Tokyo Boys & Girls Vol. 1

Title: Tokyo Boys & Girls Vol. 1
Author: Miki Aihara
Series: Tokyo Boys & Girls #1
First Published: March 1, 1995
Publisher: VIZ Media
Pages: 192
Genre: Romance, Shojo
Format: Paperback
Source: Purchased
Rating:


Synopsis:

The school year starts off well when Mimori befriends the beautiful Nana, but things quickly turn sour for her when she is chosen to be the class representative. Through a series of unfortunate events, she finds herself the focus of attention by three boys and her teachers for all the wrong reasons! Mimori is reunited with Atsushi, a boy she knew in elementary school--and it turns out he despises her for allegedly bullying him in their grade school days. In fact, he plans to exact a little revenge!

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Review

Tokyo Boys & Girls is one of Miki Aihara’s more underrated works, and I think part of it stems from the first volume. I first read it as a young adult that was obsessed with Aihara’s more popular series Hot Gimmick. Eager, I picked up the first volume of Tokyo Boys & Girls and felt only lukewarm, and didn’t revisit the series until a decade later.

The story follows a girl named Mimori making her high school debut, she’s excited to make friends, become fashionable, and spend her high school days with a handsome boyfriend. It’s cute honestly, and the older I get the more I like Mimori. I liked the group dynamic and it was fun to follow the chain of crushes as they developed. The drama remains relatively low stakes which makes this first volume feel cozier. There are some silly parts of the series, like the boys developing a game and for some reason only saving their files to a floppy disk with no backups. I had a hard time believing it, but I could forgive it for the sake of the story.

Overall I think Tokyo Boys & Girls deserves more of a chance, and it only gets better as the series progresses. I’m glad that I gave it a second chance all those years ago and have enjoyed re-reading it again out of nostalgia.

♥ Basically Pure-Hearted: The bonus story included at the back of the volume was mediocre at best and the first time I read it I got a little angry. The story follows a nice girl whose dating a popular guy, pretty standard stuff. It’s a high school romance and the central conflict comes from a lack of communication. Both of the main characters are immature and their relationship is toxic, but at least the level of toxicity is believable.

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