Tag: hikaru yuzuki

Otasukebito Hashiru! chapter 1b

Reading chapter 1b will be enough to give you an idea of the shift in power that characterizes the rest of volume 1 of Otasukebito Hashiru! (おたすけ人走る!). Before and during the entrance exam, Kana held all the cards. She could decide who got in and who stayed out and there wasn’t a thing they could do about it. Once the entrance exam ends and the new students are selected, however, they become the new heroes of the school. Nothing is too good for them, since they hold the future of the school in their hands while Kana is now just another student. Now then, what will they do with their new found power?

I don’t want to spoil the whole story, but if you suspect that Sukesaku Oda with a little bit of power is going to be a serious jerk, you are not far wrong. It was hard not to feel sorry for Kana at time, but she retains just enough selfish and mean tendencies to make it hard to root for either one.That’s all in volume 1. As the series progresses, Oda starts to like Kana more, a rival for her affections appears and she doesn’t seem to entirely hate him any more by the end of the series. Volume 2 is spent on the team’s qualification for the Koshien tournament, with all the wacky hijinks this entails, while Volume 3 is spent on the actual tournament itself.

The series blurb promised that Otasukebito was funny, but I didn’t get any real laughs until volume 3, where Oda inadvertently pisses off the umpires for his match in a cross-dressing incident and then has to deal with the inevitable fall out when they decide to take revenge. A picture speaks a thousand words:

O03-066-067

The series becomes a more than decent sports manga in the last volume, featuring a typically long baseball game full of ups and downs, twists and turns and drama galore. It was very interesting stuff, though a little hard to believe in places.

Unfortunately this focus on pure sports and away from the gags and romantic tension that defined the earlier volumes was probably the downfall of the series. All the other characters fell by the wayside as this became a sports manga worthy of Shonen Jump or any other boys’ magazine. Not bad at all, but not the sort of thing you’d see in Margaret Comics. Or maybe there was some other reason for the series to end somewhat abruptly. I thought the characters needed a bit of help in the likeability department, but they got some laughs out of me in volume 3 and the sports component was satisfactory, so I was sorry to see it go. No sense living in the past though, so on to the next series!

Otasukebito Hashiru! manga review

Otasukebito Hashiru! (or: Help comes Running! おたすけ人走る!) is a shoujo sports manga from 1979, written and illustrated by Hikaru Yuzuki. Yuzuki is probably best known for Amai Seikatsu/Sweet Life, the barely worksafe long-running manga about a naive young man who goes to work for a lingerie company.

That is that and this is this. Otasukebito Hashiru is worth a read at best, but it’s not the kind of manga that really sticks in anyone’s memory. The story is simple: PR Academy is an ex-girls’ school on the verge of collapse. To save their skins and get more students, they decide to become famous for sports. But why start from scratch when you can recruit the best (and dumbest) sports students from across Japan? First, though, you have to put them through their paces… with a set of increasingly ridiculous tests.

otasukebitohashiru000001It could have been good. And I suppose it really was considered funny back in 1979. Now, though, the gags are cheesy and stale and while the art is clean and the story is amusing, the manga suffers most of all from a thoroughly unlikeable cast. The main female, Kana has a short temper, a sadistic streak and a tendency to look down on those who don’t conform to her ideals.

On the other hand Sukesake Oda, the “hero” is a hero in name-only. He’s a lazy, perverted and uncooperative cheat, though those qualities don’t come out till later in the manga. The worst character of all, though, is Kana’s mother the principal, who is willing to do anything (and I mean anything) to see that her plan succeeds. Money comes before everything else, her own daughter included.

As a character manga, therefore, Otasukebito Hashiru! will leave you fuming at every turn. It’s quite amusing as a sports manga, though. Volume 1 ends with one of the most ridiculous ‘tennis’ matches I have ever witnessed, though for people who’ve read Prince of Tennis it will barely be a blip on their radar.

Still, I picked this up because it promised to have baseball in it. And it does, as the team strives to win the national Koshien tournament, the quickest and most reliable way for a school to become famous in Japan. That’s the good news. The bad news is, they only play baseball in volumes 2 and 3 so… yeah. If you want to find out whether they win or not, buy the Otasukebito Hashiru manga on Amazon (and ignore the wacky Google Translate titles).