Wolf's Rain's ending, explained

First, the events, which are not ambiguous. In the last OVA episodes the world comes apart as the pack climbs toward the place where Paradise opens. Cher dies on the road. Toboe dies shielding others, shot by Quent, who dies in the same exchange. Hubb falls. Darcia, maddened, kills Hige, Blue, and Tsume. At the summit, Darcia tries to enter Paradise and is destroyed by it, because he is not a true wolf. Kiba, dying, reaches Cheza as she dissolves into seeds. Rain begins to fall, the first real rain of the series, and Kiba sinks into the water as the red moon clears. The final scenes show a modern city, recognizably ours, where Kiba and the others live again as humans, strangers to each other, and a Lunar Flower blooms in an alley. A trace of Darcia's corruption is visible in the new world too.

Now the interpretation, labeled as such. The most common reading is cyclical: Paradise was never a place to reach but a remaking, the world dying and being reborn, with the wolves reborn inside it as the humans they pretended to be. A second reading takes Paradise as genuinely opened and this world as its flawed fruit, which is why Darcia's taint survives into it: paradise, in this telling, is not perfection, just another world, with the same seeds of ruin. A third, bleaker reading holds that the city scenes are Kiba's dying vision. The series supports pieces of all three and confirms none, which is deliberate. Nobumoto built the ending the way she built Cheza's songs: to be felt at a level below argument.

One thing the ending does settle, quietly, is the title. Rain appears in the opening credits for thirty episodes and almost nowhere else, in a frozen, drying world. It falls only when the world is remade. The rain was the sign of the new world all along.