がっこうぐらし!~おたより~ [Gakkou Gurashi! Otayori]

Gakkou Gurashi! #13

by Norimitsu Kaihou (Nitroplus), Sadoru Chiba (Illustrator)

パンデミック収束後の世界で、手紙が紡ぐ、みんなの「その後」。
彼女たちは自分の目指すべき道を歩んでいます。
「ずっとみんな一緒」ではない、学園生活部の近況を「おたより」にのせてお届けします。

Genres: Manga, Horror, Graphic Novels, Comics, Zombies

202 pages, Paperback

First published October 12, 2021

About the author

KAIHOU Norimitsu
Name (in native language): 紀光海法
Associated Name:
KAIHOW Norimitsu

Reviews

[Matt W · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I heard that book depository was closing down, I knew I had to get one more book delivered from them. This was the one I chose.

Endearing and a little bitter-sweet, this epilogue volume wrapped up the School-live story with a nice little bow while still delivering some great moments and insights.

In some ways, it's symbolic of the era that book depository has now brought to conclusion, and yeah... without getting melodramatic, that's about it.

"School-live" is a great series, by the way. Not your typical zombie story, merging both the cute and the psychological horror into an effortless tale of friendship and what it means to live.

[Mehsi · Rating 5 out of 5]

The girls are back in this gorgeous epilogue/sequel manga.


So I was utterly sad when the main series ending + with the rushed ending I just wanted more. I needed more closure! And apparently I wasn’t the only one who wanted that, because here we are with a shiny new manga. It is just one volume but it brings the closure that I definitely needed.

In this manga we see the girls again, it has been x years since the events of the manga Gakkou Gurashi and we are going to find out what is up with the girls (and the world). Each chapter lists a different character and we see both the main girls as well as the university girls. I was really happy with this format and was eagerly looking forward to each chapter. I loved reading about Yuuri, see how Miki is doing (still having a hard time getting over the loss of Kei), I was so proud of my girl Kurumi though also heartbroken given everything. I was happy to see how the world is doing. It is still a mess, zombies are still around, but deaths and injuries are almost not happening. They got a cure. They got something to use against the zombies and kill them. They are saving people (I was just crying for that poor boy stuck in the car). They are finding out about families and friends. The world is coming back. Slowly, because a lot of things got lost. Lots of people died. But they are trying and I love seeing the hope and the happiness get back into this world. Plus, we see how they saved the world a bit better, we see what happened afterwards. I definitely got the conclusion and closure I wanted.

I loved that the last chapter is about Yuki. Our delusional but sweet girl who is now doing what she wanted to do the most. I loved how her chapter also ties the whole letter sending that happened throughout the volume. How she taught the kids about letters and let them write one (and made me cry when that little girl asked that question to Yuki).

But I am rating 0.5 stars less because of chapter 7, that one just felt totally useless and made me more confused and weirded me out. I would have preferred a different chapter.

Highly recommend for the fans of the manga. Bring tissues.

Review first posted at https://twirlingbookprincess.com/

[Erica Berquist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review of the entire manga series, anime, and live action movie, posting here since it was the last chapter and I don't want to spoil the Otayori by posting elsewhere. To start off, here is a description of the characters involved in the series without getting too in depth or spoiling the series, including the big twist at the end of the first episode of the anime. Following this description, there will be a warning before I get into spoilers.

The school living club has 1 faculty advisor and 4 members. The School Living Club Rules are as follows:
1. We encourage the spirit of self-governing independence by camping at school, as well as socializing with various after-school clubs.
• School Living Club members not only attend classes but live their whole lives at school, so as to grow closer to the school's many departments, and with them foster self-governance and independence, and set an example for all to follow.
2. When we borrow tools, we must return the favor.
3. Do not move around by yourself at night. You must move with at least one other person at any given time.
4. Members will always help and support one another and have a fun school life!
5. Members must diligently participate in school activity.

Megumi Sakura is the staff advisor of the school life club, and their teacher. She's young for a teacher, so the students of the school view her more as a big sister, calling her Megune (a nickname) rather than Miss Sakura. She corrects them every time about how this is not appropriate, but they don't listen. This is getting her in trouble with the other teachers and principal who say this isn't professional and she needs to draw a line with her students, but Miss Sakura never tells them about this, preferring to shoulder her own burdens. She's also very close with her mom, who constantly tells her that she doesn't have it in her to be a teacher, but Miss Sakura is persisting. She finds her job very rewarding, and loves it when her students come to her to confide their personal problems.

