furthermore, like A Sign of Affection, Insomniacs After School not only follows two people with insomnia starting a romance, but has a female lead that, while not specifically disabled like Yuki, has a condition outside of insomnia that prevents her from doing certain things.
Tsuki ga Kirei
For the first time in their third year, Azumi and Mizuno were put in the same class. Initially, they are nothing more than classmates, but continued exposure sees them grow progressively closer.
As the year goes on, the pair and their classmates must come to face themselves as they mature emotionally.
Like A Sign of Affection, Tsuki ga Kirei follows a newly formed relationship between two people whose paths just cross one day. While their relationship progresses rather quickly, the bulk of the series is instead aimed more at the drama that happens between them as well as the characters around them.
That said, while A Sign of Affection explores more mature romantic and character drama, Tsuki ga Kirei, as a middle school romance, focuses more on drama caused by the turbulent emotions of puberty and growing up.
For Fans of Disability Romance
For some reason, the only other romance anime – or anime, in general – that explore disabilities are movies. I guess it is too hard to make a touching, tender, but still respectful story in a 12-episode format. Regardless, they are all great emotional movies, and very applicable to A Sign of Affection.
A Silent Voice
After transferring to a new school, the hearing impaired Shouko Ishimiya is bullied by the popular Shouya Ishida. However, as Shouya continues to bully her, eventually his class beings to turn their backs on him. After Shouko moves away, he fully becomes an outcast for his behavior.
Growing up, now alone and depressed, the regretful Shouya seeks Shouko out to make amends to her for his behavior as a child.
Like A Sign of Affection, A Silent Voice is about a deaf girl and her romance with a man. However, unlike A Sign of Affection, which is a more wholesome sort of romance, A Silent Voice features a romance between the deaf girl and a boy who used to bully her for being deaf when they were younger. Of course, age has filled him with regret and the movie bases its drama around that.
In a way, A Silent Voice would be more like if A Sign of Affection were a romance between Yuki and Oushi instead.
Josee, the Tiger and the Fish
Tsuneo is a fourth-year university student who dreams of studying oceanography abroad, but lacks the funds. Josee is a woman who lives with her grandmother and rarely gets out of the house due to being unable to walk and bound to a wheelchair.
One day, their paths intersect as Tsuneo is hit by the wheelchair-bound Josee after her grandmother lost control of her on a hill while taking her out for her morning walk.
After the event, Tsuneo gets a job as her caretaker to earn extra money and, with the grip of her overprotective grandmother loosened, allows Josee to experience just a little more of life.
Like A Sign of Affection, Josee, the Tiger and the Fish follows a blooming romance between a girl with a disability and the guy who just happens to cross her path one day. However, instead of deafness being the disability, Josee follows a girl who is wheelchair-bound.
While A Sign of Affection focuses more on the various character dynamics and drama therein, Josee, the Tiger and the Fish tells a more cliched romance story at a faster pace. Given that it is a movie, this makes sense, but it does do a great job giving you the relationship moments you want quickly.
I Want to Eat Your Pancreas
Haruki Shiga is an aloof bookworm that normally has little interest in his peers. However, while in a hospital waiting room, he comes across a book that has has “Living with Dying” written on the cover.
He discovers that this book is a diary that belongs to his classmate, the popular and cheerful Sakura Yamauchi. It turns out that she is secretly ailing from a pancreatic illness that will soon claim her life.
Now sharing her secret, he watches her live her limited life to the fullest, and her unpredictable actions begin to foster a change in his heart.
Unlike A Sign of Affection which thrives more on drama than tragedy, I Want to Eat Your Pancreas is more of a tragic love story since the “disability” of the female lead is having a terminal illness.
That said, both series still explore a tender and poignant romance between a someone who is disabled, in a way, and the guy that just happened to cross her path and take an interest.
Do you have more anime recommendations like A Sign of Affection? Let fans know in the comments section below.
