By Banri Hidaka. Released in Japan as “Sekai De Ichiban Daikirai!” by Hakusensha, serialized in the magazine Hana to Yume. Released in North America by CMX.

First off, I’m not certain if it’s my copy of just a general thing, but the early pages of this volume have some bad original pages, with some of them looking blurry. Luckily, it seems to go away after a chapter or so. I’m not sure what original art CMX uses for their books, I usually assume it’s the Hakusensha tankobons.

In any case, this volume – Six Hate, as the author abbreviates it – begins where the last one left off, with Arata confessing to Kazuha. After realizing that he’s serious, she starts to slide into self-hatred, feeling that her aggressive cluelessness was ‘leading Arata on’. It’s slightly wearing, and one of the joys of seeing IHYMTA advance the plot is we see this from her less and less. (It does lead to some wonderful expressions, though. Hidaka-san’s facial expressions are one of the top 5 reasons to read her books, as she can convey so much in a single piece of art. Especially the comedy expressions. Check out Senko on Page 106.)

Eventually she lets him down, noting that while he’s her ‘best guy friend’, she can’t see him that way. (This is not only an extremely common trope in shoujo manga, but in Hidaka-san’s own works – readers of V.B. Rose will be seeing the same thing happening right now with Ageha and Nagare.) Luckily, he has his emergency backup girl, who realizes, after he drops by to confess he’s been rejected and try to make up with her, that she loves Arata despite his faults. She confesses to him at their graduation, and all seems well. (The author’s note says we’ll see more of them after this, but for the most part we don’t. Much of the latter half of IHYMTA suffers from compression, and Hidaka freely admits the editors told her to compress and leave out plots to hurry the story along.)

Meanwhile, Kazuha wants to buy Maki a present, and goes out shopping with Chizuru (who is still having issues with his ‘sister complex’). She buys Chizuru some earrings, showing that she’s forgiven that particular ‘rebellious’ streak of his, and then decides to get Maki some as well. Blue ones, since Maki already wears red. Chizuru, annoyed and jealous of Maki, runs off with them and crashes into another guy, who helps Kazuha catch him. The guy looks smug, blond… and slightly familiar. He also seems to know who Kazuha is. I note that we also see briefly another guy in this chapter, Nijo, who sees Chizuru at the store and remarks how he admires Chizuru’s rebellious spirit. We had seen Nijo in an earlier Akiyoshi story, pre-IHYMTA, as Chizuru’s friend in high school, so thins is another great example of Hidaka doing some retroactive filling-in continuity in her work. I do hope one day someone might pick up the 4 volumes worth of Akiyoshi stories still out there.

Meanwhile, Senko and Honjo meet again, and things go as they’ve tended to go with these two – he mocks and teases her, and she rages. There’s a wonderful section on page 84 where, to stop her stomping off, he yanks on her long hair – and then briefly pulls it up to his mouth, kissing it with a smile. Honjo has genuine smiles so rarely in this series that it’s almost startling, and confirms to the reader that he is attracted to her. Senko, meanwhile, is startled by the expression as well, and tries to insult him to death – something that is next to impossible with Honjo. This is counterbalanced by Kazuha getting an old photo of Maki and friends from middle school, which shows Maki with a grumpy, serious face, and Mizushima looking smirking and evil. She finds this younger Maki intriguing.

After a brief Akiyoshi family scene (Hidaka really does write a large family scene very well), we’re now into Kazuha’s senior year of high school. And oh my goodness, they have a new mystery teacher! Who could he be! If you said it’s the blond guy she ran into earlier in the volume, you clearly know your shoujo manga. His name is Saki. Saki Sugimoto. Yes, that’s right, he’s an estranged brother. Well, half-brother. He grows close to Kazuha very fast, and admits that he doesn’t want Maki to let him know he’s there, as Maki hates him. Aw, poor guy! I’m sure Kazuha won’t worry about that at all! She’s not the type to – oh wait, she so is the type to do that.

