Afterword

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VOLUME 5

Afterword

Good afternoon, everyone. This is Kimura Shinichi. How was the fifth volume?

I thought that I’d shine a spotlight on some of the sub-heroines in this volume, and so the story turned out like this.

Ayumu and the others played instruments in the third volume, Yuu put on a live performance in the fourth, and Saras sang in a live house in the fifth… and so, the music goes on and on.

I always think something.

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You have clothes (cosplay), food (Sera and Haruna’s cooking), and a place to live (the house Ayumu and the others are staying in.

So, what comes next? Sound, of course.

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I feel that in my line of work, I can express sound to even those who can’t normally feel it.

Sure, sometimes people say “Oh, this sound is pretty refreshing, like I’m listening to a babbling brook or whatever,” but that’s not the only thing I’m talking about.

For example, take the title of this series; “Kore wa Zombie Desu ka?” Depending on who’s reading it, the intonation and feel of it changes. This is where “sound” comes into play, I think.

“Pops, mum, Rodriguez!” (1)

Didn’t the last five syllables there come out sounding like English? You probably felt the same sound as I did there. Please be my friend.

In other words, I want to emphasize this nice quality of sound throughout the work, and use it to maintain a fun atmosphere.

That’s my dream. I may still be inexperienced, but I want to completely pack this work with sounds that are pleasant to the ear when read.

Anyways, even as I’m hammering this chapter out, I’m listening to music the entire time. Lately, I’ve almost exclusively been listening to Western music from the eighties, but I also occasionally listen to radio talk shows while I work. And then, a spot of good news came for a talk show and music enthusiast like me.

An extremely generous anime producer graciously sent me an invitation to a “Sora no Otoshimono Youth Hit Paradise” live event.

So, I’d like to borrow some space here to express my gratitutde for that invitation.

Seriously, thank you very, very much!

So, about that live… it was really good. I really think it’s impossible to understand that sense of harmony from across a screen. And, for such a huge seiyuu fan like me, I couldn’t help but just smile ear-to-ear the entire time.

There were a lot of people performing, but everyone was great .And there was Nomizu Iori and Mina in cosplay… cough cough. Of course, all the singing was insanely exciting too.

Oh right, there was also Natsuo Kamon’s song, “Yuke! Yuke! Kawaguchi Hiroshi” at some point, but before they played the song, there was a video message from Tatsuo Kamon herself! Wow, these organizers sure know how to liven up the crowd, I couldn’t help but think.

Either way, in the first place…

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It was quite a rare sight indeed to see all those panties flying about at a live performance.

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I can’t talk about too many of the details here, but I just want to say one thing!

That was so, so, so fun!

At one point Suzuki Tatsuhiki picked up one of the panties that were raining down on stage and wore it over his trousers, pretending to be a huge perv, and Hoshi Souichirou put on an afro while singing “Chiku Chiku B Chiku.” All this just got the crowd revved up to a whole other level, and made everything even more exciting.

The atmosphere was so comfortable to me that I almost wanted to bring my laptop and work there.

But nah, that would’ve been the rudest thing for the other people in the audience, I guess.

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In general, I’m really bad at working in a world devoid of sound.

Although, ever since I was a kid, I’ve also been pretty bad with movie theaters. “Sound” also had something to do with that… but seriously, there’s a volume that’s comfortable for me and there’s a volume that isn’t, you know?

Of course, I really wanted to see all the pretty images on the big screen! But I also hated not being able to control the volume, and I barely went to movie theaters as a kid.

But even then, a few days ago I went to the TOHO Cinemas in Roppongi.

After the live event, they would be showing Sora no Otoshimono and Omamori Himari all night, and I was invited to that too.

The showing would last until five in the morning, so I was afraid I would just fall asleep, but I found I didn’t feel sleepy at all.

All that pervy stuff in Omamori Himar-… cough cough. All those wonderful scenes, and the panties in Sora no Otoshim-… cough cough. When you saw such wonderful scenes up there on the big screen, of course you’d get excited.

That day just reaffirmed my belief that anime are awesome.

Whooo I want to see Zombie up there in the moving pictures too~~! I said to my supervisors, but…

“Shut up and behave,” they told me.

But but but… I really don’t like quiet…

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Anyways, I’m happy to say that it’s already been announced that Kore wa Zombie Desu ka? is getting an anime adaptation!

It’s because of all of you getting this book that I’ve been able to get this far.

Seriously, seriously, thank you very much! I’ll try to repay this debt by trying all the more harder from here on out! Please be kind to me from now on as well.

Starting with the cover of Dragon Magazine, we produced a drama CD, a manga version, and our Twitter account grew. And all this is thanks to the powers of Kobuichi-san and Muririn-san.

If those two hadn’t done the illustrations for this series, then I really doubt we would have gotten this far.

The illustrations for this volume were also wonderful. Please, I’d be thrilled if you took a look at the feature page illustrations in Dragon Magazine. It’s another wonderful drawing, different from the one opposite the title page, and it leaves quite a deep impression.

I really want to just express my heartfelt thanks to those two.

Thanks for pulling me along all this way!

And next, there’s Sacchi-san, who draws the manga version.

Sacchi-san’s drawing of Kyouko was so cute that she managed to work her way into Volume 5. I had originally planned this volume to be all about Saras and Haruna.

Whenever I meet together with my supervisor Morioka-san after we get some more roughs from Sacchi-san, we always agree on one thing: we’re really lucky to have him.

Thank you. Seriously, thanks for everything.

I think my job is to take all those cute illustrations and make cute characters out of them. I hope to continue bringing you more weird but cute girls from here on out.

Saras’s illustrations were also so good that I started having her say “my darling,” and wanted to show different sides of her personality during this volume.

It got to the point where I wrote “my darling” so much that whenever I went to the udon restaurant or the fish market near my house, and they thanked me with the standard “maido ari,” I started hearing “my darling.”

I’m planning to release the next volume in autumn, but until then I want to depict all the different sides of the heroines in Dragon Magazine and other places, so I hope you warmly watch out for that in the meantime. Please take care of me in the future as well.

– April 2010, Kimura Shinichi

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TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

(1) A reference to Red Yoshida, a Japanese comedian who had a bunch of one liners. This was apparently one of them.

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