Funny manga series about a girl named Mizuki who gets herself into an all-boys school in Japan so that she can meet her high-jump idol, Sano. ( )

Its really good. I think i had a bad first impression cause i thought it was the same as this cross-dressing manga i read ages ago that i hated. But now that ive started reading it i dont want to stop. ( )

I watched the Japanese live action of this manga, well, because I am a fan of Shun Oguri & Toma Ikuta (a little). The series is cute and funny. But reading this gender-bender manga, I can't seem to like it that much. First, the illustrations, I don't really like it that much. Maybe it is not the style I really prefer. Second, the plot, I know how it will go but Mizuki's excuse to pretend is just lame. She is risking too much for going to another country, but I like her courage and guts. Lastly, the excessive characters in one go but it's okay anyway.

I'll continue to read this series, maybe I'll like it better. ( )

3.5 stars ~
Hana-Kimi, Vol. 1 is a book that has sat on my bookshelf untouched for longer than I care to admit. I find that I have to be in the right frame of mind to began a new manga series, mostly because I like my shojo romances totally opposite than my usual reads—cheesy, unrealistic with lots of fluff. It’s a guilty pleasure that I discovered in middle school, and I just can’t help snatching up a cute looking manga when it comes my way. Hana-Kimi, Vol. 1 did not disappoint in the cheese department and so I unsurprisingly became enamored with the story fairly quickly.

♥♥♥♥

Mizuki Ashiya moves from the U.S. to Japan to follow her dream of going to the same school with her high jumper idol, Izumi Sano. There’s just one small hitch in her plan: Sano goes to Osaka High Private School – an all boys school! Mizuki won’t let that detail stop her befriending her obsession idol; she cuts off all her hair and disguises herself as a boy! When she finally arrives, she learns that not only will she be going to school with her stalkee idol, she’ll be rooming with him too!

Okay, so it’s more than a little creepy for a girl to go to such drastic lengths to meet her “celebrity” crush, and typically, this sort of obsessive behavior would totally turn me off. But for some reason, it didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of this book at all. She’s just so upfront about her reason for going to so much trouble and freely admits that she came all this way to meet him, it’s hard not to enjoy that kind of straightforward honestly. Plus, it’s super hard not to fall in love with all the characters. Here’s why:
~ Mizuki Ashiya is super naive and not all that smart when it comes to boys or their feelings in regards to her. She sees the best in people she’s ridiculously slow to figure things out. This causes her to walk into some weird, wacky, but ultimately entertaining situations. But what she doesn’t have in worldly knowledge (or common sense for that matter), she makes up in enthusiasm, loyalty to her friends, and eagerness to lend a helping hand—even when they really don’t want it. And she’s so humble it’s almost a weakness.
~ At first, Izumi Sano seems like a cold, standoffish dude, but the more I learned about him, the more I realized that he’s a kind and caring friend. He appears aloof, but he’s actually just private and closed in about his feelings. He’ll go to any lengths to keep his friends out of trouble, but he’s just quiet about it. He also falls asleep in weird and unusual positions and reminds me a bit of Kiri Koshiba in Beauty Pop.
It took me a bit more time to truly fall for his character, but fall in love I did.
~ Shuichi Nakatsu is a character that I knew I would enjoy from his very first appearance in Hana-Kimi. He’s goofy, loud, enthusiastic, and positive. He’s a person who has a hard time hiding his feelings so he comes off as a guy with a flair for the dramatic. He makes for an entertaining read, because when you add in his infatuation for Mizuki and his inability to see personal boundaries around people he cares about, well… he’s a funny guy to have around. You guys know I love a goofball, so Nakatsu swiftly became a favorite of mine.
~ Minami Namba is the resident advisor (RA) for Dorm 2, the dorm building that Mizuki and her friends reside in. He’s nephew to Dr. Umeda and shares the pervy gene is known as a womanizer. He takes to Mizuki quickly, which causes some tension later on.
~ Yujiro is dorm 2’s canine companion whom quickly takes to Mizuki (he likes girls). Even though he’s considered Dorm 2’s “mascot” he’s mostly tended by Sano and Mizuki.

The quirky and fun characters of Hana-Kimi are what makes this series so much fun. I had a great time meeting them in this book, and as the series moves on, they grow more important to the plot.

