Hot Gimmick is a great teen soap opera manga. Hatsumi lives in an apartment complex for the families of company workers. The complex is ruled by the nosy Mrs. Tachibana who exploits her husband’s high rank by surrounding herself with a gang of housewife minions. Hatsumi has an older brother (Shinogu), a flighty younger sister (Akane), and a baby brother.
The first few pages of the book set up a soap opera plot in grand fashion. Hatsumi’s day starts out very hectic. she has a run-in with Mrs. Tachibana and her minions, and on her way to school she sees that Akane is ill. They return home and Akane confesses that she thinks she might be pregnant and asks Hatsumi to go buy a pregnancy test for her. Hatsumi is totally mortified by her sister’s sexual habits and the thought of buying a pregnancy test. She does want to help her sister, so she goes to the corner store in a clever disguise accessoried by giant platform boots. I know whenever I need to do anything undercover, I wear my platform boots:
I might not be able to run, but at least I’m 4 inches taller!!!
She meets a devastatingly handsome boy at the store who offers to help her because she seems lost. She starts wondering, “does he know me?!” “does he live at the housing complex?!!” She quickly excuses herself, buys the test and makes it home, but she literally bumps into Ryoki (the evil son of Mrs. Tachibana). The pregnancy test goes flying, Ryoki picks it up and makes many insulting comments about the stupidity of Hatsumi and her family.
Ryoki seems to be without any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Hatsumi finds him terrifying because he used to bully her when she was younger. Ryoki quickly seizes on Hatsumi’s fear of bringing shame to her family, and blackmails her into promising to be his slave. Hatsumi rehearses what she would say to tell Ryoki off in her mind, but she is too afraid of what Mrs. Tachibana would do to her family if Ryoki tells her secret. Ryoki forces Hatsumi into a dark corner and starts to grope her, but suddenly the handsome boy from the drugstore appears on the stairs and yells at Ryoki to stop! He turns out to be Hatsumi’s best friend from childhood, Azusa, who moved away after first grade. And now he’s back and he saves her from the clutches of a misanthropic boy! And all of this happened in a mere 25 pages!!!!
One of the things I liked about this comic was the attention to character. Hatsumi has the mood swings typical of a teenager — she’s elated for two seconds and then something happens to remind her of her predicament and she is totally dejected. She vows to stand up for herself, and even rehearses what she is going to say in her thoughts, but something always happens to keep her silent. As the story goes on, you begin to learn more about the motivations of the characters. Even though Ryoki seems like pure evil, his motivation for making Hatsumi his slave is gradually disclosed (and it isn’t what you’d think at first). Azuza seems to have a hidden history, but I expect that his story will be explored more in later volumes.