Tarōmaru is a Shibe inu puppy who lives in the school with the club. He was briefly Miki's dog, but she yelled at him once and he's never forgiven her, growling at her when she tries to pet him. He now spends most of his time with Yuki, and generally creates havoc around the school by getting off his leash, opening doors, and running into classrooms while class is in session. The girls say he's too smart for his own good. Of note, while the dog has a big presence in the anime, he only appeared in one chapter of the manga, and was completely absent from the live action movie. In my opinion, making him a bigger figure in the anime was a good creative choice, and he has a big impact on the lives of the girls.

Yuuri (nickname Rii) is a 17yo member of the school live club. She is the only member of the club with a younger sibling, so she has fallen into a motherly role in the club – since the rules of the club are that you can never go home, it's been a long time since she saw her little sister, so she's using the other girls in the club as surrogate little sisters in order to not miss her own so much. She also does a lot of work for the club, such as gardening on the roof, so they have fresh veggies to eat every day, and keeping an inventory of how much food they have in storage. She doesn't have the best coping mechanisms for stress, and whenever she needs to cry she tries to hide it and how truly stressed she is from the others.

Yuki, also 17, is the main character of the manga and the anime (although another girl, Kurumi, is the main character of the live action movie). She looks younger than the rest but is just small and has a higher voice. She's the most devoted to her studies, when the rest slack off, although she isn't the smartest (yet) but she's determinedly working on it. Yuki has had issues with depression in the past, which caused her friends to worry, but she's currently found coping mechanisms that seem to be helping. Because of this, she seems to know how to help out her friends when they're stressed, overwhelmed, and worried – she instantly comes up with a distracting activity that has them laughing again soon. She's aware that her friends depend heavily on her for this skill, which she views as the only thing she can give them since she isn't strong like Kurumi or super smart like Miki.

Kurumi is a 17yo member of the school living club. Before joining the school living club, Kurumi was a member of the school track club because she had a crush on a boy there (the boy is referred to as senpai and his real name is never given). She's a very romantic figure who dreams of getting married someday, but while doing track to get noticed by her senpai, she discovered that she is extremely athletic and got stronger. She's like Usain Bolt, and carries the shovel she uses to help Rii garden everywhere, which she tells Yuki is for resistance training. Unfortunately, her senpai from the track club is dead, so her dreams of marrying him have gotten shelved, but she is still into fitness and uses her strength to protect the other members of the club whenever someone tries to mess with them. She's the super tough girl of the group, but this has given her issues, so that if she ever feels weak, she starts to wonder who she is without her strength. It’s like she feels it's the only thing she can contribute to her group, which is unfortunate because they value her for more than her skills.

Miki is a 16yo girl, the youngest in the group and the last to join the club (of note, the anime starts with her as a member from the first episode with their past of how she joined discussed, but the manga starts without her in the group and she’s acquired a few chapters later, and lastly the live action movie shows her joining the group a little bit into the movie. Also, in the manga and anime she meets the group for the first time in the mall, but in the movie she meets them in the cafeteria which conceptually makes sense, and doesn’t greatly change her role in the story). She had the difficult task of finding her place in what was already a tightly knit group when she arrived. They already had their ways of doing things, some of which she didn't view as healthy. She instantly called them out for their co-dependance. She didn't care if she pissed them off or lost friends, so long as they got into healthier habits. When they self-diagnosed a member of the group with an illness, she went to the library to read a book for research, so she could come back to call bs on their incorrect assumptions about another girl. She's very smart, is attempting to read a book in English which she read in Japanese once, and she goes out of her way to learn about people to connect with them. Miki's best friend Rei recently died, so she views being in the school life club as a chance to connect with new people to recover from the loss.

The four members of the School Living Club are an amazing and solid team of characters. If one girl in the group has a weakness, it's a strength of another in the group, so they're able to help each other out. The girls are aware of their co-dependence issues but acting as a unit is a sort of survival mechanism for them, and currently it’s working.

---- spoilers past episode 1 beyond this point ----

The big twist at the end of episode 1 of the anime and chapter 1 of the manga is that a zombie apocalypse has happened. The four girls are the only students at their school who have survived. Kurumi is the strong fighter of their group, taking out zombies with a shovel. Rii grows food on the roof and keeps a careful inventory of their supplies. Yuki has had a mental break that caused her to forget about the existence of zombies, and her cheerful personality helps to keep morale up for the group. Miki’s skill is that she is able to view their group without bias, since she is the newest member – she’s very skeptical that playing along with Yuki’s delusion is good for her, until events convince her.

