I've never read ecchi manga before, but after hearing good things about Hanjuku Joshi in yuri circles, I thought I would give it a go. What I was expecting was lame fanservice and ugly, unromantic sex scenes full of shallow girls just doing it for doing it's sake and to titillate the audience.
How wrong I was.
What Hanjuku Joshi paints is a lovely story about two girls who fall in love with one another, and explore both sex and sexual desire with one another. They don't launch into bed with one another off the bat, nor do they wait about five years to express their wants and desires from the other person.
It is very refreshing to see that people do want to have sex with the person they love, and that is a natural and wonderful thing to experience. And scary, too.
Yae and Chitose go through the motions of every sort of first time/losing your virginity story, but you hardly see manga take this route and portray it this beautifully. Yae is a cute, soft, girly girl and Chitose is the rough, loud, athletic tomboy. The perfect idea of the traditional "princess and prince". But they don't fall into deep cliches or anything like that. No, they manage to have personalities, insecurities and quirks to them. More importantly, watching their relationship is utterly entertaining. When they take those steps to get to first base, second base, and beyond, they don't do it to please US the reader. They do it to please themselves.
Which makes Hanjuku Joshi so good to read. Even though it is so very ecchi with lots of nudity and sexual situations, it feels more like art than porn.
I highly recommend this title. It is just shy of getting a better score because it is so short. The ending makes you feel like you build up and build up all this tension, and you only get...well, read it and see!
But it is very much worth your time. A lovely ecchi yuri manga. Who'd have thought! Considering my favorite manga is Aoi Hana, it's a big difference, and someone like me would be extra skeptical. But it proves in the end to be a wonderful tale of two girls loving each other emotionally and physically. Now what more can a guy ask for?
