Tomoko Konparu

Tomoko Konparu (Japanese: 金春智子, born 13 March 1956) is a Japanese anime screenwriter and novelist from Nara. She has been writing for television animation since 1977, which makes her one of the longest-serving writers in the industry, and her name sits on a run of series that several generations of viewers grew up with.

She was born into an unusual household. Her grandfather, Konparu Hachijo, was the seventy-eighth head of the Konparu school of Noh and was regarded as a master of the form, and her father, Konparu Kinzo, is a Noh actor of the same school. She did not follow them onto the Noh stage. She read English in the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Sophia University, where she founded a science fiction club called Animedia, and in her final year enrolled in a writing class run by the screenwriter Masaki Tsuji, taking its anime course.

That class produced her first professional credit. A script she wrote for it, for the television anime Ikkyu-san, was accepted, revised over three months and broadcast in 1977 as Giyaman no Tsubo to Isshaku no Ita. She kept writing for the show roughly once a quarter, and then took a regular writer’s seat on Hana no Ko Lunlun. Through the 1980s her credits pile up quickly: Mahou Shoujo Lalabel, Ojamanga Yamada-kun, Dr. Slump Arale-chan, Shin Dokonjo Gaeru and Urusei Yatsura.

The Urusei Yatsura credit comes with a quirk worth noting. She wrote only one of the series’ two hundred and eighteen television episodes, and yet, working with essentially the same team, she wrote four of its six feature films. In 1983 the novelisation of one of those films made her a published novelist as well, and she has since written anime novelisations alongside her own mystery series, Ojosama Sakka Haruna no Jikenbo, which draws on her habit of travelling abroad.

She has a long association with the manga artist Rumiko Takahashi. Takahashi drew every cover for the Haruna novels, and Konparu wrote the novelisations of Mermaid Saga and Inuyasha even though she had not scripted those anime. They are also both committed Hanshin Tigers supporters, which by her own account is a large part of it.

In the 2000s and after she moved into series composition, the role that shapes an anime’s whole run rather than a single episode. She held it on NANA (2006), Chi’s Sweet Home (2008) and From Me to You: Kimi ni Todoke (2009).

She is credited with series composition on the Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?! anime.