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K-ON's Aki Toyosaki Picks 3 Manga That Fire Her Up
posted on by Lynzee Loveridge
Newlywed voice actress Aki Toyosaki recently participated to launch NHK's Manga Love: Watashi no Manga Best 3 interview series. NHK posted the project's debut interview with Toyosaki on its Domō, Manga Desu. website on Wednesday.
The interview series will include interviews with all four voice actors who play season-themed characters for NHK's weather information feature. Toyosaki plays Haru-chan, the spring character. In the interview, Toyosaki introduced three manga that get her fired up. Her top three choices were An Invitation by a Crab (Kani ni Sasowarete) by panpanya, Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix, and A Perfect Day for Love Letters by George Asakura.
In the interview, Toyosaki detailed that while An Invitation by a Crab is a fairly new work to her, it is a mysterious, magical work that causes her to loop through feelings of fear, doubt, and anxiousness while reading it. The invocation manga has a surreal feeling, like taking a strange dream from the night before and drawing it the next morning. It is liking looking into someone else's mind.
When it comes to Phoenix, Toyosaki first read Tezuka's masterpiece when she was in elementary school after checking it out at her local library. She had already read Blue Blink, Unico, and Princess Knight, so needless to say, she didn't know what she was in for when she opened up Phoenix, simply thinking the bird on the cover was pretty. Despite the narrative's serious themes, she ended up reading the entire work at the library and feels that reading it as a child was actually formative for her.
Picking George Asakura's manga as her top choice was actually difficult, since Toyosaki is a big manga fan. She owns all of Asakura's manga but A Perfect Day for Love Letters is her favorite. The story collection moves her emotionally and she said she finds it easy to caught up in the manga's words, characters, and artwork. When she first read the manga, its world view was much different from both boys and girls' comics she'd read up to that point. She was also very impressed with how it acutely depicted the senses, like smell and temperature, are in the manga.
Toyosaki also described manga as "something like a textbook for living" in the interview. The full interview discusses Toyosaki's approach to voice acting (she tries to read manga of the works she appears in) and art, like drawing her own original characters.
Aki Toyosaki recently starred as the antagonist in Re:CREATORS, Akane Minagawa in Scum's Wish, Yunyun in KonoSuba – God’s blessing on this wonderful world!! and Chitose Ikeda in Yuruyuri. She's slated to voice Miō Aida in Itsu Datte Bokura no Koi 10 Centi Datta. and Aoi Inuyama in Yurucamp. She may be best known for her roles in K-ON! and To Love Ru: Darkness.
The next interview is scheduled for November 15 with Natsu-chan's (Summer) voice actress Aoi Yūki. Interviews with Aki-chan's (Fall) voice actress Haruka Tomatsu and Fuyu-chan's (Winter) voice actress Ayane Taketatsu will follow on November 22 and November 29, respectively.
Source: Comic Natalie
