CD/Extras
Drama CD
Although the Sono Te Drama CD was the elusive white stag in my fervent manga conquest, when Kristina B. and Sasuga Japanese Bookstore finally hooked me up I discovered it was well worth the wait. This CD, an audio drama following the plots for Acts 1, 3, and 5 of the manga, is probably the closest thing we'll ever see to Sono Te coming to life off its black and white pages. Choice.
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Objectively, this CD does have a few minor low points: the casting/acting fails a touch at times (though not very often--except for Mio's voice actress, whom I think was horribly miscast), the background music ranges anywhere from hokey to sounding disturbingly like porn, and the lyrical song at the end, entirely in English, is quite possibly the worst song ever created in the history of the world.
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But overall, this is a great CD for Sono Te fans. Just remember that although the plot doesn't deviate much from the manga, this entire CD is in Japanese and therefore can be very hard to follow if you don't have at least a decent grasp on the Japanese language. In other words, don't give up an enormous amount of money for this thing unless you're sure you want a Japanese audio drama. After some meditation and your imminent emotional breakdown because Sono Te is the greatest thing ever, go here to buy it (ISBN: KECH1165).
Now, I'm not quite sure how to use the audio/video software on my computer, but I managed to rip a few seconds off the CD in an odd format just so those of you dying of curiosity could hear the boys' voices. Click below and prepare to see a blank video and a kinda crappy audio to go with it. ;_; Sorry, I'll try and do better next time.
-Kotarou showing up late to the first day of school. And yes, his voice actor is the same man who does Ginji from the Get Backers anime (in case it isn't painfully obvious).
-Yuuto trying to find out what's wrong with a quiet Kotarou, Tatsuki interjecting, and Kotarou finally admitting "Mouse Corpses." Uh, you kinda need to read Act 5 to understand that, but the clip still sounds cool.
Extras
This is a little ad (maybe the second installment? I never received the first ...) that came folded in my copy of Sono Te Vol 7. (Sorry for any poor scanning and handwritten furigana my Japanese dorm mate drew in for me. ^_^;) Printed on a very thin, green-tinted paper, the "Katsumoto Club Scoop" was a comical little way Katsumoto-sensei corrected a typo in a previous volume and announced the upcoming Ore-tachi Wo Tenshi To Yobuna series (a prologue to Sono Te) to appear in Shoujo Teikoku magazine. Katsumoto-sensei is the destroyed, drooling mass half-asleep on her table; when Kotarou asks her if what Tatsuki said about Udou-sensei is true, she mumbles, "Yes." Kotarou screams, "THEN UDOU-SENSEI IS EROTIC AND VIOLENT?!" and runs off screeching. Amusing--if a bit odd.
Katsumoto Club (back) (link fixed)
...and here's the back of the ad. The two bishounen who look like a grown-up Kotarou and Tatsuki are actually a young Udou and Kiba (isn't that wicked?) and the two girls are characters from their little tale. Kotarou is chanting about how he still believes in Udou.
Expect a fair amount of further Extras to appear in this section over time.