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Manga Classics: The Boys Know What Girls Like at Ouran High School Host Club
Ouran High School Host Club is a manga lover’s manga. The whole premise is over the top; it’s filled with beautiful, willowy men; and it pokes fun at otaku culture and manga tropes while simultaneously telling a very entertaining story.
After all, a host club is all about pleasing the ladies.
Let’s start with the premise: Ouran High School is an expensive school for the children of the elites—destined to be elites themselves and therefore seldom required to do any work. Haruhi Fujioka is the one scholarship student at the school; her mother is dead, and she is being raised by her improvident but loving father.
If you’re playing shoujo manga cliché bingo, you probably have a full row right there—but wait! There’s more!
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The non-scholarship students at Ouran High School have so much leisure time that a group of male students have set up a host club in an unused music room. Haruhi, looking for a place to study, bumbles in there, and while trying to back out, accidentally breaks an expensive vase, allowing the boys to blackmail her into doing what they want.
Bingo!!
That blackmail-the-girl thing is usually awful, but not here. This is a comedy, and Hatori never makes Haruhi feel threatened. Haruhi is more than able to stand up for herself, and despite her humble upbringing she’s no shrinking violet.
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Bingo again!!
What the guys want Haruhi to do is join their host club. Because she has a gender-neutral look and name, most of the guys don’t realize at first that she’s a girl—and once they do, they really don’t care. It’s fun just to pass her off as a guy, especially because she turns out to be really good at pleasing women.
So Haruhi joins the host club and hilarious shenanigans ensue. Return to your bingo card, please, because no high school manga plot twist is left untouched. The school festival, the school physical exam, competition between clubs, parents who have positions of power over the school, a class trip gone awry, cross-dressing, transfer students from overseas, and many, many comedic treatments of class differences. Just toss that bingo card out the window—we’re all winners here!
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Each of the six members of the host club has a distinct personality (except for the twins—we’ll get to the twins in a minute) and a different approach to pleasing women. Tamaki Suoh, the “king” of the club (the others also call him “dad”) is the handsome, devilishly flirtatious, hopelessly vain woman-pleaser. Kyoya Ootori the vice president, is the typical shoujo manga guy-with-glasses—smart, quiet, a bit aloof. Hikaru and Kaoru Hitachin are twin brothers who delight in teasing the ladies with their faux-twincest act. Mitsukuni Haninozuka, known as “Hunni,” is as sweet as his nickname, childlike (though he is actually the oldest host), bubbly, and inseparable from his stuffed rabbit. Hunni’s constant companion Takashi “Mori” Morinozuka, on the other hand, is the strong, silent type.
That’s the starting lineup, with some of their female customers playing supporting roles. The first few volumes of the series are high-energy shoujo rom-com, with cluttered panels, snarky asides, and plenty of overacting. The backgrounds suddenly fill with flowers, and readers are abruptly yanked from one setting to the next. Also, the guys like to dress up a lot.
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As the series goes on, the story gets a bit more depth. The hosts all have feelings of one sort or another toward Haruhi, so there’s plenty of room for drama, and eventually this business of Haruhi being a poor kid on a scholarship who needs that education becomes real, and she has to make some hard choices. The guys are also more complicated than the facades they put on at the Host Club. Despite all the craziness, Haruhi and the rest of the Host Club are not that much different from any group of high school friends, except maybe that six of them are fantastically rich.
The real appeal of Ouran High School Host Club, of course, is that it’s a story where all the guys are centered on pleasing the girl—even more so than most shoujo manga. it’s like an otome game, and in fact, in a life-imitates-art sort of way, there is an Ouran High school Host Club game, although it’s only available in Japan.
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The series ended in 2010, but Bisco Hatori’s recent appearance at Anime Expo has brought new attention to the series. It’s a perfect midsummer manga, light and funny and full of ridiculousness. Then when autumn starts to draw in, readers can switch gears to Hatori’s new series, Behind the Scenes!!, in which an awkward college student finds his bliss in the crazy world of the Art Squad, the student club that makes props for student filmmakers. It’s like a grown-up version of the host club, with crafts projects instead of tea and flirtation, and no blackmail. Just good, clean fun.
Ouran High School Host Club and Behind the Scenes!! are both featured in our ongoing Buy Two, Get the Third Free manga sale, going on now through August 6.