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A quirky small-town country girl moves to Tokyo to start her exciting high school career. Is this Daytime Shooting Star? Or maybe Mucha Kucha Daisuki? Could it be Imadoki! Nowadays? No, this is Skip and Loafer, and while it certainly isn’t unique in premise, it really is one of the more charming entries in the genre. Our country gal in this series is Mitsumi, who hails from a small town on Japan’s northern coast. Her middle school class was about eight people in total, so she is in no way prepared for the reality of life in the city. Not that she has any clue about that – she’s come to the city armed with a ludicrously detailed plan for her future, which involves law school, a government post, and, of course, ending up as the (famous) mayor of her hometown.
It would be too easy to say that these plans are dashed upon arrival in Tokyo, but they certainly do get a setback when she gets lost and panics on her way to the first day. Fortunately for her, a fellow classmate (who is seriously contemplating skipping) finds her in a train station and helps her out. Shima has clearly never met anyone like Mitsumi and doesn’t quite know what to make of her…especially after he found out that she’s giving the speech at the opening ceremony as the student with the best test scores in the incoming class and then watched her barf all over their new homeroom teacher. Mitsumi’s plans may not be destroyed, but a school year that began with the nickname “the puker” is not what she had in mind.
At this point it seems as if Skip and Loafer is a pure comedy series. That’s not entirely fair or true to say, although it is definitely a very funny two volumes. But the humor drops off a bit between volumes one and two in favor of looking at the characters in more depth. Mitsumi, we learn, was almost entirely dependent on her friend Fumi back home, although that’s not something she really was aware of until she left for Tokyo. The realization of how much Fumi supported her and allowed her to be a better-functioning person than she might otherwise have been is gradual, and it isn’t really until near the end of volume two that Mitsumi comes to terms with it. In part that’s because she has, it turns out, more trouble making friends than she realized. Fumi may have smoothed the way to a degree, but she also had such a small peer group that she never really had to try before. Her rosy dreams of easy friendship with sophisticated girls in her class stall the minute they realize that class heartthrob Shima likes her – in any capacity. Mitsumi’s awkwardness and difficulties expressing herself certainly don’t help, and the two issues combine to make her very nearly persona non grata among the girls in class. (The guys mostly just think she’s weird.)
This is most prominently seen with class mean girl Egashira. Egashira at first comes off as nothing more than the usual mean girl trope – she’s snide, she’s two-faced, and she’s determined to come out on top of the social pecking order. In her eyes, Mitsumi just charges in and gets everything without having to work for it at all, and since the implication from her wordless flashbacks is that Egashira worked very hard to get where she is, that’s something that she resents deeply. We see a chubby elementary-school-aged Egashira denying herself food and poring over fashion magazines, and just generally not being happy in the hopes of attaining some sort of coveted social goal. Egashira may have turned into the bully herself, but she’s got a real reason to have done so, albeit in a context that really only applies to middle and high school mindsets. It would have been very easy not to develop her character at all and just leave her in generic mean girl mode. That she is given a backstory makes Skip and Loafer more than just another cookie-cutter high school manga – it’s a series that treats even its most stereotypical characters as people.
That certainly goes for Shima and Mitsumi as well. Volume two begins to deal with Shima’s past, and while it’s nothing shocking or out of the ordinary, it is something that he’s very keen on having people respect. One upperclassman, the head of the school’s failing drama club, is desperate for Shima’s participation, and in manga-familiar fashion is determined to use any means necessary to secure it – including enlisting Mitsumi’s help. Since Mitsumi is unaware of Shima’s starry past, she’s at first confused; later she thinks about it and decides that the most important thing is to respect her friend’s wishes, and that means saying no to the upperclassman who is pressuring her. It’s a deceptively small, quiet moment in a story that often tries to play itself off as more broad comedy.
Shima and Mitsumi’s relationship is in some ways the cornerstone of the books. While Mitsumi’s arrival in Tokyo to stay with her aunt Nao (who, it is implied, may be a transwoman) is the catalyst that starts everything, it’s her meeting with Shima that really grounds the story. Shima likes her oddities and the fact that she’s a girl he can be genuine friends with, which confession in volume two absolutely sets the stage for some angst, possibly for both of them. Everything keeps coming back to this one relationship as both books unwind their plots, and even when Mitsumi makes other friends or faux pas, her friendship (and later maybe-crush) with Shima is what pulls her back from whatever self-made brink she’s teetering on. I wouldn’t call the series a romance, but if the two do develop in that direction, it will be an organic center to the whole story rather than the series’ raison d’être or something that was shoehorned in.
Skip and Loafer may not have fabulous art and it may not have an innovative story. But it does have a firm grasp of its storytelling and characters and a not inconsiderable sense of humor. It’s light without being frothy and real without being a drag, and if you’re looking for a story that verges on the humorous slice-of-life genre, I can’t recommend this enough.
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