Seiho Boys’ High School 3

Kaneyoshi Izumi – Viz – 2010 – 8 volumes

Again, this is way more charming than it has any right to be. It’s also one of the only girls/boys only school stories that hasn’t resorted to romantic triangles, wacky gender misunderstanding hijinx, or undercover boys/girls.

The reason it’s not relying on very many of the plot devices common to its premise is that it’s way more character-driven and slice-of-life than the other stories. The boys don’t really need anything to shake up their lives because… well, the story is about their lives and how normal they are in such a school. It helps that the characters and dialogue are quite funny and well-written, too. It’s not quite like a shoujo manga, and this volume takes things a step further by making fun of the many things I thought it would contain. A girl points out the difference between her disappointing situation (the boys sneak her in to pass her off as a guy in drag in order to win an AC for their dorm, she accepts because one of the competitors is a boy that’s prettier than she is) and what would happen in a gender swap shoujo manga, where all the boys would fall in love with her but act confused since they would think she is a boy. Later, Seiho Boys’ High School punished me, personally, by having an entire chapter dedicated to how much the boys hate it when a fujoshi comes in and… assumes things.

The chapters are once again mostly one-shot stories focusing on different characters, with most of the emphasis on Maki. The school year starts again, so the cast is all second years now. The first chapter is about a play and a girl that may or may not be falling for the charismatic school stud Kamiki, the second chapter is about the friendship between Kamiki and Maki, the third chapter focuses on hilariously rude and insensitive Nogami and the school nurse (a subplot from a previous volume), and the fourth story is about Maki and a girl he met in chapter two, the aforementioned fujoshi.

While the stories are self-contained, they do have threads that bind them together, and the experiences of all the boys and the people they meet come into play along the way. The characters and the school setting build with each chapter in every volume, and the characters are all funny and well-written. It’s more slice-of-life than it is shoujo, and it’s quick to remind you that it doesn’t really have to be anything. I like it a lot for that, and it did teach me a lesson about not automatically judging a story based on genre cliches before I’ve read it. Though I would argue that method is valid 99% of the time.

The sense of humor really is top notch, though. The second story… has a scene at the beginning that made me laugh really hard. While complaining about the meat in the cafeteria, the lunchlady lets on that she knows a spot where the boys might be able to see dolphins. The boys get excited, with adorable smiles on their faces, until she reveals the bizarre meat they’re eating was the last dolphin she spotted in the harbor. The boys look so sad, then ask her what the Americans would think. It was perfect. The lunchlady breaks the news with a little heart, and there’s a cute dolphin speech balloon coming out of the bowl of meat.

Give it a try. I think it has the potential to appeal to a lot of people outside the shoujo fanbase. Hopefully the good word will spread and a lot of people can give it a chance. It’s not stupendous, or groundbreaking, or anything like that, but it is a nice, funny story with wonderful characters. It gets better with every volume, too, in its own slow way, so maybe it’ll really knock my socks off later.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.