Review:

Even though there are three unconnected and unrelated stories in this book, the only one worth reading is the first one. The first story is the title piece called Ohikkoshi. It’s a essentially very much a college age version of a shojo romance story. There are romantic relationships and feelings that are a tad complex and there’s not a simple fix or happy ending for the characters. All the characters act fairly realistically and show maturity but also show that they haven’t exactly finished growing up yet either. The art works very well. The art style really goes to show the worn and dirty look of typical Japanese urban buildings. Also the art sufficiently conveys the emotion and body language of the characters.

My only real complaint about the first story was that there was a character and subplot that was just silly and took me out of the story a bit. There’s this Japanese/Italian character that has the absurd background and plot that while it may had worked in a sillier or more humorous story, it just badly stuck out in this story. The character does serve a small purpose to move the main plot a little, but that still didn’t warrant the time invested for his goofy back story.

The second story I honestly couldn’t find a point to. It starts out with a young virgin female who draws manga. Then through a misunderstanding or actual prompting from her perverted editor (it wasn’t clear what the editor’s intentions where), she decides to make a change in her life and then it just bounces around from there as her life changes many times. There doesn’t seem to be any noticeable theme to the changes. Also since a lot of the life changes for the lead character are so radical, she seems like a different character each time and it’s a short enough story as it is to get characterization in. The other characters are really just there as set pieces to help move things along for each section of her life, but they are more like caricatures and not real people. So the story just meanders along until it ends unsatisfactory (it technically is a happy ending, but it was still odd).

Finally, the last story. I would say something about it, but there really isn’t much to it. Basically these two guys are in Kyoto and their guide is a female friend of theirs. They do some sightseeing and bar hopping and the story ends with a weak joke, then end. This story just helps show that even the greatest of creators are more than capable of making a throw away story.

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