If you stripped the plot summary of Happy Hustle High down to its essentials, you could be forgiven for thinking I was talking about Imadoki! In HHH, an outgoing girl turns over the apple cart at a stuffy high school, making friends and encountering romantic complications along the way. It isn’t nearly as good as Imadoki!, but it’s an amiable shôjo outing.
The premise of HHH is more interesting than its actual execution. The student body of declining all-girls Uchino High School gets absorbed into an all-boys institution, Meibi, forcing all the students into a new, co-ed world. This would seem to offer all kinds of interesting comic fodder, interpersonal and sociological, but the transition goes pretty smoothly. Despite some initial anxieties, the girls quickly latch on to the vastly expanded social possibilities a co-ed school presents.
But it seems the Meibi Student Council has some fairly draconian prohibitions in place: no comics, no snacks, and, worst of all, no dating. (Try not to think too hard about why an all-boys school would have a ban on dating in place.) Reduced to giggling yes-women in the face of the clouds of testosterone, the old Uchino leadership turns to protagonist Hanabi to get the rules overturned.
Hanabi is the ideal choice. She’s an extroverted tomboy, difficult to intimidate and easily bribed with food. Hanabi has a history of standing up for her classmates, smacking down disrespectful and unsavory boys who give the girls a hard time. She steps into a student council seat to sway the boy officers’ minds on the dating rule (and score free lunches from a grateful sisterhood), determined to turn the snackless, romance-crushing institution into “Happy Hustle High!” (Mercifully, the phrase is never repeated, at least in the first volume. It’s a terrible title, really. When my partner saw the digest lying around, he asked if it was about a vocational school for prostitutes.)
Naturally, complications arise. Council President Yoshitomo doesn’t seem to care much either way. A bemused observer, he likes the idea of watching Hanabi stir up trouble and tells her she only needs the agreement of the other two officers to get her way. Council member Tokihisa comes off as a bit of a bully, but he’s prone to the same kind of persuasion as Hanabi (food). Lastly, there’s Vice President Yasuki, who doesn’t have much use for girls. He was raised in a family of men after the death of his mother, and the integration of the schools is really his first significant exposure to the opposite sex.
Guess which one sets Hanabi’s heart aflutter? Exactly. And it’s too bad, as she and Tokihisa have an easygoing chemistry and a lot in common. They also can compare notes on their complex relationships with Yasuki, who snubs Hanabi at every turn and bests Tokihisa in just about everything. It makes sense that Hanabi would be inclined to break down Yasuki’s resistance, but it’s less apparent why she becomes so smitten with him.
With the male characters introduced and the romantic complications in play, creator Rie Takada pretty much abandons the gender-integration aspects of the story. The female supporting cast, marginal to begin with, becomes even more nondescript. While Hanabi’s interactions with the boys have charm and a nice reversal here and there, I can’t help but think how much better the title would be if Takada had mined the possibilities for social satire that are inherent in the set-up. Elements of class conflict go a long way to deepen the romantic comedy of Imadoki! and the soap opera of Hot Gimmick, but the rich vein in HHH is almost entirely unexploited.
And that leaves you with a competent, reasonably charming shôjo title that has the unfortunate side effect of reminding you of its better, more complex competition. There’s nothing seriously wrong with HHH (okay, aside from the title), but there’s nothing uniquely right about it either. And as an increasing number of shôjo titles make their way into publication, it seems wasteful to have a hook with such potential and not make better use of it.
(This review is based on a preview copy provided by Viz. Happy Hustle High is set for release in March.)