A Manga Taisho Grand Prize Winner Finds Its Sound
On July 3, 2026, Minoru Toyoda's Draw This and Die (Kore Kaite Shine) began airing in Nippon TV's late-night "Fla-Ani (FRIDAY ANIME NIGHT)" block. The original manga has run in Shogakukan's Gessan since 2021 and swept both the Manga Taisho 2023 Grand Prize and the 70th Shogakukan Manga Award. To mark the broadcast, heavyweight artists including Gosho Aoyama, Mitsuru Adachi, and Rumiko Takahashi contributed tribute illustrations, a clear sign of how much the industry has invested in it.
The story is set on Izuo Island, 120 kilometers south of Tokyo. Ai Ankai, a manga-loving high school freshman, is pushed from "reader" to "creator" after a fateful meeting with an admired manga artist. She founds a manga research club, makes a book alongside friends and rivals, and aims for the doujinshi fair Comitia. With no flashy battles and no other worlds, this is a work about creation itself, and the real question is: what kind of music can carry it?
The Composer of Jujutsu Kaisen Leans Into a Quieter Heat
The score is by Hiroaki Tsutsumi of Miracle Bus. Born in 1985 and a graduate of Kunitachi College of Music, he took an unusual path, picking up the guitar at 14. Line up his credits and the range is striking: Jujutsu Kaisen, Tokyo Revengers, Teasing Master Takagi-san, and Children of the Whales, spanning the tension of action, the sweetness of romantic comedy, and dreamlike lyricism.
The muscular sound of Jujutsu Kaisen in particular, where rock guitar collides with orchestra, is burned into the ears of countless fans. Now Tsutsumi faces a story with no explosions and no curses, just "a pen moving across a desk." Precisely because the subject offers few big set pieces, the score's job grows larger. The swell of a character's inner life, the swell of a blank page filling in, the frustration of not being able to draw. The music must speak for all of it.
In fact, Tsutsumi has a real gift for scoring stillness. Recall the light piano and ukulele of Teasing Master Takagi-san and it becomes clear how well he knows the art of lending body heat to the small, ordinary moments of daily life. That breadth, an ability to accompany both the noisy laughter and the sudden silences of girls hunched over their manga, is exactly what a delicate subject like Draw This and Die needs.
An Anime About Creating, and the Score as a Second Act of Creation
Come to think of it, a story about people who create and the work of the composer who scores it are mirror images. The tension of Ai drawing the first line on a blank page is not far from the tension of a composer placing the first note on an empty staff. That Tsutsumi, a craftsman who has voiced "heat" across every genre, was called to a story about generating something with heat feels almost too fitting to be coincidence.
The opening theme is Tatsuya Kitani's "Isho," the ending Regal Lily's "Conifer," rounding out the songs with sharp young artists. Yet the true musical draw here may be the score humming in the gaps between those themes: the light pouring over a summer island, the chatter of an after-school classroom, and the weight of the resolve behind "I'll draw this and die." Just how Hiroaki Tsutsumi paints each of these in sound is worth waiting for. Until a soundtrack release is announced, tune in every Friday night and listen closely.