Comparison of manga, anime, and live action movie:
The anime (since there is only one season currently) and live action movie cover the same events, whereas the manga covers an additional arc and the short sequel manga wraps up the story. The first arc covered by all 3 media contain some slight differences. In the last couple episodes of the anime, it’s revealed that Miss Sakura’s reanimated corpse has been wandering the basement bunker below the school, which had been set up as a fall up shelter in the event of a pandemic (the government had known the zombie apocalypse would happen). Miss Sakura bites their dog, and when Kurumi comes looking for him, she bites her too. Meanwhile, zombies overrun the school and are breaching all the barriers. Miki has to kill Miss Sakura in order to get the cure from the basement to save Kurumi, while Yuki devises a plan to get the zombies to leave the school. The school is too destroyed from the invasion for them to continue living in it, and they mourn the heartbreaking loss of their dog, but are relieved that Kurumi survived the bite. They plan their future after they leave school. (This version of the ending works so well. All of the girls have their chance to shine. Kurumi, the one who had been saving everyone, has to let herself be saved. Miki steps into her role, with a little bit of help from the memory of her friend. Rii attempts to keep her promise to kill Kurumi when she’s bitten, but fails. And Yuki more than anyone saves the day by appealing to the humanity of the zombies and telling them to go home over the school’s PA system. The dog’s death, which is the biggest change from the manga, is the most tear-jerking moment of the anime.)

In the live action movie, things go differently though the outcome is the same. The focus is on Kurumi as the main character – she does not get bitten, but she overcomes impossible odds to fight off the hoard. A generator catches fire on the roof, setting fire to the zombies who spread it as they walk around the school. Miki and Rii have an unlikely escape when trapped in a room by zombies. The most touching part of the movie is when Yuki finally breaks free from her delusions, as she remembers what happened to Miss Sakura – unlike in the other versions of Gakkou Gurashi, this fact had not been revealed until the end. Yuki finds Miss Sakura in the nurse’s office, where she tied herself up so that she wouldn’t hurt the girls, which fits so well with her character. Kurumi puts Miss Sakura down after thanking her. (The movie attempts to turn Gakkou Gurashi into an action movie, in comparison to how it was adapted with the anime. By giving Kurumi more screen time to shine as a hero, other characters have to take more of a backstep. Miki and Rii serve very little purpose in the final act, while Yuki only manages to keep herself alive rather than saving the day – this would be my only complaint, because I do love what they do with Kurumi’s emotional arc, and the movie invests much more emotion in her relationship with her senpai than the other adaptations, and this is also my favorite adaptation where Miss Sakura’s death is revealed, as it is so moving to have the girls she looked after thank her and say goodbye, rather than having Miki who didn’t even know her kill her alone. All in all, I’m a fan of this movie, although it does not reveal the secret bunker and Kurumi is not bitten, which might interfere with the ability to make a sequel based on the second part of the manga which has not yet been adapted yet.)
In the manga, the events of the finale (as shown in the anime) are actually broken into 2 parts. First, Kurumi is bitten, but in the manga she was simply exploring the bunker, not looking for a dog. Yuki has very little to do in this arc, and Rii simply sends her out of the room to kill Kurumi as she promised her she would, but Rii fails.

This is lucky for Kurumi though, because after Miki kills Miss Sakura, she obtains the cure and brings it back in time, before the bite stops Kurumi’s heart, or Rii finds the courage to kill her. In the manga, the girls get to enjoy a little time going through the supplies in the bunker, which includes food and information on the zombies, while Kurumi recovers from her injury. However, events soon play out like they did on the anime, when a note leads an army helicopter back to the school – in the anime, it’s the note Yuki attached to a pigeon, but it never led the army there like it did in the manga.

The fire during the zombie invasion in this version of events is actually caused by a helicopter that crashes. One of the biggest differences from other media in the manga is that Rii completely breaks down when she thinks Yuki can’t see her, hinting at future developments for her character – Rii was given the least characterization in the anime, so it is unfortunate that this moment of weakness for this character was cut out of other renditions of the story. So far in her development, Rii had been the strong motherly figure of the group who was unflappable in stressful situations. Rii’s character starts down a new path in the story now, as when she thinks she is alone and that her home is lost, she starts to cry.

This is a big moment for Yuki too. Previously Rii has acted strong for Yuki, as up until now Yuki was labeled as the mentally fragile one in the group. But Yuki seems to sense that Rii needs her to return the favor now, and she gets Rii back on her feet again, when the other girl seemed ready to give up. She also thinks of a way to let Kurumi and Miki know that they’re taking refuge in the basement shelter, as the school burns due to the helicopter crash. The four girls survive the fire (which luckily burns most of the invading zombies), but the school’s amenities don’t. Their crops burn and the power is permanently knocked out, so after cleaning up the school (during which Yuki takes out her first zombie solo, saying she is determined to not be a burden on the group) and having a graduation ceremony, before deciding to move onto university, since Miss Sakura marked it as a safe place on a map. This is where the anime and movie end, but the manga continues as they make their way to the university.