This is complicated by her giving Maki the earrings. He loves them, but for some reason, when he sees the blue earrings, and she talks about thinking of his old red ones, he begins to silently cry. Why, we don’t find out – much of this volume is Hidaka-san laying seeds of plots that will grow over the next several volumes. Especially in the last page, which shows – to no one’s surprise, and to be fair it wasn’t really meant to be a surprise – that Saki is playing with Maki, and has an evil smirk (TM) and ulterior motive.

Cartoon violence of the volume – Senko shooting a bullet into a teacher’s head.

Again, much of the joy of reading this series is of seeing the improvements that Hidaka-san is making. Her art is still cluttered, but nowhere near as bad as it was in the first couple of volumes, and she’s grown more relaxed about throwing in nonsensical comedy and metatext into the middle of her serious school romance. And we’re still not even halfway done with the series!

By Banri Hidaka. Released in Japan as “Sekai De Ichiban Daikirai!” by Hakusensha, serialized in the magazine Hana to Yume. Released in North America by CMX.

Despite the fact that Kazuha still hasn’t confessed to Maki, this volume is very much about how a couple starts off – awkwardly, with lots of blushes and little fights turning into SERIOUS BUSINESS. Kazuha’s general personality does not help here at all, of course.

Contrasted with this is Senko, who’s just as emotional but a touch more sensible – well, she thinks so, at least. Senko proves to be easily manipulated in an incredibly hilarious scene where Honjo talks her into going out with him. The expression on his face as she walks right into his trap makes me remember why I fell for this couple hard. (Later in the volume, Kazuha realizes that Honjo likes Senko, and the idea of them as a couple makes her freak out. This freak out leads to possible the funniest line in the entire manga, from her little brother Ichihisa: “Oh noooo! Senko-chan! Kazuha-chan is tripping!”.)

The ‘date’ turns out to be Mizushima’s wedding – Maki decided to trick Kazuha and make it a suprise. It’s a lovely wedding (western-style), though it does show one of the difficulties in translating Japanese to English. Manami, Mizushima’s bride, speaks in a ‘third-person cutesy’ sort of way, saying “Manami wants” instead of “I want.” Another character later in the volume also slips into this on occasion. It’s common in manga with ‘cutesy’ girls, but over here I think it just looks childish. (Another funny moment, when Kazuha discusses the wedding with her mother, and her mother starts teasing her: “Ichihisa takes after his mother 100%.” She does – we’ve seen that evil grin on teenage Ichihisa in the pre-IHYMTA Akiyoshi arcs.)

We then get Valentine’s Day, which leads to more angst for Kazuha – she’s never given anyone chocolate before, even her teachers, so has no idea what to do for Maki. It doesn’t help that Maki gets drowned in chocolates from all his admirers. Kazuha stresses, then eventually decides to not do the chocolates thing, as she wants to not be like all the other girls. (We’ll see what she decides on in the next volume).

The Valentine’s arc also has the one big flaw in the volume, however. A new character, Miharu, is introduced. She’s Arata’s childhood friend, and clearly has a crush on him. And coincidentally, she appears just as his crush on Kazuha is about to be resolved! I don’t dislike her, but her entire arc, here and in the next book, reeks of ‘I need to get rid of this guy, let me invent a girl to pawn him off onto”. It’s awkward, and I feel if this was how she wanted to do it then Miharu should have been there all along, especially as we had many scenes at Arata’s school before this. It underlines how Hidaka-san basically plots on the fly for this series (compare this to, say, Tears of a Lamb’s tight structure).

Overall, though, this continues to be funny and heartfelt, and even though the romance aspect is still going nowhere fast, you root for these people to find happiness. In fact, the only thing stopping Kazuha and Maki getting together now is her reticence, and that won’t last long. I’m sure that the manga will end next volume! Well, unless the author throws a huge spanner in the works. But she would *never* do that…

By Banri Hidaka. Released in Japan as “Sekai De Ichiban Daikirai!” by Hakusensha, serialized in the magazine Hana to Yume. Released in North America by CMX.