Though I loved Hana-Kimi, it isn’t without flaws. There’s all those major plot holes that makes the book unrealistic (not including the entire plot). How the hell does Mizuki even get accepted into an all boy’s school with her parents in the dark about it being boys-only and without the school knowing? I don’t know how it works in Japan, but there are so many health forms, birth certificates, immunization records, etc. that go into enrolling for school these days, I’m not sure how she could possibly get past those.

This book was cheesy, unrealistic, and pretty pretty stereotypical when it comes to shojo romances, but I still wound up loving it. I can’t help myself—these kinds of manga are my guilty pleasure. I enjoyed Hana-Kimi, Vol. 1 so much that the very next day I went to the used bookstore and bought every book they had in the series. I recommend this book to those shojo romance fans that don’t mind fluff as long as they come with a healthy helping of awwwwhs and adorable characters! ( )

I liked this just as much as the first one. ( )

I’ve actually read Hana-Kimi twice before, so this was both nostalgic and somewhat eye-opening. Early on in my manga obsession, which began in the summer of 2008, I read Hana-Kimi. It was one of the first I picked up and I was IN LOVE with it completely. I thought it was the best. Thus, I later had to reread it, only to find it didn’t live up to my memories of it, now that I had a larger basis for comparison. My third read through is a bit more balanced, seeing both the good and the bad.

Read the full review at A Reader of Fictions. ( )

I really liked this first volume, and I have the second one coming! Hurrah! ( )

I liked this just as much as the first one. ( )

I loved it, and all the characters. Mizuki is adorable and Nakatsu hilarious. I only wish it was easier to distinguish between characters, because it was often hard to tell who was talking.

Second time reading:
Still great. Had me grinning to myself multiple times. Admittedly, the art's a little messy, but it's easy to get past because it's so dang fun. ( )

On my latest visit my local library's Asian Center, I discovered almost a complete set of Hana-Kimi on the sale table (in fact, every volume save for number 18) for a quarter a volume. I remembered, distantly, hearing positive things about the series and, after brief wavering about the missing volume knowing how hard it can be to obtain out-of-print manga, decided I simply couldn't pass it up at that price.

After reading this first volume, I'm glad I took the chance. The situation is contrived, within the conventions of shoujo manga: Japanese-American student Mizuki Ashiya returns to Japan by herself to go to high school with her idol, high-jumper Izumi Sano. The catch? The school is an all-boys school, so Mizuki is disguising herself as a boy- oh, and not only is Sano in her class, he's also her roommate.

Mild spoilers follow.

The characters are well-rounded and likeable, both major and minor. They aren't overly angsty (beyond what I expect for teenagers) or, worse, stupid. There aren't the all-too-common communication breakdown incidents- for example, Mizuki sees Sano talking to a girl. Naturally, she wonders if the girl is Sano's girlfriend- but after a complete failure of eavesdropping, she actually asks about it, rather than seething and angsting about some imagined betrayal.

Where the story really shines to me is in its treatment of the central girl-disguised-as-a-boy theme (which I admit, is a theme I'm quite fond of!) and the consequences thereof. There is, so far, a pleasantly refreshing lack of homophobia and heteronormativity (ie characters concluding "I'm a guy, I'm interested in this guy- obviously he's a woman in disguise!" and being completely, author-endorsed, right) on the author's part.

Sano catches Mizuki when she passes out early in the story and figures out she's a girl- which is then definitively confirmed for him in the next chapter. This isn't hidden from the reader for some dramatic reveal later on. We see Sano reflecting on this knowledge and being uncomfortable with it, not immediately falling in love or lust with her over it- he's not completely indifferent of course, but there are other issues in his life that he's dealing with that take precedence to him.

The other person to figure out Mizuki is the school doctor, but rather than being the stereotypical flat shoujo villain, a creep who feels her up, he's gay ("Please, no homophobia, hmm?") and picked up from gender cues on the fact that Mizuki's not exactly a normal boy. He admits that he knows about unrequited love and won't interfere, and in fact the author seems to maybe be setting him up as something of a confidant for Mizuki (though he's a bit exasperated about that).

The final piece is Nakatsu, an outgoing and overly melodramatic classmate of Mizuki and Sano. He's attracted to Mizuki. Rather than the trite "somehow he knew X wasn't a normal boy" or concluding "obviously I'm completely, so she must be a woman!" (which I have, unfortunately, seen- more in novels than in manga), he's conflicted- and then, when coming to Mizuki's defense, decides "So what if it does make me gay? I don't care!" I'm sure this is the start of a love triangle, but both Sano and Nakatsu are interesting enough that I don't think I mind.

