Character · Sound! Euphonium
Kumiko Oumae
She joined the concert band almost by accident and spends three years failing to stay uninvolved.
In Otakana the clue reads: Euphonium player in a struggling concert band
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Sound! Euphonium
- Letters
- 6 · Hard
Kumiko Oumae plays the euphonium, an instrument that mostly holds the middle of a piece together and rarely gets handed the tune. She picked it up in middle school and drifted into her high school band without much intent, which suits her. She watches, she narrates, and she works hard at not having opinions where anyone can hear them.
The band she joins has slipped badly. A new conductor arrives, asks the members to vote on whether they actually want to compete at nationals, then holds them to the answer. Auditions get reopened. Friendships get tested against a seating chart. Sound! Euphonium takes school music seriously enough to let people be genuinely unfair to each other over it.
Ayano Takeda published the novel in 2013, and Kyoto Animation adapted it from 2015 with the sort of animation usually reserved for fight scenes: correct fingerings, real embouchure, the small business of emptying a spit valve. The show is also unusually honest about how unevenly effort and talent are distributed around a room.
Spelling KUMIKO
KUMIKO is six letters and the game wants the given name rather than OUMAE, which hides a long vowel of its own at the front. Three vowels alternating with three consonants, ku-mi-ko, and no doubled letters anywhere in it. The name is common enough in Japan that most players spell it right first time. This row is a fair one.