I won’t be covering everything that happens as they journey to and then arrive at the university, but I do want to comment specifically on the characterization and development of the girls as they continue to grow during the story. Yuki has really come into her strength in this part of the story. She’s almost entirely overcome her delusions about the apocalypse, and the girls mostly mention Miss Sakura fondly, such as wishing they could have her input on things, rather than feeding into Yuki’s delusion that she is still alive, since Yuki now remembers her death.

Rii meanwhile has completely broken down. Along the way to the university, they stop at Rii’s little sister’s school, which is overrun with zombies. Rii is tormented with guilt, since she didn’t think of her the entire time they were living at the high school. While Kurumi and Miki look on in horror, Rii carries a teddy bear out of the zombie-infested school which she insists to everyone is her little sister. Yuki recognizes that Rii needs this delusion to keep going, so she plays along, just like Rii had when Yuki was too depressed by reality to live in it. So Yuki interacts with Rii’s “little sister” to make her friend happy.

When the girls arrive at the college, they encounter a group of people who I won’t describe, as most of them are very boring and not worth mentioning. But Kurumi bonds over video games with one of them, and Miki shares a love of books with another. When issues happen on campus with another university group, Kurumi comes under fire for her bite. She’s started changing since arriving on campus – she’s cold, too weak to hold her shovel, and she can walk through a hoard of zombies without them noticing her. Worst of all, she feels like she is slowly turning into one, and she would have slipped away already if her friends weren’t there to remind her that she’s human.

During an odd plotline at the university, Takahito Tougo the leader of a gang at the university attacks the girls to try to get the cure from them. This was odd, since during his questioning they denied any knowledge of the cure, despite thinking they had cured Kurumi at this point with a shot. Later they find out the shot they gave her wasn’t the cure, but with the info they had at the time they should have believed the syringe they found in the bunker of the school was the cure. Yet they didn’t bring any of the syringes with them in case of emergency, they didn’t try to give the gang leader the syringe when he threatened them, and they didn’t at least tell him what they thought they had cured Kurumi with.

When Kurumi gets sicker, they need to find out what actually cured her – both to save her life and to bargain with the army who is looking for them (there’s a lot involved here, I’m simplifying), and with the help of a scientist from the college they learn it was the water at the school that saved her from the virus. This solution feels a bit heavy handed on the part of the author, who tries to also use this as the explanation for other events in the story, such as why Miss Sakura’s zombie acted oddly. But it’s a nice detail to draw the girls back to the school, so the story can end where it started, which feels only right. The water is indeed proven to be the cure, as when Miki gets bitten by the zombie of her old friend Kei, the water quickly (almost too quickly to feel realistic) saves her life. But by the time the army shows up, the girls have a proven bargaining chip to guarantee that Kurumi won’t be taken against her will.

I will be touching on the ending of the Otayori, which shows the events in the lives of the characters a few years after the main manga, in the next comment (ran past the word limit).

[Sesana · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extended epilogue to the School-Live! series, giving closure for the characters. It's heartfelt and satisfying and a little heartbreaking. Yes, the world is slowly starting to recover, but the keyword there is slowly, and with a lot of scars. Each of the four main girls are moving on, but also marked by their experiences. The last chapter, focusing on Yuki, is particularly cathartic. Then there's chapter 7, which... I don't know about this one. It feels very out of place in this volume. Other than that, this is a fitting farewell to an incredible series.

[Valentina · Rating 4 out of 5]

EL PLOT TWIST QUE HUBO Y FUE MENTIRA HAHAHA

Quedé de piedra cuando eso paso, estaría genial alguna historia así. A esta no le quedaba bien, porque se perdería la esencia. Ha sido un cierre sobre su vida adulta, no ha estado mal.

[Archie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some genuinely heartfelt moments and quite a lovely way to round off a series that had previously had a somewhat messy conclusion.

[Drucilla · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like that this got a full volume epilogue. The girls went through so much, it's nice to see where they are years after the series.

[Ana ★ Tesserell · Rating 3 out of 5]

They skipped over so much

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice little coda, but no action and no actual reunion means it falls far short of the rest of the series.

[Tiniew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is great! I love the aftermath of the characters, especially Yuki ^^

[Lilith · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 /5 stars
[8 /10 stars]

- story [1 /2]
- worldbuilding & consistency [1 /1]
- art [1! /1]
- characters [1 /1]
- length & progress [1 /1]
- ending [1 /1]
- originality [0.5 /1]
- enjoyment [1.5 /2]

~quick thoughts~
• short n' sweet