Tsukumizu Returns to Girls' Last Tour With Kaisō Toshi Danpen-Shū, a New Prologue Manga

When a story ends, it rarely stays quiet. It sits there like a parked Kettenkrad, engine ticking, waiting for us to turn the key again. And now we do: Tsukumizu is launching Kaisō Toshi Danpen-Shū on June 26, a new manga collection of short stories that works as a prologue to Girls' Last Tour (Shōjo Shūmatsu Ryokō). From our corner of Murcia, we’re calling it what it is: a return ticket to the world before the silence.

Megacity: a vertical world built in layers

Kaisō Toshi Danpen-Shū is set in a colossal, stratified metropolis—a Megacity that humanity built with advanced technology, stacked upward until it practically argues with the sky. The concept is simple and eerie. Life happens on layers. People live, work, dream, and vanish across different eras, while the city keeps climbing like a concrete tree that forgot when to stop growing.

The series frames these moments as a “log of life.” Not the loud kind. More like flipping through old photos you forgot you had, except the photos are from a world heading toward its end. Some characters will be citizens. Others may be “the people’s creations.” In a place like this, machines can feel like neighbors, and neighbors can feel like ghosts.

We like the premise because it’s honest. It doesn’t promise comfort. It promises fragments. And fragments can cut, but they also reflect light.

Why this matters if we loved Girls' Last Tour

Girls' Last Tour ran digitally on the same platform where this new project will appear and concluded on January 12, 2018. It ended with six compiled volumes. That’s not a mountain of books, but it is a full journey—compact, deliberate, and quietly devastating.

If we’ve followed Chito and Yuuri across ruins, we already understand Tsukumizu’s trick: the world is bleak, but the two girls manage to find small rays of warmth anyway—a bowl of soup, fuel for the ride, a moment of tinkering with machine parts, a shared glance that says, “We’re still here.” Civilization may be dead, but companionship is stubborn.

What a prologue like Kaisō Toshi Danpen-Shū can do is widen the lens. Instead of only witnessing the quiet after, we get to study the “before” in slices. Think of it like seeing the skeleton under the city’s skin. Not to explain everything—Tsukumizu doesn’t work like that—but to add texture and weight.

And yes, we suspect it’ll hurt a bit. That’s part of the deal. Like stepping on a LEGO in the dark: unpleasant, memorable, and somehow you still come back for more.

The wider timeline: anime, shorts, and Tsukumizu’s recent work

For anyone tracking the franchise across formats, the TV anime adaptation of Shōjo Shūmatsu Ryokō premiered on October 6, 2018 and ran for 12 episodes. It was licensed by Sentai Filmworks, streamed in the United States on the now-defunct Anime Strike service, and outside the United States on HIDIVE. Physical releases followed with both a premium box set collection and a standard complete collection on January 29, 2019.

That same day—October 6, 2018—also brought the spinoff shorts Shōjo Shūmatsu Jugyō (Girls' Last Class). Short-form, quick hits, still carrying that familiar quiet tone. Sometimes a “short” is just a smaller window into the same long winter.

Meanwhile, Tsukumizu also created Shimeji Simulation, which launched in January 2019 and concluded in November 2023. Different vibes, same authorial fingerprint: an off-kilter calm, a sideways sense of wonder, and the feeling that reality is one step away from turning into a dream you can’t fully explain at breakfast.

What we should do next

If we’re already fans, our call to action is simple: mark June 26 on the calendar and give this prologue a fair read. If we’re newcomers, we can start with the six volumes of Girls' Last Tour (licensed in English by Yen Press) and then jump to the anime’s 12-episode run when we want motion, sound, and that special kind of silence only animation can deliver.

Next step: when Kaisō Toshi Danpen-Shū drops, let’s read the fragments slowly. These stories aren’t fast food. They’re canned soup in a frozen world—simple, sustaining, and better appreciated when we don’t rush the spoon.