Hana-Kimi

(Viz, 2004-2006)
™ and © 2004 Hisaya Nakajo
Right to left reading format; black and white. Original Japanese title translates as “For You in Full Blossom.”

Cross-dressing women who attend all-male high schools in order to get the attention of the man of their dreams is no new theme on the manga scene. In this latest reiteration, Hisaya Nakajo presents us with Japanese-American track star and transfer student Mizuki Ashiya: a girl with serious stalker issues who wormed her way through conveniently unattentive officials in charge of international transfers to win herself a place at the all-boys boarding high school that her crush, Izumi Sano, attends.

Like other cross-dressing romantic-comedies, Ashiya encounters her obligatory share of awkward moments and misunderstandings before making the equally obligatory loyal friends and confidantes: amongst them the gay school doctor and the sexually confused Shoichi Nakatsu, who can’t understand why he finds himself so attracted to the supposedly male Ashiya. Convieniently for Ashiya, her touchy-feely tendencies are excused as American culture shock.

Unlike its crasser counterpart, Girl Got Game (also about an over-eager girl who pretends to be a boy in order to join an all boys school basket ball team; and equally obliged to live in the male dorms), Hana-Kimi tries to put some real heart behind its clichéd premise, with likeable side-characters and almost plausible awkward scenarios, but it still manages to miss the right romantic-comedy pitch. For readers who can’t get enough of gender-bending misunderstandings, however, this is just the right kind of fluff.

— Shiaw-Ling Lai

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