This volume’s primary focus, besides the still simmering relationship between Kazuha and Maki, is about Kazuha’s new part-time job at Honjo’s family hair salon. (Probably a good thing the school has no rules against part-time jobs, like many other manga I’ve read.) The manga does not sugarcoat the world of hairdressing, and it’s shown that the job can be pretty grueling. Of course our heroine, being the determined girl she is, is not going to get things like standing all day and dishpan hands get the better of her.

No, Kazuha prefers to angst and panic about people. Honjo’s mother, who we meet this volume (and who seems to be a female him) is all right, except for her tendency to grope, but her co-worker Moritaka is one of those people who keeps a straight face and doesn’t always say what she’s thinking. In other words, Kazuha’s worst nightmare. Much of this volume is spent with Kazuha convinced that Moritaka hates her, either because she’s the new girl, or a replacement for someone else, or what have you.

Of course, in the end it’s all a misunderstanding, though Moritaka *did* have issues with Kazuha’s hiring. An earlier co-worker, who Moritaka took a liking to, had to quit as the doctors said her hands were getting too chapped from the hair solutions. This led the girl to getting depressed and abandoning her job, and Moritaka felt guilty that there was nothing more she could have done. Of course, this being shoujo manga, we then meet the girl again, and Akiyoshi brings her and Moritaka back together though the power of HEART.

The other major plot line in this volume is resolving Senko’s crush on Maki, and her decision to let it go. You really feel for her here, as it’s become crystal clear that Maki is not only head over heels for Kazuha, but completely unaware of Senko as a girl. Before she confesses, she asks Maki what he thinks of her as, and he replies bluntly “My rival,” implying he feels he would lose if HKazuha had to choose between them. To her credit, she does confess, but then promptly admits to him that she’s giving him up.

Balanced against this is the growing prickly relationship between her and Honjo the elder. This is the first volume where we can see that Honjo is genuinely interested in her, but in many ways he’s just as bad as Maki, deciding that teasing her is more fun. Of course, his teasing can also be advice giving, which is his other bad habit. He notes that she has to choose between Kazuha and Maki, and forces her to confront what she’s been denying. In the end, after her confession to Maki, he even shows up at the train station to comfort her.

I note the title, by now, makes no sense whatsoever in terms of our lead couple, but at least for the next 2-3 volumes we can pretend it’s referring to Senko and Honjo. At one point she refers to him as “her number one enemy”, and it’s clear that, much like Kazuha, Sensko has no idea how to handle men who put her off balance.

There is a wonderful scene towards the end with Senko describing to Maki how frustrating it is being Kazuha’s friend. Noting that Kazuha only thinks about things right in front of her, is idiotic at times, constantly panics, but then becomes suddenly mature and pulls through when you’re expecting everything to fall apart. Seeing as the only character in this series more emotional than Kazuha is Senko, I found this dead-on analysis very amusing. Most of the characters in this series are fantastic at diagnosing everyone but themselves.

The Akiyoshi family troubles take something of a backseat here, though we do get a lovely scene with Kazuha and her sister Momoka, who is upset about her fight with Chizuru and generally feeling depressed as she feels like an only child. (The family had Kazuha and Chizuru, then waited about 3 years before Momoka, then about 3 more before having the youngest three in close succession, so Momoka feels she’s the only one not part of a group.) Kazuha’s advice to her once again shows off her mature side, and proves that she’s an excellent older sister.

So, to sum up, I still love this series. The liabilities remain the same – her art is still too busy, something she’ll fix by the time Tears of a Lamb rolls around. But really, this series is just plain happy and fun. Even the angst is touching rather than the heavy grip on your heart of a ‘We Were There’ or ‘Sand Chronicles’. Recommended.