That Summer, Once More 5

Five volumes, one summer

The premise of the あの夏をやり直す (That Summer, Once More) series is time-loop fiction's most human variant: a man in his thirties wakes up in his seventeen-year-old body, in the last summer before everything in his life quietly went wrong — including the childhood friend he failed to confess to. Four volumes ran the loop: each redo fixing one regret and exposing a deeper one. Volume 5 (RJ01297261) is the exit — the volume that has to decide what "getting it right" actually means, and does.

Why the finale works

Circle Natsu Machi understood the trap of redo fiction — that infinite retries drain choices of weight — and built the series' emotional logic around the cost of remembering timelines no one else lived. Volume 5 pays this off in a final act that recontextualizes the first volume's opening pages, the kind of structural rhyme doujin manga rarely attempts at all, let alone lands. The childhood-friend heroine, who could have been a static prize, gets the series' best scene: her own account of the summers she experienced, unlooped, waiting.

The art remains the series' honest weakness — expressive faces on loose anatomy — but the paneling matured visibly across volumes, and the finale's key sequences are storyboarded with real control. H-scenes are sparse, story-anchored, and the better for it.

The English edition

The official English edition (translated for DLsite's global storefront) is genuinely good: idiomatic, tonally faithful, and careful with the series' time-marker vocabulary, which matters in a story where which summer a line belongs to is plot-critical. Its Manga Gold at the 2024 English Awards reflects real overseas readership. All five volumes have English editions — total cost for the series is under $35.

Verdict

The rare doujinshi series with a five-volume plan that arrives where it aimed. Read in order; bring something for your eyes at the end. 87/100 — Excellent.

The series occupies a specific niche in Japanese doujin manga discourse: it is the standard counterexample to "doujinshi can't do long-form story." Volume 5's release week produced the kind of reception usually reserved for commercial serialization finales — trending discussion, long-form review threads, and the recurring half-joking complaint that a doujin circle had no right to make readers cry this hard (同人誌で泣かされるとは思わなかった). The DLsite rating held near-perfect across the volume's large review base.

Japanese readers particularly praised the finale's treatment of the heroine's unlooped perspective — the revelation that her constancy across every timeline was a choice, not a fixture — which review threads called the series' 答え合わせ ("answer key") moment. There is also meaningful discussion of the series as a 30代向け (for-thirtysomethings) work: the loop premise is read domestically as being about midlife regret specifically, not adolescent wish-fulfillment, which is why the redo-fiction framing lands harder with the demographic that has accumulated regrets worth redoing.

H-content is sparse by doujinshi standards — a handful of scenes across 180+ pages, each anchored to a narrative turning point in the loop structure. Content is consensual, adult-cast (the narrator's adult interiority is the POV), and drawn in the series' expressive rather than polished style.