Character · Clannad
Tomoya Okazaki
A third-year who has given up on the school, the shoulder and the father, roughly in that order.
In Otakana the clue reads: Delinquent who meets a girl on the school hill
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Clannad
- Letters
- 6 · Hard
Tomoya Okazaki arrives late, skips class, and tells anyone who asks that he hates the town he lives in. He shares a flat with a father who drinks and apologises to him like a stranger, and a shoulder injury from that household ended the basketball he was good at. On the hill up to school he meets Nagisa Furukawa talking herself into going in, and the story starts because he waits for her.
What follows is a school club plot with the volume turned down. Nagisa wants to restart the drama club that folded while she was ill. Tomoya recruits her members, argues with teachers on her behalf, and gets pulled into the private trouble of every girl the club collects. He is sarcastic the entire time and helpful anyway, which is the joke the writers keep making.
Key released the visual novel in 2004, Kyoto Animation animated it in 2007, and After Story followed in 2008, tracking the same characters years past graduation into work and marriage and whatever comes after. That second series is why people still argue about Clannad. Tomoya spends it trying to become the kind of father he did not have.
Spelling TOMOYA
TOMOYA is the given name, not the family name Okazaki, and it alternates consonant and vowel the whole way through, t-o-m-o-y-a, so hearing it once is enough to type it. Six letters, two O's in the even positions, one Y. The trap is order rather than sound: Japanese puts Okazaki first, and plenty of English material follows suit.