#for you in full blossom

Hanazakari no Kimitachi e (or Hana-Kimi) in both manga and live action form is a story I have consumed in media time and time again and every time I love it.  The base plot is ridiculous: girl (Ashiya Mizuki) ends up at an all boys high school because of the fact that she wishes to encourage her sports hero, (Sano Izumi) a high jumper her own age.  Hijinks ensue when she ends up roommates with said sports hero and he discovers her real sex/gender immediately and decides to help her preserve her secret while not giving away the fact that he knows she’s a girl.

The manga has quite nice art, and every time the live action version is cast they always find lots of lovely looking guys to fill the school, but in my heart my favorite version is the Taiwanese one starring Ella Chen of S.H.E and Wu Chun of Fahrenheit.  Mizuki in that version had the energy and the perkiness that I love, and Izumi was sufficiently serious and yet good humored.  I also think the Taiwanese version had the best Nakatsu Shuichi in Jiro Wang.  Nakatsu coming to terms with crushing on a “boy” when he thought he liked girls always strikes me as a more interesting situation than the Mizuki/Izumi angle, but that wasn’t the story being told here.

In stories like these I always end up thinking back to Twelfth Night, and wonder if maybe the author read it and was inspired by it.  Clearly, there’s something to this story that brings people back time and again for it to have been remade so much, and other than pretty men I think it’s because the relationships are all weirdly pure.  The friendships are strong, and the comedy and drama doesn’t diminish them.  Because the friendships are strong the romance is more touching, which is probably easier to see in the manga because it had longer to tell the story, but the best casts in the live action series also convey.