Amyu's Kono Oto Tomare!: Sounds of Life is finishing. Amyu posted a note on X on Sunday addressed to the series' readers: the manga ends in three more chapters, and the first of those runs in the Jump SQ issue shipping September 4th (details via Anime News Network).
A 35th and final volume will follow. Shueisha hasn't dated it yet. Volume 34 arrived in June, so the wait shouldn't be a long one. Jump SQ is a monthly, so the last three chapters will run across the next three issues.
The series started in Shueisha's monthly Jump SQ in August 2012. Ending now puts the run at fourteen years and change, with more than 7.5 million copies in circulation.
The story follows Takezo, who's the last remaining member of his high school's koto club, the koto being the long thirteen-stringed Japanese zither, and the club is one bad term away from being dissolved. Then Chika Kudo, a delinquent everyone else has written off, walks in and wants to play. The two of them rebuild the club around the goal of reaching the national koto competition.
Platinum Vision adapted it into two thirteen-episode seasons in 2019, airing in spring and then again in the fall, and both are on Crunchyroll with a dub. That adaptation covered a fraction of the manga and stopped there, so anyone who only watched the anime has seven years of story they haven't seen.
It looks like a school-club drama, but everything builds toward the competition scenes, and a koto piece only comes off if six players breathe together. Amyu draws those performances as the big emotional moments, and that's what won the series readers who would never normally pick up a music manga. Competitive koto is a real school activity in Japan, with national tournaments… The competitive angle makes it relatable to those who are fans of sports manga. One reason that the series has become so popular.
With the anime streaming in English and 34 volumes on the shelves in Japan, Kono Oto Tomare! is yet to receive an official English release. It has been licensed in French, Chinese, Korean and Thai. Amyu addressed this directly back in 2021, telling readers on X that no official English translation existed and asking them to steer clear of pirated copies.
For now the two 2019 seasons on Crunchyroll are all we've got in English, and they stopped well short of where the manga is about to end.
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