I first picked up this series quite some time ago (possibly before this website even really existed).  I'm not sure what compelled me to pick it up, but I was sitting at my friendly bookselling establishment looking for manga to read, and I found this.  I read the description and thought to myself "cross-dressing and hot high school high jumpers?!  How can this go wrong?".  Fortunately, it doesn't go wrong.  It doesn't go wrong at all (Ok, it does have some slightly unrealistic plot points to it, but I think you have to overlook those if you want to get any sort of a series out of this.)

So here's the premise:
Mizuki Ashiya is a Japanese girl who was raised in America.  One day, on a family trip to Japan, she was watching a middle school track and field event on TV and saw Izumi Sano...a high jumper.  She instantly fell in love with his form and the beauty and grace he carried when he jumped. From then on, she bought every magazine she could find with articles about Sano...she even had them imported from Japan.  So, one day, Mizuki decided that she wanted to meet this Sano...she wanted to find out what he was doing and get to know more about him.  She convinced her parents to let her go to high school in Japan, and enrolled at Sano's school, Osaka High (which is in Tokyo...try not to get confused by that).  The problem (and first unrealistic plot point) is that Osaka High is an all-boys high school.  You'd think her parents would check stuff like that, but then we wouldn't have much of a series, now would we. 

So, Mizuki, telling her secret to only her best friend Julia, cuts her hair short, designs some kind of denim vest thing to hold down her chest (slightly unrealistic plot point 2), and heads to Japan to meet her high jump idol Izumi Sano.  Little does she know that when she gets there, she's not only in Sano's CLASS....she's also his roommate.  That's right, they have dorms.  And she's a girl pretending to be a boy. (There's NO WAY this would work in real life....absolutely none at all.) And, it turns out that Sano's a bit of a pretentious a-hole and doesn't want anything to do with Mizuki (at first).  He's also stopped jumping because of an accident he had a while ago that he just won't let himself get over.  So, Mizuki has her work cut out for her.  Fortunately, she does make some friends, and one in particular....a bleach-blonde soccer star from Osaka by the name of Shuichi Nakatsu......who finds himself falling hopelessly in love with Mizuki (who he ALWAYS thinks is a guy) throughout the course of the series.  I like this side arc....we get to see Nakatsu obsess that he's a man falling for another man and his inner struggles and conflicts because of it.

As far as characters...this series is full of great ones.  There's the school doctor, Dr. Umeda, a very promiscuous gay man who instantly knows that Mizuki is a female. This, of course, gives her someone to confide in when she's having trouble.....and leads to a lot of advice and sarcastic comments by Umeda, who's having plenty of man troubles of his own.  The guys in the dorms are great, and each has their own little quirk. But, the best character interaction of all is our main love triangle of Mizuki, Nakatsu, and Sano.  So, here's how that goes.

Mizuki loves Sano (obviously), but she can't tell him that because she's supposed to be a boy.  She has no idea that Sano KNOWS she's a girl, and falls more and more and more in love with her throughout the series.  She does know that Nakatsu is crazy in love with "boy" Mizuki...but she likes Sano, and she certainly can't go out with Nakatsu as a "boy".
Nakatsu is one of the star athletes in the school, he's a crazy Osakan with bleach-blonde hair...he's the last person that anyone (including Nakatsu) would expect to like boys. But he finds himself more and more attracted to Mizuki each day, and he doesn't understand why. He doesn't WANT to like boys, but he's finding that he can't help himself. Then he sees how close Mizuki and Sano are getting, and he realizes that he has to fight for Mizuki with everything he's got in him....and it still won't be enough. But he's friends with them both, and he's definitely a gracious loser.
Sano knows that Mizuki is a girl from VERY early on in the series, but he doesn't say anything.  At first, he keeps quiet because he wants to know what she's up to, but as he finds out more things about her, and as he learns more and more that the whole reason she risked everything and came here was to be near him and see him jump again, he grows closer to her.  He knows that he can't let Mizuki know that he knows that she's a girl, because then she'll have to go away, and he wants to keep her by his side.  Sano is very in love with Mizuki after a while, but he has to resort to being just her friend and keeping her by his side that way...at least until high school is over.

And that's our cross-dressing love triangle.  This series has a LOT of hilarity, a lot of trying to come to terms with feelings and emotions of growing up, and even more cross-dressing than just Mizuki.  I recommend it to pretty much everyone.  It was never made into an anime (which is one of the saddest things in the world), but it was released as a live-action TV drama that I'm hoping we'll get to see on DVD in the US sometime soon. Hana-Kimi is a great series start to finish, and I recommend it to EVERYONE who can at least stand high school dramas.

I give this a 9.5 out of 10.

posted by Yukino at 11:21PM