This is a promising first volume. It's not perfect- there are sometimes awkward transitions between scenes (I'm thinking especially of pages 31-32, it took me a couple of reads to figure out what exactly was going on), but the art is decent and the characters raise the story above the typical shoujo contrived situation. I'm docking half a star for these minor glitches.

The other half is coming off for the unrelated short story "The Cage of Summer". This story takes up about a fifth of this volume, which didn't resonate with me at all. More spoilers: a distant cousin comes to stay, she finds out he's a playboy who goes to clubs and sleeps around and is a jerk to her, protagonist hates him, then after cornering her when they're alone together in the family house he says she's his first love, she realizes her hate for him is actually love, and they have sex.

Yes, "what??" The "I hate you, you're a jerk, but even though I don't know it myself I love you" plot is one of my very least favorites, but I'm keeping it to half-a-star off since it's unrelated to the main story.

I'm going to try to pace myself to a volume a week with the series to make it last- I'm looking forward to it. ( )

Hana-Kimi by Nakajo Hisaya is about an American-Japanese girl named Ashiya Mizuki who decides to go to school in Japan to get closer to her track star idol Sano Izumi. The school that he attends just happens to be an all male school though so she then decides to pretend to be a boy for her high school years. Throughout the series, we experience all of the adventures that Mizuki has and the close calls for her as people find out or try to find out her ultimate secret and the romance that blossoms between Izumi and Mizuki.
I could use this book in upper level grades to introduce graphic novels to a more mature audience. This book does include inferences to cross-dressing and nudity so the students reading it would have to be cautioned appropriately. I could also use this book to allow Americans and other cultures an inside view into the Japanese Manga scene. It is written in the traditional Japanese style so the students could get a feel of how different other cultures are just by how they write their books.
I have really enjoyed reading this series. The first one completely hooked me and I haven’t stopped reading them since! (except when I need to study!) I have read almost the entire series (23 books) in just over a week. So as you can tell, I really love these books! I hope that I can find another series that can satisfy my new found craving after I have finished this series. I love all of the scrapes that Mizuki gets into and that she needs all the help from Sano (who already found out her secret, but she doesn’t know that!) to make her way through the trying times of high school. ( )

This is one of my favorite manga series. I'm a bit of a sucker for the cross-dressing motif that appears again and again in this format. (As well as in television and movies, Japanese and American, dating from way back when - Twelfth Night, anyone?) In this series, Mizuki wants to go to school with her idol, Sano, who is a high jump athlete. Unfortunately, he attends an all-boy school. What's a girl to do? Cut her hair, don a halter to hide her bust, and enroll, of course! We meet all the main characters in this initial volume, and also see that Sano learns Mizuki's secret right away, but decides to keep mum. The romance abounds, but not as much as the humor and school shojo themes. A happy and uplifting story about truly good people, it made me miss my college days (which seemed more akin to their high school experiences). ( )

Mizuki is a teenage girl who idolizes high-jump champion Izumi Sano. So much so that she disguises herself as a boy and transfers to the all boy boarding school that Izumi is attending. Lucky for her, she becomes roommates with him! On the flipside she has to try extra hard to keep her secret, not only from her hero/roommate, but from her other classmates, and the school doctor as well. Sure this manga isn’t very realistic, but it’s pretty fun and entertaining. My favourite character is Nakatsu, who is freaking out about how he is attracted to another boy (but its really a girl!). I’ll definitely check out the next one to see is anyone finds out the truth! ( )

Mizuki is a Japanese-American track-and-field star who transfers to a high school in Japan. To be close to her idol, high jumper Izumi Sano, she's going to an all-guys' high school disguised as a boy. As fate would have it, Sano and Mizuki are more than classmates, they're roommates! Now, Mizuki must keep her secret in the classroom, the locker room, and her own bedroom. And her classmates, and the weird school nurse, must react to the new transfer student who looks like a very pretty boy…

The Hana-Kimi series is one of the more entertaining and well drawn mangas I’ve read. There is plenty of humorous tension as Mizuki tries to maintain her male façade. Definitely recommend for more mature readers who enjoy romantic comedy. ( )

Re-Read... ( )