Honestly surprised by the low attention this has, but if you’re starved for more manga about creating and playing music then this is for you. Mashiro no Oto is about a young shamisen player whose grandfather was a unknown god in the shamisen space that never desired to break out (aka become popular). The manga has 3 main arcs, the beginning starts out slow with his passing and our MC running away from home trying to find his passion for playing again, which he finds through a school club and finding out he likes improvisation when playing. This is honestly the slowest, and most hard to get through portion of the manga as it of has a lot of at first unlikable characters and feels like it has some pacing problems. But after maybe like 40 chapters and when our MC wants to compete solo is where the manga wonderfully picks up the pace, going competition after competition eventually transferring into going pro in the music industry as 2 main groups try to popularize the genre/instrument that is shamisen music. It honestly had me pretty captivated once it got going and if you ever liked the professional part of Nodame Cantabile for even the current run of Blue giant supreme then you’ll enjoy the later 2 3rds of this manga. Now for the negatives is that I don’t love the romance and outside of our MCs group, character interactions are somewhat lacking, though they serve good story reasons. I also think that they super cut down on the side character’s appearances and what they are doing though that’s to be expected, especially considering they are talking about quite the different scopes in the latter half. Overall its pretty good and I would highly recommend, the art is fantastic with lots of beautiful panels during the playing and when they have their musical philosophy moments. The characters by the end are all pretty likable too and I loved the ‘villain’ of the mom and her motivations throughout the entire manga. Looking forward to the authors and especially the artist’s next work.

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