Anime like Nana: 5 messy relationship and music dramas
Nana lets love, friendship and artistic ambition interfere with one another instead of resolving them into a tidy fantasy. These recommendations follow those competing needs; none should be mistaken for a continuation of its unfinished anime story.
If you want relationships with competing ambitions
These picks share the part of the original that matters most. Use the notes to choose the tone, length and setting you want next.
Paradise Kiss
A student enters an independent fashion circle and becomes entangled with its charismatic designer. Another Ai Yazawa adaptation, it shares Nana's style and attraction to complicated people, but trades music for fashion.
Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad
A teenager discovers a voice and a place in a struggling rock band. The rehearsal rooms and industry compromises connect directly, though the perspective is younger and the romance less central.
Given
A band gains a new singer whose unresolved grief changes its music and relationships. It links performance to things characters cannot easily say, with a more focused boys' love romance and a smaller ensemble.
Honey and Clover
Art-school students negotiate unrequited love, money and uncertainty about their futures. It shares Nana's ensemble interest in unequal emotional investments, with more drifting comedy and less music-industry pressure.
Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju
Performers' friendships and romances shape the inheritance of a traditional storytelling art. Its adult relationships and consuming vocation fit Nana's deeper concerns, but the historical setting and tragic register are very different.
As an Amazon Associate, AniWorth earns from qualifying purchases.
How to choose
Paradise Kiss is the closest authorial companion. Choose Beck for building a band, Given for grief expressed through music, or Honey and Clover for uncertain young-adult futures. Rakugo Shinju is the slower, heavier option about an art form consuming a life.