On the night The Garden of Words aired, the series reached a glorious high point in the Dragon Kingdom. Several topics about it shot to the top of the trending charts late that night!
The hottest topic of all was searches for the song "Rain"!
In films and anime, many background tracks were nothing special on their own. But when paired with the story and visuals, they could have an entirely different effect!
In the Parallel World, "Rain" was a Japanese song written by Senri Oe. By the time The Garden of Words was released, the song had already been around for more than twenty years. But Makoto Shinkai felt it perfectly suited the atmosphere of The Garden of Words, so he bought the rights and had Motohiro Hata perform it. That was how the classic ending theme for Foot Fetish Garden came to be in the Parallel World!
In this world, Chu Yu had asked his staff to bring in one of Japan Island's top singers, Fujiwara Toru, to perform the song. Of course, Japan Island was strong only in the anime industry. Its film and television industries were far behind the Mainland's, and neither actors' fees nor production budgets were even in the same league!
So even a top singer from Japan Island would rank somewhere between the top of the third tier and the bottom of the second tier in popularity across the Dragon Kingdom as a whole!
He'd agreed to sing "Rain" partly because Chu Yu thought his voice was decent, and partly because he was the only singer on the shortlist who was available at the time!
It was a bit of a coincidence, really.
But when he woke up the next day, the streaming numbers for his version of "Rain" had been pushed into