
Saka no Ue no Kumo is an NHK 21st Century special drama which was aired over three years starting from November 29, 2009. The series runs 13 episodes at 90 minutes each. The first series, with 5 episodes, was broadcast in 2009, while series two and three, each with 4 episodes, were broadcast in late 2010 and 2011. While most episodes were shot in Japan, one of the episodes in series two was shot in Latvia. The TV series is based on the novel Saka no ue no kumo by Ryōtarō Shiba and adopted by Hisashi Nozawa. The theme song of the drama series is titled "Stand Alone". It was composed by Joe Hisaishi, written by Kundo Koyama and performed by British soprano singer Sarah Brightman.
Saka no Ue no Kumo is a Japanese drama of 122,866 characters, with 8,653 unique words and 1,903 different kanji. Its difficulty rating on Jiten is expert, 4.3 out of 5. The full vocabulary list ranks all 8,653 words by how often they appear, and you can study them on Jiten or download them as an Anki deck.
Here are some of the words that appear most often in this media, as well as a sample of its rarer vocabulary.