This is the story of two girls, both named Nana.
Nana Komatsu is a naive girl addicted to love who is moving to Tokyo to chase after her boyfriend going to school there.
Nana Osaki is a proud punk rocker that is moving to Tokyo to become a rock star.
By chance, they meet on the train. By even bigger chance, they end up wanting to rent the same apartment only to decide to rent it together.
What’s better than character drama surrounding realistically flawed characters? Character drama with a banger of a soundtrack! If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Nana, then head on down below.
Anime Like Nana
For Fans of Character Drama-Driven Plot
Paradise Kiss
Third year high school student Yukari is only into studying so she can get into any college outside of her boring town.
One day, she meets a suspicious stranger with bleached hair and piercings. She tries to politely leave him, but ends up meeting his friends who are fashion design students for an art school.
They want her to model, but she is afraid it will interfere with her studies. Still, she ends up agreeing and it leads her into another less boring world.
Both Nana and Paradise Kiss share an author, and it shows. It shows in everything from the drama to the complicated characters. Paradise Kiss is Nana, but with fashion instead of music.
Unlike Nana, Paradise Kiss has high school characters interacting with college-aged characters, which adds more relationships akin to Nana Komatsu and her naivety being manipulated by others.
Peach Girl
Everyone is under the impression that Momo Adachi is beach bunny due to her tanned skin. However, after years on the swim team, she just tans really easily.
Unluckily for her, the boy she has a crush on is rumored to only like fair skin. To woo him, she tries to transform herself into what he wants in a woman.
As Peach Girl is a high school anime, even though it shares Nana’s similar passion for character drama, it does occasionally feel a bit younger in that drama.
That said, both series deal with complicated love triangles and the general pain and regret that comes with being young and figuring things out for the first time.
Honey & Clover
Honey and Clover follows a group of college students who meet Hagumi, an artist with a tremendous amount of talent who transfers to their school.
From there on, Honey and Clover tells stories about the joys of falling in love, the pain of letting go, and the journey to discovering who you really are.
Both Nana and Honey and Clover follow a young adult-aged friend group. In Honey and Clover, they are all students at the same art school while Nana focuses on a rock band and their extended friends.
Neither show has a particularly large driving plot, choosing instead to just let the character drama drive the show. Both shows do a great job at balancing career and general life drama with romantic drama.
Golden Time
Banri Tada has finally been accepted into a private law academy in Tokyo, but due to an accident, he is without all his memories.
During his freshmen orientation, he meets Mitsuo Yanagisawa who is consummately stalked by Kouko Kaga, a girl from his old school. Banri begins to hit it off with both of them.
As they spend more time together, their fates seem intertwined, but for better or worse?
Nana has a passion for a sort of frequent and heavy character drama that is dying out in modern anime. However, Golden Time, a more modern anime, keeps that old school drama style alive.
The characters in Golden Time are, admittedly, less complex, but their relationships are all driven by the drama that is running through an interconnected friend group of young adults like in Nana.
Despite following college students, Golden Time does, unfortunately, often just feel like a high school drama series at times, though.
For Fans of Music and Band Relationships
Beck
After dispirited young boy Yukio rescues a dog, he becomes dazzled with the dog’s owner, Ray, and his guitar skills.
This entices him to the world of rock music, and ultimately the pair decide to form a band together.
As they are both anime of an older age, you will see quite a of similarities between Nana and Beck in terms of everything from story to art.
Both Nana and Beck follow members of a rock band who are struggling towards success, but also dealing with the drama that is slowly chipping away at the characters. The plot of the series is not just their struggles professionally, but personally as well. They are both drama-heavy music series.
That said, they are also rock music anime that feature amazing soundtracks as well.
Given
On one particular day, Ritsuka Uenoyama decided that two things he loved – playing guitar and playing baseball – had become boring to him.
However, when he encountered Mafuyu Sato holding a broken guitar, he fixes it. Upon fixing it and hearing him sing, it leaves a huge impression.
Given is immediately different from Nana in that it is a boy’s love series set in high school.
However, those differences aside, both Nana and Given surround the relationships and drama of those in a rock band and related to the rock band. They both follow interesting characters who have occasionally messy relationships with each other.
Like Nana, you get to see characters deal with pain, regret, and all the feelings that life brings.
Bocchi the Rock
Having social anxiety but still wishing to make friends, Hitori Gotou started learning the guitar to help lure people into talking to her. Years later, she has amassed great guitar skills, but is in high school with still no friends.
One day, she happens to meet an outgoing girl who just so happens to need a guitarist for her band. Gaining the nickname Bocchi, Hitori is recruited in and puts her heart into improving her stage skills to make the band a success.
Like how Nana is relatable with its adult problems and young adult life struggles, Bocchi the Rock is relatable to people with social anxiety.
Bocchi the Rock is frequently a bit more silly, but no less relatable even in its silliness and its character relationships.
That said, what Bocchi the Rock and Nana most have in common is they are both music anime surrounding the lives and relationships of a rock band. They feature different overall tones, but they both feature great rock soundtracks.
Anonymous Noise
After her childhood best friend, crush, and singing buddy moves away as a child, Nino Arisugawa is devastated.
Yet, years later she reunited with both this boy and the boy who comforted her during that fateful time. After joining a rock band at her high school, each finds their paths intersecting.
This is perhaps a strange way to “sell” an anime to a potential watcher, but do you want to watch a music show like Nana but a little worse?
Because that’s Anonymous Noise.
While both Anonymous Noise and Nana have plots that surround the relationships of those in a rock band, they are perhaps more similar in their passion for extra doses of drama. While Nana is subtle and takes its time building character drama, Anonymous Noise is a bit more heavy-handed with drama.
