This book is a set with a special drama CD (STR-2443), and was originally sold at Comic Market 82. They recently started selling them on-line at Takeshobou site. Of course, they don't ship overseas, and I really wanted this ever since they announced it that I almost signed up for a proxy shopping service to get this. In the end, I ended up getting through a friend of mine in Japan.
Although I'd guess that the original work concept included the manga serialization, to me, the main activity was the internet radio aired between 2011-12-01 to 2012-10-18 (22 broadcasts total), plus a Nico Nama broadcast on 2012-11-17.
The concept was an internet radio run by four high-school students who wanted to become seiyuu. Of course, there are probably thousands of kids who'd love to have their own show on the Hibiki Radio Station. So how do these four manage it? One of the girls' aunt happens to be a radio director. Convenient, eh?
It turns out, all that was a lie and the four are actually real seiyuu, although not all that well known. They had me fooled. Once the truth was revealed, I did think that the four sounded too good to be normal kids. Otherwise, they were pretty convincing.
Most memorable moment of the whole series to me is the free talk section of episode 8 (2012-03-15) where Tanaka Miki talks about a little girl she saw in a train. The little girl apparently did her "mikan" performance with her mother. I'm not going to explain this in detail because I won't be able to convey the cuteness of the whole thing, but just thinking about it puts a smile on my face.
The characters (and their respective voices) are Aoyama Hikari (C.V. Takai Maika), Tanaka Miki (C.V. Watanabe Keiko), Kujisawa Nao (C.V. Ueda Akane), and Tanakura Airi (C.V. Beppu Narumi). Actually, there are two more characters from a seiyuu-bu from a rival school, Toono Shizuka (C.V. Ootani Satomi) and Saionji Reiko (C.V. Sakai Rei).
I Googled all their names and, well, most of them are still fairly minor, particularly in the anime related areas. Out of the six, Beppu Narumi appears to be doing the best, getting *minor* roles in some *major* anime, such as "Sword Art Online," "Accel World," "Kono Naka ni Hitori Imouto ga Iru," and "Sanka Rea." Without a doubt, it's a saturated market with an endless supply of new competition.
The 4-coma manga on this book is almost an extra item for me. I think I've become too much of a "radio seiyuu otaku" or something, with its negative consequence of worsening reading comprehension skills. At least I have good listening skills. w
I stole an image from Bamboo Channel Blog on fc2.com without permission. I'd figured it's public data and I wanted to keep a cast photo on file. I left the original EXIF data intact, so they are free to find me out. If you Google the right things, you can get to a similar photo in full 9MP (tiny sensor non-)glory, too.
From left to right, Sakai Rei, Ootani Satomi, Takai Maika, Watanabe Keiko, Ueda Akane, and Beppu Narumi.
