Hello everyone! This week I’m taking a look at one of the most peculiar series I have ever read. I am talking about Azure Konno’s Koe de Oshigoto!. Koe de Oshigoto! follows the story of a girl named Kanna Aoyagi, who is asked on her 16th birthday by her 28 year-old older sister Yayoi to help give her a hand at her workplace after school.
Oh if she only knew . . .
Yayoi works at a video game company called Blue March. Kanna explains that the name of the company comes from her sister’s name as Yayoi means “the third month” which is March and Blue comes from a portion of their last name. When Kanna enters the company’s office she sees a poster for one of the games Blue March had made and notices in the lower corner of the poster there is a series of screenshots from the game and realizes one of the screenshots was pornographic. Kanna asks her sister what kind of games Blue March makes and Yayoi tells her that Blue March makes eroge, which is short for erotic games, in other words they make interactive pornography.
Kanna asks Yayoi how could she possibly help Yayoi, and Yayoi hands Kanna a stack of papers held together by a clip and Yayoi tells Kanna to look at the pages. She opens the stack up to a page filled with pornographic lines of dialogue and throws the stack of pages out of her hands and asks Yayoi what the papers were. Yayoi replies by saying it was a script for an eroge. She goes on to tell Kanna that the job she wants Kanna to do is to be a seiyuu, or voice actor, for a character in the current eroge that Blue March is making.
Kanna initially refuses and even storms out of the office until she runs into a friend of her sister’s who reveals to Kanna that both she and Yayoi have been saving up money so Kanna could fulfill her dream of going to college after high school. As a result Kanna goes back into the office and tells Yayoi that she’ll give being a seiyuu a try.
Famous last words . . .
Yayoi starts Kanna off by having her practice saying the words “pussy” and “dick” out loud, starting with the former. Kanna struggles to do so at first, but is able to belt it out after noticing she and Yayoi are the only two people in the office. Before she can move onto “dick”, though, a male co-worker walks into the office and reveals he heard Kanna, greatly embarrassing her.
As a result of this encounter, she can’t bring herself to say the word “dick” at all. On the drive back home, Yayoi tells Kanna that she has to get over it, because there will be much more sexually explicit lines that she’ll have to say. A few days later, Yayoi takes Kanna to a recording session to show her what it will be like when she starts recording her own lines. When Kanna and Yayoi enter the recording studio, Kanna is greeted by another seiyuu, named Fumika Warasono.
Quite personally, I might add.
They begin recording Fumika’s lines and as Kanna listens to Fumika performing, she finds herself pulled into a visualization of the lines Fumika is reading. Kanna is taken back when Fumika reaches some erotic lines of dialogue in the script and is shocked that she’s even visualizing these erotic lines.
A little while later Yayoi and Fumika continue to train Kanna to prepare her for her first recording session, which is a week away. After they finish training for the day, Yayoi hands Kanna some eroge and tells her to play them, as Yayoi thinks Kanna should study up on what exactly eroge are.
Kanna begins playing through the games, and most of the games she plays are heavy on regular dialogue and story with only a small amount of erotic content at the end of each game. Then she plays the last game she was given, and it is the complete opposite from all the other eroge she played, being heavy on erotic scenes with very little normal scenes instead. Kanna gets too engrossed in this final game and even begins visualizing herself in the game but is snapped back to reality when Yayoi sends her a text message. The jolt back to reality causes Kanna to fall out of her chair, and Kanna makes a firm vow never to play an eroge again.
Koe de Oshigoto! is an ongoing series and has been made into 5 tankobon volumes so far. It has also been made into a two episode OVA anime. The series has yet to be brought to the West, and knowing the content in the series, probably never will.
I rather like Koe de Oshioto!. It is an incredibly funny series that simply dwells in audacity. However, and this I cannot bear repeating enough, this series should not, by any means, be read by young people. It is firmly a seinen series through and through, meaning it is for adults. This is made abundantly clear from the very first page of the series. But, if you are an adult and you can handle things being a little bit on the raunchier side of things, I can’t suggest this highly enough.