Both Nana and Anonymous Noise do have similarly good rock soundtracks, though.
For Fans of Friendship Between Opposites
Princess Jellyfish
Kurashita Tsukimi loves jellyfish, to the point of obsession. One day, when she sees a jellyfish being mistreated in a pet store, she tries to stick up for it, but her social awkwardness gets in the way.
Thankfully, a sparklingly beautiful woman steps in and sparks the beginning of an unlikely friendship.
While Tsukimi’s new friend charms her and her roommates, what they don’t know is that this princess is also a man.
In one clandestine event, both Nana and Princess Jellyfish have two wildly different characters meet and they become entwined in each other’s lives.
However, Princess Jellyfish isn’t about music, but it is about complicated adults. You explore the unique character drama surrounding the adults in lieu of more structured plot. However, while Nana drifts into melancholy often, Princess Jellyfish tends to lift things up with comedy more often.
Carole & Tuesday
This is the story about two very different girls with the same goal.
Tuesday, a girl raised in wealth, and Carole, a girl just scraping by, both want to make music. A chance meeting brings them together, and together they may just make their dream come true.
Both Nana and Carole & Tuesaday follow two girls who happen to meet one day and it bonds them. While in Nana they share a name, in Carole & Tuesady they share a love of music.
What Nana and Carole & Tuesday have most in common is that it has two main characters, and they are so vastly different from each other. However, their differences expand their understanding and they uplift each other in their struggles.
Furthermore, both Nana and Carole & Tuesday are, without a doubt, some of the best music anime. However, Carole & Tuesday’s music is more pop music than Nana’s distinctly rock music.
Kids on the Slope
After moving around his entire life, classical pianist Kaoru Nishimi has abandoned all hope of fitting in as he arrives in Kyushu for his final year of high school.
However, that all changes when he meets the thuggish drummer, Sentaro Kawabuchi, a man with an immeasurable love for jazz.
Over the music, they bond together and Kaoru learns that music should be something to bring joy to others, not something dictated by hundreds of years of technique.
While Nana takes place in a more modern era, Kids on the Slope takes place in 1960’s Japan, but still features a similar story.
Both Nana and Kids on the Slope are both music anime where two people of the same gender, but otherwise incredibly different from each other bond. However, Kids on the Slope features jazz music opposed to the rock music in Nana.
Throughout each series, there is no greater plot, but instead it focuses on the problems of the two main characters and how their friendship develops through these struggles.
Stop This Sound
After the senior members graduated, Takezou is now the sole member of his Japanese string instrument club. Facing termination, he now begins his search for new members when suddenly a wily one bursts right into his club room.
Chika has a strong reputation as a violent thug, but due to his grandfather being a renowned koto artisan before his death, he has a passion for the koto that will help Takezou revive his dying club.
While Stop This Sound is a high school music series following the members of the Koto Club, both series have an element of not judging people based on how they look.
Like Nana Osaki is a punk rocker with a good and vulnerable heart, Chika looks like a punk but has a complicated, powerful love for the koto.
It is the relationships that both Nana Osaki and Chika form with their more “normal” peers that they become friends with that sort of serve to even them out, but even those “normal” peers have their own problems that are being explored.
While koto music seems a bit more boring than the great rock songs in Nana, Stop This Sound really presents in an appealing – and very powerful – way.
For Fans of Complicated Romance
Scum’s Wish
To the outside world, Mugi and Hanabi look like the perfect couple, but the truth is that they are only dating each other because they can’t be with the people they actually want to be with.
For Hanabi, it is her childhood friend-turned-homeroom-teacher and for Mugi it is his older tutor that has been teaching him since middle school.
In order to stave off the loneliness, the pair find solace in each other’s arms.
You quickly learn in Nana that everyone, to some degree, is flawed and often a somewhat terrible person not unlike actual people. It is actually what makes Nana feel so deep and unique.
In Scum’s Wish, like many characters in Nana, everyone is awful to vary degrees. They act selfishly, they manipulate others, and they lie to themselves. It is also what makes it such an interesting romance anime to watch.
If you enjoyed how the characters in Nana were realistically flawed, Scum’s Wish makes its characters perhaps a little unrealistically awful at times, but it captures that same essence.
Orange
On the first day of a new semester, Naho Takimiya oversleeps. On her way out after being late for school, she finds a letter waiting for her that says it is from herself ten years in the future.
The letter ardently states her regrets that she has surrounding a new transfer student Kakeru Naruse. Thinking it is a prank at first, Naho ignores it, but when the events described within begin to come true, Naho decides that she will try to help her future self.
Nana is a show about life. It is messy. There are happy moments, big and small, and the same goes for the pain and regret of it all.
While Orange adds a little element of time manipulation, it is also an anime about regrets and the more painful moments in a relationship.
However, because Orange is set in high school, it lacks a lot of the more adult themes present in Nana.
We Were There
Nanami Takahashi is ready to enter her high school life and hopes to make as many friends as possible. However, she makes a fool of herself during class nominations by calling a student by the fake name a boy gave her.
This boy is the super popular Motoharo Yano who has most of the girls in their class in love with him. At first Nanami is mad, but soon she, too, begins to like Yano.
While We Were There is set in high school, it doesn’t let that setting stop it from approaching some more adult themes like Nana. In fact, it does well to capture how frustratingly young the characters are, but how they consistently want to act older.
While Nana explores character storylines outside of romance, We Were There is solely focused on the messiness of romance.
Unfortunately, what both Nana and We Were There also share is rather lackluster animation as older anime.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Nana? Let fans know in the comments section below.
