Character · A Silent Voice
Shoko Nishimiya
She hands the class a notebook before she says a word, and the class decides that is funny.
In Otakana the clue reads: Deaf girl who transfers in with a notebook
- Type
- Character
- Series
- A Silent Voice
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Shoko Nishimiya transfers into a sixth-grade classroom in Yoshitoki Oima's A Silent Voice and passes around a notebook asking everyone to write to her. She is deaf, she wears hearing aids, and she has plainly done this at a previous school. The room is careful with her for about a week. Then the novelty wears off, Shoya Ishida starts pulling the aids out of her ears, and the rest of the class treats it as a show.
The hardest thing to watch is the apologising. Shoko says sorry for the notebook, for the hearing aids, for the teacher's time, for taking up room. Her mother's answer is to keep her hard. Her younger sister Yuzuru's answer is to fight anyone who comes near her. Shoko's own answer is to smile and take the blame, which is why the apology she finally receives lands so badly.
Oima serialised the manga in Weekly Shonen Magazine in 2013 and closed it after seven volumes. Kyoto Animation filmed it in 2016 with Naoko Yamada directing, and the adaptation does its best work through sound: voices drop out of range, crowd noise turns to mush, and speech arrives half-formed. Shoko is the person the film asks you to hear properly before anyone in it manages to.
Spelling SHOKO
Otakana wants the given name here, so the answer is SHOKO and not the family name Nishimiya. The Japanese is しょうこ, and that first beat carries a long O, which strict romanisation writes as Shouko or Shoko with a macron. Five tiles leave no room for the U. One more caution: her name and Shoya's differ only in the final letter.