So after completing my third read though of Gantz, my favorite manga, I decided to familiarize myself with more of Hiroya Oku’s work. After all if Gantz is my favorite manga, surely I would at least be somewhat interested in his other material. So I started reading Hen and I was quite surprised how different this title is from Gantz. Gantz in case you aren’t familiar with it is a horror, sci-fi, action drama that is really ambicious in both its scale and scope. Hen on the other hand is almost as far from that as possible. In the case of Hen we see a slower paced slice of life drama with comedic elements. The the setting is almost entirely limited to a high school, and the size and scope of the story is decidedly narrower.That being said, I feel the story had a lot of strengths for a work of this kind.
Hen is a series that was first serialized in Weekly Young Jump. The original run lasted from 1988 – 1992. So this series actually pre dates my birth, a fun fact which makes copies of this work a bit of a hassle to track down in English. Explaining this serialization from here gets a bit more complicated as Hen actually has two serializations by Hiroya Oku with different stories. Both series share the same characters and settings so it gets a bit confusing because there is no subtitle of any kind to really denote the second series from the first. The second serialization ran from 1992-1997, this review will focus only on the second serialization as I couldn’t find the original in any format in English although the story does do a decent job of filling you in on the events of the first series. The original Hen series is about an attractive male high school student who finds himself falling in love with another man although he doesn’t feel he is gay. character in question Suzuki can have his choice of women in the school, but he ends up falling wildly in love with an average male student who looks and acts a bit feminine. The characters struggle to come to grips with this as he doesn’t want to think of himself as gay and finds the whole situation unnerving. The second Hen is the story of a very attractive high school girl who finds herself falling in love with an average looking girl. As she is very attractive she is used to having most things given to her, but it seems that her mostly unrequited love is something she can’t immediately gain from her appearance. Being a very self centered character Yoshida uses her beauty to manipulate the people around her into making her desires to be with this girl into reality
Read More…