So you’re publishing a manga series that takes place in a high school Koto music club and you want to promote it as well as provide your readers with some idea of what the music your characters are creating sounds like. What better way to do that than to ask an actual koto playing group to play some of the songs that were featured int he manga? Which is exactly what Jump Square did to promote Kono Oto Tomare!, with the video above featuring the song (Ku-On) played at the club’s first public competition in chapter 26 of the manga. There’s also videos for “Ryuuseigun” (chapter 8, the club’s first school performance) and “Double Personality” (chapter 16, an exchange session with two other school’s koto clubs). If you think the sound is familiar, you may have heard the koto used in David Bowie’s “Moss Garden”, off off Heroes.
I blew through this series — in as far as it’s been translated in English — in a day after I learned about it from this tweet as the artwork intrigued me. It’s one of those manga series you hope gets picked up by a decent anime studio –KyoAni would be perfect — to make a series from it, as it would be great to see the actual performances animated. The manga does a good job of showing the intensity and emotional impact of each performance, as shown above, but a static medium can only do so much.
Kono Oto Tomare! has a fairly straightforward story: Takezou was the only freshman in the koto club, so once his seniors graduated he was the only left. He’s trying to find new members but nobody is interested and his club room is taken over by deliquents. Enter Kudou, a guy with the worse reputation in school, even to the point of having been arrested last year and this guy wants to become a club member? A bad joke, but Kudou is serious and when not only his friends join (for a lark), but the club also gains an actual koto prodigy, Hotsuki Satowa, who comes from a prestigious koto family, it finally has enough members to be safe, if they can convince the vice-principal both of Kudou’s sincerity and the club’s right to exist — through a public school performance…
Once the club’s survival is guaranteed, the story moves on to that well traveled path of the underdog club wanting to make an impact at the national competitions, introducing rival schools, various challenges as the club members realise the enormity of the task ahead, as well as new supporting characters. There’s plenty of melodrama, as expected of a series like this, as well as more than a hint of romance… Nothing new perhaps, but the execution of these familiar beats is done very well. The gorgeous art helps a lot of course in selling it; Amyuu can certainly draw pretty girls and isn’t afraid to distort when necessary to convey the tension in a performance. One of those series that sucks you right in and keeps you reading until there’s nothing left.